Two heroes of Japanese liberalism have passed over to the Grey Havens

Keiji Nakazawa
Asahi Shimbun Obituary

When Keiji Nakazawa was 6 years old, the Hiroshima atomic bomb vaporized nearly his entire family.

He portrayed this experience in a comic book.

As far as I know, Barefoot Gen is the most famous anti-war work in Japanese history. Search for it in Google Images and it will imprint itself in your mind as well. The art style, typical of fun adventures, makes what is depicted inside feel even worse. Perhaps if a book like this were required reading in American junior high schools, we would not declare another war of choice. Irrespective of America, Nakazawa’s work has doubtless been monumental in Japanese culture. My junior high school there had a student performance of it every few years.

Beate Gordon

Read the New York Times’ obituary. It’s one of those that’s so astonishing you wonder why you’ve never heard of this person before.

Beate Sirota Gordon introduced women’s rights to postwar Japan, writing the clauses specifically guaranteeing them into the Japanese Constitution, emancipating 40 million people, when she was 22 years old.

Gordon studied other nations’ constitutions and drew on her childhood experiences in Tokyo and wrote the articles in a week. A sleepless week. Imagine all your learning and moral training and ethical thought suddenly being put to the test, now, and you have to lay out the future legal status of millions of historically marginalized people.

And then she kept her role a secret for decades.

All she did in the meantime was introduce the West to every kind of traditional Japanese art and every style of Asian performance art she could find. It’s amazing to think of how little even Americans in the highest reaches of power understood of Japan when they began ruling the country after the war. And pre-WWII cultural globalization mostly meant Westernization. Ms. Gordon was very important to turning on the East-to-West cultural flows and contributing to the cultural relations between Japanese and Americans today.

With her parents and Kosaku Yamada in Tokyo in 1928 (source: http://www.shinyawatanabe.net/atomicsunshine/ny/beateintroduction.html)

Mr. Nakazawa, Ms. Gordon, rest in peace. May our generation, too, have people as amazing as you.

Spain’s Most Successful Female Athlete: “My Parents Have Left Me With Nothing; I Don’t Speak With My Family”

Arantxa Sánchez Vicario with her parents in 1989

Spain’s Most Successful Female Athlete: “My Parents Have Left Me With Nothing; I Don’t Speak With My Family”
Arantxa Sánchez Vicario attacks her parents in her memoirs, accusing them of squandering her fortune and giving her equal treatment with her tennis-playing brothers Emilio and Javier
El País: “Mis padres me han dejado sin nada; no me hablo con mi familia”
J.J.M. reporting from Madrid February 5, 2012

“I was born into a family of tennis players, and I watched the sport ever since I was little. You may be born into something, but you have to work to keep polishing it and to become a champion. You sacrifice a lot in such a mental sport in which you have to know how to control your emotions,” says Arantxa Sánchez Vicario over the telephone from Moscow, where she has just finished her debut as coach of the Spanish women’s tennis team, which bowed to Russia 3-2 yesterday in the first round of the Federation Cup.

In 30 seconds, the ex-#1, winner of four major tournaments and four Olympic medals, has summarized the values of her whole life. In one breath, she has underlined the themes that marked a unique career: sacrifice, family, the mind, and emotions. These few phrases display the concepts at play in ¡Vamos! Memorias de una lucha, una vida y una mujer (Let’s Go! Memories of a Fight, a Life, and a Woman), her autobiography, which will be published tomorrow and which makes accusations against her family, according to the extracts published in El Mundo, which is publishing the work through La Esfera. “I don’t talk to my family,” writes the ex-player, married to businessman Pep Santacana since 2008 despite the “categorical” opposition of her family members. “They’ve left me with nothing.”

There are now two opposing books dedicated to one clan, the Sánchez Vicarios. The other is Forja de Campeones (Force of Champions), which was written by Emilio Sánchez and Marisa Vicario, the parents of Arantxa, Emilio (formerly #1 in doubles, #7 in singles, and an Olympic silver medalist), Javier (ex-#23), and Marisa; it speaks of the values that formed so many champions. The former player’s book, on the other hand, is the story of the destruction of these ties. There is a point of inflection. It occurred in 2010, when Forja was presented to the public. Arantxa did not attend: “the time had come to take off our masks and show that the myth of a united and happy Sánchez Vicario family was just that: a myth,” she writes. “My parents’ behavior has caused me a lot of suffering. In recent months, I have been through such difficult situations that there are still moments when I think I’m in a nightmare. What’s certain is that my relationship with my family doesn’t exist. How is it possible that everything I’ve obtained has disappeared, has ceased to be? (…) I’m the victim and the deceived.”

Dinero and discipline caused the rupture. “They’ve left me with nothing. I’m in debt to the Housing Department (she was condemned to pay €3.5 million in fines for paying taxes to Andorra while living in Spain), and my properties are very inferior to those of my brother Javier, for example, who has won much less than me over the course of his life. Could I accept this abuse and keep quiet? I wasn’t going to do it,” said the ex-tenista, who is 40. According to the WTA, which manages professional women’s tennis, Sánchez Vicario won about $17 million (some €12 million) during her career. The sponsorships she had during that time elevated her income to some €45 million by her count. Sources knowledgeable of the tennis world and her family are surprised by the insinuation of bankruptcy (“She has a boat, houses…”) and the elevated figure of her winnings: there are high taxes on tournament prizes (up to 35%), and Arantxa did not enjoy a large advertisement contract outside the tennis world (“like Sharapova’s style brands.”)

“My father has enjoyed full decision-making power over the management of my assets,” she said. “He has made the investments he considered opportune and administrated all my winnings. They gave me a certain amount of money every month, and I gave them a precise account statement; never for a moment did I worry enough to ask them about anything. I never doubted the way my father managed my money. Now I have nothing left,” she adds. “What happened with Housing was fatal. Establishing my residency in Andorra was my camp’s [their] decision.”

Arantxa, according to the book, which her parents’ lawyers are studying, was a girl who robbed a motorcycle to escape the tennis academy in which she was training. An adolescent whose her parents wanted her to go to bed early and leave her own birthday party. A champion weighed down by her “faithful shadow”, her mother – “for her, discipline and victory went before anything else, when sometimes what I needed most were caring words…I ended up doubting my self-worth and looking for help from psychologists to recover my self-esteem.” A tennis player who saw that her family managed everything in her life while her brother Emilio could make his own decisions from the age of 18. And a coach, finally, who yesterday only wanted to say of the Federation Cup, “I’m here because the players want me to be.”

