A couple of links I meant to post last week

The Firefly comic that was supposed to come out this summer prior to the release of Serenity in the fall? It's actually three comics:

"Joss Whedon announced at WonderCon that he was supervising a three-issue comic book series (from Dark Horse Comics) that would serve as a prequel to the movie Serenity, which is due out from Universal Pictures on September 30th. The Dark Horse comics, which are being written by Brett Matthews (Angel), will be released this summer and will serve as a bridge between the cancelled Fox TV series Firefly and Whedon's new Serenity film. Each of the three Dark Horse Serenity comics will come with three variant covers, each of which will feature one of the nine principal players in the film. John Cassaday, who is currently illustrating Whedon's Astonishing X-Men series for Marvel, will be drawing Mal (Nathan Fillion) for one of the covers of the first comic in the series." (ICv2News)

And Robert Fagles discusses how his translation of Virgil's Aenid is coming along in the Daily Princetonian:

"Aeneas, a Trojan soldier who escapes with a band of neighbors from the burning walls of Troy, is initially guided by gods on his quest for a new home. But in Book Ten, the god, Jove abandons humanity, leaving Aeneas shouldering a sudden burden of free will in an indifferent universe, a state that seems existential to the modern eye and that prompted critic Matthew Wyser to call Aeneas 'the loneliest man in literature.'

"'I don't mean to make him contemporary, but Aeneas has a very modern predicament, very timely,'" Fagles said."

I Just Wanted To Tell You This

I just wanted to tell you this.
Now you can have a restless night.

Ragged, scattered clouds
like notebook pages hastily put together
pass through the lenses of a telescope.
Each hazy cloud
which has long been lumped together with the stars,
makes its small circle in the blackness
but you have nothing left.
What could you have selected from that pattern?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just poetry.

-----

IN THOSE WINTERS WHEN. . .

In those winters when the electricity died
And the broadcast disappeared quietly over the
Luxurious disorder of everyday buckles and clasps and powder
I sat one morning by burning candle light
And listened to the music a comb played
With a woman's hair.

The flashing little sparks crackled silently,
Almost imperceptibly,
Brightening, again and again,
The world that was only dark before.

--Jaroslav Seifert, The Casting of Bells

Chickens as the grand prize

And the winner in the first annual TMN Tournament of Books is--the Heifer Foundation!

Needless to say, I am extremely happy with the way things turned out in the tournament.

Sometimes doubt beats one word against another
To forge certainty,
But it is never the one truth in this world.
And heated words walk limp
A brief distance, until death,
Where they remain an unspoken secret
Setting fire to a darkness that does not move
In the enormous grave
But only clings
To miserable bones:
The mark of fire
Which they left in the pocket
Of the shot victim.
But I am not him.

--Jaroslav Seifert, The Casting of Bells

I first heard of Bohumil Hrabal from C. last June, who placed an ILL request on Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age based on something she'd read somewhere. C. didn't read Dancing Lessons (as far as I know), but determined that I ought to since I was the one with a trip to Prague in the immediate future. But after determining that the entire book was one long sentence I decided I was a bit too flighty at that point in time to muster the concentration necessary for such an undertaking. I returned the book unread.

Then in Prague, in the Kafka bookstore that no one went in except for R. and me (because you had to pay to enter), I saw some books by Hrabal again, and chose a couple while R. was selecting an Ivan Klima. I started Klima's No Saints or Angels on the flight home, but ignored Hrabal until this morning when I was feeling the pangs of having too many books in progress—too many books to feel I'm making progress in any of them. Why not start yet another one, but a short one, one I could finish in a few hours? Closely Observed Trains is a mere 91 pages? Perfect!

And it was. I love this book. It's the story of a young Czech, Milos Hrma, who is just returning to his job at a railway station after a three-months leave following a suicide attempt. It's 1945 and the Germans have lost command of the air-space over the town and the country, but the trains, although not running on time, are still carrying S.S. escorts and getting ammunition and other supplies to the front lines.

There's a fabulous chapter that juxtaposes Milos being taken prisoner aboard a close-surveillance military transport with his earlier suicide attempt and the reasons behind it. Milos had traveled by train to a town where he was unknown to kill himself. He passed a bricklayer installing a fire extinguisher in the hall of the hotel who was whistling a waltz and began to whistle the same waltz himself as he got out his razors in his room and ran his bath. Before getting in the bath, he opened the door a crack and made eye contact with the bricklayer. It was this moment of connection that led to his rescue, and it's that moment of connection with the scar-faced German captain on the train, who notices the scars on Milos' wrists, that results in Milos' release.

A similar moment of shared humanity comes at the end of the novel after Milos becomes involved in an attempt to blow up a train loaded with ammunition, the very night Dresden is air-bombed and the station is flooded with Germans "who looked as though they'd escaped from a concentration camp, for they all had on striped trousers, but when they came into the office we could see that these were people in striped pyjamas, with only coats thrown over them, just as they had got away with their bare lives, and they all had fixed eyes that never blinked." Milos feels no pity for them, much less than he has felt previously for mistreated livestock, but after a more personal encounter with a German soldier of low rank comes to the realization that "surely if we could have met somewhere in civil life we might well have liked each other, and found a lot to talk about."

I'll be getting the movie based on the book, Closely Watched Trains (also the American title of the book), from the library in a day or two. It evidently won a few awards back in the 60s. Hrabal helped write the screenplay.

I still have I Served the King of England to read. From what I've heard it's supposed to be even better.

Just as I predicted earlier, it's now Cloud Atlas vs. The Plot Against America in the First Annual TMN Tournament of Books.

Links over coffee

Remember the puffy shirt? Jerry's puffy shirt?

According to Smithsonian Magazine, "The puffy shirt, one of the most memorable props in one of the funniest half-hours of 'Seinfeld' was recently donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History by the man who wore it with such memorable unenthusiasm, Jerry Seinfeld."

It's always interesting to see what television artifacts wind up in the Smithsonian. We saw "Star Wars" stuff, the ruby slippers from "The Wizard of Oz," Fonzie's leather jacket the last time we were there, and, if I'm remembering correctly, Archie Bunker's chair was still on exhibit.

And

"'The first time I opened Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare.' The Palm is a restaurant known for its beef, the sentence is the opening of an article in the New York Times Magazine, and the author, Michael Pollan, is now a professor of journalism at Berkeley. The sentence shows how Pollan works as a writer. He doesn't lecture or assume a superior position; instead, with a comic juxtaposition, he places himself (and, by extension, the reader) directly inside a cognitive dilemma, setting up a tension for the article to resolve. "

Michael Pollan, who wrote the wonderful The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, is interviewed in Mother Jones. He talks about his next book and how he's preparing to write it (e.g., taking a course in gun safety and then going to the vineyards of Sonoma to hunt wild boar with a couple of chefs); genetically modified food; journalism; science journalism; and compares himself to a character in Middlemarch during his discussion of the cornification of America.

And

Has anyone read James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? I've read only A Death in the Family. Dale Maharidge writes on the former and the importance of "living" journalism in Columbia Journalism Review.

And Jon Carroll, writer of the always funny cat columns in the SF Gate, turns his attention to the One Thing books.

And I'm also exploring several links R. sent me concerning her upcoming field research trip to Austria, Bosnia and Croatia--she was accepted into the study program yesterday afternoon.