What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[rotting bones]

Some videos I found interesting recently:

Dead Hearts (Screamfest): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KjFGAAp1KY
Home Education (Screamfest): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m24oN9WI46Q
Strategy Stuff (channel): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJn_zQ ... HRQ/videos

[Arzena]

The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs. It's helped me work through a lot of internalized homophobia

[Salmoneus]

I'm trying to read Pale Fire. I'm not finding it easy. It's not that there's anything wrong with it per se, except that it just goes on and on for no apparent reason (difficult, given its brevity). And I'm always suspicious of that "write intentionally badly so everyone assumes you must really be a good writer" style.

[Linguoboy]

I'm trying to read Pale Fire. I'm not finding it easy. It's not that there's anything wrong with it per se, except that it just goes on and on for no apparent reason (difficult, given its brevity). And I'm always suspicious of that "write intentionally badly so everyone assumes you must really be a good writer" style.

I loved it. I thought it was the best novel I've read so far this year.

Now I'm working on Beloved, which I'm kind of abashed to admit I haven't read before. I wasn't expecting the magical realism given how firmly grounded the Morrison novels I've read have been.

[Salmoneus]

You've also read it this year? I can only assume you've been reading my mind for inspiration, given the Cerberus thing.

Actually, reading The Fifth Head of Cerberus is one reason I'm not loving Pale Fire, I think - Nabokov, and I realise this is officially heresy to say, kind of reads like a less capable Gene Wolfe.

I think my biggest problem is that, so far, I don't see the point. The joke - a literary pratfall - has kind of worn thin already and I'm only halfway through. He just seems to be repeating himself. The characters are thin and have no interest, and it feels as though you could guess the plot in the first ten pages (I don't know if that's true, maybe there's a huge shocking twist, but the first half of the book has just been very gradually hinting at things any genre-savy reader guessed straight away), which means there's basically no suspense. The odd good line aside, there doesn't seem to be much intellectual depth to it either - although I've no doubt that suggestion would be met by outraged hordes explaining that I've just not understood the subtle symbolism of this colour or that butterfly. Frankly, I'd appreciate subtlety of any sort at this point, because it feels like I'm being hit over the head with nothing right now. The conworlding is irritatingly slapdash, to the extent that I'm actually hoping he goes the "it's all a delusion" route he's hinting at, since it at least it would make it intentional.

A lot of it feels like a Wes Anderson film without the humour. I'm sure Anderson must have had a minor character killed in a freak tobogganing accident at some point...


...sorry for the rant. I want to like it - The Royal Tennenbaums is one of my favourite films! - but so far I just haven't been able to. I don't actively dislike it, although this rant might make it sound as though I do, but I just can't get hooked by it.


Still, at least it's a more entertaining brick wall than The Quiet Don. [yes, I'm still theoretically reading that. Almost finished the first half. It's just getting bleaker and bleaker and bleaker...]

[Linguoboy]

You've also read it this year? I can only assume you've been reading my mind for inspiration, given the Cerberus thing.

I guess the moderatorial mind-meld hasn't completely worn off yet.

A lot of it feels like a Wes Anderson film without the humour. I'm sure Anderson must have had a minor character killed in a freak tobogganing accident at some point...

Whereas my reaction was "If anyone had told me Nabokov was this funny, I would have read him a long time ago." I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud so many times at a "great novel".

Sometimes it does feel like an awful lot of effort to satirise a very modest target, but the character of Kinbote is imbued with enough pathos that the satire never feels vicious. Maybe it's the nerdboy in me--or the homo, or the homo nerdboy--but I find the overweening need for acceptance and a sense of purpose that leads him to invent this fantasy world (if that's, in fact, what it is) deeply endearing. An old friend of my late husband's (another homo nerdboy on the fringes of academia) had a very similar reaction. Make of that what you may.

Still, at least it's a more entertaining brick wall than The Quiet Don. [yes, I'm still theoretically reading that. Almost finished the first half. It's just getting bleaker and bleaker and bleaker...]

Thanks again for advising me that I could dodge this bullet.

