Hey friends,
Greetings from a new year, new me… I know you’ve all missed your regular dose of musings.
The world seems as consistently chaotic as ever, so I’ll let this 41st edition of Maya’s Musings(TM) similarly reflect both stochasticity and constancy… that is to say, read on to find what words / sounds / sights have caught my attention since we last met.
Always curious to hear what my dedicated fanbase is up to! What’s new in your world?
Cheers,
Maya
Best of, since last time
- Podcast: “The Good Whale” — the story of what happened after everyone who saw Free Willy wondered whether the real Willy was free, too.
- Words: In favor of more irregular verbs, in the style of “go, went, gone.” For example: “Frisbee, friswas, frisbeen: Although he had never frisbeen before, after watching the tournament he friswas every day, trying to frisbee as the champions friswere.”
- Song: “If I Had a Boat” — Lyle Lovett
- [Audio]Book: Dark Wild Shore — Charlotte McConaghy — third novel by a favorite author, and this one continued to impress! Such a haunting combination of darkness and light in characters, setting, and theme… dark and wild are apt descriptors.
- Very Good Idea: Combining chill music with live air traffic control radio for the best focus soundtrack. I made an app: https://chill-atc.streamlit.app/
- Quote: “Creativity lives in a box.”
- Very Short Story:
More books
- Andorra Revealed — Clare Accard, Judith Wood, Iain Woolward
- [An Anthology]
- 🇦🇩 Andorra book. A collection of essays, fiction and non-fiction, by Andorran expats
- Learned so much! Andorra is a tiny independent country “co-ruled” by the French and Spanish leaders (either princes or elected officials, don’t remember). Tons of outdoor activity options (winter sports, hiking) and a culture of “doing” without necessarily competing. Great tax situation which leads to lots of smuggling, especially of tobacco, but otherwise not too much crime. Many festivals throughout the year, from an interesting mix of Catholic and “pagan” traditions. Kinship with the Catalans (pro-self-governance and all) and therefore Força Barça! There’s a cool public bath sorta building (the Caldea Spa) with hot springs, cold baths, and other cool treatments, including a grapefruit pool.
- Deep Water — James Bradley
- [The World in the Ocean]
- Australian narrator, highly enjoyable
- Sense of oneness, awe, wonder that arise from things like skydiving, surfing, psychedelics, meditation (my favorite things) → neurological basis potentially in synchronization of circuits governing our “inner” and “outer” worlds — also, Earthrise, water in general
- “Time, water, the ocean. The three are inextricably connected.”
- How climate patterns affected colonization…
- Ocean currents greatly facilitated the “Columbian Exchange” and the triangular slave trade… another one of those environmental, sorta arbitrary, non-generic factors underlying modern social disparities.
- Racial underpinnings of swimming, in two waves:
- Initially, the ability to swim itself was seen as suspicious by Europeans; a sign of savagery, an animal nature, “otherness” of people in the “New World”
- Even once it became more accepted, Europeans lauded breaststroke over the much more efficient “side stroke” varieties that the Pacific Islanders used, until some guy on New Zealand “invented” freestyle based on one of their examples
- The soundscape of the seas
- Echolocation in toothed whales may affect the animals’ sense of self, since each individual can “hear” the signals of other animals (sometimes even a distance away) in addition to their own
- The Cocoa (Keelings) Islands
- Some islands in the middle of the Pacific (between Australia and Sri Lanka?) that were basically under the dictatorship of a Scottish family for >150 years, only officially joining Australia in the 1970s— as Wikipedia puts it, the islands were a “personal fiefdom”
- The population wasn’t even “indigenous,” but rather comprised of the actual harem and indentured laborers brought over by the family
- Overall, this was interesting and well-written, spanning a huge range of topics and time-spans with a compelling mix of personal and scientific storytelling. However, I did have trouble staying focused— not sure if it’s because I’ve read a decent amount about many of the topics Bradley covers (whales & dolphins, fish behavior and sensory systems, coral bleaching and research, plastic pollution, the shipping and seafood industries, climate change in general?), but there were only rarely truly captivating or exciting sections (most of which I noted above). Still, I’ll keep this one bookmarked as a solid overview of ocean-related environmental and social issues.
- It Would Be Night in Caracas — Karina Sainz Borge
- 🇻🇪 Venezuela book
- Follows a women living in Caracas during (current?) political turmoil and violence, through her escape to Spain. Learned a bit about the terrible and mercurial living situation in the country, including the economic mess, political persecution, and brutal suppression of the press. This was a frightening, haunting, and heartbreaking (I know, so many books have been, but it’s the only word that seems true) glimpse into the reality of those living in Venezuela, and felt like a warning to what the consequences of far-right politics in our country may be.
- A Dream Life — Claire Messut
- 🇦🇺 Australia novella
- Super short, kinda funny story of an American expat family in upper-class Australia struggling with the exemplar first-world problem of finding a housekeeper.
- The Man Who Could Move Clouds — Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- 🇨🇴 Colombia book; memoir
- “There’s surviving, and then there’s surviving the surviving.”
- The Lion Women of Tehran — Marjan Kamali
- 🇮🇷 Iran book; covers the political turmoil of the 1950s through current times, the bizarre alignment of anti-shah sentiment (pro-self-government, I think, against colonial influence) with the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the backward slide of civil rights. I appreciated and learned a lot from reading about how secular much of the population was, and it makes the religious oppression all the more painful.
- Coming-of-age to political drama, sorta— heartwarming and heartbreaking, in turn
- Martyr — Kaveh Akbar
- Another 🇮🇷 Iran book
- Sufi prayer: “Lord, increase my bewilderment.”
