i’d probably buy that blake book too if i saw it but i’ve always found it odd to separate the poem from his own illustrations. they’re part and parcel for me.
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I have a nice Blake edition reproducing all of his plates already + I like Ellen Raskin for Ellen Raskin
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yes it does! i have a longer impressions post in my back pocket but im waiting to post till i finish reading it. i chose to reread los siete locos now with the added context 
i really appreciate how this edition was put together, feels very generous
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beautiful
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i cannot tell a lie i was expecting a very different homer
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It’s like a Norton Critical Edition but even more abundant yeah. I’m having a good time looking at the textual edits Arlt was subjected to in subsequent editions of this books and finding myself a little more sympathetic to those posthumous publishers even if overall they tended to the persnickety. I get why someone would change all his "obscuro"s to "oscuro"s, for example.
I think his misspellings are really (endearingly) funny though:
What was the thought process? I know this word, but I dont know how to spell it, but I’m not going to find out. Fuck it we’re going 100% phonetic
And now, 100 years later its got a marginal gloss and a footnote like youre chaucer hell yeah
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the dream.
in all seriousness rereading some of the commentary on Arlts spelling mistakes etc. reminds me of when I read Hood Struggle by Kevin Guillard. I bought the book from him directly, which he signed. He was selling it an a local market in New Orleans. I really enjoyed the book despite some mistakes in grammar etc and think it would be so much like punching down to critique Guillard’s work based on that, which seems to be what happened to Arlt at the time. Aside from that I have massive respect for the DIY approach and also find the rough edges loveable as in “dreagnouths” lol
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if I were as into this book as yeso I would pick up this nice edition but then again if I were yeso I wouldn’t need it
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That HC Lindstrom book is the one I’d recommend for English readers all things considered but the Caistor translation is perfectly fine as well and more accessible thanks to the NYRB edition
@connierad speaking of which this was just published
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She’s awesome. Does anyone know what happened to the announced HBO adaptation of The Westing Game? I feel like it would’ve ate those lil Knives Out movies for lunch
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The 90s film adaptation doesn’t really do the job and instead goes for the kind of magic of friendship messaging that was the style at the time - abe simpson. But to be fair, not the kind of text you can adapt into a 90 minute runtime
700 pages in… I get it. I’m fully engrossed. This is me at the recommending-Infinite Jest-to-women-store:
More thoughts to follow when I finish the book :)
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I was recently thinking about the iconic scene in Natsume Soseki’s I Am A Cat where a character goes to a Western-style restaurant and baffles the waiter by insisting on ordering “moat-bells.” There’s a whole gag where the waiter says he can give him meatballs instead, but he refuses. The waiter then says he’ll have to specially order the ingredients for moat-bells, and it will take a very long time, but the character says he’ll wait. After a while, the waiter returns and says that there is a national shortage of the ingredients required to make moat-bells, and that he will have to order something else.
I always liked the idea of moat-bells, and whenever I eat vegan meatballs I always call them “moat-bells,” which consistently bewilders my wife despite the fact that I think I’ve described this scene to her at least three times (that’s a little sneak peek into what it’s like to be married to me.)
I finally had the thought recently to check what the characters are saying in the original Japanese. Instead of moat-bells, the character orders「トチメンボー」(tochimenbō), which is similar to the Japanese word for meatballs, 「メンチボール」(menchibōru) (apparently derived from “minced meat.”) I initially thought that tochimenbō was just nonsense, but then I looked up an article that explained that it’s actually the word 栃麺棒 (tochimenbō) which is a rolling pin used to make a type of udon made from chestnut flour. Apparently, the chestnut flour hardens very quickly, so one has to rush the preparation of this dish, and the expression 「栃麺棒を食う」(“to eat the tochimenbō”) means “to rush.” [1]
Anyway, that’s interesting, but I still think moat-bells is funnier.
Apparently the Buster Keaton movie Seven Chances was translated into Japanese as Keaton’s Tochimenbō. ↩︎
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… gonna read kelsey lewins new animal crossing book when I can get a hold of it…
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just downloaded los siete locos to my abuelas kindle after she picked up and read my library copy…yeso’s influence spreads ever further
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i felt the urge to reread this javier marias story today. what a masterpiece.
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Who are the Seven Madmen of videogames
my apologies
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video games not allowed itt you rats
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