umberto eco

Hey, neither have I, and I've owned a copy for about, what, over a decade now?

For what it's worth, I've heard The Da Vinci Code (which I haven't read) described as "Foucault's Pendulum for Dummies."

I am sometimes too relaxed.

Also, it's Eco, a superb historian and cunning linguist (heh), just kicking back and having fun, trying to hook together as much stuff as he possibly can. Somehow he manages to bring in everything, including the kitchen sink, and it's still glorious.

Read it if you liked the Illuminati Trilogy, The Name Of The Rose (another fine Eco novel that everyone ever should read) etc. And that means, you, too, Ned.

(My mum is trying to get me to read The DaVinci Code right now, but only after her book group are done with it.)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,659577,00.html

Eco: The people from the Louvre approached me and asked whether I'd like to curate an exhibition there, and they asked me to come up with a program of events. Just the idea of working in a museum was appealing to me. I was there alone recently, and I felt like a character in a Dan Brown novel. It was both eerie and wonderful at the same time. I realized immediately that the exhibition would focus on lists. Why am I so interested in the subject? I can't really say. I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have their preferences.

haaaaaaaaa

last two sentences way more wtf though tbh

i love u all so so so tenderly

Haven't given this guy much thought in the last 20 years, glanced through his newest one, The Prague Cemetery, in a bookshop and it started with a bewildering multi-car pile up of clauses and commas that hurt my eyes to look at.

A passerby on that grey morning in March 1897, crossing, at his own risk and peril, place Maubert or the Maub, as it was known in criminal circles (formerly a centre of university life in the Middle Ages when students flocked there from the Faculty of Arts in Vicus Stramineus or rue du Fouarre, and later a place of execution for apostles of free thought such as Etienne Dolet), would have found himself in one of the few spots in Paris spared from Baron Haussmann’s devastations, amidst a tangle of malodorous alleys, sliced in two by the course of the Bievre which still emerged here, flowing out from the bowels of the metropolis, where it had long been confined, before emptying feverish, gasping and verminous into the nearby Seine. From place Maubert, already scarred by boulevard Saint-Germain, a web of narrow lanes still branched off, such as rue Maitre-Albert, rue Saint-Séverin, rue Calande, rue de la Bucherie, rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, as far as rue de la Huchette, littered with filthy hotels generally run by Auvergnat hoteliers of legendary cupidity, who demanded one franc for the first night and forty centimes thereafter (plus twenty sous if you wanted a sheet).

great book

eco's stuff definitely misses william weaver as a translator, but i was pretty ambivalent abt prague cemetery regardless of the prose--it plays with so much anti-semitic conspiracy that it ends up feeling pretty anti-semitic itself

^i didn't really feel this. i thought the great success of the book was how well it portrayed the cynical opportunism of the rebirth of euro antisemitism, underscored by a protagonist whose grandfather is set up (in the book but also i guess in history) as like the typhoid mary of the new antisemitism but whose only interest in that is whatever angle he can work with it and then who as an older man has written his fiction so often that he has started to believe it. a lot of the historical story was totally new to me and the farce of it really emphasizes the tragedy, but if i have a criticism of the book it is that it is very strong on the farce but not so much on the tragedy. i mean, it is pretty heavy handed with the foreshadowing ("final solution" eh?) but the inclusion of something more on a personal level would've balanced that out a bit better imo.

i like eco because you always are at least going to learn something even as the quality oscillates.

http://blackbag.gawker.com/is-ancient-history-completely-made-up-by-the-man-1694539419/+adamweinstein

I want an Eco novel tied into this.

omg that is so fucking stupid that i got furious at myself for even reading it

At least Eco could possibly make it humorous, Fomenko seems like the usual combination of ax-grinding and tooth-grinding you find in conspiracy theorists.

"Speaking of carbon, don't bother relying on carbon dating or other "scientific" chronological methods, Fomenko says: They are premised on the "old" dating system, and hence thoroughly corrupted."

uh

ok

Reports coming out of Italy that Eco has passed.

https://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=dV-ClQLPjLLNtcMdMdfdTt5nvWOvM&q=umberto+eco&lr=English&hl=it&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZtbKihIXLAhVCLSYKHU65BdUQqgIIKDAE

:(

Oh no :(

RIP

Man, at this rate I'm not sure I can take 2016.