[Vijay]

Reread a bit of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, then listened to "Vash Malle," a famous song from the Bollywood movie Henna (1991) set and filmed in Kashmir:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4119MSJLzfk
Lyric video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ3K1La2_Ns

Then the Kashmiri version of the same song by Maqbool Nargis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvjbHgo0JrA

"Sirpiki Mairen," a Miskito song from Nicaragua by Dimensión Costeña:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRd13EVCBtA&t=47s
See here for a slightly different version of the lyrics with a translation into English.

The anthem of Greenland:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQKknk1O7Nk
This song inspires me to use the phrase "I don't give a cock" (because one of the words is atunngiveqaaq), but I never do.

An excerpt from a Yueju (Shaoxing Opera) performance of The Butterfly Lovers subtitled in Mandarin and English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAxgNWbn8kA

"Madrid, princesse des Espagnes," composed by Claude Debussy and sung by Véronique Dietschy (stanzas 1, 3, and 7):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd-y8oJbqB0
Full song lyrics: http://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.h ... 11985&RF=1

[alynnidalar]

Reading Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch about, naturally, written language on the internet. It's quite good so far! I follow her on Tumblr so I already had a high opinion of her knowledge of internet language, but at least the first six chapters of the book are very solid. (that's as far as I've gotten ) She has an interesting analysis about how communication differs based on what "era" you entered the internet in that completely lines up with my intuitive assumptions (I am a Full Internet Person, evidently, which explains a lot about my language use online). And I finally understand why old people use ellipses so much (but not old people who've been on the internet the whole time)!

[Salmoneus]

Whereas my reaction was "If anyone had told me Nabokov was this funny, I would have read him a long time ago." I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud so many times at a "great novel".

In fairness, I did find the prologue genuinely amusing, and the beginning of the poem. The problem is, it doesn't feel like the jokes have moved on. Kinbote is still boorish and oblivious, and Shade's occasional moments of insight are still bathetically undermined.

Sometimes it does feel like an awful lot of effort to satirise a very modest target

Yes, I think that's a lot of the problem for me. It's this great storm of venom directed at someone I don't know, don't care about, and didn't feel any great respect for anyway. Yes, lots of people in academia probably are idiotic shitheads. I don't feel I need that case to be made at quite such length! It's like being on the jury at a murder trial, and the prosecution has spent the first two months building an impermeable case to prove that the person in the dock is indeed the person who was arrested... which the defendant has never denied. OK, we got that bit, now move on to the actual accusations...

, but the character of Kinbote is imbued with enough pathos that the satire never feels vicious. Maybe it's the nerdboy in me--or the homo, or the homo nerdboy--but I find the overweening need for acceptance and a sense of purpose that leads him to invent this fantasy world (if that's, in fact, what it is) deeply endearing. An old friend of my late husband's (another homo nerdboy on the fringes of academia) had a very similar reaction. Make of that what you may.

Well, he is pathetic, certainly - but for me, directing such a sustained attack against someone pathetic, coming from someone with (in academic terms) power and influence and prestige makes it feel MORE vicious than it would do otherwise. Maybe I'd have done better with Lolita - when the defendant is a predatory paedophile, it might make sense to target him with so much demeaning satire. But when it's just making fun of someone for being kind of a sad git, it feels uncalled for and unnecessary. I don't know which reviewer, professor or editor pissed Nabokov off so much to inspire him to do this, but I also don't really care.

It also doesn't help that in his character assassination, he's left his victim with essentially zero redeeming features. What's that Wilde quote? "The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible"...

Still, at least it's a more entertaining brick wall than The Quiet Don. [yes, I'm still theoretically reading that. Almost finished the first half. It's just getting bleaker and bleaker and bleaker...]

Thanks again for advising me that I could dodge this bullet.

Well, as this discussion illustrates, clearly our tastes diverge - you might love it!

To be fair to Sholokhov, I'm clearly not in a position to really render a sound judgement right now; my struggles with it are only 30% the book, and 70% me. It is interesting, and there are great passages in it. I really liked it when I started it, and I wasn't wrong to do so. It's just... it's so rambling, and repetitive. I think some people probably see this as elegaic and poetic, but I find it dull.

Actually, what I realised the last time I was reading some of it is that it probably worked much better how it was originally published: in serialised form. That maybe it's not so much a random wandering from character to character, and more just a series of interlocking vignettes. The long elegies, meditations on death and painstaking descriptions of foliage would also seem more poetic, and less like filler, if you treated it more like a weekly installment of a worldview, and less like a really, really long and repetitive essay to be read in one go.

