Reviews and Words: Rothko, Rock, Finnegan, and Lions
This Week: Three Short Reviews of Rothko, Rock, and Finnegan
Mark Rothko: A Biography
by James. E. B. Breslin
A giant tome, but fascinating. A look at the life and art of one of the greatest American abstract painters. It also analyzes the artist's work, including some of the late "blank" canvases where analysis would not seem possible. Worth a read for anyone interested (or not!) in art.
Future Days: Krautrock and the Birth of A Revolutionary New Music
by David Stubbs
A fascinating chronicle of a time when there was no distinction between "popular" and "experimental" music.
Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce
Unreadable nonsense or an epic/mythic/philosophical/comic masterpiece? Answer to both: yes. If you try to read it as a "regular" novel, it may seem too dense to bother. Or not. If you read it out loud, it transforms into an epic, poetic masterpiece. If you try to analyze it and pick apart its multiple puns, neologisms, and other wordplay, it'll keep you interested for longer than Joyce took to write it. The critique of Anna's letter (which is also the Book of Kells), wordplay in the museum, character sketch of Shem the Penman, and the fate of the Russian general: all of these made me laugh out loud (though it took me a while to find the latter). The Mookse and the Gripes and Yawn at the inquest sequences contain some of the most beguiling dream imagery I've ever encountered in a book. "There's a lot of fun at Finnegan's Wake." Indeed, there is: enough fun for a friend of mine to be memorizing and performing the entire thing, one chapter a year, as a stage play.
This Week's Words: Lions
In one of the appendices to my "Tond" series, the Fyorian word for “lion” is listed as ásalan. The familiarity of that word has been pointed out. Obviously I didn’t make it up, and the Narnia reference is likewise obvious. However, C. S. Lewis didn’t make it up either. It’s an old Central Asian word that has variants from eastern Europe to China:
Azerbaijani: aslan
Hungarian: oroszlán
Kazakh: aristan (арыстан)
Kyrgyz: arstan (арстан)
Manchu: arsalan (also erselen “lioness”!)
Mongolian: arslan (арслан)
Turkish: aslan
All of these languages except Hungarian belong to the (possibly theoretical) "Altaic” language family, which (also possibly theoretically) includes Japanese and Korean – though the latter two use completely different words for the big cat in question. (Chinese, belonging to another family, has another completely different word.) Japanese has ライオン, which if you know how to sound it out, is roughly the same as the English (and the writing in katakana letters indicates that the word is of foreign origin).
What does all of this have to do with Tond? Not much, really, except that I found it interesting and based Fyorian grammar/syntax on the "Altaic" model. There is also a little bit about comparative linguistics in Book IV.
Other than that, there are tigers.
And Now for the Shameless Self-Promo
A review of the first novel in my "Tond" series: So much to like about this book - the characters are well-drawn, the settings are vivid, the quest is introduced along with the coming of age theme. Readers will be intrigued, engaged and definitely moved to continue the series.
Reader on Amazon.com
Mark Rothko: A Biography
by James. E. B. Breslin
A giant tome, but fascinating. A look at the life and art of one of the greatest American abstract painters. It also analyzes the artist's work, including some of the late "blank" canvases where analysis would not seem possible. Worth a read for anyone interested (or not!) in art.
Future Days: Krautrock and the Birth of A Revolutionary New Music
by David Stubbs
A fascinating chronicle of a time when there was no distinction between "popular" and "experimental" music.
Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce
Unreadable nonsense or an epic/mythic/philosophical/comic masterpiece? Answer to both: yes. If you try to read it as a "regular" novel, it may seem too dense to bother. Or not. If you read it out loud, it transforms into an epic, poetic masterpiece. If you try to analyze it and pick apart its multiple puns, neologisms, and other wordplay, it'll keep you interested for longer than Joyce took to write it. The critique of Anna's letter (which is also the Book of Kells), wordplay in the museum, character sketch of Shem the Penman, and the fate of the Russian general: all of these made me laugh out loud (though it took me a while to find the latter). The Mookse and the Gripes and Yawn at the inquest sequences contain some of the most beguiling dream imagery I've ever encountered in a book. "There's a lot of fun at Finnegan's Wake." Indeed, there is: enough fun for a friend of mine to be memorizing and performing the entire thing, one chapter a year, as a stage play.
This Week's Words: Lions
In one of the appendices to my "Tond" series, the Fyorian word for “lion” is listed as ásalan. The familiarity of that word has been pointed out. Obviously I didn’t make it up, and the Narnia reference is likewise obvious. However, C. S. Lewis didn’t make it up either. It’s an old Central Asian word that has variants from eastern Europe to China:
Azerbaijani: aslan
Hungarian: oroszlán
Kazakh: aristan (арыстан)
Kyrgyz: arstan (арстан)
Manchu: arsalan (also erselen “lioness”!)
Mongolian: arslan (арслан)
Turkish: aslan
All of these languages except Hungarian belong to the (possibly theoretical) "Altaic” language family, which (also possibly theoretically) includes Japanese and Korean – though the latter two use completely different words for the big cat in question. (Chinese, belonging to another family, has another completely different word.) Japanese has ライオン, which if you know how to sound it out, is roughly the same as the English (and the writing in katakana letters indicates that the word is of foreign origin).
What does all of this have to do with Tond? Not much, really, except that I found it interesting and based Fyorian grammar/syntax on the "Altaic" model. There is also a little bit about comparative linguistics in Book IV.
Other than that, there are tigers.
And Now for the Shameless Self-Promo
A review of the first novel in my "Tond" series: So much to like about this book - the characters are well-drawn, the settings are vivid, the quest is introduced along with the coming of age theme. Readers will be intrigued, engaged and definitely moved to continue the series.
Reader on Amazon.com
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