19 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2023
    1. Nowhere is the P&V distortion so plain and disturbing as in their versions of Tolstoy.Critics sometimes say it is impossible to ruin Tolstoy because his diction is so straightforward. But it is actually quite easy to misrepresent him if one does not understand the language of novels. Since Jane Austen, novels have tended to trace a character’s thoughts in the third person. The choice of words, and the way one thought begets another, belongs to the character, and so we come to know her inner voice. At the same time, the character’s view may not comport with the author’s, and it is the art of the writer to make clear that what the character is seeing is deluded or self-serving or foolish. This “double-voicing” lies at the heart of the 19th-century novelistic enterprise. For Dickens and Trollope, “double-voicing” becomes the vehicle of satire, while George Eliot and Tolstoy use it for masterful psychological exploration. If one misses what is going on, the whole point of a passage can be lost.
  2. Dec 2022
    1. ranslated by zalas as part of al|together 2005, io[ChristmasEve] is a novel game made in the KiriKiri engine. The game received an update a year after the release of the translation patch which caused the patched game to crash immediately after starting, so my friend at the group Re*define has made a fix for it, making the game playable from start to finish. The fix consists of removing malfunctioning lines calling for an apparently nonexistent object called options2Menu. The XP3 archive was worked on with insani's xp3tools-20060708 available at http://insani.org/tools/. The fix has been tested on Windows XP and Windows 10.

      Thanks to Re*Define and Kaisernet, the original 2005 English-language translation of io [Christmas Eve], a freeware Japanese visual novel written in KiriKiri, is playable in English. The 2005 patch ceased working due to the Japanese game receiving a minor update in 2006. Kaisernet notes that "[t]he fix has been tested on Windows XP and Windows 10." I personally tested it on Linux running the game with the patch on WINE and found that it works without issue.

  3. Nov 2022
  4. 7nightstranslations.wordpress.com 7nightstranslations.wordpress.com
    1. Tanabe Meito is a psychology student in the “World of Light”, a completely ordered world were people don’t have a shadow. He’s not entirely satisfied, though; and when he meets a girl with a shadow called Shimon he ends going with her to the “World of Shadow”, a rural village where the people are shadows, and Shimon is the only one with both body and shadow. Right after that they meet two other persons with body and shadow: a girl with no memories, who they finally name Sou, and a woman also with no memories but who recalls being called Riri. Then they start living together in Shimon’s house, and have mostly slice-of-life happenings while they investigate a mysterious voice Meito heard just before going to the World of Shadow, and Meito gets used to the shadow people. And while that’s happening you have scenes of a boy who lives with his mother, who eats him, until he discover eating is love, eats her, and goes out into the outer world. Then things get real trippy, and nothing else makes any sense, until the very end, or ever.

      "And while that's happening you have scenes of a boy who lives with his mother, who eats him, until he discovers eating is love, eats her, and goes out into the outer world. **Then things get real trippy, and nothing else makes any sense, until the very end, or ever."

      This is as apt a description of MYTH as one could write.

  5. Aug 2022
    1. Once a pícaro, always a pícaro.
    2. the modern picaresque begins with Lazarillo de Tormes,[9] which was published anonymously in 1554 in Burgos, Medina del Campo, and Alcalá de Henares in Spain, and also in Antwerp,
  6. Jun 2022
    1. As SherlockHolmes says to Watson on a famous occasion: "If page 534 findsus only in Chapter Two, the length of the first one must have beenreally intolerable."

      Interesting to see Barzun quote Arthur Conan Doyle here. Not surprising given his penchant for mystery novels however.

    1. My own copy of A Catalogue of Crime certainly fits that description, even though I generally disagree with many of its harsh judgments on modern crime fiction. Barzun and Taylor definitely prefer classic whodunits, especially those written with wit, panache, and, above all, cleverness. The Catalogue lists more than 5,000 novel-length mysteries, collections of detective stories, true-crime books, and assorted volumes celebrating the delights of detection. Every entry is annotated, and a succinct critical judgment given.

