Thick skinned

According to our contemporary oracle, Wikipedia, the war in the Congo is the world's deadliest conflict since World War II, killing 5.4 million people.

Joëlle Sambi, a young scriptophile who lives and works in Brussels, has written a book about it called Le Monde est Gueule de Chèvre.

“The world is a goat’s mouth” which, apart from a pointed beard with Satanic overtones, makes me think of a goat’s cud and chewing the cud: slow and aimless mastication. Like a giant shredder, crusher. Mechanical madness. Automated atrocity.

Here is a rough translation of an excerpt from Chapter 1:

Numbers, numbers, and more numbers. Two, three, four… numbers and dead bodies. 162, … 164 dead bodies, thousands of them, dead bodies and their souls tossed about, ground into pieces, pushed around… there are 10,000 of them from one end of the world to the other… 10,000 of them between land and sky. Souls in distress wandering, drowning, seeking justice. In this writhing world, my mind is sinking…

My name is Jerry and I’m 13. Maybe a bit older. I don’t really know exactly. Whatever!
My name is Jerry, I have a job to do and I think I’m about 13. My job: counting the bodies. A bit like Papa Diallo counts his dollars, in my jotter I write them down, list them, calculate, enumerate, measure and count: 162, 163… 164! Today, we’re at 164.
What I know for certain is that 164 won’t get through the gates of paradise. He’s enormous. A pachyderm. 'Pachyderm, from Ancient Greek pachydermos, someone (or something) with a thick skin. Used for animals such as an elephant or a hippopotamus.'

Zoology was a subject I loved when the school was still standing. I had brand new jotters, so bright and clean. They all had an animal on the cover: a lion, a giraffe, an elephant, an okapi .'

********


By the way, "an Okapi (Okapia johnstoni) is a mammal living in the Ituri Rainforest in the north east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo". I, for one had never heard of it until I read this book. "Although it bears striped markings reminiscent of the zebra, it is most closely related to the giraffe. Until 1901 it was known only to the local people. The tongue of an okapi is long enough for the animal to wash its eyelids and clean its ears: it is one of the few mammals that can lick its own ears. Male okapis have short, skin-covered horns called "ossicones". They have large ears, which help them detect their predator, the leopard. "

Listen to Joëlle talking about her book (in French) :

and Now, Ladies and Gentlemen Please, here is the information you need :

Titre: Le monde est gueule de chèvre
Auteur: Joëlle Sambi
Editeur: Biliki
Année de Parution: Novembre 2007

to vote for Joëlle Sambi in the Rock Salt book competition !!!!!

Vote now!!!

and buy the book !!!!
or hide your tee-shirts!!!!



Book émissaire (page en français)

Sunday

Sunday is a day like no other. I wrote a prose poem about it a few years ago in French.


Last Sunday was a degree beyond every other Sunday. I swear it felt like Christmas. It had the same fullness about it, everything being available, being in place - it didn’t matter that it was raining… or maybe the rain helped, by making inside cosier and outside palpable.

I got to the village shop before it closed – they had a farm chicken left for Sunday dinner. It felt like the opposite of the feeling in “Sunday morning coming down”…

“and there’s nothing short of dying half as lonesome as the sound”

… the empty city sidewalk with the Sunday smell of someone cooking chicken. For once, I was the one cooking chicken. I had crossed over to the other side. I was “in”.

and yet just the day before, I had been observing my awkwardness, my inability to make small talk, my uneasiness in company, and feeling very “out” of it.

Life is full of this kind of up and down, extremes that are connected, you feel excluded and a few seconds later you feel accepted. Just like this house. I was so excited about how great it is and how pleasant to live in and when I had finished sending the photographs I looked around and knew I was over it already. It’s not that it’s not important. But it isn’t everything.



Whenever I think I have mastered something I fall, fail, trip. Like learning to go a bike. When I think “I can do this” I lose my balance and fall off. But when I do master something, it becomes pointless.

I sat down at the piano and played, like a child with a toy. Starting at opposite ends I hit every key several times, moved up and down and thoroughly filled my mind and the room with the random sounds of the keys. Freedom.

I thought about the octave again and about repetition and how the most infinite of fields – music – on a certain level can be broken down into a small number of units and consists in how they interact.

