Gonzalo Barr

Big Foot is a legend, a myth, a hoax, a tall tale that like all other legends, myths, hoaxes, and tall tales, does not go away. People claim to have sighted Big Foot in the wilderness of North America. It is described as a tall biped that appears to be half ape and half man. Photographs of this beast are always grainy or out of focus or both. Big Foot is also shy. Whenever anyone approaches, it does a Nessy and dives for cover.

Recently, two men claimed to have found the body of one of these creatures. They contacted a group devoted to the search for Big Foot, demanded, and received an undisclosed sum of money. In exchange, the two men delivered a freezer with a block of ice containing what appeared to be the body of a large hairy creature.

A spokesman for a group devoted to the search for Big Foot went on national television and announced the finding. He would ask scientists to conduct DNA tests on the body. He also invited the press to a conference where he would allow them to see the body for themselves, all on camera.

Then the ice melted –

The “creature” was a rubber ape suit. The group plans to sue the men for fraud.

Photo: Big Foot a.k.a. Sasquatch on the run, wikipedia

A very polite Chinese blogger emailed me to ask permission to translate my post about the ending of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.  (My original post is here.)  I confess that I do not read Chinese, but I recognize enough of the characters to identify a few of the words.

The blog is devoted to literature and writers, topics that would interest anyone who reads this blog.  If you read Chinese, please visit Bimuyu’s Blog and say “hello.”

While Paul Theroux was in Turkmenistan to research his latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, someone in the audience asked him, “How do you write a novel?”

His answer — You need an idea, characters, setting, and about two years of solitude.

Photo: Paul Theroux; Source: Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), at 121

We don’t expect much in the way of sustained winds from Fay. It will be too far from here and on the other side of the peninsula.  But we do expect some gusts and heavy rains, both of which have begun.

Here is a palm tree in our back yard. Watch how the fronds bend in the gust, before they straighten back.

The storm will probably be at its closest to Miami later tonight through early tomorrow morning. I live in a part of the city where the power goes out each time a squirrel sneezes, so we expect to be without power, even if there isn’t much going on outside. But that’s what candles are for, right?

Stay tuned.

Photos:  Gonzalo Barr

We are back early for several reasons, including Tropical Storm Fay.

“By the way, what’s the deal with Fay?” Sol asks.
Walt looks relieved. “Storm’s strengthening. Made landfall in western Cuba. Could be veering our way. We should be under a hurricane watch by now.”
“So what can we expect tomorrow?”
“Overcast skies with occasional wind gusts, precipitation, even some thunderstorm activity later in the day.”
“Some what?”
“Rain.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“A lot depends on whether the storm veers our way or heads north into the Gulf.”

from “Faith,” a short story in The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa

No one died in my story, even after the fictitious Fay became a hurricane.  I am keeping my fingers crossed that the real Fay is no more than an inconvenience when it becomes a hurricane, which it is expected to do in the next few hours. 

Image: Satellite image taken August 18, 2008 1644Z, TS Fay, NASA, Weather Underground; Excerpt from “Faith,” in The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa (2006) by Gonzalo Barr

We’re off for a few days. Please check back on Wednesday, August 20, 2008.

Image: gif from La république des livres blog

The Spanish newspaper El mundo reports that Franco-Vietnamese film director, Tran Anh Hung, plans to make a feature film based on Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

Murakami has approved the project, which will be undertaken by Asmik Ace Entertainment and Fuji Television. Filming will start in two months and a release date is foreseen for 2010.

Image: UK Verso edition of Norwegian Wood, wikipedia; Source: El Mundo (Spain)

Roy Medvedev comments on Solzhenitsyn’s work. He calls him the “first to break down the wall of silence surrounding repression in the Soviet Union.” That may be overstating it a bit, but there is no doubt that Solzhenitsyn was and remains a towering figure, a Russian conservative and traditionalist who was not afraid to experiment with literary forms, as he did in the inmense (even by Russian standards) three-volume, The Gulag Archipelago.

Solzhenitsyn did not want Western democracy here. He was a conservative nationalist, a religious man, and he wanted Russia to return to somewhere in the 16th century.

Future generations will recognise Solzhenitsyn’s huge impact on the course of life in the Soviet Union, but they won’t pay so much attention to his philosophy because it doesn’t suit modern life.