My Autistic Brother John’s Essay about “Of Mice and Men”

Of Mice and Men: a Report by John Smyth

Of Mice and Men was written by John Steinbeck in the 1930s about the sad conditions of the poor migrant farm workers who ate and slept at apartments made for them on farms.  This was called a “bunkhouse” in the book.  When they didn’t have an apartment at a farm, then they slept outside and quietly experienced the weather for better and worse. A way of seeing what they were was as performers who always played a bit part in the farm economy and died in a poverty that was all-encompassing personally, economically, and emotionally. Even when they were successful, they were tragic figures. And this was the setting for Lennie and George’s self-destructive experience.

Lennie and George early saw each man as a complement to the other.  George was small and smart. Lennie was autistic and big and strong. He was raised by his aunt and abandoned when she died.  George became a brother to Lennie who had no family. They always were together and Lennie followed George’s advice. Sometimes Lennie’s intuitive side let him appreciate that something was not right, but George’s logic always trumped it. Really, the very plot of the book revolves around the demonic mental side of man’s existence and his spiritual intuition to surrender to the way of the heart. As the plot unfolds, a choice is made to betray brotherhood and friendship for convenience and the will of a misunderstanding mob. Everyone loses innocence except Lennie, who gives his life but keeps his heart and goodness.

 

From the beginning, Lennie is taken advantage of. Sometimes he knows it and sometimes not. He is always surrounded by smarter, more worldly people. Sadly, they attempt to use him for their advantage. This is the world he lives in. Even his friend George is like this.  Always self-centered and successfully controlling, George is the world. The story compares the simplicity and purity of Lennie’s world to the sophisticated dirtiness of George and every other person’s cheap angle on life. I am impressed by the contrast and see it as a biblical allegory even Christ-like except Lennie has no mission to redeem.  But he is a lamb led to slaughter.

 

The story was so sad that I wanted to cry and I passionately wanted to scream and yell that it wasn’t fair for Lennie to die. Everyone else ends up ok but Lennie and his ignominious way end. I learned that horrible things happen to autistic people.  Our world desperately needs the goodness, simplicity, and pure, child-like intent of Lennie.  There is a Lennie in each of us.  Everyone’s Lennie wants to express itself and our George and the crowd kills it.  We need to care for our Lennies in the world and in us.

 

This book released many fears in me, especially the fear that if something happened to my family, I would be vulnerable like Lennie. And I am more motivated to educate and help people understand about autism. Everyone thinks we can help what we do and we can’t. When we do what we do, we never intend the bad consequences. Autistic people like Lennie need understanding and help. For all of us, we need to do more. A succinct statement is that Lennie could be anyone. All of us are in need of understanding and love. 

“This Crisis is Counterspiritual”

Álvaro Pombo, winner of the 2012 Nadal Prize.

“This Crisis is Counterspiritual”
The recent winner of the Nadal Prize calls for people to “take to the streets to denounce institutionalized egoism”
El País: Pombo: “Esta crisis es contraespiritual”
Carles Geli reporting from Barcelona January 7, 2012

Here he goes. Tireless, he cites quotes from one philosopher after another early in the morning although it’s been just six hours since the conclusion of the award gala for the 68th Premio Nadal, which he won for El temblor del héroe (The Shaking of the Hero), about the worries (or lack of them, rather) of a certain Román, a retired university professor who isn’t the least bit concerned about the misfortunes of others, as dramatic as they may be, and which he criticizes in one way or another. “I’d thought about titling it El furor heroico (“Heroic Fury”), in honor of Giordano Bruno, for that delirium to achieve divinity, beauty, the good, but I left it as it was,” drops Álvaro Pombo (born in Santander in 1939), who has an aquiline nose and a beard on a booming chin, a face like a reflected half-moon from a reflective short story; he has defined “the poetry of the good”, and it pervades his almost thirty titles. And he’s not tired of it all despite the limited effect his sermons have had on Spain society. “Yes, my Román is tired and frustrated with the world; I am not, which might mean I’m an idiot; I have spikes, but I enjoy good health, and perhaps that’s what lets me keep thinking about the Platonic world: I believe that we should do good, otherwise we’ll be unfinished creatures; the problem is that today we’re really installed in a philosophy of unfinished business, of letting everything flow really quickly, everything on the Internet…what I don’t know is how to redirect this; that’s why I write, because the novel is fizzy with its dynamite: you can do emotional experiments without causing too much damage.”

Pombo admits, nevertheless, that he feels “pretty much alone” in his crusade in Spanish letters. “I see it more in English fiction, in Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene…in Spain, perhaps the person who’s closest would be Javier Marías.” It could be that what Pombo has denounced many times is not alien to him: the predominance of the paralyzed intellectual, like Román, who feels “blocked up” after his retirement, “without feedback, flirting with boredom” and also a young digital journalist for a site symbolically named The Non-Current, “which could interview me, as well…yes, the intellectual paralysis of Spain is notable, and in part it’s because of our politics, which have intervened badly: our political discourse is paralyzing, as well, with the repetition of slogans and over-discussion of topics; today, here and in Europe, the conservative discourse seems less paralyzing – perhaps because it’s not monolithic? – than the social democratic movement, which has not thought to rethink labor and the duality of the rich and the poor…”

“We don’t have any intellectuals like Ortega y Gasset.” The author of The Platinum-Iridium Meter, a reader of essays, drops Ortega y Gasset’s name twice; he quickly clarifies that he also monitors two or three other good authors – “Villacañas, Pardo, and Marina”, but he does so in the context of a society where “we cannot make exquisite culture, where everything has to be divulged because 50% of youth would need someone to explain Plato and the steam engine to them.”

The economic crisis has not facilitated the solidification of the liquid society that Pombo has already advanced (“much earlier than Kundera and Bauman”) in Relatos sobre la falta de sustancia (Stories on the Lack of Substance) in 1977. The crisis has accentuated this: “this crisis is counterspiritual; the philosophy of the personal salvation of the soul rules over that of the city, and is so distant from that of saying that I don’t save my circumstances, I won’t survive…we can see it now: Ortega continues to be seminal.” Solutions? “I can’t accept everything as it is; we have to take to the streets and denounce it, but we can’t leave the discourse like this either; we have to get up, and to get lively, and that’s why I joined Union, Progress, and Democracy; for that and for Fernando Savater.”

Hard times require a different kind of literature. Pombo admits that he has changed his way of writing, shortening it, as if it were dictation. “Now I make my works much more brief; in Spain we have constructed a very large and heavy kind of fiction; The Shaking of the Hero [which will be published February 2 by Destino] will be a short novel, 200 pages long, to avoid becoming a sprawling reflection; it’s a bit like the works of Henry James, following the Borgesian idea of having self control and a powerful image,” he says while, without realizing it, he shakes the table. Like he shakes his readers.

