amazing instrumental guitar track
Friday, 4 August 2023
Thursday, 3 August 2023
R. F. Kuang - "Babel"
Amazing story about an alternate historical 19th century England where silver runs everything, and a boy "rescued" from Canton, is whisked off to Oxford by his not-addressing-the-daddy-issues professor Lovell.
Grasped me from page 1.
The Analects of Confucios made the claim sibujishe, that even a four-horse chariot could not catch a word once uttered, that the spoken word was irrevocable. But this seemed like a great trick of time. It did not seem fair that such a minuscule action could have such reverberating consequences. Something that broke not only his world but Ramy's, Letty's, and Victoire's should have taken minutes at least, it seemed; should have required repeated effort. The truth of the murder would have made more sense had he stood over his father's body with a blunt axe, bringing it down over and over into his skull and chest until blood sprayed across both their faces. Something brutla, something sustained, a true manifestation of monstrous intent.
The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford's good graces, and who now held the nation hostage. Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quentessentially English institution.
But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning 'house slave'; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals - the vulgar cants, as it were - had infiltrated English until they became proper. And the English vernacular could not properly be called domestic either, because English etymology had roots all over the world. Almanacs and algebra came from Arabic; pyjamas from Sanskrit, ketchup from Chinese, and paddies from Malay. It was only when elite England's way of life was threatened that the true English, whoever they were, attempted to excise all that had made them.
The British did not hate them, because hate was bound up with fear and resentment, and both required seeing your opponent as a morally autonomous being, worthy of respect and rivalry. The attitude the British held towards the Chinese was patronizing, was dismissive; but it was not hatred. Not yet.
Paolo Bacigalupi - "The Windup Girl"
tauted as the next William Gibson,.... nope.
I'm quiting after 100+ pages. It's just not that interesting, I don't care about the characters, and while the world is interesting, the constant dropping of foreign phrases in italics starts to piss me off.
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