      While this excerpt doesn't indicate the index card origin of the published book, it does indicate that it has descriptions of more than 5,000 novel-length mysteries, detective stories, etc. which includes annotations and critical judgements of each.

      One can thus draw the conclusion that this shared index card collection of details was used to publish a subsequent book.

    2. Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison reads in as follows in its entirety: “JB puts this highest among the masterpieces. It has the strongest possible element of suspense—curiosity and the feeling one shares with Wimsey for Harriet Vane. The clues, the enigma, the free-love question, and the order of telling could not be improved upon. As for the somber opening, with the judge’s comments on how to make an omelet, it is sheer genius.”
    1. together with his friend Wendell Hertig Taylor, kept a running tally of every mystery book that came along. Their brief descriptions, scribbled on three-by-five-inch index cards, eventually coalesced into “A Catalogue of Crime,” one of the foremost reference works in the mystery/suspense genre.

      Jacques Barzun had a card index for cataloging mystery/suspense books which he maintained on 3x5" cards with his friend Wendell Hertig Taylor.

      Did he keep a card index for his ideas as well?

  7. Apr 2022
    1. Political independence required cultural independence, and novels proved the best way of gaining it.
    2. Novels didn’t have the baggage associated with ancient forms of literature and therefore allowed new types of authors and readers to emerge, especially women, who used the flexible form to grapple with the most pressing questions of modern society.
  8. Mar 2022
    1. Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems, a collection of 10 14-line sonnets with each page cut into 14 strips to allow readers to arrange them into a astonishing number of variations; Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood, a novel composed entirely of questions; and Geoff Ryman’s 253, which was originally published on the web in the form of a collection of hypertext links.
    2. One of those books was B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, which Wildgust says he has used “to demonstrate how a ‘book’ can also be a box with unbound pages.” According to Wildgust, Johnson borrowed the idea from Turkish-born writer Marc Saporta’s 1962 experimental novel Composition No. I, which was printed as a collection of 150 unbound, single-sided pages that can be read in any order.

      Link this to Henry James Korn's experimental novel/cards in the early 1970s and late 1990s hypertext fiction.

    3. Laurence Sterne, best remembered for his 1759 experimental novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
  9. Feb 2022
    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._(Dorst_novel)?

      This was mentioned to me at an IndieWebCamp event today.

      Seems interesting with respect to the meta portions of books.

      Looks like the sort of thing that @remikalir and @anterobot may be interested in.

  10. May 2021
    1. he could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

      What does this tell us about Julia? Very meta.

  11. Jan 2021
    1. https://outline.com/tan7Ej

      Why Do People love Kungfustory?

      It’s well-established among the original novel/translating community that Kungfustory.com is the best.

      Kungfustory.com is just a place where Kungfustory can be hosted. It’s very user-friendly for readers, with a superb app that functions very well and reliably on phones. It’s easy to compile a list of reads, to know when those reads have been recently updated, and to follow along your favorite story.

      Select any genre you like: romance, stories with reborn heroes, magical realism, eastern fantasy the world of wuxia, horror stories, romantic love novels, fanfiction, sci-fi.

      New chapters added daily, Never be bored with new addictive plots and new worlds.

      https://www.kungfustory.com/

    1. Why Do People love Kungfustory?

      It’s well-established among the original novel/translating community that Kungfustory.com is the best.

      Kungfustory.com is just a place where Kungfustory can be hosted. It’s very user-friendly for readers, with a superb app that functions very well and reliably on phones. It’s easy to compile a list of reads, to know when those reads have been recently updated, and to follow along your favorite story.

      Select any genre you like: romance, stories with reborn heroes, magical realism, eastern fantasy the world of wuxia, horror stories, romantic love novels, fanfiction, sci-fi.

      New chapters added daily, Never be bored with new addictive plots and new worlds.

      https://www.kungfustory.com/

  12. Jan 2020
    1. In the far future, the [human group] fights a pitched battle against the mighty [alien name] Empire, but deep in the mysterious [region of space], among the ruins of the past, a darker threat looms."

      If I could write a short story or even a novel using only annotations (and info on the web pages themselves, like setting, plot developments, clues)! Might be fun! What cool uses can you think of?