Hearing the news I couldn't help but think about the first game I've ever played, "La Abadia del Crimen", a version of "The Name of the Rose", for Amstrad CPC.
Umberto Eco has died
101–110 of 137 posts
Re: Umberto Eco has died
#102One remarkable thing about The Name of the Rose is that the characters in it don't think and talk like modern people who happen to have been transported into the Middle Ages. They seem to think differently -- about what's possible, what people can expect from life, how you know things, what counts as an argument... Possibly my favorite part: "What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind i…
This reminds me of the philosopher whose name I can't recall now who claimed that consciousness came into being some 3,000 years ago
Re: Umberto Eco has died
#103I didn't read any of his novels (yet), but this I consider one of the most important documents I'm aware of. http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini's fascism was based upon…
> Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.
He wrote a whole book about this: The Prague Cemetery.
Re: Umberto Eco has died
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Umber Eco was one of the greatest scholars of Middle Age's philosophy. It is a great delight for all of us that he decided to share his knowledge in the form of a Novel. I don't think you can find any other writer capable of translating the thinking of ordinary men from Middle Ages into a book like he did.
I really doubt we know very much about how people thought back then. There are many filters between what was thought, who knew how to write it down, the form people used to express thought in written form, what happened to be copied or survive. Ex: People don't actually believe in Santa Clause, but if you randomly chose 10,000 pages to represent US thought from 1800 to now. Them handed them to scholars in the future…
You'd be surprised. Read Baudilino by Eco, which speaks to this precise point.
Re: Umberto Eco has died
#105Umberto Eco on operating systems and religion, in 1994: The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells th…
This is just one of many possible quotes giving a measure of how overrated Eco was and will be for the decades to come. An intellectual focusing mostly on showing himself as much more intelligent than others, either by literary exhibitionism, nonsense metaphors on subjects he barely understood and ultimately a love for manipulation of language. That said, his ability to do all those things with perfect execution and…
If that quote shows how overrated he is, I should read more of his stuff.
Re: Umberto Eco has died
#106Foucault's Pendulum was maybe the most transformative book I've ever read - it changed how I think about literature (and of course the Knights Templar). Ah well, guess it's time to reread it. :(
That book made me feel stupid and uneducated. There was hardly a paragraph without a word I had to look up or a reference I couldn't get. The translator utterly defeated me. I never finished it.
I don't know which translation have you read. The fact is that translators rarely understand all the subtleties of Eco's original, translate it incorrectly and thus the translations are much more confusing than they should be.
Re: Umberto Eco has died
#107Umberto Eco on operating systems and religion, in 1994: The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells th…
This is just one of many possible quotes giving a measure of how overrated Eco was and will be for the decades to come. An intellectual focusing mostly on showing himself as much more intelligent than others, either by literary exhibitionism, nonsense metaphors on subjects he barely understood and ultimately a love for manipulation of language. That said, his ability to do all those things with perfect execution and…
Interesting. Mind recommending someone else we ought to read instead?
Re: Umberto Eco has died
#108Harper Lee and Umberto Eco in the same day. It's like when Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day.
I smell a replacement for the birthday problem in introductory probability courses.
Absolutely. A century has around 36500 days. If you compose a list of 100 people who died on that century, your chances of hitting the same day more than once are estimated at almost 13%. As a matter of fact, even 28 people will get you over the 1%.
Re: Umberto Eco has died
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just one of many possible quotes giving a measure of how overrated Eco was and will be for the decades to come. An intellectual focusing mostly on showing himself as much more intelligent than others, either by literary exhibitionism, nonsense metaphors on subjects he barely understood and ultimately a love for manipulation of language. That said, his ability to do all those things with perfect execution and…
Interesting. Mind recommending someone else we ought to read instead?
I always recommend Italo Calvino. An underrated Italian writer IMHO. The Baron In The Trees or the Invisible Cities are a good start.
Re: Umberto Eco has died
#110Foucault's Pendulum was maybe the most transformative book I've ever read - it changed how I think about literature (and of course the Knights Templar). Ah well, guess it's time to reread it. :(
For me it was the only book ever where, once I'd put it down, I couldn't remember where I had been when I picked it up again (after some time had passed).
That's because it keeps jumping from subject to subject, revisiting some, and sometimes even repeating the same information in different ways. I was completely lost after a while, but I didn't have the heart to start from the beginning. It's a very big book.
I did enjoy it though, in a way because I got so lost in it, that after a while it didn't make any difference where I was and what I'd read. It was a bit like floating into someone's dreams.
Also, it put me off my New Age books for ever - you know the ones, Alistair Crowley, Dion Fortune and the like. I'm much happier with technology than magic, thank you. Thank you professor Eco, that is.