READIN

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

🦋 Reasons

Between this reason and the truth that he would never announce himself, however, lay a gap wider than the distance separating him from the firelight. Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong.

One thing that is puzzling me a bit about this novel (halfway through) is the complete absense of race. I would have thought race and racial tension would be important factors in South Africa of the mid-to-late 20th Century; but so far there has been absolutely no mention of it, everything is class tension among characters whose race is not mentioned but I don't see how it could be other than white. I'm not quite sure what to make of this; one idea is that apartheid means the white characters have no interaction with blacks -- though my understanding was that blacks were transported from the "homelands" into white areas to work -- another possibility is that I'm reading this wrong, and the setting is not historical South Africa but a hypothetical, allegorical location.

posted evening of June 20th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 I am falling, he thought.

I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see.

Two aircraft streaked across the sky from south to north leaving vapour trails that slowly faded, and a noise like waves.

Coetzee's epigraph for the book sounds oddly familiar, I'm sure I've heard it quoted elsewhere: "War is the father of all and king of all. Some he shows as gods, others as men. Some he makes slaves, and others free." -- Or possibly I am thinking of some other similar quotation; I think this aphorism is composed in the style of some classical writer, but I'm not sure who...

Update: the epigraph is from a fragmentary writing of Heraclitus, quoted by Hippolytus in Refutatio â…¨.

posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Wish list

OK, this is the post for my list of things I would love to receive as presents. Not necessarily directed at you, don't feel like I'm asking you to give me gifts -- it's more a tool for my own use, since now and then someone will ask me what I want for a birthday or similar, and it will have slipped my mind that I really wanted to own John Wesley Harding "A Bloody Show" or whatever. OTOH if you are already looking to give me a gift, well here are some things I've been thinking about.

• DVD's of John Wesley Harding "A Bloody Show" and "Wisconsin Death Trip" (or also, the book Wisconsin Death Trip.)
• León Ferrari: Obra 1976-2008 and the catalog from the Tangled Alphabets show.
• Any box sets from JSP Records.
• The book La España Negra by José Gutiérrez Solana, and/or a collection of prints of his paintings.
• The DVD of Dirt Road to Psychedelia.
• Borges Laberintos Dručmelić -- short stories by Borges illustrated with paintings by Dručmelić.
• Portable USB Turntable
• A Humument by Tom Phillips
• Purgatorio, illustrated by Dalí

That's all for now, more later as I think of them... I will store this post on my "Reading list" thread due to its list-y nature.

posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Historical Background

I started reading Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K this morning. It is a dark, fascinating book, drawing me in to its violent, damaged world immediately from page 1 onward. I'm wondering a bit about the precise historical setting of the novel -- it was published in 1983 and I'm assuming without any confirmation, that it is set in the present, i.e. the late 70's or early 80's. (And Michael is 31, so would have been born around 1950.)

I realize suddenly how limited my knowledge of South African history is -- I remember as a young teenager reading in the paper and in magazines about apartheid, and thinking it was important that it should end, and self-identifying as an opponent of apartheid; but it was all pretty abstract. I did not realize that a hot civil war was being fought -- and I would not have thought of it that way prior to reading this book. But it seems from the book like at the point where the narrative starts, war is an established, ongoing state of affairs -- people are used to living in wartime.

This is the second book of Coetzee's I am reading that is not Disgrace... I went to the library this morning thinking (among other things) of checking out Disgrace; but looked at the first couple of pages and it did not really seem like what I wanted to be reading right now. (Also checked out Saramago's History of the Seige of Lisbon.)

posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: 2 responses

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

🦋 Come for the Robyn Hitchcock, stay for the John Wesley Harding

So I heard a while back about this tape of a John Wesley Harding concert which featured some performances by Robyn Hitchcock, called "A Bloody Show: Live at Bumbershoot 2005" -- and I had kicking around in my consciousness some occasional recommendations that I listen to Harding, and of course the obvious Dylan tie-in. So I put it on my NetFlix queue and forgot about it until it came in the mail yesterday.

