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Saturday, February 13th, 2010
 Nearing the end of La Sombra del Viento... I'm getting really agitated about the identity of the being who calls himself Lain Coubert. For a long time I was thinking this was Jorge Aldaya, consumed utterly by his hatred for Carax -- and that's still my fallback assumption; but Carax killed Aldaya in Paris, according to Nuria Monfort's narrative. So either Ruiz Zafón is going to need to explain how Monfort got it wrong, Aldaya/Coubert survived and returned to Barcelona and somehow sustained himself for the next 20 years... Or he will need to bring the supernatural into the story in a more immediate way than it has been -- I mean there have been a lot of ghosts in the book but it has not seemed like a "ghost story" in quite the way it would if Coubert is in fact a supernatural presence. Possibly I am overthinking this.
 (Ooh -- or another possibility just occurred to me as of p. 395, one which would be a pretty fantastic twist if it were to come to pass...)
posted afternoon of February 13th, 2010: 1 response
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 Yesterday was a day full of sights and sounds.
Jeremy E. came to town! We made a plan to spend Friday in the City -- talking about it Thursday night, we were thinking: It's probably going to be really cold and unpleasant out; Jer E. coming from California did not really bring suitable winter clothing; let's do something inside like go to the Brooklyn Museum... But plans change. When we got off the train in Penn Station, and went up onto the sidewalk, we noticed that it was a fantastically beautiful day -- not bitterly cold, and with the unique quality of light that you get on a cloudless day in New York when the sun is relatively low in the sky. So we decided to walk around some... We ended up walking close to ten miles, down to the East Village, around and about the Lower East Side, across to Brooklyn, around and about Williamsburg. The city was our museum.
posted morning of February 13th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, February 11th, 2010
 So YepRoc has no plans to release Propellor Time in the U.S., in physical or digital format. That's no good! If you are on FaceBook (and it makes a difference to you), go join the FaceBook group Persuade YepRoc to release Propellor Time stateside. That'll show 'em!
posted evening of February 11th, 2010: 3 responses
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Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
 If it's Wednesday, it must be time for another post from Christopher Higgs! Mr. Higgs does not disappoint; along with other great visuals we get a link to Kate Westerholt's gallery of cross-stitch samplers. Funny stuff...
posted evening of February 10th, 2010: 2 responses
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Lordy, I thought that was the prettiest sweepingest music that I ever heard. I wanted to holler and jump up and down I just couldn't sit still on that log bench when that tune started snaking around the school house. I let out a yell and leapt off that bench and commenced to dance and clog around and everybody was hollering and laughing and every time he touched the bow to them strings hell would break loose in that school house.
Found a treasure trove today; at folkstreams.net is a huge library of documentaries about... well about folkways; but a great number of them, running into what looks like hundreds of hours, are about American folk music. Learn about the Dallas of Blind Lemon Jefferson in Alan Governar's film Deep Ellum Blues. Listen to Peg-Leg Sam Jackson, one of the last medicine show performers, in Tom Davenport's Born for Hard Luck. Alan Lomax travels through the southern Appalachians, filming dulcimer players, banjo pickers, guitarists, fiddlers and more in Appalachian Journey:
The whole thing is great -- even the last 15 minutes or so, which I found a little gratingly kitschy, has some great music in it. Especially wanted to point out the fiddling of Tommy Jarrell about 20 minutes in. Jarrell is a new star in my firmament, a new sound for me to aspire to.
posted evening of February 10th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, February 8th, 2010
Ruiz Zafón is apparently a composer as well as an author -- I was searching on YouTube with the thought that some scenes from Shadow of the Wind might have been produced with an eye towards making a movie of it -- it seems like it would lend itself well to cinema -- and what did I find but this record of songs composed by Ruiz Zafón to accompany the book:
Well, wow: impressive. I am still thinking this is not a great book, though I'm liking the second half a lot better than the first. But I think it would make a really good movie, and filming it in black-and-white definitely seems like the way to go, and this soundtrack would go really well. It goes nicely with the reading, too.Track listing below the fold.