Winners of Akutagawa and Naoki Literary Prizes Announced; Mayor of Tokyo (a Former Novelist) Intends to Quit Selection Committee, Citing Idiocy of Submissions

Messrs. Enjō and Tanaka Win Akutagawa Prize; and Naoki Prize to Mr. Hamuro
Yomiuri Shimbun: 芥川賞に円城さん・田中さん、直木賞に葉室さん
January 17, 2012

The winners of the 146th Akutagawa Prize and Naoki Prize, hosted by the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature, were decided, announced, and honored the night of the 17th at Shinrakuchi, a 136-year old first-class restaurant in Tsuiji, Tokyo. The Akutagawa Prize [for best short story in Japanese by a new or rising author] went to Tō Enjō (39) for “The Clown’s Butterfly”, published in the July 2011 edition of Gunzō Magazine (a gunzō is a group of sculptures), and Shinya Tanaka (39) for “Eating Each Other”, published in Subaru (Pleiades) last October. Rin Hamuro (60) won the Naoki Prize [for best novel in Japanese by a new or rising author] for Chronicle of Evening Cicadas (published by Shodensha).

Mr. Hamuro, who has been nominated for the Naoki five times, was born in Kitakyushu. He debuted in 2005 and won the Seichō Matsumoto Prize in 2007. His prize-winning novel is about a samurai who passes the four seasons in hiding after being ordered to commit suicide by feudal enemies.

Committee member Jirō Asada said “it’s more complete than anything that came before it. It’s extremely well-designed and progresses from a setup that’s clear from the very beginning. It’s a mature piece that was written with care and attentiveness.”

The monetary award is 1 million yen. A formal presentation ceremony will be held in mid-February.

Akutagawa Winner Tanaka Displeased with Long Wait for Award: “I Obviously Deserved to Win This”
Yomiuri Shimbun: 芥川賞・田中さん不機嫌「私がもらって当然」
January 18, 2012

“Modern intelligence and old-fashioned thinking: we have both,” committee member Senji Kuroi commented about the contrasting careers and styles of the two Akutagawa Prize winners, both born in 1972.

Mr. Enjō was born in Sapporo. After receiving a doctorate in theoretical physics from Tokyo University and serving at various research institutes, he began to write “Eating Each Other”. The work, his third to be nominated for the award, is an experimental short story about a writer fluent in dozens of languages which examines the spoken and written word. Even the selection committee was divided about it.

Mr. Tanaka was born in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi. After graduating from high school, “because I couldn’t do anything else,” he randomly selected and read the works of writers like Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima and free-wrote about them. His literary debut was in 2005. He lives in his childhood home with his mother. This was his fifth nomination.

His story is set in a Shimonoseki neighborhood in the much-beloved very late Showa period. Its protagonist is a high school student, living in a village that smells of rivers and fish, whose feuds with his father and sexual impulses are described in dense sentences.

The differences between the two authors were clear at the press conference as well. Mr. Enjō said “the prizewinning works are read by many people. If people don’t read mine, there’s nothing I can do about it, but I want to keep writing strange and mysterious tales,” he said gracefully.

Mr. Tanaka began his speecy by quoting an actress: “I obviously deserved to win this. That’s pretty much what I’m feeling right now.” He said with a displeased-looking expression, “Reading books, writing novels, and being an author is all I’ve ever done.” The press conference was a short one.

Tokyo Governor Ishihara Announces Intent to Resign from Akutagawa Prize Committee: “It’s Not Stimulating”
Yomiuri Shimbun: 石原氏「刺激にならない」と芥川賞選考委員辞意
January 18, 2012

Shintarō Ishihara, [once a novelist and now] Governor of Tokyo, announced his intent to resign from the Akutagawa Prize Committee after this award because it’s “absolutely unstimulating.”

Governor Ishihara said “I’ve been hoping that a young person would come up, make me shudder, pull me back into it, but nothing has excited me. It has no meaning for my life.”

The governor became a committee member in 1995.

Governor Ishihara: “All the Submissions are Idiotic”
Yomiuri Shimbun: 石原知事「バカみたいな作品ばかりだよ」とも
January 19, 2012

Regarding Tokyo Governor Ishihara’s announcement of his intent to resign from the Akutagawa Prize Committee, the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature which hosts the award said “nothing is decided as yet. We’d like to meet with him soon and talk about it.”

However, Mr. Ishihara emphasized to the press today that he could not be dissuaded: “I’m quitting after this award. I said that (at the meeting on the night of the 17th), and they’ve been asking me not to quit, but I’m quitting.”

After a regular committee meeting on the 6th, Mr. Ishihara said about the nominees, “I’ve been laboring through the reading, but all the stories are idiotic.”

At the announcement on the 17th, Mr. Shinya Tanaka (39), who won the award along with Tō Enjō (39), said, “If I refuse this award and took down that small-minded man, the government would fall into chaos. For the sake of His Excellency the Governor and the citizens of the capital city, I will accept this award.” The rippling across the Internet and media.

In response to Mr. Tanaka, Mr. Ishihara said on the 18th, “Now that’s a good one. It’s ironic. I rather liked his story, though.”

Originals/原稿:

The Spanish Book Price War

Illustration by MAX

The Spanish Book Price War
Spanish publishers forced to rethink strategies after Amazon burst into the market over Christmas and sold reams of titles for less than three euros apiece
El País: Guerra abierta por el precio del libro
Antonio Fraguas reporting from Madrid January 8, 2012

Will it dynamite or dynamize the publishing ecosystem? After the December irruption of Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader, accompanied by an avalanche of 28,000 titles in Castilian (Spanish), some of them at prices lower than two or three euros and some even less than that, the Spanish book market will never be the same. New online publishing houses and bookstores have started a price war that challenges everything that was known before, from the way we read to what we understand to be a book. Above all, there is confusion between the container (the reading mechanism) and the content (text in electronic form). The machine manufacturers are doing battle over the former, the publishing companies the latter. Amazon is fighting on both fronts.

The novelist Juan Gómez-Jurado is very close to the cannonfire and has fired a volley himself. The Kindle edition of El emblema del traidor (The Traitor’s Emblem) has been the top seller on Amazon.es for more than a month. “For contractual reasons, I can’t say how many I’ve sold, but it’s in the thousands,” he says. He fixed the price (which has risen from €1.49 to €2.68 in a week). “I expect to make a dollar from each sale; the rest goes to Amazon,” he says.

