So THAT’s why I love cars!

I'm almost done with my thesis. So almost-done, in fact, that I watched the Transformers movie yesterday. I think there may be spoilers in the following post, although there's really nothing new about the storyline.

Wow. I was kind of expecting it to suck. I really was. But while there were loose threads galore and some of the acting was a bit overdone, I thought (but then how else are you supposed react to giant robots from outer space?), it really was ol' Optimus and the gang. Sure he wasn't a MAC truck like in the cartoons (all the cars are General Motors models) and had an unnecessarily bright paint job, but the voice was him and it gave me goosebumps just like it used to back when I was five years old.

I love this movie. Not because it's a particularly great story since we've heard it all before, but because, in a way, it was like going to see your favorite band play. You're not going there to get to know their music but because you already know it and them and now you want to see them up close, doing what they do. I'll admit I teared up a bit when the Autobots appeared and when Bumble Bee first transformed and when Jazz died and when Ironhide wanted to kill that stupid chihuahua and when Bumble Bee kept fighting and when they did the whole motorcade sequence on the way to the big battle - every couple of minutes, in short. The humans were ok too, although you really shouldn't put John Turturro in a scene with nobodies because he steals it completely. You know the other actors are there, and that you're supposed to be on their side, but he's such a presence that it's hard to remember all that. The man could do a movie entirely by himself and I'll bet nobody would notice that there weren't any other actors there with him.

I'll probably go back to see it a few times since I want to see them again ('them' being the Autobots, although I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Starscream as well. I seem to remember him helping out the 'bots at some point so he's a borderline baddie.). The action sequences are really well done and I love that the noise they made when they transformed in the cartoon is still there, even if it's been updated a bit. Yep, this was totally a rollercoaster ride down memory lane, but with more ups than downs, really.

Because I have other things to do

I'm going to voluteer to be tagged by Penni. So answers to the follwing questions:

1. Four of my favourite jobs
2. Four of my favourite local places
3. Four of my favourite foods
4. Four of my favourite international places
5. Four names of people I am tagging

Favourite jobs

  • Teaching/tutoring, particularly the creative writing tutoring I got to do this semester. I love that moment when you see the light flick on in a student's eyes. 

  • Editing - I spent five years as a technical editor at an energy and environment consultancy firm and can't say I didn't enjoy it. It helped that people were willing to let me resort to violence on occasion. I also learnt how easy it is to collapse into hysterical giggles when you're five hours from an 8am deadline.

  • Content writing, when you're working with sensible people who actually give you the information you need to do your job. The opposite has also happened and that can turn it into a nightmare.

  • Cat sitting. Getting paid to take care of a cuddly, purry cat? Yes please. Poop-scooping is not fun though and is probably why I remain very firmly a dog person, but it was nice to get to know a cat properly.


Favourite local places

  • It's pretty big, but Sydney Road pretty much from Brunswick Road to Bell Street. I don't know how many times I've walked from Coburg to Parkville and back, but it serves up something new each time.  

  • Coburg Lake Reserve for picnics or for days when you want to lie out in the sun and read a book next to a lake.

  • The CBD for me. Although it doesn't have nearly as much of a vibe as other cities, it combines some of their speed with a sense of safety I find almost odd at times. Great for when you want to dance your ass off too.

  • Ashi and Nuz's apartment. It's the comfiest, coziest, homiest place I know in Melbourne.


Favourite food

  • Croissants and baguettes fresh out of the oven. Also bagels. Also fresh naan. I am an Atkins aficionado's worst nightmare.

  • Chop suey, which I used to hate until a few years ago.

  • Pakistani food of pretty much any description. It is quite possibly the most delicious kind of food on the planet. And no, it is not the same as what you get in Indian restaurants. The spices are different, as are the cuts and kinds of meat. So there.

  • The burgers at Munchies' in Islamabad.


 Favourite international places

  • Kathmandu, Nepal. The approach is one of the most spectacular in the world (if you can still look out the window once you realize what you're looking at is rock, not cloud). The place is small but extremely friendly and, with the right company, is full simply fantastic.

  • Still in Nepal, the Annapurna Circuit. I only did part of it, which meant ten days of trekking and camping including a stopover in the village of Ghorepani and a dip in the Tatopani hot springs, as well as dodging rock falls and goats and one very nasty mountain buffalo.

  • New York City. It is the most amazing, electric, alive place I have ever been. Living 28 stories above the East River didn't hurt either. I still squeal when I see 'my' building in shots of NYC in movies. (Look left of the UN building. That building that looks like a stack of cigars? That's it.)

  • Hunza in Pakistan, nestled in the Karakorams. Where the Himalayas give the impression of softness, the Karakorams are naked rock. Terrifying and beautiful. In fact, here are some pictures of our trip there in 2006.


Four people I'm tagging

Let me take a leaf from Penni's book here and say, consider yourselves tagged.

