ThePanda

Midway through The Plague (La Peste), another one of Camus’ novels, I have reformed my view of both french translations and Camus’ writing. Seemingly his writing seems to be pretty continuous and unbroken, besides being rather interesting. Funnily, or rather interestingly the first part of Camus’ L´etranger, the subject of yesterday’s post, was supposedly written in a more American style, a style supposedly borrowed from authors such a Faulkner and Poe, and well I haven’t come across any story by either Poe or Faulkner which was broken in that hideous a manner. Either ways Camus’ writing seems to be true, and nearly timeless, something that I can testify to after having lived through a plague, a plague during which my mother had to return from London (supposedly they used to test for plague bacilli somewhere near the tower), a plague in which my father played a pretty major roll, not very far from the roll played by Dr. Rieux in the book, and from the reaction that I saw at that time, the reactions I have heard of since, and from stories garnered off of many a dinnertime (lunchtime too) conversations the entire progression of events, right down to the reactions of the common people, government reactions and the like are pretty accurately described. Oh and it’s hellishly more interesting as compared to Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.

Umm well this entry was supposed to be about Papillon (which I am going to read, soon) and Camus, topics I wanted to research a little more, and I would have, if it wasn’t for two events which threw me off course. For one, HBO was broadcasting this brilliant movie, Live From Baghdad which kindda had me enthralled, and thus delayed me. Then there is WikiPedia, which is one of my two favorite research tools, at least for research on such topics, research on which I don’t want to spend a lot of time, research which returns specific answers without having me wade through tons of Googled links, though I do use Google for some of my more in-depth research (I don’t trust news networks too much, so I kindda stick to Google News when I need a story, multiple reports usually work for me). Anyways researching a topic only from H2G2 is perilous to say the least, which is why I kindda pass through topical entries in both the WikiPedia and H2G2 dbs, and then I kindda google the more interesting parts, and since I already know something about the topic I am working on (for example the ant incident in the French New Gunniea prison colony described in Papillon, and the fact that Camus died in a car crash from which they recovered his autobiography, I don’t need anything for that, television and advertisements usually provide you more than enough information) and I kindda mix all of those up to come up with information, on my informational but non-computational (I use a different methodology for those, hell I actually don’t have a standard methodology, this is what I was planning to do today) entries. Umm well ok as the bracketed comment made clear, I don’t really have a standard method, it’s just that I soooooooo wanted to follow this approach today, and well sadly WikiPedia has had one of it’s frequent outages today, of late WikiPedia outages have become common, it’s almost as if the chimps have started targeting WikiPedia. First it was a server overload, which led to people adding more servers, now it’s a database outage, and God knows what else is about to transpire. Oh and no promises about tomorrows entry, I don’t have the faintest idea what it’s going to be about, but I am pretty sure it’s not going to be about this.

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2004 at 2:52 pm and is filed under article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.