But The Traitor’s Emblem is a peculiar novel for another reason: its electronic editions are being sold at two different prices: €2.68 on Amazon and €7.99 on Casadellibro.com (Book House). In principle, this violates Spanish law (the same edition of a book cannot have two different prices inside national territory). Gómez-Jurado explains that “in one case, the author is selling the book directly; in the other, he is selling through a publishing company.”

One brand that is well-known for aggressive pricing is B for Books, launched by Ediciones B in November: “we decided to offer the lowest prices on the market against paper books (€1.99-9.99). We wanted to make digital and paper prices as distant as possible,” Director Ernest Folch affirmed. The brand sells titles on Amazon and other online stores like Leqtor.com and Fnac.es. Folch only gave ballpark sales figures, such as “we sold three times more e-books in December than we did in previous months.”

Paula Canal of Anagrama dampened this dose of euphoria: “You can set those kinds of prices for bestsellers because they sell millions of units, but what happens if no more than 1000 copies of a title are sold?” she asked. “These prices are unsustainable in a healthy publishing environment that includes small publishing runs for difficult titles.” She is suspicious of the new arrival, Amazon: “For the moment we won’t stop selling our titles in Latin America and the United States, where there are not fixed prices, so as not to compete with other online stores with which we’ve signed contracts.”

Diego Moreno of Nórdica Libros (Nordic Books) has decided to enter the arena: “This year we’re starting a digital line (€4.99 apiece) and another with Pirandello stories, which we’re selling for pocket change, €0.99. The logic of the electronic book is that the price is much lower than paper’s. It’s a new way of conceiving the book and the reader. They’re bite-sized products that can’t cost as much as paper editions.”

Writer Rosa Montero has self-published three works on Kindle: compilations and discontinued books. “We’ve lost precious time to navigate against new technology…this slowness has favored the pirates, and now it seems like the only people providing something for free are we the creators, if no one plans to pay for the reading apparatus.” Montero also put forward an old demand of the sector, that the VAT for e-books fall from the current 18% to the same super-reduced rate of 4% that paper books enjoy.

80% of digital books sold in Spain go through Libranda. It was created in 2010 by, among others, Random House Mondadori, Planeta, Santillana, and Roca Editorial, and up to 30 publishers that sell digital works on Amazon negotiate over their offerings with this distributor. Its director, Arantza Larrauri, values the arrival of the Kindle: “if the electronic book is talked up in the press and on television, it will help the culture of digital reading.” He also recognizes that the sector is moving: “new publishers, medium and small ones, are being incorporated, and they’re beginning to make strides.”

There is room for everyone, thinks Pilar Gallego, treasurer of the Spanish Confederation of Booksellers’ Associations, which includes 1600 stores: “Paper books are still being sold, most of all children’s and youth literature, as those works are very eye-catching.” Gallego believes that “the Amazon phenomenon” is overstated: “it’s more about the publicity about the devices than the reality of the sales.” Literary works in digital format, according to Libranda’s forecast, will produce 1% of the revenue of paper book sales in 2012, still five times more than 2011.

For the director of the Spanish Federation of Publishers’ Assocations, Antonio María Dávila, Amazon’s focus is not the works themselves: “it could be a crazy entrepreneurial strategy for selling Kindles – which in my view are fairly poor in quality, like all cheap things – because their business is not about content.”

The Book Most Venerated by the SS

Nazi Convention in Nuremburg, 1936. Photo courtesy of the Associated Press.

The Book Most Venerated by the SS
A study analyzes the Nazis’ slanted use of Tacitus’s Germania; Himmler searched for the classic’s manuscript in Italy in 1943
El País: El libro más venerado por las SS
Jacinto Antón reporting from Oslo November 28, 2011

What is the most dangerous book in the world? Mein Kampf, many would quickly reply. The Bible, the Koran, the Malleus Maleficarum (the grand manual for witch-hunting), the Communist Manifesto, a grimoire like Necronomicon, Madame Bovary, the Kama Sutra…the answers would be much varied, but few would seriously consider a little work like Tacitus’s Germania, a moralizing ethnography little more than 30 pages long written at the end of the first century A.D. by a Roman historian. And yet, good God, what damage this little book of inaccuracies has done!

It was the Nazis’ bible: they thought it proved German superiority, and they used it to justify the racial laws passed in Nuremburg. Himmler had a fixation for the work, and he is known to have driven the reichsführer‘s own obsessions. In 1943, Himmler sent an SS detachment to Italy to claim the oldest preserved manuscript of Tacitus’s booklet, the Codex Aesinas. Curious work for the Nazis: they took a book in order to venerate it rather than to burn it, which was their usual custom. Himmler assigned the Germania manuscript with power as great as that of his other favorite relics, such as the Grail, the Lance of Longinus, and Thor’s Hammer. As opposed to these other legendary objects, the book was real, and the evil it caused as well.

In order to explain the shadowy history of Germania and its impact on the mentalities of people from the völkisch (folk) humanists to the Romanticists, a book which eventually had as privileged a position on nightstands as the greatest crime stories, Harvard University Classical Studies Professor and Tacitus Specialist Christopher B. Krebs, has written a passionate essay with the eloquent title of A Most Dangerous Book. Krebs picks up on the great Momigliano’s opinion that Germania deserves a special place among the most dangerous hundred books ever written and takes us on a fascinating journey from Imperial Rome to Hitler’s Germany, passing through monasteries, courts, and libraries, in a retracing of ideological history that required much detective work and seems now and again to be an intrigue novel.

When one holds Germania in one’s hands – the book is so small that it is normally published together with two other short Tacitus books, Agricola and Dialogue About Orators (such as in the Biblioteca Clásica Gredos edition which also includes introductions, a translation, and notes by J.M. Requejo) – one cannot imagine that this tiny piece, a rapid panoramic of the geography and customs of the Germans, could be compared to a smoking gun. But Krebs brings to light the considerations that would incite enormous enthusiasm throughout history until the book’s use by the Nazis. “I am almost convinced that the Germans were indigeneous and did not mix at all with other peoples…Because they were not degenerated by intermarriage with any other nations, they have maintained their particular race, pure and similar only to themselves, such that their physical characteristics, as much as possible for such a numerous group, are the same: ferocious blue eyes and blond hair.”

To the Nazis and their precursors, Tacitus demonstrated the continuity of the people on the land and justified racial policy. “We will return to being what we were,” Himmler wrote in his diary; he felt emotional about “the nobility of our ancestors” after reading Germania. The reichsführer executed homosexuals the way Tacitus said the ancient Germans did: by drowning them in bogs. Simple, valorous, loyal, pure, honorable, even chaste: many Germans are profiled this way in Germania. The SS identified themselves with their warriors: the Aryan archetype reincarnated, for whom loyalty was honor.

