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Friday, March 21st, 2008
No need to read Ibn Khaldun; those charged with this task would quickly guess that the only way forward was to rip away our memories, our past, our history, leaving us with nothing but our misfortunes.... But later on, the Western bloc's "humanitarian wing" had declared this reckless initiative too dangerous...and switched to a gentler approach that promised longer-lasting results: the new plan was to erode our collective memory with movie music.Church organs, pounding out chords of a fearful symmetry, women as beautiful as icons, the hymnlike repetition of images, and those arresting scenes sparkling with drinks, weapons, airplanes, designer clothes -- put all these together and it was clear that the movie method proved far more radical and effective than anything missionaries had attempted in Africa and Latin America. (These long sentences of his were well-rehearsed, Galip decided. Who else had had to hear them, his neighbors? His colleagues at work? His mother-in-law? The people sitting next to him in a dolmuş?) It was in the Şehzadebaşı and Beyoğlu movie theaters that they set their plan into action; before long, hundreds of people had gone utterly blind. Viewers who sensed the terrible plot that was being perpetrated on them and rebelled with angry cries were quickly silenced by policemen and mad doctors. When the children of today showed a similar reaction -- when they were blinded by the proliferation of new images -- they were fobbed off with new prescription glasses. But there were always a few who refused to go away quietly. A while ago, he'd been walking through another neighborhood not far from here around midnight when he'd seen a sixteen-year-old boy pumping futile bullets into a movie billboard -- and immediately he'd understood why. Another time, he'd seen a man at the entrance to a theater with two cans of gasoline swinging from his hands; as the bouncers roughed him up, he kept demanding that they give him his eyes back -- yes, the eyes that could see the old images.... We'd all been blinded, every last one of us, every last one...
(Want to write about this quotation in a minute, but I am being called away by Sylvia to read Pippi Longstocking just at the moment. Back in a little while.)
 A few observations: Rüya's ex-husband's (I believe he has not been named, though a few of his aliases surfaced in a previous chapter) sort of anti-semitic rant weaves uncertainly between weird craziness and poetry -- reminds me in a way of the Islamicists in Snow. Galip's parenthetical aside is just masterful. (There is a similar aside a few paragraphs later where Galip describes the man as "sinking into the pages of his encyclopedic metaphor".) I like the coincidence here with Blindness -- I wouldn't necessarily give it a whole lot of weight but I think this passage might be a good one to have in mind when rereading Saramago. Also -- not sure if this is valid but I see vaguely a reflection of the remarks that Jeremiah Wright is being pilloried for these days.
posted evening of March 21st, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The Black Book
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They're ready to go now -- here's some of what the new generation is listening to (well at least based on communication from my nephew Cole) -- Ginny is, a punk rocker! Cole's a budding wizard rocker, he's learning to play bass.
posted afternoon of March 21st, 2008: Respond
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The open mic went ok. We played three songs; I thought we did really well on the two songs that Jerry sang ("Bed on Your Floor" and "K.C. Moan"), but had trouble keeping in time together when I sang "John Hardy was a Desperate Man". Not sure exactly what to make of that -- I want to work more on that, it's one of my favorite songs. The space is nice and there was a decent crowd. A couple of really good guitarists. Too many poorly-done Beatles covers, alas. My favorite performance for utter weirdness, was the tightly-wound guy strumming guitar and singing "All Through the Night".
posted afternoon of March 21st, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Fiddling
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Thursday, March 20th, 2008
I heard a segment about Parsi New Year (which is today! Happy New Year!) on NPR this morning. (Chuckled a little when Freddy Mercury was mentioned as a famous Parsi.) It made me think, how many cultures with different New Year's days are there? Presently active and celebrating, it can't be that many -- less than 20 I would think offhand -- but historically there must be hundreds. So possibly every day of the calendar could be named as the New Year's day of some culture.
 (Thinking further: boy, the vernal equinox is an excellent day to celebrate the New Year.)
posted morning of March 20th, 2008: Respond
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We're playing tonight at Tierney's, in Montclair -- if you're in the neighborhood, come listen!
posted morning of March 20th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Music
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Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
Listening to "Sweet to Mama" in the car today, and then replaying it in my head all day at my desk. And thinking, that's really a song I could play pretty well on my violin. I came up with a nice-sounding rhythm part consisting of an eigth-note rest followed by a triplet of sixteenths followed by eighths -- it sounds catchy and unusual. So when I got home I tried playing it on my violin -- and was a bit disappointed in the sound. Put it down, and an hour or so later I wanted to try it again, but only the viola was handy -- so I picked it up and was amazed by how natural it sounded. The key is G minor, which I think fits just as well to a violin as a viola; but something about the lower register is just fantastic for this song.
 Update: Well, tonight I tried it on the violin in D minor and it sounded just as good -- so it was a matter of finger positions rather than register. Unfortunately it seems pretty hard for me to sing it in either G or D, I'm going to need to work out fingerings for it in some other key.
posted evening of March 18th, 2008: 2 responses
➳ More posts about Songs
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Handy to know: if you write to stderr from a CGI application (note: when I say "CGI application", I don't actually know what that means -- what I mean is, an application invoked by the http server in response to a GET or POST request and which uses environment variables to get information about the request), the output will go into the http server's log file. At least it will if the http server is Apache.
posted afternoon of March 18th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, March 17th, 2008
New York Magazine reprints a hot, filthy poem attributed to W.H. Auden.... A little searching online makes the attribution appear to be correct -- although Auden denied authorship, this page says "a copy of it in Auden's own hand showed up among the papers of Christopher Isherwood. Kenneth Rexroth said 'Wysten told me that he had learned more about writing poetry from writing the Platonic Blow than from anything he had ever written.'"
posted evening of March 17th, 2008: Respond
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This evening and yesterday evening, I am (amazingly) starting to see progress towards a clean basement -- much of the sawdust is swept or vacuumed up, my bench is clear of tools and I'm reasonably clear on where the tools are located; I found a couple of tools that I've been wondering where they were; I'm just about ready to start work on the repeatedly delayed fence for the front yard. I've built it in my head enough times now, it should be fairly straightforward getting it into physical existence.
posted evening of March 17th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Carpentry
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So Bear Stearns is done for. (I did a fair amount of work for them in my first job.) Good analysis from John Quiggin.... More from Jared Bernstein. Nouriel Roubini asserts that it is not in the Fed's power to be of much help here.
posted morning of March 17th, 2008: Respond
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