- I had been looking forward to this book for awhile based on early reviews, and was somewhat disappointed (especially at the beginning, the main character Cyrus was portrayed as rather unsympathetic, which made me annoyed rather than interested in his internal plight). As a result, I didn’t pay that close attention to the first 2/3 or so of the book, so take my opinion with a grain of salt! However, once Cyrus made his trip to Brooklyn, I felt more invested in his story, and appreciated the dynamics of his relationships and the dramatic reveal and subsequent conclusion. Overall, would recommend if you can get through to the good part!
- I resonated a lot with Cyrus’s conflicting extreme hopelessness (to the point of passive suicidal thoughts) and desire to leave a mark on the world (to be a martyr), and then the guilt that follows over the self-importance that making such an impact assumes.
- It was interesting to read this right after The Lion Women of Tehran, which covered some of the same events (Iran-Iraq war, etc.) but from a different vantage point. Despite the differences in characters and their proximity to the conflicts, there was a common theme of a their deep love & connection to their Iranian heritage and the pain/betrayal (? not sure if these are the right words) from the actions of the political elite. Just another reminder that “the people” are not represented by the most extreme, and in fact may be the ones most hurt by them.
- The Extinction of Irena Rey — Jennifer Croft
- (Another) 🇵🇱 Poland book.
- Super-meta work of translation: written as a translated novel with “notes from the translator” of a story she was part of, but from another point of view— and that story is that of an author and her loyal group of translators representing many languages as they’re faced with a mysterious disappearance. And the actual author, Jennifer Croft, is herself an award-winning translator of Polish, Ukrainian, and Spanish works (her translation of Flights from Polish to English is my 🇵🇱 Poland book, actually!), although the book is written in English (obviously the language I’m reading in).
- Translation is such a crazy process! Reminds me of Babel (an all-time favorite novel).
- Well… I fell asleep listening to the last 30% of this and had no desire to reread, whatever that means.
- No Friend But the Mountains — Behrouz Boochani, tl. Omid Tofighian
- [Writing from Manus Prison]
- Written by an 🇮🇷 Iranian author, involving 🇦🇺 Australian systems and mostly set in 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea, but this was a book more of humanity and human systems than any particular country.
- Boochani wrote this book from 2014-2017 through hundreds of thousands of text messages sent from a contraband phone while kept prisoner in Manus Prison in PNG, where he was held by the Australian government after seeking asylum. It was simultaneously translated from Farsi into English; with author, translator, and other correspondents working together to develop and convey the philosophical themes of oppression.
- Translator’s notes: Tofighian, an Iranian-Australian, describes how, while translating, he had to be conscious of the fact that the book was being written in the language of Boochani’s oppressors (in Farsi, rather than Kurdish), being translated into another language of oppressors (English), and that he himself was not Kurdish. Even just linguistically, the differences between Farsi and English made “faithful translation” (is this even possible?) challenging: the lyrical, poetic style of his attempt was captivating, and makes me so curious how it was originally written.
- This was one of those books that was incredibly uncomfortable to read (and especially, to listen to), both from the descriptions of gruesome, disgusting prison conditions and accounts of immoral, desperate human behavior. But that was the point: the secrecy of the prison only made its oppression more powerful, and one of its aims was to make the systematic torture more widely known.
- Boochani describes prison as a kyriarchal system (took me a long time to figure out this word, since I was listening!), a concept from feminist theory, many forms of purposeful oppression combine to isolate and break down the oppressed. The casual abuse by Australian guards and loss of humanity by both the guards and refugees seemed like a spooky real-world instance of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
- Title reference: “No friends but the mountains” is a Kurdish proverb expressing the “betrayal, abandonment, and loneliness” felt by the Kurdish people as an often-stateless ethnic minority, and particularly of the tolerance of their oppression by US policy. (h/t Wikipedia)
- The Fox Was Ever the Hunter — Herta Müller, tl. Philip Boehm
- 🇷🇴 Romania book.
- We Had to Remove This Post — Hanna Bervoets, tl. Emma Rault
- 🇳🇱 Netherlands book.
- Celestial Bodies — Johka Alharthi, tl. Marilyn Booth
- 🇴🇲 Oman book. 2019 Man Booker winner.
- Just couldn’t get into the audiobook, and always felt a little confused by all the characters. Maybe would have been better to actually read? Still, got a sense for some of the history (and classic British colonialism) and culture of Oman, which was interesting and new to me.
- Wait, Blink — Gunnhild Øyehaug, tl. Kari Dickson
- [A Perfect Picture of Inner Life: A Novel]
- 🇳🇴 Norway book.
- This was weird, I think in a good way? Initially had the vibe of annoying, melodramatic characters, but I ended up sympathizing with them as the book went on. The writing style was unique and lent itself well to audio— sometimes lyrical, lots of repetition, all the internal dialogue. I’m not sure if the sorta monotonic narrator added to the experience, but definitely affected it!
- Also had my favorite structure of following a bunch of random people whose lives eventually, inevitably, and unbeknownst to them, intersect.
- Another thing that stood out to me was the third-person omniscient POV— it was kind of striking to jump from one mind to another, to hear glimpses of what another person is/was/will be doing across the continent and maybe across time, and to be directly addressed (breaking the fourth wall? Is that what it’s called?). It made the day-to-day events and familiar insecurities of the characters feel a bit uncanny and a bit more engaging.
- A Charm of Finches — Suanne Laquer
- Read this three times in a row, very good