I've actually not yet given up on the novel, and I think that when I feel up to it I'll try to finish off the first half adopting this sort of mentality, and not trying to read it in a way in which it was not intended to be read...

[HourouMusuko]

I read Pale Fire earlier this year. I enjoyed it a lot, both for its unusual metafictional structure and for the many possible interpretations of the novel's plot. I don't think you'll find that all will be answered by the text. There are several possible readings of what's going on and just what (or who) is "real". I read it one way, but that's certainly not the only way.

(I didn't remember such "venom" in what I read, but perhaps I didn't understand it or I just don't recall; it was months ago that I read it).

Reading Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch about, naturally, written language on the internet. It's quite good so far! I follow her on Tumblr so I already had a high opinion of her knowledge of internet language, but at least the first six chapters of the book are very solid. (that's as far as I've gotten ) She has an interesting analysis about how communication differs based on what "era" you entered the internet in that completely lines up with my intuitive assumptions (I am a Full Internet Person, evidently, which explains a lot about my language use online). And I finally understand why old people use ellipses so much (but not old people who've been on the internet the whole time)!

Glad to hear good things about this one. I listen to Lingthusiasm and heard her push this book; I think I will pick it up, then.

[Vijay]

"Chespa Micho," a Ladakhi song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Oh1ZmpDxI

[MacAnDàil]

"Chespa Micho," a Ladakhi song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Oh1ZmpDxI

Cool

I went to a concert of Ziskakan last night with my (relatively new) girlfriend. It's one of my favourite bands and have been going on now for 40 years. They come from Réunion themselves, and play music based on Réunion traditional music genres, sega and maloya, but with other influences, like rock and Indian genres. We really enjoyed the concert, where they played some of their classic songs, including even more excellent versions of Mon nasion and Sanson gazé (Bonbon)

[Raphael]

I've started Margaret O'Mara's much-discussed The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. It's quite interesting, and well-written. At the same time, it's apparently not quite what some of the people recommending it claim it to be. For instance, right in the introduction, there's this paragraph:

To declare that Silicon Valley owes its existence to government, however, is as much of a false binary as declaring that it is the purest expression of free markets in action. It is neither a big-government story nor a free-market one: it's both.

This provides an interesting contrast to certain people who love the book but seem to think that it "unveils" the "dirty secret" that Silicon Valley's success is entirely thanks to government spending, and that all the rich people there got rich of public money.

(One minor criticism is that the book doesn't seem to contain any maps of Silicon Valley or the Bay Area anywhere. But it's not that difficult to find such maps in the Internet Age.)

[Vijay]

"Chespa Micho," a Ladakhi song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90Oh1ZmpDxI

Cool

I went to a concert of Ziskakan last night with my (relatively new) girlfriend. It's one of my favourite bands and have been going on now for 40 years. They come from Réunion themselves, and play music based on Réunion traditional music genres, sega and maloya, but with other influences, like rock and Indian genres. We really enjoyed the concert, where they played some of their classic songs, including even more excellent versions of Mon nasion and Sanson gazé (Bonbon)

Thanks and nice songs! Does at least one of the band members know Tamil pretty well? Because I noticed the words for 'how much longer now?' written on the image and a bit of Tamil being sung in the video for "Mon nasion" (didn't pay much attention to what exactly they were singing, though). I didn't know anything about maloya until now. All I'd ever heard of music from Réunion was "Séga piqué" and "Chaud devant."

This is a song in Zangskari, an endangered Tibetic language closely related to Ladakhi and spoken in Zan(g)skar, a mostly Buddhist subdistrict of the mostly Muslim district of Kargil in Ladakh. The pictures in the video are not of Zangskar but rather of Dharamshala:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96jCBw1mNJQ

[MacAnDàil]

Glad you like them!

The band members of Ziskakan have changed several times over the decades. The only permanent member has been the leader, Gilbert Pounia. Some original members are now politicians, lexicographers and/or authors. The style has changed along with the membership changes of course. This was from 23 years ago for example. It wouldn't surprise me that one of the current (or at least current at the time of writing and/or recording) members were fluent in Tamil. Most people of Indian origin don't speak Tamil, but it's usually recognised as their heritage language.

