August 31st;
Deadline stuff for
Cannes and
Milan.
August 30th;
Changed
trains
at Kecskemet for the evening trip back to Pest. On the platform, a metal trellis
mast has hanging inside its four verticals a stack of 11 cement hoops pulling the free end of a
1-inch-diameter steel cable tense. This is to hold the overhead power wires taut. The block of
18-inch-diameter, 4-inch-thick cement
polo
mints hangs a couple of feet above the base. It looks
solid, but very slightly swings to and fro.
August 29th;
Bob e-mails that I've missed the Budapest
Pa-ra-de
(vowels as in 'carjack
spray'), the
annual
day of slow-moving truckloads of topless girls & loud music.
August 28th;
Horrible cat-allergy asthma from Robin's new kitten. And a nasty
needling cut in my left armpit makes me feel like a character in a
Cronenberg
movie.
August 27th;
At 10pm,
Robin
& Constantine meet me off the train at Lakitelek.
Village pool hall until midnight.
August 26th;
On Tuesday, my
Erd
student, bless her, just back from Amsterdam, told me she was
pretty sure that Hungarian (her native language) and Dutch (the language she couldn't
follow a word of while in Holland) must be closely related. I checked several times
if she really meant to say that, and she did. But today, she made a breakthrough,
and started using the English passive correctly. Excellent moment. Later on,
caught Bob zooming through town, and at
Chez
Daniel we discussed
decorated
buildings and how often prices end .99 in Arabic (How often do they
end .99 in Arabic,
people? )
August 25th;
More tiredness. My
Achilles
tendons hurt, but I am not
Achilles.
August 24th;
A lovely dinner with Heather, Linda & Ally. Ally, the
ex-hypnotist & soon-to-be
management
consultant, memorably describes
John
Kerry as "like
tofu, but better than
Satan".
August 23rd;
Surprisingly tiring day. Probably the low point was sitting in the conference room with
at least ten framed photographs, none hung straight, of
one Hungarian TV journalist hugging or greeting
Gorbachev,
in order to hear out two musical composers cross that
2 of their electronic compositions ended up on a pornfilm soundtrack
8 years ago. Since the contracts showed the music was correctly bought, but
from dodgy friends of theirs who dishonestly signed themselves as writers
of the tracks, there was really nothing for us to discuss. Everyone
spoke quietly, in the Hungarian style, one podgy composer managing low-key friendly
insistence while the other podgy composer ground his teeth and twitched in silence.
The wheedling reasonableness became harder to keep up once the sound of
power drills coming through ceiling & walls started.
August 22nd;
A reactor worker from Chernobyl who
still lives.
'Chernobyl' in Russian and Ukrainian means
'mugwort',
a spice.
Meanwhile, good old Maddox is still
going strong.
August 21st;
For a couple of blocks along Szondi utca, I slowly catch up with a small blonde
woman dragging her feet and an even smaller boy with pale brown hair. The boy
was attached to two helium balloons shaped like animals. One was a
zebra with black
stripes on an iridescent, metallic silver background, exactly the same size
as the boy. The other was a red-and-black
ladybird
beetle about 2/3 the size
of the zebra and the boy.
August 20th;
Coffee & cake with Heather & Linda. Heather tells me how
classy the
Chicago
Style Manual is.
August 19th;
Surprisingly hard to fax 2 pages to
Paris.
August 18th;
Over to
Jeremy's
office for Robin's disc. On the way out of the building, we find a
discarded fluffy green crocodile, so I take it home.
August 17th;
A very pleasant drink with Tim. We touched on the increasingly bossy & nosy state,
and why so
few
people
are
opposing
its tumour-like growth. To my surprise, we were waited on by
Mariann's friend
Margo.
As we left,
Ilan
stopped by, perky as ever.
August 16th;
On the way to catch my train, in hot, mid-afternoon sun,
Robin,
Bela, Vicki the dog & I visited the
8th
World Meeting of Felt Art, mysteriously happening
down the road in sleepy Lakitelek. Robin is suitably dressed in his father's felt racing hat.
We got there and found, under a tree, a grinning Kyrgyz man
enjoying a cigarette. He squatted quietly next to a
yurt,
gher or Central Asian tent (there were at least five of these in different
stages of construction). Around him were about a dozen friendly hippy types
rubbing wool into giant rubber balls - by this stage covered with matted, soapy
felt.