Comics

I love web comics. My latest discovery is 7 Shades of Black by James Treagus. It begins with Violet being so goth that Death turns up thinking she's dead. Violet, naturaly, seems to develop an...erm...attachment to Death and proceeds to woo him. Oh and then there's Poe, Violet's cat, providing social commentary and a general reason. They're all still getting to know each other at the moment, but I hope this strip sticks around. It's funny in the way only death and cats can be.

Another discovery, although it's been around for years is Questionable Content. I started at the beginning as I tend to do and so far the whole indie/emo thing is quite funny. I don't know how it's developed over the years, but the drawing's certainly improved between #27 and #891.

Stuck

I dislike middles intensely. I have an idea, I have images, I have symbols, I have a story and I have research to back them all up. I also have a beginning and an ending. All I'm missing is about, oh, 135 lines of middle.

Which really isn't that much to come up with when you think about it, specially when it's just the middle that needs to be placed neatly between a tidy beginning and a strong ending. But this one's different. This one's surly. I've written and re-written and cut and tightened and squeezed and stretched, but it's still all flabby and jiggly and even saggy in bits and I'm beginning to suspect it ducks out to gorge on candy bars when I'm not looking. Tsk. No discipline.

Taglines

Since taglines are oh-so-important and so utterly pithy and positively oozing with meaning, I thought it appropriate to spend a bit of time thinking about mine. Because, you know, with a name like 'mixed nuts' a blog can so easily be confused with, say, a laundry list and it's so very important that you explain that it isn't.

So our search for clever little taglines for our blogs threw up the following for mine:

  1. Smarter than the average nut

  2. More nuts than you can shake a stick at

  3. Because you're worth it

  4. My imagination is more than a match for your reality

  5. Nuts eat dementors for breakfast

  6. The premium choice for sophisticated hunter-gatherers

  7. Evisceration is best done on a cool day

  8. Mixed nuts are happy nuts


I'm quite partial to number 3 simply because it's so beautifully inane. 4 and 7 come from my journals. They're true, too. Don't ask. 1,2, and 5 are similar to 'mixed nuts are happy nuts' (which Ameel came up with and I quite like) and don't really say much at all, which is good. As for number 6, the more I look at it, the less I like it. Hmm. Since so much hangs in the balance, I think I'll simply avoid a decision and cycle through the lot. Hey it gives me something to do while I try to write something worth writing.

Of trochees and iambs, or how we pick up language

If you've ever wondered why our voices go up a few octaves and become distinctly sing-song-y when we talk to children (and yes, even a misanthrope like me does on occasion talk to children), Professor Steve Jones may have an answer.
And thereby hangs a tale; for rhythm is essential to language. Children pick up the pulse of speech well after they have learned its vocabulary and grammar. That explains in part why they sound childish and why adults talk to them in such an embarrassing way. The young pick up trochees first (which is why "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" - a perfect example of the form - is so popular and may even lie behind Shakespeare's use of the same rhythm for the child-like figure of Puck). An ability to respond to the ponderous iamb takes much longer to emerge. When faced with a complicated word like "banana", infants often turn it into a tasty trochee, or "nana".

Rrrrrr

Penni posted ten things she likes that begin with D and has bestowed upon me the letter R. Although research is something quite close to my heart, I'll start off the list with Reunions. Given the amount of traveling I've done (and plan to keep doing), reunions figure pretty heavily in my life, at least as a concept if not a reality. From my family to friends from high school (some of whom I haven't seen in ten years now) college and work, it seems sometimes that I have more people to meet again than meet in the first place.

The other kind of reunion that's got me all giddy is when bands get back together. Specifically The Police (eeeek). I seriously have every single thing they have ever done. From Fallout to the first ever live performance of Message in a Bottle to their last reworking of Don't Stand So Close to Me, to Sting's solo work, Andy Summers's albums, and Steward Copeland's stint with Animal Logic, I. Have. It. All. So yaay for me and they'd better be planning an Australian tour or I'm getting me some voodoo dolls. What I'm happiest about, really, is the possibility of seeing Steward Copeland drumming--I love what he does and his influence is audible in so many different drummers' work that the prospect of seeing the original is just really exciting. You can read all about it here. Now. On with the rest of the list.

I actually do like Research because it means I can spend hours in the library or at the computer (but more the library, really. Weight, texture, smell, sound..there's so much *more* to books.) leafing through information on obscure facets of obscure subjects.

That said, Reading is so obvious it feels a bit like cheating...maybe I'll do 11 just to make up for that. I've wanted to read ever since I figured out that there was a hell of a lot more going on than people were telling me about (To be precise, I was about 3 years old and, following my mother out of her room after asking what was probably yet another awkward question, I realized I'd been fobbed off with some sort of kiddie explanation.) Now, I come from a long line of looker-uppers whose homes are not complete until filled to bursting with dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauri, grammars and the like, and I'd already been watching my elders leap for the nearest reference book any time a question came up, so I suppose my assumption was to be expected. I don't remember learning to read, only that I could. I was very disappointed when, soon after learning to string letters together to make words, I found I *couldn't* read everything.

