If This Isn't For You, Feel Free to Disregard It

a) Disambiguating Gemini:

Castor is on the side of Capella; Pollux is on the side of Procyon. Easy, no? Capella's the main star in Auriga, the Charioteer, that's way up high and we haven't really gotten to yet. Procyon's in the Little Dog, which looks even less like a dog than the Big Dog. (But both look way more like dogs than The Hunting Dogs look like a whole group of them, but that's another season's constellations.)

[I really shouldn't do my observations and attempts at astrophotography (cursèd low batteries) without shoes on, though. Woo for Alphard in Hydra, though. Next step: using the winter hexagon to locate things outside of the winter hexagon!]

b) My 'Complete Saki' lies, unfortunately.

Ah well. One can't have everything, even in massive omnibus editions. "A Shot in the Dark" and the Clovis story are about the only semi-spectacular ones, in that order.

"My tender one," said Mr. Kopfrkingl...

It was two years ago today that I sat down with a now-battered notebook, a work of Ladislav Fuks', my dictionaries, and a pen. Two hundred scribbled words later, I had started the process of turning his life's published work into English.

I had done some tentative scribblings earlier. I would also do but a [tentative/halting?] heavily-annotated chapter and a half of the work (rework later?) and then let it sit for almost six months, but since that was the try that ended up taking, and since I was thoughtful enough to put the date at the top, that's the anniversary I have.

I can't remember what got me started that day, and those first couple of pages have seen more heavy revision than others, but I now have a sixth or seventh draft of Burner of Corpses and am editing the second drafts of the short story collections Death of a Guinea Pig and My Black-Haired Brothers. I believe I've also got a first-draft first chapter of Mr. Theodor Mundstock sitting in a notebook upstairs as well. This time last year, I'd barely had a second or third draft of the first one; I'm fitfully picking up steam, it seems. The more the merrier.

Goals for Year Three? [Purely as it pertains to translating]. I'd like to have all three of the ones I'm done now in servicable form (read--fifth draft or more), with Mundstock and the novella The Way to the Promised Land at least transcribed from their [as-yet nonexistent] handwritten first drafts. There's enough to do that running out of things is the least of my worries.

I'm thankful for projects, and for all the people who've had a kind or kindly critical word to say along the way.

Only one way to move forward, though.

To work.

November rain?

Two-thirds of the month has gone by and I haven't listened to that song yet?

I must be happy.

I haven't listened to it even in jest?

I must be busy, too.

My sixteen-of-nineteen day span at work ends tomorrow, and then I'm skipping town to catch up with my roots for a Thanksgiving in the Slovak enclave in southwestern Massachusetts.

A je po říjnu...

Another month past. It has been brought to my attention that others don't necessary use the month as a basic unit of time insofar as conceptualizing projects or lenghty events, preferring weeks or seasons. It's the month through and through for me, regardless of such fripperies as details. March was Buster Keaton, April was housesitting and translating (right up to finishing a collection of short stories at noon on April 31st, as I redubbed the first of May) and September was mono. October...well, they don't all have to be categorized.

Have been academic of late, acquiring books on Old English vocabulary, the dawn of the Slavic languages, and an etymological dictionary of German, which means I can spend my time doing things like discovering case relics in English (whilom, the more the merrier), smiling confidently about my knowledge of Proto-Slavic morphology as reflected in Czech (my agricultural vocabulary is a bit lacking) and finally confirming over that nagging suspicion that the suffixes -heit and -(ig)keit were the same thing originally. And cognate to -hood.

In other wrds, I'm reasonably happy. What's more, I have an application in for immersion studies at Middlebury next fall, and hope to be working on masters applications before the month is out.

Halfway there...

I have been a fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers since...at least 1988, those being the earliest Topps cards I have. [well, at least the ones I got myself at the time. Yes, I still have a bunch of football cards. They're in a box in the closet somewhere.]

There was some long story here, involving years of fandom when they were terrible through to dressing up and going nuts when they won a Super Bowl, but I just saw the highlights of their 62-yard game-winning field goal, and there's not much else I can say.

I almost stopped picking them for the first time ever in my father's football pool last week, but thought better of it. Halfway back to .500, boys!

Initial squu-

I was reading through The Dain Curse on a car trip this weekend, and was struck by an unorthodox spelling Dashiell Hammett employs.