It is clear, nevertheless, that the Nazis read Germania with a slanted view. The Roman historian was not referring in his book to the supposed exemplary ancestors of modern Germans. His Germans were not a homogeneous people, indigeneous and pure, given to ethnic continuity, but rather an amalgamation of tribes with uncertain identities and destinies milling about in the fog of the past. Tacitus also made some unflattering observations about the Germans and their country. These were simply ignored. For example, Tacitus thought Germania was a revolting place to live; he said that the Germans practiced human sacrifice (curiously, this bothered the Nazis greatly, though they did the same during the Holocaust); that when they were not warring, they passed most of their time doing nothing, succumbing to the pleasures of sleep and food; that they grew up naked and dirty; that they drank and fought amongst themselves continuously. He even said one of the tribes, the Chatti, “have great capacity for reasoning, considering that they are Germans.” None of this kept poor Tacitus, the great Tacitus, from becoming part of the self-legitimizing discourse of the Nazis. It would have taken a lot to ask them to read the classics well.

A Roman Consul Abducted by Himmler
It took centuries for Germania to become a dangerous book; its diffusion began with its rediscovery in the 15th century, and that eventually turned it into a terrible ideological instrument. Krebs traces a story that sometimes calls to mind The Name of the Rose or The DaVinci Code, featuring manuscript hunters and bibliophilic popes, and shows us the text came to be loaded with symbols and interpretations, some of them sympathetic nonsense like arguments that the Germans were descendents of Noah or the Trojans in order to give them a pedigree.

The only story of the German peoples left by antiquity, this book came to be considered, in a mortal leap, as a historical source and an irrefutable portrait of the German past, though what it describes, with a moralizing and political spirit meant to compare the good, unadulterated savage with the corrupt, decadent Romans, is a mishmash of apocryphal observations and legends.

It’s probable that Tacitus, although he traveled thanks to his high posts and seems to have stayed in Belgic Gaul for a time, never personally visited Germania. Perhaps the book was an attempt to incite Trajan to conquer the region at once, a process paralyzed by the annihilation of Varo’s legions in the Teutaborg Forest by Arminio in the year 9. We are ignorant about many facts about the historian, such as his origin (which seems to be Gallia Narbonensis) and the exact dates of his birth and death. We know that he was a son-in-law of the great general Agricola, to whom he consecrated an encomiastic biography, and he was bequeathed and served in the posts of Senator and Consul and possibly Proconsul of Asia. All this is without a doubt less important than his work as a historian. He is Rome’s best in the eyes of many, as proven by his Histories and Annals. Krebs points out how the Nazis tried to make Tacitus’s story into reality, “past in future.” In the epilogue, he emphasizes that the book’s danger has not yet passed, and the fault is not with Tacitus but rather with his readers.

Chilean Poet Nicanor Parra Wins the Cervantes Prize

Chilean Poet Nicanor Parra Wins the Cervantes Prize
The 97-year old, creator of the antipoesía (antipoetry) movement, is the most veteran winner of the most important award in Hispanic letters, which comes with 125,000 euros
El País: El poeta chileno Nicanor Parra, premio Cervantes
Javier Rodríguez reporting from Madrid December 1, 2011

The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, age 97, has won the Premio Cervantes 2011. He is the most veteran writer to receive this distinction. The Minister of Culture, Ángeles González-Sinde, announced from the ministry headquarters the ruling for the most important award in Hispanic letters, which comes with 125,000 euros. Parra (San Fabián de Alico, Chile, 1914), creator of the antipoesía (antipoetry) movement, is the brother of the celebrated singer Violeta Parra, who passed away in 1967. Chilean academic, mathematicist, and physicist, he had been mentioned for the award several times in recent years. The cover story for Babelia (El País’s literary supplement), to be published precisely this Saturday, is a Parra profile written by Leila Guerriero. In it, the author affirms, “I have always fished for things that walked in the air.”

Parra is the survivor of the most outstanding group of contemporary Chilean poets, along with Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and fellow Cervantes winner Gonzalo Rojas (who passed away this April). After Cancionero sin nombre (A Songbook without a Name), which was much influenced by the popularismo of Federico García Lorca, was published in 1937, in 1954 came the book which marked his career and broke open Latin-American poetry in the second half of the 20th century, Poemas y antipoemas (Poems and Antipoems). After that came Versos de salón (Salon Verses) (1962), which included a poem in which he affirmed: Durante medio siglo / la poesía fue / el paraíso del tonto solemne. / Hasta que vine yo / y me instalé con mi montaña rusa. / Suban, si les parece. / Claro que yo no respondo si bajan / echando sangre por boca y narices. (For half a century / poetry was / the paradise of the solemn fool. / Until I came / and settled down with my Russian mountain. / They come up, if they want. / Obviously I don’t respond if they come down / bleeding from their noses and mouths.)

In 1948, in a poetic (a theoretical introduction) for an anthology, he had already minted the terms to which he would remain faithful in his work: “I seek a poetry based on actions and not on combinations or literary figures. I’m opposed to the affected form of traditional poetic language.”

In 1977, Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui (Sermons and Predictions of the Christ of Elqui) came to light; it is about a mystic and visionary who made predictions from the northern Chilean mines. Besides the Cervantes, he had already won the most important literary prizes for the Spanish Language, the Juan Rulfo in 1991 and the Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana (Queen Sofía Prize for Iberoamerican Poetry) 10 years later.

Parra’s work has had a kind of good luck with regard to publication given he is a poet and Latin American. Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de lectores has published a second, monumental, and we can say definitive tome of his works, Obras completas & algo + (the first appeared in 2006). Here the totality of the new Cervantes winner’s work is collected; the project was supervised by the writer himself and set up by the Hispanicist Niall Bins – the great expert in his work – and looked after by the critic Ignacio Echevarría. There are more good anthologies, like Parranda larga (A Long Night Out on the Town – note the pun) (Alfaguara), edited by Elvio E. Gandolfo, an ample selection of his books, visual poems (he calls them artefacts) included. This title, published last year, summarized already historical editions like Chistes para desorientar a la policía/poesía (Jokes to Disorient the Police/Poets) (Visor) and Poemas y antipoemas (Cátedra), edited by University of Chicago department head René de Costa, who studied the Hispanic vanguard and was also commissioner of the 1992 Valencia exhibition of Parra’s visual works beside Joan Brossa‘s.

Influence on Bolaño
Parra, among others, exercised enormous influence on the departed novelist Roberto Bolaño, who considered him on the same high level as Jorge Luis Borges and César Vallejo. “He writes as if he’s going to be electrocuted the day after,” Bolaño said. He also said that “he who is valiant should follow Parra.” The Chilean represented the adaption of the Spanish language to what critic Julio Ortega called “the civil dialogism of modern English poetry,” closer to spoken conversational language than the lyric and sometimes epic elevation of his compatriot Neruda.

