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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Wow, sometimes a passage of  reading just sends you scrambling for reference materials... A izquierda y a la derecha, absortos en su lúcido sueño, se perfilan los rostros momentáneos de los lectores, a la luz de las lámparas estudiosas, como en la hipálage de Milton. This comes from the dedication at the front of Borges' El hacedor -- Borges is dedicating the book to his deceased countryman Leopoldo Lugones, and imagining a library where he would give the book to Lugones. "To the left and to the right, absorbed in their lucid dream, the momentary faces of the readers are outlined in the light of the studious lamps, as in the hypallage of Milton." Wait -- the what of Milton? Wikipædia is useful as normal -- "studious lamps" is a hypallage, an application of the adjective to a different word than the one it's actually describing. Now I was curious and wanted to know why Borges was making reference to Milton here. So I looked; and in the course of surfing around trying to figure it out, made a very useful discovery. In Dreamtigers, Mildred Boyer translates "lámparas estudiosas" as "bright officious lamps" -- why? A search for that phrase brings one directly to the source passage in Milton -- Paradise Lost IX.103-4: Terrestrial Heav'n, danced round by other Heav'ns,
That shine, yet bear their bright, officious lamps I spent a little while trying to figure this one out -- is "officious" rendered as "estudiosas" in the Spanish translation of Milton? That would not make a lot of sense, and besides I'm sure Borges read Milton in English. Ultimately I think it is just a really weird choice on Boyer's part -- Borges is not quoting Milton, he's alluding to him, but Boyer seems to be committed to a reading that says Borges is quoting Milton -- and thus makes the usage not be a hypallage but simply an incoherency. But look at how Andrew Hurley translates the passage in Collected Fictions:To left and right, absorbed in their
waking dream, rows of readers' momentary profiles in the light of
the 'scholarly lamps,' as a Miltonian displacement of adjectives
would have it. This is a little wordy maybe -- but it communicates the image in Borges' piece precisely, indeed it allows me to see the image much more clearly than I had when I was grappling with this unfamiliar word "hypallage".I came across Hurley's translation in an essay he wrote for Cadernos de Tradução, the journal of the translation department at Universida de Federal de Santa Caterina in Florianópolis, Brasil: What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges [PDF]. It is a magnificent article and I want to post about it in more detail, but I strongly encourage anyone interested in Borges to read it. One of Hurley's points in this piece is that the hypallage is a key element of Borges' style. In the following sentences, Borges refers to two more instances of hypallage: the "arid camel" from Lugones' own Lunario sentimental, and Æneid VI.268: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram (approx. "They passed in darkness under the lonely night through shadow." -- according to Borges, a line that both "employs and surpasses this artifice.")You can hear Borges reading this dedication at Poema en audio. Lots more of his readings there too, which I haven't begun to check through yet.
posted evening of May 20th, 2009: 7 responses
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 Looking at the Film Forum's web site yesterday to see what was playing this summer, I was really excited to see that Agnès Varda's Les Plages d'Agnès will be opening in July. I heard this movie was in post-production last year and have been anticipating it eagerly ever since. It's an autobiographical piece, a look back at Varda's career; should be a lot of fun. If you're going to be in town in early July, give me a holler -- we should make plans to see it.
Varda also has a funny brief interview with Michael Musto in the Voice.
posted evening of May 20th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
A friend gave me Paulo Coelho's The Devil and Miss Prym for my birthday, and I've been reading it for the last couple of days. Some nice language but what is notably lacking is a sense of place -- the village is ostensibly in Galicia but there's nothing that really makes me think of this particular village in Galicia distinct from any other small town in any other country. This seems like a shortcoming to me -- Coelho is very obviously going for an impression of universality but he has not established the particulars of his story firmly enough for that to work for me. This is a working impression though, there is still a lot more book to read and it could turn around.
posted evening of May 19th, 2009: Respond
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Padeces cautiverio, pero habrás dado una palabra al poema.
I was reading from Labyrinths this afternoon and took a look at the third section of the book, "Parables", which had totally slipped from my memory. It is very short pieces, a page or less, not quite "fictions" because they are not plotted, just quick, terse observations of the human condition. The first two pieces, "Inferno, I, 32" and "Paradisio, XXXI, 108" use Dante's comedy to posit the impossibility of knowing one's place in the universe. Sharp and sweet. It looks like these pieces are almost all taken from Borges' 1960 book El hacedor (I think this is roughly "The Creator"; it was published in English as "Dreamtigers"), which is available online from literatura.us -- I think I will try to read some of them in their original language. (A note about translations, though: the translations in Labyrinths, mostly done by James E. Irby, are head and shoulders above the other Borges translations I've been looking at, mostly by Anthony Bonner.)Perhaps some feature of that crucified countenance lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was obliterated, so that God could be all of us.Who knows whether tonight we shall not see it in the labyrinth of our dreams and not even know it tomorrow.
posted evening of May 19th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, May 17th, 2009
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you Hi everyone, hope you are well. It is time for me to observe the passing of my 38th year on this earth and the beginning of my 39th.*  A nice round number, 39 -- not until I am 416 will I again be a number followed by its square. (Or I guess 101 would qualify depending how you think about it.)Anyway -- thanks for reading my blog this year, I appreciate your presence here. We're experiencing a little intermittency in blogging currently because I've been spending most of my free time on recording music -- if all goes well I will have some music to share in a little while. Meantime come in and sit down, have a slice of virtual cake! Good stuff below the fold. If you're trying to think of a good birthday present to give me, I always appreciate fun links; leave 'em in the comments. * Wait, no that's wrong -- I am mixing up cardinal numbers with ordinal again. This is the beginning of my 40th year of life.