For maloya that's more traditional and not so original or mixed with other genres (the mixed form is sometimes known as maloya électrique), there are Danyel Waro, Granmoun Lélé and Firmin Viry for example.

While both segas, the two songs mention were from widely different time periods: George Fourcade wrote in the 30s, whereas François Dal's wrote his most famous songs in the 90s -2000s.

[Vijay]

That's because I got the first one from Encarta and the second randomly off of YouTube. Encarta had some pretty old songs. Nice songs btw!

This was from 23 years ago for example.

Interesting, it actually reminds me a little more of Indian movie songs than the newer ones! (Although that might also be partly because of the image in the video ).

Danyel Waro

This is even more reminiscent of South Indian music. Did he actually say some Tamil words in the middle (towards the end of the chorus?) there? I thought I heard some (/puːkaljaːɳam/, /t̪iɾumaɳam/, both words having to do with a wedding).

Firmin Viry

And of course, this one has a number of things obviously taken right out of South Indian classical music.

This is a song in Gojri by Noor Mohammad Noor called "Kartar Poonchi" and recorded in Poonch, a town near the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir (i.e. near the border with Pakistan). Gojri is a Rajasthani language spoken from Kashmir to Afghanistan. This is literally the only thing I have ever heard in Gojri so far, but I can understand a lot of it pretty easily because of similarities with other Indo-Aryan languages (mainly Punjabi and Gujarati). Poonch District was partitioned along with British India, so the part that's in India is administratively part of Jammu and Kashmir whereas the other part on the other side of the border is in Azad Kashmir. The song is about taking a train to visit relatives in Rawalakot, in the part of Poonch District that's in Azad Kashmir. Rawalakot is about 19.8 miles or 31.86 km away from Poonch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CKCF8Pqcvo

[MacAnDàil]

tiroumanom (and variant pronunciations) is indeed there. It's a word of Tamil origin to refer to Indian mariage, whereas maryazh refers to Christian marriage.

Do you recognise the title Narlgon?

I'm surprised to hear that the Ziskakan song from 23 years ago reminds you more of Indian film music.

I'll check the Gojri one out later.

[xxx]

Touching Something No One Found ...
or just conlang...

[Vijay]

tiroumanom (and variant pronunciations) is indeed there. It's a word of Tamil origin to refer to Indian mariage, whereas maryazh refers to Christian marriage.

Wow, so interesting!

Do you recognise the title Narlgon?

I didn't, so I looked it up, and apparently, it comes from [ˈn̪aːɖəgəm]. In Malayalam, that means 'play' (as in a theater, but it's related to the word for 'dance').

I'm surprised to hear that the Ziskakan song from 23 years ago reminds you more of Indian film music.

Yeah, sometimes, the most random things remind me of Indian movie songs, or at least older songs of that kind, though I think perhaps there are reasons for this. In this case, it's probably mostly because Indian movie songs are heavily based on the folk tradition. Specifically:

• This song begins with flute music. Indian music in general is big on flute music (though, of course, other cultures are, too). Krishna is often depicted with a flute. Some songs even explicitly mention flutes in the lyrics.
• The singing starts out with one voice at a relatively low pitch, then continues after a pause to a higher pitch and a slightly faster tempo, followed by several voices. This is a common pattern in Indian movie songs, too. Here's an example from a well-known movie.
• The soft xylophone music from 2:12 to 2:28 reminds me of Indian songs to some extent, too, since Indian movie songs also sometimes have xylophone music and I don't often hear xylophones elsewhere. This old Malayalam song also has xylophone music from 1:25 to 1:44, which is repeated again from 3:36 to 3:55.
• Okay, admittedly, this is not a comparison with an Indian movie song per se, but the soft guitar music in the background from 1:55 to 2:04 reminds me of this hilariously elaborate Pakistani ad for tea from 0:25 to 0:33.

[MacAnDàil]

It seems there is similar semantic development involved in narlgon to the one involved in tiroumanom: narlgon means specifically plays involving scenes of the Mahabharata and not just any play. I'll check the others out as well. it was largely due to Indian influence in Réunion that I got interested in Indian culture.