Parra succeeds last year’s winner, the Catalonian Ana María Matute. Since 1976, 36 Spanish and Hispanic-American writers have won the prize considered the “Nobel of Castilian Letters”. The prize, created in 1975 by the Spanish government’s Ministry of Culture, recognizes authors whose work as a whole has contributed to enriching the legacy of Hispanic literature. Although it isn’t officially established, there is a tacit agreement to alternate the award between Hispanic America and Spain. This award has continued that tradition another year.

A Woman Presided on the Jury
For the first time, the president of the jury was a woman, the scientist Margarita Salas. The poet José María Micó, a member of the jury, said that he valued the writer’s long career, that he is an active poet, his great creative independence, and his qualification as a “grand master without a school.” At the moment the award was announced, the jury had not yet spoken with Parra.

After hearing of the award, the founder and director of Anagrama magazine, Jorge Herralde, who is in Guadalajara, currently the site of the most important international book fair in the Spanish-speaking world (the FIL), said of Parra, “it is one of the best Cervantes prizes that has been given, and he should have won it earlier. I discovered him long ago at Oxford, reading his Poemas y antipoemas,” reports Winston Manrique.

“Nicanor continues the path of the great Parra family, whose creativity, talent, and genius fill all of us Chileans with pride,” Chilean President Sebastián Piñera tweeted.

Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman sent his congratulations by e-mail: “How marvelous, and how delightful. Parra has transformed, desacralized our language. I’m dying with anticipation to hear the anti-speech he will give when he accepts the award. Cervantes and Parra together will never be topped…”

“Yesterday I was with him, and he didn’t mention the Cervantes” by Ana Marcos
Patricio Fernández, director of the Chilean seminar The Clinic and author of El País‘s blog Far From Everything, said that yesterday, Wednesday, he was with the awardwinner “all day, and he didn’t mention the Cervantes.”

“We had a peaceful day, lunching in Las Cruces (a region of Valparaíso),” said Fernández, who has known Parra “for 12 years.” “We’ve become very good friends.” He says Parra’s “anecdotes, skills, and good ideas are infinite.” “I couldn’t select one.” How did they meet? “One day I went to his home and asked him to do something for my review, which is very similar to the one he made, El Quebrantahuesos (The Lammergeier). So for some time he wrote a column he called Hojas de parra (double meaning: Parra Pages or Vine Leaves), like his book.

After that he started another section called Adivina de quién es este poema (Divining whose poem this is) about Chilean poetry. In fat, we once did a Parra special, an edition dedicated to him with unpublished texts, criticism, and commentary.”

Fernández was very happy the Cervantes was given to Parra because “it’s taken a lot of work to make people recognize that he has been the most important poet in Chile for quite a while now. I believe that thanks to the publication of his complete works, he has begun to receive more recognition.” “Today I called him, but he didn’t answer. It would be a lot like Nicanor to not pick up the phone right now because there’s nothing he dislikes more than answering questions.”

Handke in Another Tempo

Handke in Another Tempo
Peter Handke breaks the long silence he began after taking a controversial position with respect to Serbia. The Austrian author, a convert to the Orthodox faith, speaks about the freedom of travel, literary inheritance, including that of his own language, and the Balkan tragedies.
El País: Handke en otro tiempo
Peter Handke interviewed by Cecilia Dreymüller, literary critic and translator of some of his works, November 5, 2011

In his home surrounded by chestnuts, situated between Paris and Versailles, Peter Handke (born in Griffen, Austria in 1942) welcomed me [Cecilia Dreymüller]. His humble aspect and barely audible voice were contrasted sharply with his fae as a media star, combative man, and defender of controversial causes. Three of his books have been published in Spanish: his collected travel diaries in Gestern unterwegs (Travelling Yesterday) (Alianza), his notes about “Yugoslavia under the bombs” in Unter Tränen fragend (Asking Through the Tears) (Ediciones Alento y UDP), and his conversations with Peter Hamm recorded in Es leben die Illusionen (The Illusions Are Alive) (Pre-Textos). After declaring solidarity with the Serbian people during the Yugoslav wars and attending the burial of ex-president Milosevic in 2006, he was the victim of a media campaign that not only condemned his political posture but also disqualified his literary work from consideration. In the texts collected in Asking Through the Tears he describes the process and clarifies the motives for his commitment. The travel diaries in Traveling Yesterday, in turn, capture the era just before explosion of war in Yugoslavia. He has just returned from a trip to Slovenia, after passing through Salzburg, where his most recent theatrical work, Immer noch Sturm (Still Storm), just debuted.

Q: What brought you to take such a long trip between 1987 and 1990?

A: Simply put, I didn’t have a place to say. I’d just left my home in Salzburg, and my daughter, my first one, went to Vienna to study. That permitted me to realize a dream I’d had for a long time, which was to travel from one place to another for years on end. It was two and a half years altogether.

Q: Reading this book, one perceives a strong desire to seek peace and calm. How did you find tranquility on your journey?

A: There’s a famous story about the treatment of mental patients during the Middle Ages: that when they became aggressive, they were put on a boat, and the movement tranquilized them. In this sense, travels and tranquility can be perfectly compatible. For me, at least. Traveling on my own dime, you understand. There is no contradiction in terms.

Q: The observations you made in Romanesque churches and monasteries in Italy, Spain, and France are important. This trip also seems to be a journey toward spirituality.

A: Spirituality is a word we should not use too often. But toward the spirit, yes. I have always thought it strange that Goethe, in his Trip to Italy, speaks with horror and rejection of the Romanesque figures in Verona and San Zeno, for example. He calls them caricatures. The spiritual attracts me, the dreamy spirituality of Romanesque figures, their postures, how they are placed between each other without twisting. Not like Gothic art, where everything leads to a point, to the sky, like an arrow; in Romanesque art, everything stays on the ground, and even so one feels the roundness of a head in the sky, the heavenly firmament, no? In Santo Domingo, in Soria, the facades were pure music for me.

Q: In relation to the contemplation of Romanesque figures, there are many annotations in the book with Biblical citations, reflections about God and the divine. Was this trip something of a religious search for the roots of Catholicism?

A: No. The search was for how to describe a person, how to relate to a person. I don’t like realistic and natural descriptions of people, even if they are magisterial like those of the 19th century, in Stendhal and Flaubert, or in a different form, like Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s. It’s alien to me. I like strong outlines, like in Romanesque art. That is to say, the outline gives form, and inside the form, the reader or observer can come to meet the person. I was searching for a different epic, for what I found as a reader of Medieval epic poems; they let me live in the personalities. I intended to contemporize them as well in My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, in Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, and in At Night Over the River Morava. These, at their core, are medieval novels, epic poems more than novels. In this sense, I don’t believe as much in the novel as in the epic, the story that comes from afar and is balanced toward the distance. In other words, I am an enemy of psychological writing.