- The Shadow of the Wind
- Remembering Ghosts
- The Graveyard of Forgotten Books
- I Cannot Remember her Face
- Laim Coubert
- Penélope and Julián
- The Mansion of the Aldayas
- Bea
- Children's Games
- Piano Lessons
- 1919
- Daniel Remembers
- Days of Ash
- Plaza Real
- FermÃn and Bernarda
- Clara Barceló
- Fumero and the Angel of the Fog
- Paris
- FermÃn and Daniel, Detectives
- The Snowstorm
- November 27th, 1995
- The Wedding
- Dramatis Personæ
- The Closing Credits
↻...done
posted evening of February 8th, 2010: 2 responses
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Sunday, February 7th, 2010
At 3% today, I read about the forthcoming Op Oloop, which will be the first of Juan Filloy's 27 novels to appear in English. Nice! It was also the first I had heard of Filloy, who appears to have had a long and important career. In honor of the occasion, I will try my hand at translating his short story "La vaca y el auto."
The cow and the car
by Juan Filloy
The rain has firmed up the unpaved road's surface. The recently rinsed atmosphere is fresh and clean. The sun's glory shines down at the end of March.
A car comes along at a high velocity. Beneath the pampa's skies -- diaphanous tourmaline cavern -- the swift car is a rampaging wildcat.
The moist fields give off a masculine odor, exciting to the lovely young woman who's driving. And accelerating, accelerating, until the current of air pierces her, sensuous. But...
All of a sudden, a cow. A cow, stock-still in the middle of the roadway. Screeching of brakes, shouting. The horn's stridency shatters the air. But the cow does not move. Hardly even a glance, watery and oblique, she chews her cud. And then, she bursts out:
-- But señorita!... Why all this noise? Why do you make such a hurry, when I'm not interested in your haste? My life has an idyllic rhythm, incorruptible. I am an old matron who never gives way to frivolity. Please: don't make that racket! Your clangor is scaring the countryside. You do not understand why; you don't even see it. The countryside flies past, by your side; your velocity turns it into a rough, variegated visual pulp. But I live in it. It is where I hone my senses, they are not blunt like yours... Where did you find this morbid thirst which absorbs distance? Why do you dose yourself with vertigo? You subjugate life with urgency, instead of appreciating its intensity. Come on! lay off the horn. Time and space will not let themselves be ruled by muscles of steel and brass. Speed is an illusion: it brings you sooner to the realization of your own impotence. The signifier of all culture is the intrinsic slowness of the unconscious, which unconsciously chooses its destiny. But you already know yours, girl: to crash into matter before you crash into materialism. So, good. Don't get mad! I'm moving. Let your nerves once again become one with the ignition. Reanimate, with explosions of gas, your motor and your brain. The roadway is clear. Adiós! Take care of yourself...
The car tears away, muttering insults in malevolence and naphtha.
Parsimonious, chewing and chewing, the cow casts a long, watery gaze. And then a lengthy, ironic moo, which accompanies the car towards the curve of the horizon...
And while I'm doing this: I get a lot of misdirected Google hits by people looking for "a translation of El dios de las moscas" or similar phrases -- I had never heard of this story until people started coming to my site looking for it; but I like it. (But do your own homework, people!) It is by Marco Denevi. Dare I say, a little bit in the manner of Borges.
The god of the fliesby Marco Denevi
The flies imagined their god. It was another fly. The god of the flies was a fly, sometimes green, sometimes black and golden, sometimes pink, sometimes white, sometimes purple, an unrealistic fly, a beautiful fly, a monstrous fly, a fearsome fly, a benevolent fly, a vengeful fly, a righteous fly, a young fly, an aged fly, but always a fly. Some of them augmented his size until he was enormous, like an ox, others pictured him so tiny he could not be seen. In some religions he had no wings («He flies, he sustains himself, but he has no need of wings»), in others he had an infinite number of wings. Here his antennæ were arranged like horns, there his eyes consumed all of his head. For some he buzzed constantly, for others he was mute, but it meant the same thing. And for everyone, when flies died, they would pass in rapid flight into paradise. Paradise was a piece of carrion, stinking, rotted, which the souls of dead flies would devour for all eternity and which was never consumed; for this celestial offal would continually be replenished and grow beneath the swarm of flies. --of the good ones. For also there were evil flies; for them there was a hell. The hell of the condemned flies was a place without shit, without waste, without garbage, without stink, with nothing at all, a place clean and sparkling and to top it off, illuminated by a dazzling light; that is to say, an abhorrent place.
