2002
...............................................................................................................................................................

October 31st; I still remember Monday morning, waking refreshed from a dream where I designed in great detail a classroom science toy to demonstrate the Coriolis force. Peculiar. Why was I dreaming about the atmosphere? Perhaps the draught under the door?

October 30th; See 'Arany varos' if you can. A black and white film about connecting to a parallel universe from the industrial town of Miskolc in eastern Hungary, it's a sort of Magyar fusion of 'Being John Malkovich', 'K-Pax' and 'Down by Law', only with better music. Some good acting & deadpan Hungarian humour. Paradise appears to be a version of summer in Bulgaria.
October 29th; Kindly Tim helps renew my domain and benign Miklos shows majestic patience when I muddle myself changing my mobile phone to Indic Arabic numerals. Tireless Pat uncovers polyglut and I go to review a smart restaurant, slightly underdressed.

October 28th; Yellow leaves move through town in drifts. I have a lovely life, actually.
October 27th; This colour preference survey, via Wired, says I'm a 'Crusader'. I wonder if there are any survey result pages which read "you are unimaginative and a bit boring"?

October 26th; I do like working at night alone in an empty office or house with autumn wind moaning under the doors and w i n d o w - f r a m e s ... Cosy somehow.
October 25th; In mid-wheeler-deal, Tim stops by for a coffee. In a separate development, Stella uses secret high-tech methods to relabel the phone Rob kindly gave me.

October 24th; I really do wish I could read this. Perhaps I should pluck up courage and borrow that book from Edina.
Someone at Bell Labs once learned Danish just to read this mathematician's research papers in the original. I wonder how often people learn a language to read maths?
October 23rd; Proofread magazine during national holiday. Slightly unhinged evening in the cheery company of Aziz, Sara, Egbert, Vadim and others.

October 22nd; Almost everyone came to see me today and yesterday. J's plan to move to LA seems to be on hold. The film industry's giddy world of cookies, apple boxes, and Dutch tilts still beckons, though.
October 21st; What's odd is we know utilitarianism is broken, but 'the greatest good for the greatest number' idea has killed our belief in any other ethics. Rule-utilitarianism is even worse: if moral rules are negotiable, they hardly seem moral or rule-like, and if rules {not utilities} decide if acts are right or wrong, it's not very utilitarian either.

October 20th; I learn more about Frosty the programmer and BooBoo the trader.
October 19th; Lovely lunch at Istvan's. Like me, not know what wenge is? Check this hardwood lexicon. Hospitable Robin shows me this Yves Klein site, with dangling blue cubes. I recharge.

October 18th; Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Please.
October 17th; My piece on misunderstanding Islam in Beirut's An Nahar today.... here?
Elegant Edit, translator and editor, came by to show me her enlarging child, snoozing in pushchair. Not once did I call it Subedit. Someone's pack of cards was nearby and we idly cut it twice. Edit cut the king of spades and I cut the king of clubs.

October 16th; Visited BorsodChem and Kosice with Tim, and people got angry.
October 15th; Why is my mobile phone switched off? To save on power.

October 14th; Jessica seemed quite impressed by Robin yesterday.
October 13th; From a rather good short story by Jake comes this line: Zsuzsa is Eve, he thought. She has tasted the forbidden fruit and now she entices me.

October 12th; Many thanks to web-developer Steve! Mouse-rollover coming soon.
Wonderful issue of Atlantic Monthly. Interviews with: the man calling for a return to good prose in his 'Readers Manifesto'; the religion academic saying the next century of Christianity is African, Latino and traditional/magical; & the Jane's reporter who has gone all anti-gravity.
October 11th; To the ballet with Jessica from SF. After, over dinner, she narrates the film she wants to make. Her story's much better than I expected, I'm a little ashamed to realise.

October 10th; Hungary's Imre Kertesz won the Literature Nobel Prize today. Suppose that means I have to sample some pages of his doubtless deeply-distressing 'Sorstalansag', usually titled 'Fateless' in English (instead of something like 'Lack of Destiny'). An American radio station embarrassed me this afternoon by asking me to comment on his writing. Rather than replying that I'd never read any of Kertesz's stuff, I probably should have said I thought he did his best work in 'Some Like it Hot' and 'The Persuaders'.
October 9th; Stuart's sharp Parisian journal blethers also links to Nashville's brave homeless guy Kevin, someone tenacious enough to update a website from public libraries while he tries to get a job and home together.
'Laughter scientists' find this joke works in most joke-telling cultures. Except Japan?

October 8th; It seems you can buy and sell 150-character-length stories on mobile phones courtesy of Manchester-based site the-phone-book.com, reveals the crisply-written blethers.com.
October 7th; Apparently Jeremy and Zita know a healer who can sort out my cat-induced asthma. Excellent. We visit a Kecskemet sports-shoe factory.

October 6th; Jeremy takes Robin, Robin's dog & myself in the Gestapo-style motorbike with sidecar for a spin over muddy fields, showing that it is indeed a top bike for a bit of squiring it around, and that goggles for dogs may not be so silly. We drop in on the half-renovated farmhouse of a friendly pornographer couple who have a clutch of cuddly Puppy-type Shih-Tzu dogs so cute they need keys in their backs, plus guard-dogs on chains and a sheep and a goat. Her husband gives us beer & old alarm clocks while trying to sell Robin an East-German minibus. I ask the very sexy wife if she has a sister? Yes, though married. But she sweetly suggests her cousin & I might get on.
October 5th; At Robin's for Letty's 9th birthday party in the barn/studio out on the windswept plain, with [in the barn of course] cakes, lovely red wine, a hurdy-gurdy player, and a conjuror doing all the favourites (ripped-up newspaper, interlocking steel hoops). Chatted about financial PR and love with Kate, and Kazakh dragons and flying horses with Edina. Edina says Arabic has beautifully logical grammar, but then if you spoke a bit of Tartar, a spot of Kazakh, and could rub along in Ottoman Turkish, you probably would think that, wouldn't you?

October 4th; The tickets and the ticket buyers for DJ Krush arrive simultaneously. DJ Krush is of course not the same as DJ Crash. Obviously, I knew that already.
October 3rd; The slightly Ayn-Randish freemarket.net brings us news of a German film about a disturbing, Milgram-type psychology experiment at Stanford University: 'Das Experiment'. That 'Das' somehow gives it an extra little something, don't you think?

October 2nd; Suddenly, desperate people start imploring me for tickets to see DJ Krush, whoever he is. Sasen motoiyasu, eh? Hmmm.
October 1st; Well, not much work got done today. artsandlettersdaily have a link to a diary about Milosevic's 3 months in a Belgrade gaol/jail, by his chief gaoler/jailer. From Granta, after they decided to get provincial by moving to London. Not hard to imagine Slobo as a hobo, really.

September 30th; Finished the translation, plus the piece for An Nahar, both by lunchtime. Sharp sunlight outdoors. Smelled the first hot-chestnut-sellers today.

-

Mark Griffith, site administrator / contact@otherlanguages.org

back up to top of page