Day 35: Baudelaire, Izumi Suzuki, Kierkegaard
Prose poem: Baudelaire - The Stranger
Whom do you prefer, enigmatical man, tell me, your father, your mother, your sister or your brother?
I have no father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.
Your friends?
There you’re using a word whose meaning has remained thus far unknown to me.
Your country?
I do not know under what latitude it is situated.
Beauty?
Willingly would I love her, goddess and immortal. Gold?
I hate it as you hate God.
So, what do you love, unusual stranger?
I love clouds . . . the clouds which pass by . . . over yonder . . . over yonder . . . the marvellous clouds!"
I like this prose poem. Baudelaire does a good job at making angst interesting. The stories below do not.
Stories: Izumi Suzuki - Three from Terminal Boredom
Bought this book to participate in a book club. The first story is pretty good, but the next two have some of the worst writing/translation I have ever read in a fancy-looking book. The dialogue is the level of Kingdom Hearts or fan translated anime dubs. Her characters are stock trope characters. The plots are Mildly Interesting sci fi stories, but are variations of better ones elsewhere. I wouldnt expect more from children's anime or JRPGs, but I expect better from the translated literature.
Story one: Women and Women (fairly good)
A story about a future where an atomic disaster has meant that men are very rarely ever born. When they are, they are treated as lepers and segregated to a.. prison? farm? mental hospital? We never find out what their situation is like, which I think is a clever move.
One has escaped and the female protagonist tries to befriend him. There is a Good Country People style ending.
The single gender society is quite interesting, especially Suzuki's take on it, but she does not really flesh out the world to make it believable.
Still this one was okay.
Story two: You May Dream
Excruciatingly bad. It mostly consists of cringe worthy dialogue from the most angsty anime stock characters. The premise is okay, but is smothered by the author's attempts to be cool and irreverent.
Story three: Night Picnic
A George Saunders story but bad. The last family in the world only know how to be a family by what they have seen on TV, so their dialogue consists of American 1950s cliches. This goes on for 20 pages but is unamusing. Then at the end is a twist. They are actually monsters playing pretend. Nah.
They feel like stories from a precocious high school student. This would be fine, but I paid money for this kitsch dreck thinking itd be good.
Essay: Søren Kierkegaard - Crop Rotation
Occasionally you meet an English traveller, however, who is an incarnation of this talent?, a heavy immovable groundhog whose linguistic resources are exhausted in a single one syllable word, an interjection with which he signifies his greatest admiration and most profound indifference, because in the unity of boredom, admiration and indifference have become indistinguishable. no other Nation but the English produces such natural curiosities; other nationals are always a little more lively, not so absolutely stillborn. the only analogy I know is the apostle of empty enthusiasm, who always journeys through life on an interjection - that is, people who are always making a profession of enthusiasm, everywhere making their presence felt, and whether something significant or insignificant is taking place, cry because for them the difference between significant and insignificant has become undone and enthusiasm's blind and blaring emptiness.
I didn't know Kierkegaard was so funny. In this essay he writes, chiefly, about how not to be bored. His remarks remind me of Schopenhauer's in his manual for happiness, Wisdom of Life. There are many funny lines and I guess three main topics:
Not getting tied down with others:
One must be always be careful not to enter into any life-relation in which one can become several. For this reason, friendship is already dangerous, even more so marriage.
Avoiding pointless business:
No one abstains from vocational responsibility, one should not be inactive but stress all occupations that is identical with idleness; one must engage in all kinds of breadless skills. in this connection one should develop oneself not so much extensively as intensively, and in spite of being on in years, prove the truth of the old proverb that it takes little to please a child.
Not taking things seriously, or in taking interest in the incidental:
There was someone whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to. He was ready at every opportunity with a little philosophical lecture which was utterly boring. Driven almost to despair, I discovered suddenly that he perspired unusually profusely when he spoke. I saw how the pearls of sweat gathered on his brow, then joined in a stream, slid down his nose, and ended hanging in a drop at the extreme tip of it. From that moment everything was changed; I could even take pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instructions, just to observe the sweat on his brow and on his nose