"My pants stuck disagreeably to my chilly legs. Water squunched in my torn shoes." (p.220 of "The Complete Five Novels," ch. 13 of the Curse)

I was immediately reminded of a line from the end of Thurber's The 13 Clocks, an all time favorite. "Hark stepped on something that squutched beneath his foot and flobbed against the wall." (p. 124)

Hitherto that word had stuck out and bothered me, occurring as it does on the last page, but as Thurber uses a lot of nonce words (flobbed, for instance, among many other joys) I had thought nothing more of it.

Now we've got ourselves a phenomenon. Upon doing a little research, I find "sqush" and "squush" to be variant forms of "squish" in my big Random House dictionary, and google gives a decent lot of results for "squunched." But this is something I had previously thought only a Thurber thing.

I can idly come up with a few attempts at explanation. Perhaps it's an attempt to render a lack of lip-rounding. I can get the same pronunciation of initial squu- in the second syllable of "sesquipedalian," indicating it may be an attempt to contrast the close-central-unrounded from the mid [i.e., the standard schwa]. Either that, or it's an attempt to avoid the orthographic assumptions of rounding that a double-O would imply .

It could also be a simple case of wanting to put a u after the obligatory qu- cluster. Or a simple visual expedient for dealing with onomatopoeia. How much "-quu-" do we get to deal with in English, after all? Is "squished," "squushed," and "squooshed" a minimal triplet for people?


As for the Hammett, I'm happy I kept Dain last. It wasn't bad, but I can see where he considered it his worst. I'm now re-re-reading Red Harvest for extra fun before I have to return the omnibus to the library. Then I may re-read my copy of The Glass Key.

Sarcophageal Synchronicity

I've talked about it before, but the Elmwood cemetery, halfway between my house and downtown, is in terrible shape. The city replaced the chain-link fence I used to run my hand along as a child during a gentrification project a few years ago, but from the first row things are going awry. Sinkholes, fallen stones, illegibility, weeds, odd lumps in the terrain...it's bizarre. Well, not really; it's an old cemetery, I suppose, and there've been maybe a dozen people interred there in the last fifty years. It's been niggling at me for most of my life in a very low-key way.

So I walk around there today on my walk from downtown, and decide to go back home and get my camera to come back and take a few pictures, wondering if there are such things as a cemetery manifest and if anyone else cares about this. Is reconstruction even possible? I see two women walking around with a binder, and it turns out less than twenty-four hours ago a story was printed about these two women and their decision to, well, clean up the cemetery.

I introduced myself and we chatted for a while about the sorry state of the cemetery, the city's $300,000 fence, and how the city doesn't want anyone to see the list of occupancy, as it were, because the paper is too fragile. So next spring and summer I may be trying to assist in the restoration of the Elmwood cemetery.

I'm glad it was a nice day.

Obsessive statistics

About 57,500 words transcribed in twenty days (21 calendar days). The short story collections "Death of a Guinea Pig" and "My Black-Haired Brothers" are 'complete,--or at least v.2.0 of each is, those being the first typed drafts.

There's a lot of work ahead, but there always is. I'm going to take a bike ride, enjoy a sunny fall day, eat an apple and walk around downtown for a while to unwind. It is my day off, after all.

Covered in Bees

So I was on my way into work today after noshing my way through our annual Harvest festival (insert gratuitous amounts cider, cheese, bread, &c.) and some guy I didn't recongize asked me three things.

1) If I had gone to Brown.

2) If I worked there.

3) Would I mind terribly much watching his bees?

This was an unexpected series of questions, except for the second, but it transpired he had seen me (and perhaps even engaged me in conversation about) the Brown intramural shirt I sometimes wear while I was working before, and was one of our honey vendors, displaying a hive. He had to go get his car while I watched thousands of bees behind glass three feet from my face, and the occasional outsider bees drawn to the sweet sweet scent pheromones within, or something.

He eventually returned to decamp with his bees, and in an interestingly heartfelt manner, gave me a copy of The New Starting Right With Bees, whose first chapter discusses how to capture a swarm of bees that wanders into one's vicinity. And I had thought it was ants or wasps.

251 Club!

So I missed the October 1 member meeting of the 251 Club due to using all my vacation/sick time for the latter, much to my great dismay. As with gardening and New Year's resolutions, though, there's always next year. Well, today Nörm and I made up for road trips missed with quite the epic number today.

