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Friday, October 10th, 2008
My brother showed me Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red -- I am interested right away just by the coincidental similarity of its title to My Name is Red -- but I just wanted to quote its opening sentence: He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
posted morning of October 10th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, October 6th, 2008
 Lots of good stuff at the Disko Bay Expedition (which is almost over) this morning -- audio of Robyn jamming with his shipmates; pictures of Paradise Lost (Marcus Brigstocke, who played Satan, reports of KT Tunstall as Eve, "Sheâ??s a pushover â?? no wonder all humanity is bound to suffer for all eternity, banished from paradise forever if the likes of Tunstall are left in charge.") Feist paints a picture of towns in Greenland and the visual voyage; and best of all Brigstocke reports they have solved the global warming problem -- "It turns out it was the sun."
posted morning of October 6th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, October 5th, 2008
The centerpiece of last night's dream was a new book by Saramago -- wait no, seems like it was an early book of his, but one I had not known about previously. It was pretty fully-formed, wish I could remember how it went! The title was something like "The Sour Grill" and it was explicitly about Portuguese cuisine, something about the national character being rooted in the cooking. A long book! I believe I had checked it out from the library and it was now overdue.
posted morning of October 5th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, October third, 2008
Dave Marc Fischer says Pynchon will be publishing a new book soon, a "noir detective story." This would be terrific! Seems like all my favorite living authors are coming out with new stuff! (via Conversational Reading.)
 Update: Penguin Press has confirmed it will be publishing the book; they are not talking about its contents.
posted afternoon of October third, 2008: Respond
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 First, just got to say this image (of houses in Uummannaq, shot by Nathan Gallagher) is one of the prettiest things I've seen all week. Uummannaq is the last human settlement they will see on their voyage north, as Robyn says it is "the last place we will visit on this trip that has an ATM."
Francesca Galeazzi did a performance piece yesterday, walking out onto the snow field of the Jakobshavns fjord with a cylinder of 6kg carbon dioxide and releasing it into the unspoiled beauty of the wilderness. My first reaction to this is visceral disgust -- sort of, "You find a spot that's untouched and you 'pollute it' just to show that you can? What's the point, just to show yourself as a human and an asshole?" But her follow-up post from this morning makes what seems to me like a really good point: Some of my fellow voyagers were upset about my piece because they could visualise that black â??nastyâ?? cylinder full of CO2 in a way that they couldnâ??t, if I told them that every time they drive their car for 30 miles they emit the same amount of carbon dioxide. So I wonder if the societal shift that I was advocating with my performance could be achieved if we would find a more direct way to visualise the Carbon impact of the resources we use! This contextualizes the performance piece in a really useful way -- I think my original reaction is kind of the response she is looking for, and that she's trying to extend that visceral disgust to everyday polluting activities.
posted morning of October third, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
 A boatload of artists is visiting the cold waters of the north, to see what they can of Greenland and its environment before that environment vanishes. You can read their ongoing account of their expedition, with pictures and video, at capefarewell.com; and more images at their Flicker page.
posted morning of September 30th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, September 25th, 2008
Saramago says (apologies for the roughness of the translation):
I suppose that in the beginning of the beginnings, before we invented speech, which is as we know, the supreme creator of incertitude, no serious doubt tormented us about who we were, about our personal and collective relationship with the place where we found ourselves. The world, obviously, could only be that which our eyes see at each moment, and furthermore, as important complementary information, that which our remaining senses -- hearing, touch, smell, taste -- appreciate. At this initial hour the world was pure appearance and pure superficiality. Material was simply rough or smooth, bitter or sweet, sour or bland, sound or silent, smelly or odorless. All things were that which they appeared to be, for the simple reason that they had no motive for appearing some other way or for being some other thing. ... I imagine that the spirit of philosophy and the spirit of science were manifest on that day, when someone had the intuition that appearance, being the external image that consciousness could capture and use as a map of knowledge, might also be an illusion of the senses. It is more often used in reference to the moral world than to the physical, the popular expression that says: "Appearances can be deceiving." Or illusory, which is more or less the same thing...This scribe has always been preoccupied with what was behind mere appearances, and now I'm not talking about atoms or subatomic particles, which, as such, are always the appearance of something that is hidden. I speak, yes, of current issues, routine, everyday, for example, the political system we call democracy, one that Churchill called the least bad of all known systems. He did not say the best, he said the least bad. For that which we are seeing, which it seems that we consider more than sufficient, and that, I believe, is an error of perception, whether we recognize it or not, we will be paying every day of our lives. Let us return to the matter.
posted evening of September 25th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
After the event this evening I made my way over to where Mr. Pamuk was sitting and said "Thank you very much for your books." I felt uncomfortable and more than a little star-struck; but he was very gracious and thanked me for saying it. And signed my book! -- Other Colors, that is; he signed it, as I asked him to, on p. 110 at the head of the essay "On Reading: Words or Images", which has made a very strong impression on me. (Unfortunately my plan where he would say, "Oh, you're the fellow who's writing so much about my work in his blog! listen, I was very taken with your reading of..." didn't pan out. Oh well, maybe next time...)
posted evening of September 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Hey anybody who's around NYC tonight and has no plans or easily changeable ones: this event is going to be well worth your time and the price of the ticket. Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie and several other authors will be reading from their work at a PEN benefit for victims of the cyclone and for freedom of expression in Burma. 7 pm at Cooper Union. If you can make it, drop me a line and we can meet up.
 Update: Not "from their work", not sure how I got that idea -- readings were from the work of imprisoned Burmese dissidents, as would make more sense given the nature of the event. What an amazing evening!
posted morning of September 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Saramago says (approximately -- I am no Jull Costa; but with a little help from Google I can get something I think close to what he has written):
I believe that every word we pronounce, every movement and gesture,... each one and all of them together, can be understood as pieces of an unintentional autobiography, which although involuntary, or for that very reason, is no less sincere and truthful than the most thorough of stories of life written on paper. ...I propose a day, more earnestly than it might seem at first glance, when every human being would have to let his life story be written down, and that these thousands of millions of volumes, as they began to overflow the Earth, should be transported to the Moon. This would mean that the great, the enormous, the gigantic, the excessive, the vast library of human existence would have to be subdivided, at first into two parts, and then, with the passage of time, into three, into four, eventually into nine, always supposing that the eight remaining planets of the solar system would have environments hospitable enough to respect the fragility of paper. ...Like the greater portion of good ideas, this one too is unrealizable. Have patience.
posted evening of September 22nd, 2008: Respond
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