Nearby, outside the folk-art school building stood trestle tables where
10 or 12 others were soaping felt strips, braiding them, making colourful
soft things out of... well, felt. Elsewhere on the
grass, a serious German man was steaming willow strips
to make gher/yurt frames; a happy Hungarian man wound string
into rope with a big hand-turned wheel; a jolly
Dutch lady was bouncing a large, soapy, felt-rubber ball. A girl
in a long brown dress and a tall
Dr-Seuss-style
felt hat, when I
asked her nationality, said "European", so she was obviously German.
Rather refreshing to meet some people actually making things.
August 15th;
Pegging my wet clothes onto the line in hot sun today, long grass
chattering away with various insects, I suddenly remembered being in
Ghana
with my mother the summer I was 9. The heat and the quiet,
chirruping bugs, mother & I in the shade reading our way through
her Methodist friend's cardboard boxful of paperbacks.
Finished 'Szamok
valosan innen es tul' by
Donald Knuth, translated into
Hungarian by Janos Viragh [original title 'Surreal Numbers'],
from
Moni's library.
Despite being slim & chatty, this
is a rather testing tale about two folk {Alice and Bill} in a
desert-island-type environment, who stumble on a stone tablet giving
the basic rules for a number system suggested by
John
Conway. This defines each
number as represented by two sets of numbers, a left-hand and
right-hand set, and two rules. Rule 1 is that no element of the
left-hand set can be larger or equal than any element of the
right-hand set. Rule 2 says a number is less than or equal to
another number if no element of the first number's left-hand
set is larger or equal to the second number, and no element
of the second number's right-hand set is smaller than or
equal to the second number. Still reading?
So Alice and Bill, in between falling in love, discussing pregnancy,
and fixing an endless succession
of bites to eat ["What a great
lunch you cooked, Bill!" "Only because of those lovely fish you
caught, Alice!"] work out Conway's numbers, learning how to prove
results on the way. In other words, this 70s book is something like
Blue-Peter-builds-the-real-number-line. Successive days create new
numbers, in between pairs of existing numbers. Knuth is the author of the
interesting-looking but intimidating book on algorithms I saw in
Mate's flat during the Italian architecture contest disaster of 2001.
A & B work through a series of proofs, all the way to showing that
Conway's elegantly minimal two axioms can even generate
Cantor's
transfinite numbers. All a bit too difficult for me.
Later in the afternoon, while Robin motored off to pick up Zsuzsi
from Tiszakurt, I finished his copy of
'Artistic
Theory in Italy 1450 to 1600',
a slim and clearly-written 1940 paperback by, of all
people,
Anthony Blunt.
While not wanting to read too much Fourth Man
stuff into it, there does seem a faint tinge of regret as he charts
the shift from the rationalistic, republican Florence of the 1450s
to the florid mysticism and complexities of Counter-Reformation
Mannerism in Milan, Rome and Venice a century later. Blunt gives
Leonardo and
Michelangelo
a chapter each, because each wrote quite a
lot about beauty and aesthetics. As we move from
Alberti through the
two master artists towards
Vasari,
Blunt shows how interest in the
outer world, at first intense, gradually faded away, how appearances
and proportions yielded to emotionalism and
NeoPlatonist dreaming.
Back in Quattrocento 1450 Alberti teaches
artists how to make nets and grids in order to perfect perspective -
defining painting as copying a slice of the cone of light reaching
the eye. 150 years later, the
Mannerists
love mystery and shadow so
much that a friend finds
El Greco
on a bright summer day sitting indoors shuttered in
complete darkness, because that way he can better see his "inner light".
August 14th;
A Friday
the 13th passed me by, and I
didn't
notice. On the train down
to Robin's yesterday, we unexpectedly rolled to a stop among some
fields and bushes. It was so quiet waiting to move again we had only
the sound of one newspaper rustling in the carriage and one cricket
chirruping in a bush outside. A young couple spoke on and off, but
very softly so as not to wake the several passengers who were peacefully
dozing, some with their mouths hanging open.
Today, after
Robin
& I zoomed off on the motorbike and brought back a new
wheel from tyre man Mr Gold in the next village, an interesting chat
in the kitchen with Georgina. She explained she believes in
parallel
universes. Bela found a dead snake, and a cheerful young couple came
for coffee: a Hungarian girl, her father and her Italian fiance, a
plumber. He cried "euro... casino!", claiming he no longer has
enough money to save since
the
euro raised the cost
of living in Italy.
August 13th;
Yesterday finished
Miklos’s copy of
‘They
have a word for it’ by Howard Rheingold.
Some nice entries, but quite a disappointment overall.