The rest of the Medvedev article on Solzhenitsyn is here.

Solzhenitsyn was not a democrat, but a dissident against secularism. The distinction is not a subtle one and yet I suspect that already he is being recast as a liberal, as the term was used during the Enlightenment. 

His speech at a Harvard commencement in 1978 remains one of the best summaries of his views.  He believed that Russia was not European nor Western.  The country would necessarily find its own best form of government, without following any foreign template or formula –

But the blindness of [Western] superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick.

I don’t agree with this. Democracy is the most fluid form of government because it demands nothing more than the people keep the right to choose their leaders and expel them from office through an orderly and legally transparent procedure. The rest of the government can be made-to-measure, if not tailor made. 

I do find his views on the rule of law or, more precisely, on legalism, instructive and even uplifting. The US must be the most legalistic country on the planet. If there is a wrong, there is always someone proposing a law to “fix” it. At the end of each session, legislators tout the number of bills they have written or sponsored.  No doubt many bills have merit, but so many are unnecessary.  I am willing to bet that no other country in the world has as many laws and regulations as this one.  And the number keeps growing. –

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.

That last sentence is not only true, it is also beautiful. 

Update August 7, 2008 Coincidentally, a few hours after writing this post on Tuesday, I read the following in Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008) –

Solzhenitsyn was the West’s most famous zek, or prisoner. Yet in her exhaustive history of the prison system, Gulag, Anne Applebaum writes that his prison time was not onerous: “[Solzhenitsyn] was an unremarkable prisoner. He flirted with the authorities, served as an informer before seeing the light, and wound up working as a bricklayer.”

Nabokov once wrote that much of Russian literature has the smell of a prison library. Yet who would argue with Varlam Sharlamov, who in his Kolmya Tales (also quoted by Theroux) wrote, “It’s easier to bear a thing if you write it down”?

Photos:  Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1953 and in the early 1990s, wikipedia; Source: The Times (Aug. 5, 2008), Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart,” speech give at Harvard (June 8, 1978), Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railroad Bazaar (2008), at 477

Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is dead from heart failure at the age of 89. He was editing a 30-volume complete Russian edition of his works for publication in 2010.

The Times has more, including a chronology of his life –

1941 Solzhenitsyn graduates from Rostov University with a degree in mathematics, before joining the army to fight in the Second World War, achieving the rank of captain

1945 Corresponding with a friend, he makes derogatory comments about Stalin. The letters are intercepted and he is arrested

1945-53 He serves eight years in detention camps, an experience that formed the basis of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

1962 Following a relaxation of censorship, the novella is published in the USSR, on the personal permission of President Krushchev. It is one of the first Russian works to criticise the Stalinist regime

1970 Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Solzhenitsyn does not accept in person – fearing that he would not be let back into the USSR

1972 He smuggles out a Nobel speech describing a “Gulag Archipelago” where “it was my fate to survive, while others – perhaps with a greater gift and stronger than I – have perished”. Two years later he is expelled from the USSR

1990 With the crumbling of the old Soviet Union, Gorbachev restores Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship

1994 Solzhenitsyn returns to Russia

1998 Refuses state award from Boris Yeltsin, blaming him for the country’s ruinous economy

The article is here.

See also my recent posts, “New Edition of Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle Due Out in English,” and “Writing Against Time.”

Photo: Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Source: The Times (Aug. 4, 2008)

I’ve posted about ebooks before (here and here) and each time it has been to reject them. I am not alone. There are plenty of people who prefer reading real books and very few who prefer to read ebooks, which probably explains why their sales numbers are so low. Also, have you noticed that the only people endorsing ebooks either make them of sell them?

British author, Nick Hornby, joins the ranks of people who don’t read ebooks. Recently, he wrote an article for The Times in which he swore he will never read an ebook and predicts ebooks will fail because people don’t read, period –

In branches of Borders, they are trying to flog us their ebook reader, the iLiad, for £399. In my branch last week the iLiad was piled high on the left, just as you walk in; on the right was their wall of bestselling paperbacks, many of which are being sold at half price. It was a quiet Monday morning, and there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the 400 quid ebook reader; what was striking, though, was that there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four quid books, either.

Attempting to sell people something for £400 that merely enables them to read something that they won’t buy at one hundredth of the price seems to me a thankless task.

The rest of the article is here.

Source: The Times (July 13, 2008)