New Link: Reading The Signs

I have added a new link. I mean, not entirely, new, but newly esconced into its place of honor in the "Links List". I meant to add it before, so my intention alone renders it not entirely new. It was, so to speak, a missing link, the loss of which has now been rectified. There. Reading The Signs writes well, an action which I merely use for FX, special or otherwise mundane. Writing well is an affectation I can no longer afford, in these day of the world economic crisis. The latest post is http://readingthesigns.blogspot.com/2008/10/body-electric.html. It is about illness and wrist watches. Sort of C.S.Lewis' Witches and Wardrobes meets Analogue Watches and some sort of unnamed illness, unnamed but hovering over all the action like some terrible plague, Magic Mountain-like, a Death in Venice slow, slow dance of symptoms and recovery. Recovery there is, accompanied by great photos of trees and sunshine. It does not quite go so far as to have Arno Breker-like warriors and maidens, diaphonously garbed in exciteable areas, standing to drink in the morning sun, all the while striking poses of determination and valor, but it comes quite close. It contains the phrase "...the only thing that helps is a certain concoction of homoeopathic drops – and resting and waiting." Phrases like that resonate like bells in my head. I mean, the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin ("concoction"), and the Greek ("homeopathic") all well woven into and around each other, each tongue supporting and adding to the others, is a fine a capella martini, symphonically shaken and stirred in the soul, and as equally intoxicating. It is also the bane of those whose native tongue is not English, this seamless sewing of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek. It is the type of thing I shudder at when stumbling across in Arabic; a true mystery beyond ken. I mean, I have actually had Arabic speakers conjugate wrong verb forms, translate something impossibly, then say the sentence is, after all, untranslatable and cannot be understood by the head, only the heart! Now that is mystification! I am sorry, but I cannot understand a sentence in a short story by Zakaria Tamir, if you come back to me with the fact that certain passages in the Quran are obscure, or the meaning is known to God alone. Anyway, I love the writing. No witches, no wardrobes; an armoire of wonder; an advent calendar of a month of marvels to be opened one by one and enjoyed.