Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

[Carmody]

Also, if you have time you may be interested in this:
https://chat.mistral.ai/chat
from France.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Here is a simple inquiry made to that French chat line and its rather full response. Thanks for the heads-up.

pouvez-vous s'il vous plait me dire tous les romans de marcel proust?

Marcel Proust est un écrivain français né le 10 juillet 1871 à Paris et mort le 18 novembre 1922 à Paris. Il est surtout connu pour son roman "À la recherche du temps perdu", qui est une œuvre monumentale en sept volumes. Voici la liste des romans de Marcel Proust :

"À la recherche du temps perdu" (également connu sous le titre "À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs"), publié en sept volumes entre 1913 et 1927 :

"Du côté de chez Swann" (1913)
"À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs" (1919)
"Le Côté de Guermantes" (1920-1921)
"Sodome et Gomorrhe" (1921-1922)
"La Prisonnière" (1923)
"Albertine disparue" (1925)
"Le Temps retrouvé" (1927)

"Les Plaisirs et les Jours" (1896), un recueil de nouvelles et de poèmes en prose.
"Jean Santeuil" (1952), un roman inachevé publié de manière posthume.
"Contre Sainte-Beuve" (1954), un recueil d'essais et de réflexions sur la littérature et l'écriture, publié de manière posthume.

Il est à noter que "Jean Santeuil" et "Contre Sainte-Beuve" sont des œuvres posthumes, c'est-à-dire qu'elles ont été publiées après la mort de Proust. "À la recherche du temps perdu" est l'œuvre majeure de Proust et celle qui lui a valu sa renommée internationale.

merci.

De rien ! N'hésitez pas si vous avez d'autres questions.

[Carmody]

Possibly I am misunderstanding your original question which I believe was "how can I find authors similar to the one I really like?" When that question is posed to the search engine, I don't believe the reults were very useful.

Possibly if you gave it that type of question you could determine if it was useful.

Carmody

[MorkTheFiddle]

Possibly I am misunderstanding your original question which I believe was "how can I find authors similar to the one I really like?" When that question is posed to the search engine, I don't believe the reults were very useful.

Possibly if you gave it that type of question you could determine if it was useful.

Carmody

This was just a test question. Then I asked a question similar to what you suggest and hit paydirt. Voilà :

Me: Thucydide, Tacite et Gabriel Garcia Marquez sont trois de mes auteurs préférés. Y a-t-il un écrivain contemporain qui leur ressemble?

AI: Thucydide, Tacite et Gabriel Garcia Marquez sont des auteurs de périodes et de styles très différents, ce qui rend la recherche d'un écrivain contemporain qui leur ressemble tous les trois assez complexe. Cependant, si l'on considère leurs qualités individuelles, on peut trouver des auteurs contemporains qui partagent certaines de leurs caractéristiques.
Thucydide est connu pour son approche rigoureuse et analytique de l'histoire, tandis que Tacite est apprécié pour son style incisif et sa description des intrigues politiques. En ce qui concerne Gabriel Garcia Marquez, il est célèbre pour son style de réalisme magique et ses descriptions vivantes de la vie en Amérique latine.
Pour trouver un auteur contemporain qui combine certaines de ces qualités, je vous recommande de vous tourner vers l'écrivain américano-péruvien Daniel Alarcón. Ses œuvres, telles que "La ville des tigres" et "Le roi est toujours au-dessus de l'eau", abordent des thèmes politiques et sociaux complexes tout en incorporant des éléments de réalisme magique. Bien que son style soit différent de celui de Thucydide et Tacite, il partage avec eux une approche profonde et réfléchie des enjeux politiques et sociaux.
Un autre auteur à considérer est l'écrivain chinois Yan Lianke, dont les œuvres, telles que "Le rêve du village des Ding" et "Les jours, les mois, les années", combinent une analyse sociale et politique pointue avec un style narratif unique et captivant.
En somme, il est difficile de trouver un écrivain contemporain qui ressemble à la fois à Thucydide, Tacite et Gabriel Garcia Marquez, mais des auteurs comme Daniel Alarcón et Yan Lianke présentent des similitudes avec certains aspects de leurs œuvres respectives.

Me: Très bonne réponse. Merci beaucoup.

AI: Je vous en prie! Je suis ravi d'avoir pu vous aider à découvrir de nouveaux auteurs qui pourraient vous intéresser. N'hésitez pas à me contacter si vous avez d'autres questions ou si vous souhaitez des recommandations supplémentaires. Bonne lecture!

Yan Lianke is totally new to me. I am familiar with Alarcón through his work with the Spanish learning series Radio Ambulante. But I think this was a very useful and productive answer. Thanks again for the heads up.

[MorkTheFiddle]

This week:

French
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt “Tout pour être heureuse” pages 138-171 of Odette Toulemonde et autres histoires 20 min

Spanish
Miguel de Unamuno “Sueño,” a story in (I just recently rediscovered) El Libro Total
Gabo “Amargura para tres sonámbulos” 61-64 in Todos los cuentos 9m 30s

Ancient Greek
Review of prosody/meter

[MorkTheFiddle]

Ancient Greek
To review grammar, I read the prefatory matter in A First Greek Writer with Exercises and Vocabularies by A. Sidgwick (the A. is for Arthur, and he was an influential British teacher). I've done the first six exercises and demonstrated to myself that there is a lot forgotten about grammar and noun declensions. And the computer is not the place to go back and forth among an exercise and a dictionary and snippets of grammar and a cheat sheet for typing Greek diacritical markings.
Nevertheless to my surprise I sort of enjoyed working the exercises.