Popped it in the player without much idea of what to expect -- I guess I was expecting some Dylan-influenced singing with guitar kind of thing. But wow! This thing is nothing like anything I could have expected. It is completely sui generis and is touched with brilliance. Harding is singing ballads that he has written (strongly and clearly derivative from particular folk ballads) with two other singers, either a capella or accompanied by a string quartet, sometimes Harding is playing guitar;* Robyn is narrating the performance reading excerpts from Harding's book Misfortune -- I had not known he was a novelist -- and great stage patter, from various of the performers.

The ballads are beautiful; I cannot find any recordings of them on the web so can only recommend that you watch the concert tape. Two lovely Harding performances are on YouTube, though. The song "Misfortune" is the first track on this concert tape, and is kind of what I had been expecting ("Dylan-influenced singing with guitar kind of thing"), and is just great:

* And more instrumentation -- a hurdy-gurdy is featured on "The Lady Dressed in Green"! And there's a full rock band on a few tracks at the end!

posted evening of June 18th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

🦋 The elephant on his journey

Saramago is taking a few days off to go hiking:

Readers will recall that the names of two villages which the expedition passed through on its way to Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo were never mentioned by the narrator of the story. These villages, as far as they were described, were simply invented to fill a need of the fiction and had no real-world correspondents. Thus it will appear appalling to lovers of historical ricor, that Salomón is preparing himself today for a journey that, while not being literally the one he took, surely could have been it, even if of that one there remains no precise record. Life carries many coincidences in her pockets and one can not exclude the possibility that, in some one or another case, the lyrics might fit with the music. It's certain that our story doesn't say Salomón crossed the lands of Castelo Novo, Sortelha or Cidadelhe, but nonetheless it is impossible to say that that didn't happen. We are making use of this tautology, we the José Saramago Foundation, to think up and organize a journey which will begin today in Belén*, in front of the monastery of the Jerónimos and which will bring us to the frontier, up there, where the Austrian cuirassiers wanted to transport the elephant to the archduke. But the itinerary is arbitrary, the reader will protest, but we prefer, if you will permit us, to consider it one of the innumerable possible routes. We will hike that way two days and we will tell the story of what happens to us. Who is coming? The Foundation will be there in full, a couple of staunch friends of Salomón are coming along, Portuguese and Spanish journalists, all good people. Stay well. Until we come back, farewell, farewell.

(I am extremely impressed by a man of his advanced years going off for a multi-day hike. Perhaps he should take as a nickname, "Father William".)

* This is a kind of interesting question: should this be rendered as Belén or as Bethlehem? He is talking about Lisbon -- unless there is a neighborhood in Lisbon called Belén -- I'm not sure quite what he is doing by referring to it as Belén. It's probably something to do with Bethlehem being a generic starting point, a birthplace. Or it might have something to do with the novel, which I'm anxiously awaiting. Here are some pictures of the monastery they are starting from.

...Aw, forget all that -- a little more research reveals that adjacent to the monastery is a structure called "the Tower of Bethlehem," and the district around there is called Belém. That's all he meant by it. Probably the correct/best way of rendering this would be Belém, since that's what locals would call the neighborhood.

posted evening of June 16th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, June 14th, 2009

🦋 Saints and Armaments

Another set of paintings by Ferrari that I found very interesting, showed saints -- rendered in a recognizable style that I don't know the name of to search for examples, one that seemed very familiar from religious iconography -- in the foreground with armaments and explosions in the background. Along similar lines to his "Civilisación occidentale y cristiana" (1965), shown here hanging at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art.

Now I'm really wanting the catalog of this exhibition! Another piece from it that really captured my imagination was "Unión libre," an image of a nude woman with the opening of André Breton's poem of the same title printed over her body in braille:

Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois
Aux pensées d'éclairs de chaleur
A la taille de sablier
Ma femme à la taille de loutre entre les dents du tigre
Ma femme à la bouche de cocarde et de bouquet d'étoiles de
dernière grandeur

posted morning of June 14th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, June 13th, 2009

🦋 Cuadro Escrito

I spent yesterday afternoon at the MoMA with some friends, where I found two exhibitions devoted to word-based art. Both are really engaging and interesting, although by the time I got to the second I was already towards the end of my attention span...