A nice little nine-hour jaunt. Plainfield, Marshfield, Lyndon, Wheelock, Stannard. And those are just the towns I did new things in. Used bookstores, scenic walks, new restaurants, odd marble stones at the side of the road...Ate well, traveled well, the leaves are nice too. And I got six or seven new books, including some Dashiell Hammett.

New photos up too.

No Čapek today, unless I get inspired before bed. Too many new books make that unlikely.

The Educated Caterpillar

Ha! I'm going to become a butterfly? Old wives' tales, sir. Mere fantasies. Bedtime stories for children. It has been scientifically determined that there are only viscera in us caterpillars, and no wings. No colorful wings. One dies and that's that.

-Čapek, Fables II

I forgot I'd outstripped anything I had planned to put up, and I'm running out the door, but a promise is a promise.

Up to 39,000 words since noon two Tuesdays ago. I'll hit 40,000 in a two-week span.

A Mouthful of Burnt Foot

It may seem an odd thing to say, but the Čapek's been nothing but a sideshow for the last two weeks, a public display of the process I've been battling with on much greater terms elsewhere. I'd finished translating two collections of Fuks short stories between November and May, but had only made fiftul inroads into transcribing them. In the last two weeks (well, it's two weeks tomorrow at noon), as a convalescing project, I started transcribing. I've typed a little over 37,000 words since then, and probably have about half that to go. This is the largest typing project I've had in over a year, since I was transcribing Burner of Corpses, the novella I'm done [a third draft of].

The translation strategy I've cobbled together over the last two years involves a handwritten first draft that, while not hard-core literal, is strikingly literalistic in its sentence structure and word choice. Transcribing is essentially creating a second draft in which I give myself leeway to edit syntax and lexicon, before I print and start in on a hard copy with whatever friends I can round up to help.

I love my first drafts, since they're carefully dated, and, in some cases, the place I was working (a house I sat in April, the library, coffeeshops, my bedroom) is noted as well--making them little diaries of sorts. They're funny to go through. In some cases I've overwritten old stuff, I write on the dividing pages, my hadwriting shrinks as I try to fit collections into one book, writing on the back cover... The mistakes are fun too--sometimes I skip lines, or combine lines, or just plain write the wrong thing. Some I have to go back to the text to puzzle over...like the title of this post. Burnt food. It was burnt food.

It almost makes me glad to have been hideously ill; I'd been assiduously avoiding my Fuks all summer. I wish I could remember why.

I'll take another break in a bit and toss up more Čapek. It's a lovely exercise in working straight to the second draft, and it's a good way to diversify my Czech reading. Back to work.

Grasshopper, Child in the Garden, Cactus, Weed

Grasshopper

Brrr! Into the earth at once! Must dig into the good, most soil! Hey, a man picked me up! How disgustingly hot and dry he is! I can't take it, my stomach's coming up! Ughhh!

Child in the Garden

He's tearing off flower buds and sticking them in the gravel paths.

"Hey, what are you doing, you little garden-wrecker?"

"Plantin' flowers."

Cactus

I stab you and for all that you still brag what marvelous thorns I have?

Weed

I know, comrade rye: there is a conspiracy against me. When they mow the meadow it is only to wipe me out. They send the hail down on me; they try to burn me with the sun; they hire the moles and locusts to come after me. But I stand my ground. I know why they're after me. Oh, I could tell you a thing or two!

Čapek, Aesop 6,7,8,9/9

I just wish there was a better onomatopoeia for vomiting. The Czech has "Fí!"

This will get buried by Čapek, but...

"As we flew over the fluffy landscape of Greenland I thought how peaceful it would be for the engines to cut out and the airplane to glide silently to a belly landing on the snow. Two hours of quiet shivering, perhaps one final defiant beverage service, and the whole thing would be over. I couldn't think of a more ideal way to go, a planeload of us frozen in place watching that slow sunset."

Just a plug for Idle Words in the sidebar. Man, I loves me some Idle Words.

A Statesmanlike Act, Flowerpot

A Statesmanlike Act

The begonia in the flowerpot wasn't long for this world; in spite of all efforts on its behalf it was rotting underneath and withered on top, so much so that it was terrible to see. The gardener even threw it into the darkest corner of the cellar in a fit of pique. Then he forgot about it altogether, having more important things on his mind than a ruined begonia.

