Norman’s Post:

Today on the radio, justice is served on Mint Raw Money; Newt Gingrinch; Arizona Governor Jan Brewer; President Obama; “right to work for peanuts” laws; and the lying, corrupt “right wing”! Yesterday, I got people upset criticizing the President.  His friends struck back and today we air it out some more! Speaking of the President, he and Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) got into a tussle in Arizona and the Gov. pointed her finger in the President’s face.  Who was wrong here? The Empire Strikes Back is NOT just a movie! Wait until you hear what the whole of the “conservative movement” is doing to Newt Gingrinch! Right to work for peanuts” laws are in many states.  Just what are they and how do they work?  Indiana is poised to join the list, too, so, let’s explore this today! Mint Raw Money is pulling a Clarence Thomas on us – his disclosure forms do not match his tax returns. Will he get a pass on this?  Would you or I????? On Beyond The Norm, if you fly commercial airlines, there are new rules that you need to know! Fierce independence means there is no time for beating around the bush (pardon the expression) just tell the plain truth!  We do this daily here, at the place where fierce independence IS the norm – The Norman Goldman Show!

Bing Chinese (Mis)Translation:

今天的電臺節目，正義被送達薄荷原始的錢 ；蠑螈 Gingrinch ；亞利桑那州總督 Jan 啤酒 ；奧巴馬主席 ；”權為花生工作”的法律 ；和撒謊、 腐敗”右翼”！昨天，我得人心煩意亂批評總統。他的朋友們打來回，今天我們空氣它出些 ！主席說，他和州長 Jan Brewer (R-AZ) 陷入爭鬥中，在亞利桑那州和州長指出她的手指在總統的臉上。誰在這裡錯了？帝國罷工回不只是一部電影 ！等待，直到你聽到整個”保守”運動到蠑螈 Gingrinch 幹什麼 ！在許多國家中權為花生工作”的法律。究竟什麼是他們和他們如何工作？印第安那州是有望加入清單中，也因此，今天讓我們研究一下這 ！薄荷原始錢我們拉克拉倫斯 · 湯瑪斯-他披露形式與他的報稅表不匹配。他會對此通行證嗎？將你或我?????超出規範，如果你飛商業航空公司，有新的規則，你要知道 ！有沒有時間只 (赦免表達） 繞圈子的激烈的獨立手段告訴實話 ！我們做這每天都在這裡，在地方激烈的獨立規範-諾曼高盛顯示 ！電話： 1-888-321-6001 (翻譯由 Bing 提供)

Literal Notes/Norman – Chinese (Mis)Translation – Bad Chinese Reverse Translation:

Today on the radio 今天的電臺節目. More or less correct. (Radio is actually a 收音机，but 電臺 is close.)

justice is served on Mint Raw Money 正義被送達薄荷原始的錢  justice is served on Original Mint’s Money. (Sometimes nicknames can be translated as such, and Original Mint’s Money may be acceptable. I don’t know why Bing added the possesive”的”, but they did and thus it’s Mint’s)

Newt Gingrinch 蠑螈 Gingrinch Róng Yuán Gingrich (Newt translated literally rather than w/cognate. Gingrinch might be a joke instead of a typo)

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer 亞利桑那州總督 Jan 啤酒 Arizona governer Jan Beer (Yà lì sāng nà is  a cognate, but the governer is Jan Pí Jiǔ. 啤酒 = pi jiu = beer, not brewer)

President Obama 奧巴馬主席  Chairman Obama. ( as 主席 zhǔ xí  = chairman, and 总统  zǒng tǒng = president. Mao Zedong 毛泽东 is Chairman Mao 毛主席. Conservatives might chuckle.)

“right to work for peanuts” laws “權為花生工作”的法律  “Peanut work” laws. (Chinese translation is literal and does not recognize that “work for peanuts” = work for small wages)

and the lying, corrupt “right wing”! 和撒謊、 腐敗”右翼”！the lying, corrupt “right wing”! (右翼 yòu yì signifies politically right)

Yesterday, I got people upset criticizing the President. 昨天，我得人心煩意亂批評總統。More or less correct. (see how president here is correctly translated. Why was he Chairman before? Bing uses traditional 總統 and my computer uses simplified 总统 )

His friends struck back and today we air it out some more! 他的朋友們打來回，今天我們空氣它出些 ！More or less correct.