↷read the rest...
posted morning of May 17th, 2009: 11 responses
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Friday, May 15th, 2009
Cool, the first time I can remember having dreamed about blogging a dream. Maybe it's on my mind because of the e-mail exchange this week with Lep and other Feg maniax about remembering dreams. In the dream I was writing down (i.e. the inner dream), I was riding the uptown 6 train, possibly going to a gig, and got off at Spring St. But as the doors closed I saw that I had left my violin in the train, on the seat. I hesitated a moment and then ran quickly through the tunnel behind the train, making it to the Bleeker St. stop in time to get back in the train and retrieve my fiddle. Ed Levy was also on the train, (possibly this is the enclosing dream now), and I was telling him how I had always fantasized about chasing a train through the tunnel, and how happy and proud I was about having done it. All I remember from the enclosing dream, besides the blogging part, is the closing image: a friend, possibly college friend Ari, is giving me a meditation lesson. We are seated at my kitchen table, where a candle is burning, looking deeply into each other's eyes -- thinking about it now I realize this is not standard meditation practice, but in the dream it seemed pretty normal. I experienced an alteration in my field of vision, where Ari stretched out horizontally and shrank vertically, and expanded to fill my eyes.
posted morning of May 15th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, May 14th, 2009
YepRoc records has made the video for "I'm Falling" available online.
It is lovely but fills me with questions -- primarily I'm curious to know what is the relationship between this song and Tennyson's Idylls of the King, some lines from which are quoted onscreen when Robyn is filming his puppet-show; also I wish I could read lips and know what Robyn is saying silently at the end of the video.
posted evening of May 14th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, May 11th, 2009
Haven't done one of these posts for a while; I was inspired to by cleek.
- "The Brave Engineer", The Carver Boys. About as Appalachian a song as I can imagine.
- "How You Want It Done", Big Bill Broonzy. Really nice, strange-sounding guitar, I think it's a National?
- "Mo Jo Hanna", Tami Lynn. (from an Apo mix.) -- This song ought to be on a mix tape right in front of "Polk Salad Annie".
- "Yah! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread", Dylan and the Band. The comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus. A good candidate for favorite Basement Tapes track.
- "Ozan Kouklé", Lafayette Afro Band. More Unfunkkedage.
- "Doin' My Time", Flatt & Scruggs.
- "The Wonderful City", Jimmy Rodgers. Cool, this mix is really drawing pretty deep on the breadth and depth of my music collection. (And wow, not even one Robyn Hitchcock track so far!)
- "Honky Tonkin", Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
 - "Original Midnight Mama", Sylvia Smith.
- "Avalon Blues", MS John Hurt.
- Bonus track, "Pablo" by Sol Ho'opi'i and his Novelty Quartet.
Lots of Apostrophic tracks in this selection; and I would be remiss if I did not mention that he has published another mix tape, Unfunkked X: Stretch -- a FB friend asks whether the image is a still from the live-action movie of "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers". Looks like a good mix; but I haven't been listening to it because I'm listening to another recommendation from Apo. Ain't no sunshine.
posted evening of May 11th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, May 10th, 2009
I just made a fun, pleasant discovery; looking back at the Orhan Pamuk interview I was reading last night, I wanted to check whether the Paris Review had published a copy of it on the web. Turns out they did [PDF], and what's more it contains reproductions of a few pages of Pamuk's manuscript notes for The Black Book. Beautiful!
posted morning of May 10th, 2009: 2 responses
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(Not today; yesterday -- today the sun is shining.)
Snufkin got a feeling that he wanted to write songs. He waited until he was quite sure of the feeling and one evening he got his mouth-organ from the bottom of his rucksack. In August, somewhere in Moominvalley, he had hit on five bars which would undoubtedly provide a marvellous beginning for a tune. They had come completely naturally as notes do when they have been left in peace. Now the time had come to take them out again and let them become a song about rain.
This is nice: last night I was reading Moominvalley in November with Sylvia, and we came across the passage above. Later on, and without being conscious of the coincidence until this morning, I sat down and finished writing out a song I have had in the back of my mind since two weeks ago (when I first thought of it I wrote down the first two bars) -- I'm tentatively calling it "Rainy Day".
An interesting thing with the key of this piece -- when I started out I was thinking it was in D minor; but then something happened in measure 5. If the three-note run at the end of that measure is D-E-G♮, then the song ends up resolving on D; if it is E-G♮-A, the resolution is on A, and the key is A phrygian. I am not sure what the accidental sharps on C and G are doing to the key. Hoping to record this later on, it's pretty hypnotic (like listening to a heavy rain outside, was the genesis of the working title.)
posted morning of May 10th, 2009: Respond
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