The idea is compelling: a list of words from languages around
the world for handy concepts for which there just isn’t a good
word yet in English. This rather exciting project
falls short in several ways. First, a lot are not words but
phrases - which feels like cheating, since if you allow
phrases, English already expresses many of
these ideas very well. And single words like
‘piston’
and ‘zalatwic’,
French for the English phrase ‘friends in high places’
and Polish for the English word ‘juice’ [informal
influence that helps you get things done], hardly say something
the English versions don't express.
‘Wei wu wei’ is
the Chinese for what is described as
‘masterly inaction’ in Britain. Also Rheingold includes quite
a few which migrated into English some time ago
[Zeitgeist,
Schadenfreude
{misspelt throughout, putting a double d into Schaden},
Gaia,
epater
les bourgeois]. The largest number are those
which aren’t worth importing at all. Among these I’d include
‘tikksun olam’
[Hebrew for changing the world for the better],
‘masa bodoa’
[Javanese for “sociopolitically passive and unaware”
- that would be ‘politically apathetic’ in
normal English, I believe], and
‘qualunquismo’
[Italian for “attitude of indifference to political
and social issues”, which would translate
as, let's see, ‘political apathy’?].
We get several Polynesian and South-East Asian words which
mean something like ‘co-operate and talk with other people’,
which the author piously suggests is something we could learn
from those cultures. What do you make of a writer who includes
‘Korinthenkacker’
[German for a person overly concerned with trivial details, not
unlike ‘Fachidiot’,
for “narrow-minded specialist” 90 pages later]
without reflecting that ‘pedant’ already does the job much better?
A lot of long words and phrases, many of which
are difficult to say in English, are seriously advocated for adoption
into English, even when we have something better, and often
shorter. What is going on? After 3 or 4 pages, I found it hard not
to feel that Rheingold took on what seemed like a fascinating
commission, found a handful of excellent words, but then had
trouble completing anything of saleable book-length.
So he filled 3/4 of it with words & phrases which add almost
nothing new. If anyone could make the case for language not
making much of a difference, Rheingold has managed it.
Which are the good new words? People in martial arts might
know the Japanese ‘zanshin’
[relaxed alertness in the face of
danger]. Japan also offers ‘wabi’
and ‘sabi’
[the beauty of something imperfect,
and the beautiful surface of something aged - though ‘patina’
already supplies what ‘sabi’ does, to be honest]. Anthropologists
know ‘kula’
[Polynesian for ritual gifts which literally circulate,
being regiven to new recipients at regular intervals] and
‘potlatch’
[Haida, Canadian native American, for ritual giving and destruction
of presents to show off wealth]. But some of the gems are totally
unexpected. ‘Tartle’
is apparently Scots for “hesitate before
recognising”. ‘Hakamaroo’
is Easter-Island for “borrow
something for so long the lender has to ask for it back” [intriguingly
paired with a less useful Easter-Island - that's Pascuense - term for
borrowing something as a way of subtly flattering the lender:
‘tingo’].
‘Zwischenraum’,
German for ‘between space’, nicely
draws our attention to something we keep overlooking - the
space between things, the interstices in the network.
‘Won’,
Korean for “unwillingness to let go of illusion”, sounds handy, though
also sounds like English words one, won, and wan.
‘Animateur’,
French for “a person who is good at explaining complex ideas for
lay audiences” is nice, though a bit close to ‘animator’.
‘Bricoleur’,
French for “a person who gets things done by randomly messing
around”, is pretty much adopted already. But it’s words like
‘lagniappe’
[Creole for an unexpected gift to a stranger or customer]
and ‘fucha’
[Polish for using company time and resources to work
for your own benefit] that deliver what the book promises.
Unfortunately, ‘They have a word for it’ has a lot more words like
the one it lists right between lagniappe and fucha - the unpronounceable,
absolutely unneeded phrase
‘aroysgevorfeneh gelt’,
Yiddish for
a bad and irretrievable investment. Not only does the American
‘money pit’ say it better and crisper, and the British ‘throwing good
money after bad’ more lyrically, this Yiddish phrase just screams “I
ran out of words to fill this book with”. Making the book financially
a bit of a dog itself.
August 12th;
Iced coffee with
Terri,
beer with Franc.
August 11th;
Mint tea with Catherine at
Al Amir.
August 10th;
Coffee with
Olga, supper with
Mihaly.
August 9th;
Swam on island. Ran in
park.
August 8th;
Last night at
club
with Gabor, Carolyn, Jessica & Udo quite fun.
Early evening tonight read 'The
Cryptographer' by Tobias Hill, one of the books
Mr Carlson's
bookswapping meet left me with. Not quite sure why though. Why
did I read this? First 20 pages because I felt lazy, and it was odd to be
reading a novel again. Following 80 pages because I couldn't quite believe
how bad the writing was, yet kept feeling it would get better.