Tangled Alphabets is a show of the calligraphic art of León Ferrari and Mira Schendel. I was particularly taken with Ferrari's work -- Schendel's mostly left me cold, though I could see how it makes sense to exhibit the two together and how Schendel's work sometimes offers a nice counterpoint. I was sorry there was no print available of Ferrari's Cuadro escrito, which seemed like the highlight of the show to me: -- the text is a description of the painting Ferrari would compose "if I knew how to paint, if God in his embarrassment and confusion had accidentally touched me..." There is a catalog of the show, and additionally a bilingual edition of León Ferrari: Obra 1976-2008 -- this latter does not have a whole lot of the calligraphic works but does contain some really interesting texts and paintings.

Downstairs there was an exhibition of printed art and techniques of printing, The Printed Picture -- the primary focus of this was on technology used to render graphic images in printing, but what really caught my eye was a room of typography in different faces and made with different printing technologies.

Si yo supiera pintar, si Dios en su apuro y turbado por error confuso me hubiera tocado, agarraría los vellos de la marta en la punta de una rama de fresno flexible empapados sumergidos en óleo bermejo y precisamente en este lugar iniciaría una línea delgada flaca ya con la intención de cubrirla después maniobrando con la transparencia. Al lado un pozo absolutamente negro y definitivo. Enganchados en las ramas algunos repugnantes amarillos circuncisos como nidos de codesera el cochino pájaro del ártico que utiliza sus mismísimos hijos para alimentar las focas que le placen (nadie supo nunca por qué siguen naciendo) colgantes arracimados a la tela ayer virgen de la cual dejo dos cuartas cuadradas libres y enseguida un caballo formidable pero frustratorio por retaceado blanco corriendo espumante con las crines y las colas desplegadas, un verdadero corcel del malón resuelto con realismo fotográfico pero con cierto aire metafísico para introducir uno de los elementos de confusión y también un sospechado sugerido signifícado opaco bajo el barniz, no simbólico, como para que al verlo alguien ni siquiera se de cuenta que en sus entrañas se refriega preguntándose qué significa ese caballo blanco veloz hacia el monte de Venus entre las hierbas altas oscuras enruladas la gran quebrada magnética y luego el volcán.

↻...done

posted morning of June 13th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

🦋 Burial at Sea

When you considered the dead man's tirade in detail, you thought it vulgar... He had implied that poverty reduced everything to mere stark need, abrogating all but the coarsest emotions. ...You will remember that the dead fisherman (even then puffing through your lungs and coursing in your blood) had not had it entirely his way. Before he faded, you had got a word in, sharp with the triumphalism of the living. ...You informed him that you would use him entirely as you saw fit, together with his compatriots, the scenery, diverting cosmogonies, smells, sounds and words.

Set around this -- pretty separate, not really blending in to the main body of the text at all -- is a narrative of a swimmer lost at sea, unable to locate the boat he dived from after the line that was connecting him to it separates. This second narrative was not really grabbing me as I read the book, I couldn't really relate it to the rest of the book. Well at the end of the main text is a note explaining that the swimmer was him -- so clearly he did make it back to the boat -- and talking broadly about what has been lost in the past century. And then, he writes a 60-page essay in the second person about a fantasy of sailing with lobster poachers and discovering a dead body at sea, intertwined with the narrative of a historical (or fictional? I cannot find any reference online that attests to his existence independent of this book) shipwrecked sailor named Giusto Forbici... I am getting impatient, unable to see what all this is adding to the rest of the book. But, well, the final two sections of this essay sort of manage to wrap everything together, to make explicit and foreground some questions and conflicts about Hamilton-Peterson's role as author that have been hinted at throughout the text.

posted evening of June 10th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, June 6th, 2009

🦋 Vanished Land

The hills are shadows, and they flow
    From form to form, and nothing stands;
    They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

I have not been blogging this book too much but it is just chock-full of memorable lines.

* (If I am understanding correctly -- it's a very long poem, Hamilton-Paterson might well just be referring to the section he quotes.) -- No: I am misreading here. The poem's ostensible subject is Tennyson's departed friend Arthur Henry Hallam; Hamilton-Peterson must just be saying the discoveries regarding the Dogger Bank play a part in the imagery of the poem. Wikipædia calls the poem "one of the greatest poems of the 19th Century"; reckon I should take the time to read it and understand it.

posted afternoon of June 6th, 2009: Respond

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