“formist”

(...and a teriyaki New Year!)

Last night’s dinner, courtesy of Nippon-do (Miguel Ángel no. 224 Tel: 36-41-29-69) —in my opinion, Guadalajara’s best kept oriental secret. They even cooked it all at 10PM so we would eat it hot!

Something made me cry in Harriet Brown’s One Spoonful at a Time —a long, personal story on anorexia from last week’s New York Times. I’ve been unbelievably emotional these days but blame it rather on it being a superbly written account (“The rough days were predictable only in the sense that they kept coming.”) by an extremely intelligent, rational, and honest mother trying to cure her daughter’s anorexia —and that it manages to be a fairly deep, scientific intro into the eating disorder (“Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry.”) while still being punctuated at every paragraph with raw, emotional portraits of desperation (“I woke with my heart pounding, full of rage and hatred for Not-Kitty, the demon who lived on air, who wore my daughter’s face and spoke with her voice.”) and hope.

In what is to date my longest translation I’ve put the story into Spanish: Una Cucharada a la vez. Please pass it along to someone who might need to read it.

Vaya, me tomo algo asi como 8 meses pero hoy por fin termine de transcribir¹ Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿Cuál era la pregunta? de Jorge Wagensberg. Estan ya en linea los 531 pensamientos que tiene el libro y el texto introductorio. Solo faltan los textos al principio de cada capitulo, que no he transcrito y que probablemente ya no transcriba.

Lo mejor de transcribir todo el libro fue poder releer y pensar lentamente cada una de las frases. Hay muchas todavia que no entiendo y algunas que me parecen equivocadas, pero en cambio hay demasiadas otras que no agoto por mas que las repienso (y he puesto en negritas las mejores). He dicho ya que suelo juzgar una frase en medida de su «permanencia». Estas son de las mejores frases que conozco.

Have you thought just how much you can say, in this tongue we speak in right now, just with words made of just one piece of sound? How short, how sweet, how wow! No? You think it’s no big deal? Well, my hard to please friend, I ask you then to put all that I’ve just said (and a wee bit more that I still have to pour), in words as short as mine, in a tongue that is not the tongue we speak in right now.

We’ll talk then.

(And if you got a thing or two, nice or bad, to say back to this post, please please a form fool and keep your words short. Thanks!)

Just started reading Neal Stephenson^WP’s Diamond Age^{WP, AM}—trembling with excitement. The 500-page, 1995 cyberpunk novel is baroquely immersive in that hip, queer way that only Stephenson can deliver. It has many, many rarefied words too, some of them beautiful («alamodality», «runcible», «velleity1»), some pedantic («cineritious», «hederated», «callypigious»), and some unfathomable (what the hell is «eutactic»?). Of the latter class was «machine-phase»; at first unconsciously ignored (I tend to do that with common-word alloys), it eventually emerged into consciousness and was diligently googled (since unfound on any dictionary I know of)—it is now most definitely a member of the beautiful words class:

Is a translator who doesn’t believe linguistic intercommunication problems should or could be remedied as ridiculous as a doctor who doesn’t believe that diseases should or could be remedied? Or put another way, is a translator who believes that linguistic intercommunication problems can or should only be palliated as ridiculous as a doctor who believes diseases can or should only be palliated, not cured?

I frankly don’t know. But those who know me can see on which side I’m leaning. The thought came to me tonight and am still grappling with what it would mean.

Adolfo (a best mind) has onsite photo coverage and there’s also a Flickr photopool on Mexican elections (442 pics so far).

(The title’s of course a snowclone^WP from Howl^WP, so don’t take the hyperbole^WP too personally: all sorts of minds have been destroyed :)

I guess it’s such an obvious rebus^WP scores of people must have had it already, but I’d never seen it before, it just occurred to me this morning, and am quite fancying it right now. (Pretty cherry from Kainoatec)