Just like human beings…

But when I do master something, it becomes pointless… or, a related feeling is when I finally manage to accept something, it is too late – like when I began to feel I could psychologically cope with my periods, I was menopausal, they had already started to stop. Is there a connection? Was I able to achieve the feeling that I could cope with menstruation because it was secretely over?

There’s something about a Sunday that brings out feelings of finite and infinite…

The rain in Berlin

Among other things Gutta percha strongly evokes colonial horse-riding women, saddles, stirrups, whips and boots. Pavements, paddles, disgust, gotcha, gutting of predator fish, to kill a mocking bird, a pair of chas… guttural cries, perchance to dream, pervanche, peridots, perched high in a tree, pandemonium.

They used to put it in the middle of golf balls. Do you remember opening golf balls? Carefully slicing through the tightly-wound elastic which sprang off vigorously, jumping all over the place, being careful not to burst the bag of white stuff in the middle but eventually getting to it…

Another concept from the plant world that knocks me out: Understory.
“the term for the area of a forest which grows in the shade of the emergent or forest canopy. Plants in the understory consist of a mixture of seedlings and saplings of canopy trees together with understory shrubs and herbs. Young canopy trees often persist as suppressed juveniles for decades while they wait for an opening in the forest overstory which will enable their growth into the canopy. On the other hand, understory shrubs are able to complete their life cycle in the shade of the forest canopy. Also some small trees such as dogwood and holly rarely grow tall and are generally understory trees.”

This left my mind reeling. “suppressed juveniles”. Nature can be so cruel.
My son is struggling through adolescence, natural sloth mostly winning over my attempts to goad him into action. “You must have some idea of what you would like to do” I said. He replied: “It’s like, we’re in France and you keep asking me what the weather is like in Berlin".

Collateral knowledge

Language is never-endingly rich. In addition to the fact that the combinations are endless, the actual building blocks are quite numerous as well. I am always coming across expressions I don't know, whether they are new to me or just plain new. I had never heard the expression “long tail” so I looked it up. My niche is at the very tip of the appendage - what I produce pleases me and maybe one or two other people. I can live with this.

“The angular gyrus, a brain region important for processing language”. Angular gyrus just tickles my poetic sensibility. I’m a sucker for unusual agglomerations of phonemes. “Humans, it seems, are like drunken poets”

Writing is a kind of Ariadne’s thread - "A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne" – (Nietzsche, quoted by) Barthes:-

"Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philter, it is also the leisurely act of drinking."

Ariadne (in French Ariane, like the rocket launcher) saved Theseus, who broke his promise to take her with him and abandoned her on an island…

I see The Possibility of an Island is on at the local cinema – but I think I’ll give it a miss …

From the Guardian:

"Houellebecq, despite being hailed as France's most successful living novelist, was lampooned for his recent film-director debut in which he adapted his novel The Possibility of an Island, into what French critics said was one of the most boring and ludicrous films ever to grace a cinema screen."

I am often amazed at the things I learn through my work. Facts that are side effects of translation. Collateral knowledge. Recently I was working on plants, and discovered the GF:

"The general flowering (GF) events of forests in south-east Asia are perhaps the most spectacular phenomena in tropical biology. GF events occur at multiyear intervals. In GF, most dipterocarp species and many plants of other families come into flower and set fruit massively; these species and plants rarely flower except during GF events. GF is unique, because it can occur over thousands of kilometres and involve hundreds of plant species representing diverse families and life forms. (…) Satiation of generalist seed predators has been considered a primary force for GF."

So all these flowering plants decide to flower at the same time and satiate their seed predators, thereby saving their seeds. The mind boggles.

As part of the same job I had to translate a sentence to the effect that some plant species exist in New Zealand and Chile only. I was intrigued, tried to find out why, and discovered Gondwana.

L'art en traits

La rentrée is a big thing in France. I never found a completely satisfactory way of translating it, maybe because in English-speaking countries there is not the equivalent of everyone downing tools for the whole summer.

À la rentrée: at the end of the summer recess

I remember the thrill of the last minutes of school in June, and the excitement of having unlimited free time ahead, and the excitement of going back to school and wearing new clothes and having a new teacher and later on, new classmates. But the phenomenon didn’t seem to concern the rest of society.

Lard entrée - rentrer dans le lard...

Yesterday the temperature changed from thirty to thirteen. The sunflowers look decidedly wabbit.




"Musicians talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art."
-- Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home

"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation."
-- Oscar Wilde