Q: I’ll quote a sentence in Traveling Yesterday: “When you move in adequate spaces, in adequate time, in adequate light, the world still becomes a story.” Are you a Romantic?

A: I don’t know if I’m a Romantic. I also have to be a Classicist. But a permeable one, not like Goethe. Although Goethe was lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you look at it – to live in a time in which this was generally accepted. I’ve just finished reading Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and it’s a horrifying book. I’ve realized that it has assembled, has managed a cohesion that does not exist. In this moment I understood that the Romantics, with their fragmentary writing…the explosion of Romanticism had to happen: Novalis, in another way Kleist, or Eichendorff, who left so many things open and didn’t try to unite them by force. But they passed over him from above. In this sense, I’m happy to live now, because not everything is accepted without more…and I don’t, either.

Q: In the book you say you wish for humanity to rise to a traumbarke, a boat of dreams. If this isn’t a 100% Romantic thought, then I don’t know what you could call Romantic.

A: I sometimes have Romantic moments, but I don’t abandon myself to them. Although sometimes one should abandon them. I often say that truly good literature seems like a beautiful popular song.

Q: In these entries, you open a process of apprenticeship which is very demanding.

A: Yes. I go at the world’s beat. I don’t march to the beat if my own drum; I adapt to a rhythm. I go with the things I see. Whatever penetrates me, I transmit. That’s what’s appropriate. I learn from what I read, and I would be lacking more.

Q: In the first part of the book, you seek tranquility; after that, the goal is permeability.

A: Permeability is what’s decisive. What it says is that the writer converts into a figure in transit, through which many things pass. But who has achieved that? I don’t know; Homer sometimes, and Georges Simenon (laughs). Sometimes William Faulkner. Literature, in reality, does not progress; it has variants. To write like Simenon now cannot be done. Once I said, a long time ago, “sigh…if only I learned how to write like Chekhov, stories like that, theatrical works like Anton Chekhov’s. Then someone said to me, “But that already exists! It’s not lacking. Write what Chekhov transmitted to you, about his world, his movement and rhythm, his quality, and above all about his shaking.” One time I said a great writer closes his path to his successors, but only so they can find their own. Or he is the opposite of someone like Thomas Bernhard, who is easy to imitate, really. A writer who is easy to imitate, deep down, does not deserve to be called a writer.

Q: From whence did this expansive worldliness, this oriental and occidental wisdom come?

A: Foolishness. I’m not an international writer. I’m from the countryside. In the town where I time from, there were Buddhists as well, but no one called them that. There was a muezzin, a minaret, although naturally they weren’t there. There were Indians, all that a kid would want. It all comes from my place of origin, from my parents, from my ancestors. Naturally, one also has to make oneself, though no one can completely do that. In any sense. No, it’s all there. Before I often thought, Oh my God, why wasn’t I born on the banks of the Mississippi like William Faulkner? But now I know that the brooks of my childhood were the Mississippi. Or I thought, when I was twenty years old and read Thomas Wolfe or Sherwood Anderson or Dreiser or John Steinbeck, hey, this world is so big, and my home is so small. Now I know that it was them, the writers, that created it. And I have to do it too, make the rhythm I know, that I can make; that wide world was already here. It was just that I ignored it, with my partially obtuse mind, because the dream of a great man always existed in me and I saw the people in my town as little. Now I know.

Q: Your childhood in a border region was also branded by language.

A: Yes, yes. In the hoe, we spoke the Slovenian dialect of Carinthia. My mother spoke pure Slovenian. I spoke less. Yet in our town, just a mile away, speaking Slovenian was frowned upon. During the Third Reich, the people there were strictly National Socialist. Slovenian was prohibited, and in my village there was the risk of deportation. Some farmers were evicted; they were taken to Germany, to the caps, and German or Tyrolese farmers took their place.

Q: In your theatrical work Still Storm you pay homage to your ancestors. Few people know about the only armed resistance to the Nazis inside the Reich, which was lead by Slovenian-speaking Austrians.

A: Yes, so it is; it occurred in the mountains of southern Carinthia. And it’s something that people only began to speak about a few years ago. Probably because inside the families, the pain was too great. And their supporters do little help by labeling them bandits, just like the followers of Hitler did. And the fissures went right through the middle of families. In Carinthia as well, the ones who were tortured the ost by the Nazis were the locals. In this they were very skilled: Slovenians, Croatians, Serbians, Greeks, and French all did the dirty work. And some of the Slovenians in Carinthia killed their own brothers and sisters. It was a tragedy.

Q: Surely these ancestors have affected your relationship with Yugoslavia?

A: Naturally. My mother spoke often about her older brother, who was a fruit farmer. I’m completely soaked in love stories because my mother talked about her two brothers who had to die for Hitler and who in reality favored Yugoslavia. And as for this older brother, who went to Maribor in Slovenia, to the closest Yugoslav city, there is much proof that he tried to convince my family to take the side of the Yugoslavs.

Q: In Traveling Yesterday you comment in 1989: “no other country which has the death penalty is questioned. What’s happening with your Yugoslavia?”

A: In 1989, the death penalty still existed in Yugoslavia, although after 1980, when Tito died, not a single person was executed, which I learned. In that tie, there was a call by the newspapers to abolish the death penalty as had been done in France. The same France which launches bombs at other countries – another form of death penalty, but that’s considered a different kettle of fish. The democracies of today permit it; outside their borders, they comport themselves like dictators. The democracies of today, in reality, are the new dictatorships, the humanitarian and economic dictatorships, the most hypocritical countries in existence. We live in an era of total hypocrisy. Pure and brutal violence reigned before, but now we have sugar-coated violence which is no less brutal.

Q: Have the Balkans been demystified for you?

A: No, not at all. The countries so hideously labeled ex-Yugoslavia continue to be the last and most terrible of beloved countries. I intend to represent them as Stendhal would have: with lightness, with grace, and without a doubt with a certain pain, a certain consciousness of loss. They are tragic peoples: the Albanians are, and the Serbians and Bosnians as well, the Muslims; the Croats less and less (he laughs bitterly). The tragedies are moving, and all deserve to be told. In “The Tablas of Daimiel” (in Asking Through the Tears) where I tell what happened in the refugee camps. There were more than one million refugees then; Serbia was full, and its situation was scandalous, and Croatia’s as well.