Hill's brittle prose did get a little less squirm-making (or perhaps
I just got used to it), and John, the cryptographer, seemed
a character who might go somewhere. By then, it's
half-read, so it was
what-the-hell-might-as-well-finish-it. The idea is that
it is about thirty years into the 21st century, and Anna, our heroine, is a
"sedulous"
inspector for the
Inland
Revenue given the honour of checking a discrepancy
in the accounts of the mysterious 'Cryptographer'. He is John Law, inventor of
SoftGold, a widely-used online currency that has rendered coins and notes
almost defunct. Like most near-future novels, it's very dated, and reeks of the
exact moment it was written - in this case the end of the 1990s.
We get lots of stuff about little envelope symbols showing funny new-fangled
"e-mail" thingies appearing on those "laptop computers" all the rage among
young folk these days. This is a low-key dystopia like
'The
Hand-Maid's Tale', but modelled closely on
'The
Thomas Crowne Affair', even down to the elusive
plutocrat being a Scotsman with humble beginnings. (Old-timers may
recall Steve McQueen breaking into his best Glaswegian accent in the
night-on-the-beach scene with Faye Dunaway). For extra cleverness points,
our bored-yet-philosophical enigma of mega-wealth is given the same name as
the
18th-century
Scots adventurer John Law.
The real Law was the man who broke the French
crown by seducing Louis XV into the dangerous delights of printing as many
state-backed promissary notes as the state felt it needed. That John Law,
who created the financial boom and crash so almighty that it
coined (hur hur) the modern word "millionaire", is mentioned nowhere in
this po-faced novel,
perhaps a way to make some reviewers feel erudite. Vagueness
on economics & cryptography (Law's
"unbreakable cipher" changes every two weeks, which would make it easier to break, of
course) would be fine if the book was more fun to read. Some humour
and worthwhile characters would help. We see Anna (the Faye Dunaway role,
is she hunter or is she hunted...) slowly falling for the
intriguing John Law. You get the feeling that she was the creation of someone
who had often heard women in love described, but never actually seen one. The
other women characters are even less convincing: sister of Anna, mother of Anna, mother of Law
are there because they have to be. Law's wife, like Anna's ex Lawrence and
Anna herself, teeter on the edge of believability, while nasty colleague Carl,
Law's son Nathan, Terence the gamekeeper, and delightful little girl Muriet
make it through into fully-fledged characterhood. With these last four, Hill
consistently gets their dialogue right.
All this might work if his arch prose didn't try so hard:
"They are Her Majesty's Inspectors after all.
("Her" Majesty, two decades hence?) They
are in possession of the facts. They have seen the most unexpected
clients lie, so that they have come to expect the worst of people,
even of one another; and this is not always without reason, since
they know about wealth without possessing it, know a few things about
deception. They are not inclined to trust." We get this
stuff larded onto every page until we arrive on Law's
estate and can relax a bit. It seems we're allowed to relax when we are around
Law because Hill is more in awe of mathematics and
finance than he is of 'The Revenue', so refrains from patronising
his Eminence Gris the way he patronises Anna.
Overall, felt a lot like a wannabe film treatment. Or if cut
down to a 10,000-word novella, it could have been haunting and atmospheric, all
suggestion and mood. Every ten pages or so the embarrassingly bad writing
produces a couple of excellent sentences,
and you see what he was straining for the rest of the time.
August 7th;
Swam
1/2 mile at pool. Overcast, thundery.
August 6th;
Literary
phone text from Sweden. Pitch German game-show to Tom over breakfast. Bump into
Moni
at the busstop. I wonder again about
connecting two
Turing machines
'back to back'
(tape1 >> state-table2, tape2 >> state-table1) to model thought.
August 5th;
Surprisingly unhungover. Normal day. Hussam tells me a story about a
wireline log in
Siberia that picked up the howling of souls in hell.
August 4th;
Beers with
Tim, Steve,
Ilan
followed by more drinks when I introduce
Jessica to
Scott, Sam, Rita.
August 3rd;
Our name 'House of Harlots' may not work. Already a Brazilian film
called that.
August 2nd;
Monday in the middle of nowhere in the middle of summer not such a bad thing.
Seen off by Robin from
Lakitelek.
Slow train back through pink-orange sunset.
Tea with Jessica at the flat she shares with photographer David by the
cathedral. By God I'm lazy.
August 1st;
Georgina takes children to
Szolnok to see a
film.
I sew up my bag on the verandah in the sun.
-
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact at otherlanguages.org
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