Other
I checked out a digital edition translation of Yan Lianke's The Day the Sun Died, which I mention in my last post, and read a couple of pages. But it's very meta with lots of references to his own works, so almost incomprehensible to me. I gave up.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Spanish
Radio Ciudad Perdida (Lost Radio City), paginas 13-61, by Peruvian Daniel Alarcón. Alarcón is one of the folks behind the good Spanish learning site Radio Ambulante. Echoes of 100 Years of Solitude. I'm not into this novel yet.

French
"La princess aux pied nus" (The Princess in Bare Feet), pages 172-189 of Odette Toulemonde et autres histoires by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt. A fairly ordinary story, I'm afraid, with an unsurprising surprise ending. Reminded me of the better IMHO "Ambre" by Anna Gavalda.

Ancient Greek
Studying/using First Greek Writer by Arthur Sidgwick. Translated the first 10 exercises, entered the vocabulary for those exercises into Study Stack, worked through some of Study Stack's game-like exercises, then ran them through ANKI, and lastly made sentences of three words that kept eluding me even in ANKI. Of great assistance were ChatGPT and Bing. I underlined the three words here:

ὁ αἰγιαλός ὁ σκοτεινός ἐφίστατο πρὸ τῶν ἡμῶν.
The dark shore suddenly loomed ahead of us.
Ἐδόκει τοῖς στρατηγοῖς τὸν στρατὸν τῶν πολεμίων ἐν τῇ νήσῳ κεκρυμμένον εἶναι.
The commanders thought that the enemies’ army was hidden on the island.

[MorkTheFiddle]

French
“Odette Toulemonde” 190-235 21:40m Touching story from Odette Toulemonde et autres histoires by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt.

Spanish
“De cómo Natanael hace una visita” (1950) 65-74 23:10m Todos los cuentos Gabriel Márquez García

El Libro Total: read and listened to 4 stories by Anton Chekhov (Antón Pávlovich Chéjov) in Spanish translation
“Aniuta” 12 pages "Anyuta," in Russian "Анюта" (according to Wikipedia)
“Cirugía” 11 pages "Surgery," "Хирургия" (Wikipedia)
“De madrugada” 8 pages "At Dawn," "На заре" (according to ChatGPT).
“El Beso” 47 pages "The Kiss," in Russian "Поцелуй" (ChatGPT)
I don't read Russian, I give the Russian titles as a courtesy.

Ancient Greek
Tried scriptorium with a couple of exercises from Sidgwick’s First Greek Writer. I am not convinced it’s effective for me.
Toyed with the idea of putting more of the vocabulary from that book into ANKI using Cloze , but am persuaded free recall is a more effective method. For starters, I can see how it might make me more attentive to the forms of words, to the cases of nouns and adjectives, to the conjugated form of the verbs. And, perhaps, scriptorium would help with that.
I won’t stop reviewing the words from Sidgwick that I already put into ANKI.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Spanish
Anton Chekhov's "El duelo," pages 2-23 of 252 pages, in El Libro Total.
Chapter 3, pages 62-81, of Radio Ciudad Perdida.

Ancient Greek

I am exploring using free recall for studying Ancient Greek.

Essentially, (my definition) free recall means listening to a lecture, watching a video, or reading a passage, and then immediately trying to remember everything one can by writing it down or reciting it. The next step some try is to read or listen a second time, but it has been argued that testing on the material is a better strategy.
For self learners, this requires creating the test themselves, thus in a sense requiring two readings or listens.
For my purposes, just finding the unknown words and creating a test on them would be enough. I think. Easy enough to get a list of words in a text and creating a test over the unknowns.

How to learn the unknowns is a part of this. I have stumbled around this working with the Greek word ὑπάρχω, which has several meanings whose relationships with each other are not obvious. This led to usage of the word in the Bible. Useful websites about the Bible exist, and a couple in particular about the semantics of Greek. They give instances of the various meanings of ὑπάρχω and helpful sample passages. Writers of classical Greek can go on and on and on to the extent that “sample’ passages often prove incomprehensible to the beginner, and I haven’t found any useful mnemonic devices a la Memrise, but working with the comprehensible Biblical samples helps me a bit to clarify the words in my head.

The following reference gives kind of an overview of free recall versus other kinds of recall:
Recall.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Ancient Greek
ANKI entries for words learned in Arthur Sidgwick's First Greek Writer and in the Core Greek Vocabulary from Dickenson College.
This morning I read a few lines of Plato's Ion until I stopped to do some vocabulary work on φέρω. Not so difficult a word, but it has some different forms in a couple of tenses which I found in the reading, and there are lots of meanings. Originally catalogued as one entry in ANKI, but this morning I spent a little time making separate cards for each of the meanings. Also I listened to a few lines of the audio.

French
I read the articles that interested me in the latest Madmoizelle. One about a single Mom living in Paris with her 14-year-old son and working for low pay at a government job. There are much better paying jobs in private industry, but she is afraid of layoffs and losing her job with a son to take care of.

Spanish
Unfortunately neglected this week.