Posts tagged literature

Insight into the cultural world of Munich's Oktoberfest, via its lost and found (here's the official site in German, in case you're missing anything). By my book, the best-ever Munich beer-binge description (which involves its own bit of lost-and found) can be found in Patrick Leigh Fermor's exquisite travel book A Time of Gifts—the link will drop you right at the start of Fermor's Hofbrauhaus set-piece.

cultural worlds, europe, food and drink, germany, literature, loss, patrick leigh fermor

Nate

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Anyone who has visited the Oktoberfest and seen hundreds of revellers dancing on the wooden tables, holding up their beer glasses and chanting along to DJ Ötzi’s cover version of “Hey! Baby” knows how merry the atmosphere can get.

For those who haven’t, a look at the lost and found register evokes the raucous celebrations.

Members of staff found 680 identity cards and passports, 410 wallets, 360 keys, 265 spectacles, 280 mobile phones and 80 cameras, one set of diving goggles, one set of angel’s wings, a superman costume and four wedding rings. A long-haired Dachshund was also found roaming the festival ground, but was later reclaimed by its owner.

“For the first time, no dentures were found,” the Munich city press department said with a mixture of surprise and disappointment. “Is this a sign of demographic change, good dental hygiene or a higher rate of tooth implants?”

I love studies of animal language precisely because, of course, they're generally really just as much about human language and culture. The generous, absurd gesture of translating a Babylonian epic into ape-ish just underscores the point.

animals, gestures and postures, horizons of the possible, language, literature, poetry, translation

Nate

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There’s been increased interest lately in monkey languages after discoveries were made about how putty-nosed monkeys combine sounds to create a basic syntax:

* Hack-hack-hack-hack: “There’s an eagle over there!” * Pyow-hack-hack-pyow-pyow-pyow: “I’ve seen a leopard, let’s move away!” * Hack-hack-hack-pyow-hack-hack-hack-hack-hack “There’s an eagle over there, let’s move away!”

But research at the Great Ape Trust using the sign language Yerkish reveals the primates are capable of far more linguistic sophistication. Primate Poetics sets out a manifesto to enrich this new language, starting, ambitiously, with a translation of the epic Gilgamesh:

“We will learn Yerkish. We will translate human literature into Yerkish. We will invent words, word-tricks, word-jokes, word-games to show the apes new ways of using (their) language. We will become knowledgeable and original enough to be invited by the researchers of the Great Ape Trust to read our Yerkish translation of Gilgamesh to Kanzi, Panbanisha and all the others.

“We are not here to compare and to compete with the ape but to appreciate its language for its own beauty. This is emphatically not about some lone genius monkey penning the Great Primate Novel.”

A sort of high-end storefront secular church emerges in London.

education, england, horizons of the possible, literature

Nate

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London’s new School of Life, based in a Merchant Street storefront, offers courses on “the five central themes of our lives—work, play, family, politics and love.” The school’s courses treat the classics (like Shakespeare’s sonnets or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) as works with practical, not just academic, value. It’s a refreshing approach. “Real” college literature and philosophy courses are often too distracted with their cerebral exercises (”deconstructing the narrative,” or whatever) to consider whether these works of genius might have actual applications in everyday life.

A marvelous review of Marilynne Robinson's new book Home by Linda McCullough Moore—a fine writer in her own right (and also, full disclosure, treasured family friend).

books, grace, literature, writing

Andy

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Marilynne Robinson is in a category by herself, and that category is both fully staffed and up to any project. I hope this is gratuitous, but if you haven’t read the essays in The Death of Adam, neither sleep nor eat till you have remedied the oversight. Her first novel Housekeeping is what I think a book should be. And now writing in Home of the same people in the same time and place as in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, everything is different. These two books could not be less alike. And just because she can and perhaps must, Robinson has pages and pages of dialogue about theology here, people sitting on the porch as evening falls, discussing and dissecting the particulars. The reader slows his pace, he doesn’t want to miss a word. Theology as conversation. She’s pulled off the impossible. (I know whereof I speak.)

In all her work we have the writer as magician. She’s making a concoction of her own invention, and if she doesn’t know if it will turn the one who drinks it into a fairy princess or blow the place to smithereens, well, those are risks she is prepared to take on our behalf. Perhaps that hints at her distinctive. She has been the sort of reader in her life who knows the possibility of writing. She takes nothing lightly, but there is lilt and charm for all of that. She can be light precisely because she knows the stakes are high, because she has cared enough to take the measure of the thing. And, she has the requisite humility to say, “There are things worth believing.”