Speaking of the President, he and Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) got into a tussle in Arizona and the Gov. pointed her finger in the President’s face. 主席說，他和州長 Jan Brewer (R-AZ) 陷入爭鬥中，在亞利桑那州和州長指出她的手指在總統的臉上。The Chairman said he and Jan Brewer argued, and the Governor pointed her finger in the President’s face. (“Speaking of the president” translated as “Chairman says”)

Who was wrong here?  The Empire Strikes Back is NOT just a movie! 誰在這裡錯了?帝國罷工回不只是一部電影 ！Close enough. (Empire Strikes Back is literal, the Chinese Star Wars movie is actually:  帝国反击战)

Wait until you hear what the whole of the “conservative movement” is doing to Newt Gingrinch! 等待，直到你聽到整個”保守”運動到蠑螈 Gingrinch 幹什麼 ！Surprisingly close. (保守運動 = the correct translation of “conservative movement.” I see that Gingrinch is a joke. Ha ha ha.)

Right to work for peanuts” laws are in many states.  Just what are they and how do they work? 在許多國家中權為花生工作”的法律。究竟什麼是他們和他們如何工作？In many countries there are “peanut work” laws. What’s the outcome and how do they labor? (工作 = gōng zuò implies work as exertion or a job, and not as a function. Not too egregious a mistranslation)

Indiana is poised to join the list, too, so, let’s explore this today!  印第安那州是有望加入清單中，也因此，今天讓我們研究一下這 ！Close enough.

Mint Raw Money is pulling a Clarence Thomas on us – his disclosure forms do not match his tax returns.  薄荷原始錢我們拉克拉倫斯 · 湯瑪斯-他披露形式與他的報稅表不匹配。Mint Raw Money we pull Clarence Thomas – his disclosure circumstances don’t match his tax report. (the opening clause is just butchered)

Will he get a pass on this? 他會對此通行證嗎？Will he reveal proof?

Would you or I????? 將你或我????? Would you or I?????

On Beyond The Norm, if you fly commercial airlines, there are new rules that you need to know! 超出規範，如果你飛商業航空公司，有新的規則，你要知道 ！Close, though Beyond the Norm 超出規範 is translated as Beyond Normal or Surpassing the Standard.

Fierce independence means there is no time for beating around the bush (pardon the expression) just tell the plain truth!  有沒有時間只 (赦免表達） 繞圈子的激烈的獨立手段告訴實話 ！There’s no time (remit the expression) circle the intense independent method and tell the truth! (not sure if there’s a bush/Bush pun, “around” was translated as “circling” and the sentence structure just confounded Bing)

We do this daily here, at the place where fierce independence IS the norm – The Norman Goldman Show! 我們做這每天都在這裡，在地方激烈的獨立規範-諾曼高盛顯示 ！We do this every day at the place of fierce independence – Norman Goldman’s show!

Miss Ang Has a Very Comfortable Life

And now a little departure from the normal, as I saw this today and had to post. In January of 1998 I bungeed off the bridge at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Recently a South African woman did the same jump, and the bungee snapped. Amazing footage. Erin Langworthy survived with scratches. Damn! That’s a story to tell, I only bounced back up and around.

As far as Frankenthaler’s art, intuitively and with a further and deeper glance, I do not see why her paintings have value. Her art does not interest me, I pass it by and look for something else.

This brings me to my mother, and do not think I imply that she should be famous. Her talent is worthy of greatness, but her output, ambition, drive, complacency et al have hindered her overall body of work. She is exactly where she should be in the art world, someone who is appreciated by family and friends. Nevertheless, take a look at the art within this post. What would you rather have on your wall?

In Taiwan I read Bukowski’s The Most Beautiful Woman in Town. I’ve never read the English. Bukowski’s language is simple, guttural, direct, and not to underestimate the difficulties of translation, but I’d bet Bukowski makes for less work than, say, Baudelaire. Below are the first paragraphs, in Chinese and English. As for my Chinese ability, it’s horrendous, it takes me ten times as long to read in Chinese than in English, and I’m so disfluent in the language that I can only manage to fake understanding to get any native speaker to converse with me, but it’s a passion. After attempting to translate the original, and I’m certain I didn’t get everything right, I then set the story in Taiwan with tangible changes. On this I’m half performing artist, half creative artist, but it’s different enough that the Bukowsky estate shouldn’t be bothered terribly.