Q: Do you still think Milosevic was a tragic figure?

A: I don’t want to say anything else about this topic. Every time I open my mouth, words and intentions are attributed to me that I’d never expressed. I’m tired of it.

Q: In your book, there is a continuous exposition and reflection over religious questions, especially of the New Testament. What does the figure of Christ signify to you?

A: The Gospels are marvelous stories.

Q: Allow me to cite another passage: “the story of Jesus is like a dramatic history of discovery. The discovery of the divine in itself.”

A: Yes, Hölderlin could have said this. He spoke of the “poor god inside of a person.” We have to do everything possible so he doesn’t stay poor and abandoned. It exists, it’s substance! We could be much better. But this matter, which is at the same time spiritual – that is no contradiction – is fought by the pace we run and by ourselves.

Q: And why did you convert to the Orthodox Church?

A: Because the hierarchy isn’t as strong or as palpable. I once visited a patriarch, a diminutive man in Serbia who didn’t seem anything like the head of a church. On the other hand, the people sometimes need to have a head, like the pope; the general abandonment of the people leads the to search for a substitute for a father figure. In any case, I’m not a proselytizer for the Orthodox faith. But I’m not interested in people who boast of being atheist; they seem silly. I have more confidence in someone who says he believes in something. There could be another tempo than the one we’re passing through so profanely, another light. This other tempo has driven my books ever since Short Letter, Long Farewell. Although we don’t have to speak so much about it, we have to practice it.

Q: But, to convert to the Orthodox Church because the structure is less hierarchical, though it is also such a conservative faith…this couldn’t be the reason.

A: My other reasons aren’t important to anyone else.

My Facebook Wall: September 2011

9/15: Back on my island. Had a great trip. Can’t sum up China within the character limit. It’s more like ten countries than one.
9/16: Check out Naxi music if you get the chance. A minority tribe on the western edge of the Chinese Empire preserved the traditional imperial music better than anyone else because generals and officials sometimes retired there and taught classes in their spare time, and they were too far away for each century’s Cultural Revolutionaries to care about them. The music sounds is much more harmonious than Chinese opera.
9/16: Self-help article of the year?
9/18: I’m planning a one-week trip to Sichuan over Thanksgiving.
9/20: I was unhappy with how much time I was sedentary last year, but even so I have to use a computer to read, write, and communicate with friends and family. Youth hostels, of all places, showed me how to thread the needle. The public computers there were on top of bars without chairs, so I could only use them while standing. Now that I’m home, I’ve put a couple boxes between my desk and my laptop. I’m typing this from my feet.
9/20: Last fall, 7-11 Taiwan ran a promotion where if you bought enough products (like $50US worth), you could select a random vintage Hello Kitty keychain. It was so popular it almost broke the economy.
9/21: I wondered: if I were running a 30-minute news program the day the Japanese solar sailor IKAROS captured this event, at which minute would I run this story? It’s the biggest kinds of explosion in the universe! A galaxy only sees one every few hundred thousand years! …But it’s so far away it will never affect us. And there are so many galaxies that one of these star-shattering explosions happens somewhere every day. Or perhaps a hundred of them do, and we only see one.
9/22: Why am I so good-looking? For the glory of God.
9/25: When did we become afraid to do what is right? When we didn’t feel secure.
9/25: Tartle: A Scottish verb meaning to hesitate while introducing someone due to having forgotten his/her name. (Source: Altalang.com)
9/28: I could shoot at a clay pigeon blindfolded and still be more accurate than the average non-American describing gun ownership in the United States.  Everyone I’ve spoken with about this subject thinks that the sale and carrying of guns is completely unregulated (so anyone can buy anything and take it anywhere), and many have an image of firearms being drawn in saloons and schools with regularity like it’s the Wild West. They don’t understand that most firearms are owned by ordinary people and kept in the home for protection, where they collect dust (I always tell them our family has a gun but I’ve never seen it), and that the most active users are hunters and target shooters. As my cousin alluded to, if your image of America came from movies and TV news, and your own elites all thought letting citizens own guns would be madness, you’d be in the dark, too.

About Translation (9/21)
The second Wikipedia paragraph about translation is interesting: “Translators always risk inappropriate spill-over of source-language idiom and usage into the target-language translation. On the other hand, spill-overs have imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched the target languages. Indeed, translators have helped substantially to shape the languages into which they have translated.
‎”The translator of the Bible into German, Martin Luther, is credited with being the first European to posit that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language. L.G. Kelly states that since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, “it has been axiomatic” that one translates only toward his own language.”
BTW, when I translate it’s annoying to go find the special vowels, so I keep them all saved on the bottom of the Notepad file like so:
¥ōū ÁÍŌ áéíóú ñç°€
Long vowels for Japanese, accented vowels and inflected consonants for Spanish, plus the degree sign and currency symbols.

Which Professional Sports Team Has the Most Wins Ever? (9/23)
Friend: On Aug. 13, the Giants became the first professional sports team in the world to win 10,500 games.

James: As great a franchise as the Giants are, every year for decades now they’ve fallen farther behind the true winningest professional sports team ever, the Harlem Globetrotters, who have over 22,000 victories on their ledger. The Trotters started 44 years after the Giants but have an incredible schedule: in the 1960s, they played 505 games per year!

Friend: I seriously dispute your designation of the Globetrotters as a “professional” sports team.

James: They’re professional in the literal sense, they make their livings exclusively by playing basketball, and in the figurative sense, they are highly skilled and take their jobs very seriously. I imagine they’re also more famous and have less margin for error from game to game than the Giants do. The results of their games may be decided in advance, so their wins aren’t equal in the competitive sense, but like professional wrestlers, they deserve respect and recognition. Ultimately, the Giants, just like the Globetrotters, are paid to entertain us. The concept of entertainment is just different.
Friend: “The results of their games may be decided in advance, so their wins aren’t equal in the competitive sense.” That means their wins mean nothing. It is, in a sense, like professional wrestling. You go more for the show and the tricks than for the sport.

James: And does the Giants’ win total signify they are the greatest sports franchise of all time? No other sport can be played 154-162 times a year. No other league is as old as the National League. Even the worst baseball teams win 40% of their games.

Friend: I’m not saying the Giants are necessarily the greatest sports franchise of all time. But I would much prefer that the team I root for reach this milestone first than some other team. And if cricket were reformed, that could be done as often as baseball.
James: Hahaha, okay. I’m happy you’re happy. Cricket fans would say a reformed cricket with 2-3 hour games wouldn’t be true cricket, right?

Friend: True dat. A rushed afternoon tea is to no one’s benefit – the players, the umpires, the fans, or the tea.