As should be obvious from my previous posts, Remembering is something I do often and at great length. I won't say reminiscing, necessarily, although it does touch on that often enough, because for me remembering is more an exercise in figuring out why things are the way they are as opposed to dwelling on fond memories. I also love the way connections start sparking when you think about something you haven't thought of for a while and realize it's all there still, neatly filed away for you to take out and examine again.

Good or bad, Relationships are ultimately likeable creatures if you listen to what they have to say.

Riding along on motorbikes is definitely something I developed a taste for, though I've done it seldom. Specifically, an impromptu ride on a motorbike on a road that takes you over bridges and past massive trees and lets you look down at the Kathmandu valley, all in the Rain, of course (thanks, Roy).

Rain. Light rain, heavy rain, cold rain, warm rain, rain with thunder and lightning, rain with wind, rain sizzling on hot concrete, rain kicking up dust when it starts, the smell of rain about to fall, the smell of trees and earth in rain, rain you can drive in, rain you can't drive in, rain with rainbows, rains with heavy, angry clouds...

I enjoy Randomness. The way some thoughts just turn up, some links just get made, some people just happen to have a layover where you live. Unplanned, effortless goodness.

Rilke. By far one of my favorite poets although I have yet to learn enough German to read him in the original which, I'm told, far surpasses the translations I've read so far.

Roads. I love travelling, particularly road trips, and particularly when there are two cars or more. There's something about the possibilites, the unknown, the road stretching ahead of you, leading wherever it leads. Winding mountain roads are amazing, particularly the Karakoram Highway, built on the legendary Silk Route. Imagine what amounts to a tiny strip of metalled road slicing through the most gigantic rock faces on the planet. Or imagine being in the Himalayas trekking up an incline and seeing ahead of you a stone tunnel obscured by foliage through which you can still see a glimmer of light at the other end. Or even just driving the steep, winding Salt Range leg of the highway between Islamabad and Lahore. (Yes, I'm slightly mountain mad.) Roads are in-between places. Roads free you from what and where you've been and keep at bay the necessity of being someone, something, somewhere for just that little while longer. Roads are probably where I can be most at peace.

Time and Translation

Time seems to fly and crawl simultaneously sometimes. I don't quite get it, but there you go. I'll be slogging away at something utterly boringly unending and suddenly the week's gone. Again. It's like being stuck in a vacuum while time rushes past around me.

The new semester starts on the Feb 26. I'm quite ready to go back to school again, although what with it being the last six (five, really) months of my thesis and tutoring thrown in as well, it should be nice and stressful, but in a good I'm-doing-what-I-want-to-be-doing kind of way. At least that's the idea.

I've been reading buckets on translation and the upshot seems to be that, at present, everyone's got a different take on it and everyone thinks that their take works for them well enough but that obviously others have their own way of doing it, although they couldn't possibly do it that way themselves. Isn't that nice?

What many do agree on is that the choice of what to translate is usually personal, particularly when it comes to poetry. Even when translators work with 'informants' who know the language of the original text, they seem to want to connect with the ideas expressed and explored before they feel able to actually render the same poem in the target language (English in almost all the cases I've read so far). At the same time, most acknowledge that a perfectly literal translation is impossible simply because no two languages are alike enough for a text to travel intact between them. But that's why they do it. Because even though the exact sense cannot be conveyed, something of the essence of the poem can, and that, they feel, is the point. Better to have an imperfect rendering of , say, Homer than none at all.

What any of this means for my thesis remains to be seen, unfortunately. The only thing I have been able to conclude so far is that there has been extremely little contact between Urdu and French. What contact there has been says to me that the two languages should cross-pollinate--the lyrical quality of each seems to me to travel well despite the distance between the languages and I think something in each manages to capture something very basic in the other in a way that English translations of Urdu and French poetry do not. But then for me there already exists a basic connection between Urdu and Frenchbecause I've heard them used in tandem my whole life. There's no such relationship between them and English for me though, even though I've used that my whole life as well--more so than the other two. That's odd.

Tales from the City

Just finished watching Tales from the City and More Tales from the City, based on Armistead Maupin's series of books of the same title. I read Maupin's books back in high school - in Nepal, I think - and enjoyed the whole saga of 28 Barbary Lane. The series is pretty faithful to the original text, as far as I remember it. At various points, I could hear in my head Maupin's original narrative as the action played out. A bit surreal, definitely toned down, but generally rather well done. About half the cast changed between the first and second series, but I'm glad Mrs Madrigal, Mary Anne, and Didi stayed the same. Both Monas were really good and each seemed to exude the right kind of Mona-ness needed at that particular time. I preferred the original Mouse initially, but I got over that by the last episode.

As usual, I think the books were better overall, but is it really fair to compare a production necessarily limited by its medium and budget against the full scope of one's imagination? Increasingly, I don't think it is. Of course I wanted it to look the way it did in my head, but not even the most gifted of filmmakers could have made that happen. But then isn't that why we keep trying: the hope that maybe, just maybe, we'll get it exactly right this time? Which is why, if one must use tedious classical references, those who try to make concrete what they imagine remind me more of Tantalus than anyone visted by the muses.