RIP. this one really hurts.

Just found out by total accident, new dramatisation of The Name of the Rose on BBC2 right now

oh cool, will catch up tomorrow maybe.

first ep was fun but the sound/accents/dubbing was pretty incomprehensible in places

not unlike reading the book then

:D

nice comment, f.h.

re: dubbing - "Naturally, a palimsest" (is that the epigraph? can't be bothered looking for my copy, something like that) fitting anyway.

Weird that the BBC didn't put out trailers for this, not that I saw, anyway.

"Naturally, a manuscript"

I dunno why I'm zinging one of my favorite authors but one of the things I loved about my initial readings of Eco was that I couldn't make heads or tails of most of it

"Naturally, a manuscript"

ah! haha :)

TNoTR is a book that bears repeated reading (in spdes) and the manuscript/palimpsest thing very strongly adds to that - Is this the same book I read five, ten, twenty years ago? Can you read the same book again etc. Is the book the same and I'm different? or the opposite. I want to read it again now.

Yeah I haven't read it in a long time and aren't likely to have the time in the near future. The first ep of this was pretty faithful from memory and over another 7 it should have the space to stay that way, so I can't be too picky about the weak bits

Also I swear it's "naturally, a palimpsest" unless silby was making a joke

Never mind, told you it had been a long time

Naming the Rose is a collection of essays about it that's fun and enlightening because you get to see some well-read folks trying to chase down the allusions Eco makes in the novel.

Bewildering interlude in ep 2. It seemed like a flashback, sad old monk remembering that time he joined up with a weird sect who all then got slaughtered and he failed to save the daughter like he'd promised - but then the guy doing the slaughtering was the pope's emissary on his way to the monastery, which made it seem contemporaneous with the main story. Also leafing through the book it looks like the interlude was an ill-explained mishmash of various different stories. I'd totally forgotten how much theological dialogue there is in the book, it's almost like the murder mystery is a thin excuse for Eco to splurge his erudition on to the page; whereas in the show they've kept the politics but virtually slashed the theology down to nothing.

Plenty of time yet. I quite enjoyed the liberties taken with narrative in that ep but you could just as easily argue it was a mess. I ended thinking that anybody unfamiliar with the book would really be struggling to follow the show. Mumbly indistinct dialogue wouldn't help either, but I'm just enjoying the ride, especially since I can't find my copy of the book right now.

I haven't reread TNotR since I came across Kipling's The Eye of Allah (collected in Debits and Credits, 1926) a few years back, so I don't really know if its precursor links are superficial (monks, feuds about manuscripts and forgery, the key figure being "john of burgos") or more than that. Jorge of Burgos is generally thought to be a playful nod to Borges: Borges was of course a serious Kipling fan.

(I wrote up the encounter here, possibly making more of it than my dimmed memories of Rose can quite justify…)

i need to read that Kipling story then

i figure the *blind* Jorge is a pretty obvious tip of the hat but then of course the library itself is straight from "The Library of Babel" and a lot of Baskerville's reflections on semiotics feel at least filtered thru the early section of Foucault's Order of Things, and the title of Eco's next novel is a reference to at least two people.

For all its flaws I love this adaptation, it often looks beautiful and Rupert Everett is killing it.

just reread eco's essay on james bond for the first time in nearly 40 years

undervalued as a semiotician i think, maybe bcz he stayed one when the gallic gang moved on, and maybe also bcz the translators from italian disdained the florid mannerism that french theory (with a bit of unwelcome help from heidegger) has now spread thru the entire academic world

of course that stuff was catnip to me once upon a time and umberto refrained and i guess i put him to one side as a humbler kind of artisan (i was a dick like that)

anyway the bond essay is smart and funny

it sent me on to the very funny alexander cockburn essay on bond and fleming, which cites the eco in passing (i have the cockburn in his corruptions of empire collection, tho it's also up on counterpunch if you want to read it straight away… not linking to counterpunch sorry not sorry).

"There were foreshadowings of things in the Bond films, – the pipe that was a gun, and other gadgets. There were some things we couldn’t use, such as foul smelling stuff like an enormous fart that the OSS agents used to spray on people they wished to discredit, and thus cause them to be socially humiliated. It was called Who, Me? We could never get it in, because the Johnson office would never let us use it."’