镇上最美丽的女人: 凯丝是姐妹中最年轻,也是最美丽的一个. 凯丝是镇上最美丽的女孩. 二分之一印第安血统,丰满而有异国情调的胴体, 如蛇般的火热胴体, 还有灵活的眼睛. 凯丝是流畅灵活的火焰. 她就像是肉体困不住的精灵. 她的黑色长发如丝缎, 婉转飘逸如同她的身躯. 她的精神不是非常高昂, 就是非常低落. 凯丝时不走中间路线的. 有人说她疯了. 无趣的人才会这么说. 无趣的人永远无法了解凯丝. 对男人而言, 他似乎只是个性爱机器, 他们才不在乎她疯了没有, 除了少数情况, 当他们准备抓住凯丝时, 凯丝就会流走, 逃脱男人掌握.

“Kai Na was the youngest of three daughters, and the most beautiful. She was most beautiful girl in Taipei, and the most beautiful girl in Taiwan. Half Atayal aborigine, and half Chinese, she had serpentine physique and black eyes, with silk hair that Oriental poets thought extraordinary. Her soul, if not noble, carried a detached air that showed humility. She did not walk down the center path. Some said she was crazy. Usually mediocre people thought this. The men she came across considered her a sexual machine. They did not care if she was crazy…”

Quotes from Bobby Fischer:

“Nobody has single-handedly done more for the U.S. than me. But now I’m not useful anymore, you see. The Cold War is over and now they want to wipe me out, get everything I have, put me into prison.”

“Dear Mr. Osama bin Laden allow me to introduce myself. I am Bobby Fischer, the World Chess Champion. First of all you should know that I share your hatred of the murderous bandit state of ‘Israel’ and its chief backer the Jew-controlled U.S.A. also know [sic] as the ‘Jewnited States’ or ‘Israel West.’ We also have something else in common: We are both fugitives from the U.S. ‘justice’ system.”

(On 9/11) “I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it’s coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.”

Fred Phelps! The dorkball behind the Westboro Baptist Church, Mr. Phelps foments hatred of homosexuals, as shown by ridiculous protests at the funerals of US soldiers. Luckily, his evil flops to the floor relatively harmless. The homophobic fellow at the right aligns himself with Phelps. Their ignorance promotes the ugliest side of religion, and does more to turn people from Christianity than anything Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins could pen.

Did Fred Phelps write this headline?

“David Rocklin’s The Luminist is based on the early life of a mid-19^th century British photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, who lived with her jurist husband in Calcutta. Rocklin moves the setting to the 1830 British colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where his heroine, Catherine Colebrook, attempts to lobby the court to show sympathy for the natives because a corrupt and greedy governor is bent on removing them, sometimes by killing, so he can sell off their farms to patrons. Her husband, Charles, is a member of the colonial law court. Enter Tamil boy Eligius, whose 15-year old father, after pleading the tax-burdened case of the locals at court, is murdered. Eligius is employed at the Colebrook family’s decaying estate. His father’s cohorts push Eligius to seek revenge or, at the very least, to steal from his employers or give locals access to the household. Eligius, however, forms a bond with Catherine as a photographer’s assistant.

Catherine, a scientist and artist, is obsessed with her quest to tame images of light and shadow. The photos through much of the story prove too ephemeral to convince doubters; the images fade within minutes after appearing. Eligius, though, shows prowess at mastering the magnification and direction of light. He becomes indispensible. Photography achieves the forbidden, a kiss stolen between dark-skinned Eligius and Catherine’s teen daughter, Julia. Couple that with the fateful clash between native and colonialist cultures and you reward all but the reader who requires a thriller’s pace.

If you read for story you will be pleased, you will want to read on. And if you seek character, you may ache for Eligius in his nearly hopeless quest to please a benefactor in order to save his family while risking the vengeful wrath of locals who believe he’s a traitor. Or Catherine, whose passion is pure, whose quest we trust, and you will follow anxiously one step behind while the Colebrook family, in company with Eligius and his sister, escape angry looters in hopes of making it onto the last ship out. But if you read for language you might find yourself stumbling over prose that is often eloquent but at other times stiff, or, worse, opaquely shadowed in the murk of, ahem…”purple prose.” 