When he was looking for an empty flowerpot in the cellat fourteen days later, he found the begonia resurrected, once so tall but now thirsty as hell, and terribly desperate to live.

"How our gardeners understands his affairs," the other flowers whispered. "What worldly wisdom!"

Flowerpot

You're staring, right? Look how much I've grown since spring! Look at the foliage I've got! How redolently I bloom!

Čapek, Aesop 4,5/9

"Thirsty as hell" may be a bit strong, but it was the best I could think of. Eh. It's feisty.

Cat in the Garden, Ownership

Cat in the Garden

You willed an orderly lawn into shape out of arid wasteland, and bushes up out of bare twigs; you raised a housecat on your lap from a stray and spitting kitten. And now your tomcat glides like a serpent through the high grass and underbrush, its golden eyes shining, joyful tremors running through its glossy coat.

"Me? I am a wild beast in the forest primeval."

Ownership

I've long since held an affection for sparrows because they are merry and poor, because they are grey as old rags, dishevelled as tramps, carefree as children; chatty, satisfied with life and somehow entirely democratic; for this and other reasons I have always regarded them with affection as they eke out their little lives.

Begone, you worthless thing, beat it, you miserable sparrow, get lost, you wretched creature! Where is my cat, where is my cane, where is my gun? You mean to tell me, you little bandit, that you took my first cherry off my little tree?


Čapek, Aesop 2, 3/9

A few artistic liberties here, with "forest primeval" and "little tree" for "wild jungle" and "dwarf cultivar," respectfully.

Earwig

You wretched, worthless, ugly little monster, who nibbles away my tender seedlings and gobbles my scarcely-emerged sprouts, you who work your way into every corner of my house in your aimless and repulsive haste, hide under my blankets and swim in my drinking glass; you wriggling little beast, snapping at me with your pincers, I beg you--what on earth are you good for? What purpose do you serve? What contribution do you make? Is there any creature under the sun more worthless than you?

"I'm not useless, sir; I have accomplished something immeasurably useful during my lifetime."

And what exactly have you accomplished, Mr. Earwig?

"I had lots of children."

Karel Čapek, (who else?), Aesop the Gardener, 1/9


Apparently I've started another wee Čapek project. This should take me four or five days; some of these are one-liners. In a short life update, I've beaten the strep and mostly beaten the mono, I figure--at least, I'm only moderately more tired than seems usual. I'm back at work, and somehow our little garden plot is still producing cukes, carrots and peppers. No earwig problems for me, fortunately.

How to Grow Clouds

It takes a lot of work: it is necessary to weed very carefully, to toss out muck and small stones by hand, to kneel on the earth, bend over, dig about in the soil, water profusely, collect caterpillars, exterminate aphids, loosen the ground and serve the earth; when your back hurts from all this and you straighten up and look at the sky, you will have the prettiest clouds. Probatum est.

[the entirety of Philemon originally in Lidové noviny, 6 September 1925]

Clay

I spoke of clay, and a gardener became angry with me. Garden soil, he said, is no clay; it is earth, humus, a useful and living substance; whereas clay, we all know, is dead matter, marl, slag itself. I was ashamed of myself somewhat; the gardener was right. Why, then, did the Lord create man out of clay and not out of soil? It is not written that Adam was made out of humus. It is not said that the Creator made him out of fine leaf mold. He carefully set the humus and leaf mold aside for the Garden of Eden. We gardeners, therefore, do not fritter away the best soil on doubtful pursuits.

--Karel Čapek, Philemon (4/5)

I had fun with "marl" and "slag." Also leaf mold. Mmmm, leaf mold.

Weeds

I made a discovery: each plant has not only its own leaves and flowers, but a certain kind of root as well. You who don't mess around in the soil, laying waste to weeds, have no conception of the hidden wealth of roots. There are roots that are light, fleshy, sickly pale; or fat, arborescent, rich as a shock of hair; creeping, woody, swollen, tuberous, stubborn, brittle, strong as catgut, shallow and deep, plump and starvingly scrawny, rosy as living nerves and black as dry rot, hirsute and bald; I tell you, life under the ground is just as rich as above it.

--Karel Čapek, of course, Philemon part 3 of 5.

This is the least intentionally funny; but as the man wrote gardening treatises among other things, I'n inclined to smile along with him anyway--hell, it was excellent adjective practice. [N.B., I had originally rendered the adjective "brittle" as "crunchy." Fine on candy wrappers, but here...]