posted evening of February 7th, 2010: 1 response
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This weekend I started working on a couple of new songs, some solo fiddle tunes and a blues tune I could play with John.
I thought I would explore the latter half of the alphabet in my music book a little; paging through the R's I found "The Road to Lisdoonvarna" -- well! I've been to Lisdoonvarna -- on a bike trip in western Ireland, with Ellen about 13 years ago -- and remember it fondly, and I have a shortage of jigs in my repertoire; so I thought I'd give it a try. Looked it up on YouTube to get an idea what it sounds like, and I found Ryan and Brennish Thompson playing it along with two other Dorian tunes:
I like all of these songs and have set myself the task of learning them -- they're coming along pretty well, I think. "Lisdoonvarna" and "Swallowtail" are jigs -- i.e. fast tunes in 6/8 time -- and "Drowsy Maggie" is a reel, in 4/4.
Another song I took a look at last night, which I think will be great to play with John, is "If the River Was Whiskey", Charlie Poole's version of "Hesitation Blues." Here are The Dough Rollers playing it: or you can listen to Poole at
lala.com. It's a great fiddle part, a lot of fun, and it'll sound great with John's guitar.
posted afternoon of February 7th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, February 6th, 2010
John and I played for a couple of hours this afternoon -- it seems to me like we're getting better, more in sync with each other, a good deal faster than I expected/hoped we would. Of the songbook tunes we played, every one was just right -- sounded like I hoped it would sound in front of an audience -- except for "California Stars", which was the first song we played and sounded like we had not warmed up yet. Two songs are ready to upgrade from "songs we're working on" to our songbook, namely "Preying Mantis" and "One of These Days"; and two songs which we played for the first time today -- "Pack up Your Sorrows," by Richard Fariña, and "On My Way Back to the Old Home," by Bill Monroe -- seemed like they could be included in the songbook straight off by virtue of how natural they were for us to play. We played "Shady Grove" for the second time, and I was happy and excited to realize that this is the source for the melody of my song Fair Elaine -- it has been nagging at me for a couple of years now to figure out where that came from.
posted afternoon of February 6th, 2010: 1 response
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A couple of passages from Diary of a Bad Year, having to do with the relationship between reader and writer. From Chapter 28, "On Tourism":
A decade ago, following in the tracks of Pound and his poets, I cycled some of those same roads, in particular (several times) the road between Foix and Lavelanet past Roquefixade. What I achieved by doing so I am not sure. I am not even sure what my illustrious predecessor expected to achieve. Both of us set out on the basis that writers who were important to us (to Pound, the troubadours; to me, Pound) had actually been where we were , in flesh and blood; but neither of us seemed or seem able to demonstrate in our writing why or how that mattered.
From Chapter 30, "On Authority in Fiction" (this essay is very much worth reading in full; I will quote it below the fold):
During his later years, Tolstoy was treated not only as a great author but as an authority on life, a wise man, a sage. His contemporary Walt Whitman endured a similar fate. But neither had much wisdom to offer: wisdom was not what they dealt in. They were poets above all; otherwise they were ordinary men with ordinary fallible opinions. The disciples who swarmed to them in quest of enlightenment look sadly foolish in retrospect.
From Chapter 2 of part II, "On Fan Mail":
Usually the writers... claim that they write to me because my books speak directly to them; but it soon emerges that the books speak only in the way that strangers whispering together might seem to be whispering about one. That is to say, there is an element of the delusional in the claim, and of the paranoid in the mode of reading.
↷read the rest...
posted morning of February 6th, 2010: Respond
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