Flaubert coined a term for a narrative device known as the “flaneur,” or “loafer.” This referred to a character that drifts without purpose through town, looking left and looking right, observing, reporting, reflecting without urgency. This flaneur becomes an obvious stand-in for the author.  This drifting consciousness becomes a “noticer” appearing as a detached voice. How a story gets told is essentially a matter of deciding who will do the noticing, to whom the story is addressed, and from what distance. A problem arises when tone, level of diction, or figurative language is inconsistent and without obvious explanation.

Rocklin’s prose drifts from concrete realism into verbal excess. As R. B. Myers, in his A Reader’s Manifesto (The Atlantic, July/August 2001), notes, “Everything is in…self-conscious, writerly prose… as long as it keeps the reader at a respectfully admiring distance.”  When Rocklin’s flaneur stays true to what can be observed, the telling is clear and engaging: “Colonials congregated in groups like clusters of nettles, festooned in their finest linens and silks. The nun tugged at brilliantly hued sashes fixed around their throats while they raged at each other in something approaching verse.  Their voices rose and fell while white boys carved into parchment with the sharpened quills of native birds.” This depiction of Eligius watching a ship’s arrival could be said to lack that scintillating detail that makes it just “this,” for example what exactly is a “brilliant hued sash”?  But his flaneur more than makes up for lack of detail when describing the process of photography: “They used gun cotton to bathe the plates in silver salt.  They lacquered skins of collodion onto them and potassium mixed with oil of lavender to lend flexibility.” But Rocklin’s flaneur cannot resist adding, “Light and shadow became their accomplices.”  Aside from the anthropomorphism, this “noticer” veers into a didacticism that can’t really be explained as belonging to either Eligius or Catherine. While not egregious, it distracts. 

And there are stiff passages of dialogue. “No more of this baseless fear…” says Catherine to her daughter.  “This is science, and a little faith…”  To which Julia replies, “This nameless pursuit shouldn’t be yours,” which leads Catherine to quip, “If it suits you to bow quietly, then do so.”  Historical fiction suffers, generally, from characters who deliver speeches as if they are so far back in time no one could speak in easeful conversational tones. Rocklin’s flaneur can’t resist punctuating the prose with “…outside the sky shed much of its black skin and bruised over with color,” or, “Charles’ stirrings had slowed to nothing. His mouth opened and remained.”  Or, when all seems lost on the colonial’s ship, when we least want to be distracted, we are confronted with, “Old by the time of its arrival, the remains of something already gone into history.”

Hemingway’s Old Man and The Sea contains stilted dialogue, proof that aesthetic mistakes are not always fatal. Thankfully, in The Luminist, there are many touching scenes.  At the docks, for example, Eligius and his younger sister are torn out of the Colebrooks’ grasp and forced away.  Before decamping for England and abandoning her loyal assistant, Catherine presses the folded camera, an icon of everything worthwhile in this story, into Eligius’s arms.  “Listen,” says Catherine, “We will find each other again.” 

The Luminist is a story worth reading. The characters are taken on a journey we know well, but in a manner that breathes freshness and urgency into that old story of exploitation. The insights into pioneer photography are a terrific added bonus for readers who like to learn something from their novels, who favor “loafers” telling stories like charismatic tour guides. I only wish Rocklin had trusted his riveting story to be enough.

Scott Driscoll holds an MFA from the University of Washington and has been teaching creative writing for the University of Washington Extension for seventeen years. He’s written articles for Alaska and Horizon Airlines Magazines and Poets and Writers. Other fiction and essays of his are in American Fiction, Cimarron Review, Crosscurrents, Ex-Files: New Stories About Old Flames (with Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, and David Foster Wallace), Gulfstream, Image, The Seattle Review, The South Dakota Review, and a notable work in Best American Essays, 1998.

The Decline of Reading: QED

According to Fair Use, I’m posting…and as far as you, Mr. Matt ”Revenge of the Nerds” Salinger, well, who and what smell are you?

JD SALINGER EXPLAINS WHY HE’LL NEVER SELL THE STAGE & SCREEN RIGHTS TO CATCHER IN THE RYE