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Saturday, October 8th, 2011
It is a leap backward that we take from 1830 to
1810. We are in Odense, that old city, which takes its name from Odin.
The common people there have still a legend about the origin of the name of the city. Upon Næsbyhoved's Hill there once stood a castle; here lived King Odin and his wife:
Odense city was not then in existence, but the first building of it was then begun. The court was undecided as to the name which
should be given to the city. After long indecision it was at last agreed that the first word which either King or Queen should speak the next morning should be the name given to it. In the early morning the Queen awoke and looked out from her window over the wood. The first house in the city was erected to the roof, and the  builders had hung up a great garland, glittering with tinsel, upon the rooftree. "Odin, see!" exclaimed the Queen; and thenceforward the city was called Odensee, which name, since then, has been changed by daily speech to Odense. O.T.: A Danish Romance
Hans Christian Andersen Jens Galschiøt will today be sinking his statue of Hans Christian Andersen into the harbor at Odense, Andersen's home town, to become covered with barnacles and seaweed, to watch the ships come and go and to "keep an eye on the mermaids." If you're in Denmark, it sounds like a great time -- go drink some funeral beer with Galschiøt and watch his creation disappear beneath the waves.
posted morning of October 8th, 2011: 1 response
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 I'd like to quote at length a paragraph from "t zero," below the fold -- so we can observe and appreciate and meditate upon the crystalline beauty of the writing and of the ideas, you and I, and so that I can briefly mount one of my favorite hobby horses.
So now that I have decided to inhabit forever this second t0 -- and if I hadn't decided to it would be the same thing because as Q0 I can inhabit no other -- I have ample leisure to look around and to contemplate my second to its full extent. It encompasses on my right a river blackish with hippopotamuses, on my left the savannah blackish-white with zebras, and scattered at various points along the horizon some baobab trees blackish-yellow with toucans, each of these elements marked by the positions occupied respectively by the hippopotamuses H(a)0, H(b)0, H(c)0 et cetera, by the zebras Z(a)0, Z(b)0, Z(c)0 et cetera, the toucans T(a)0, T(b)0, T(c)0 et cetera. It further embraces hut villages and warehouses of importers and exporters, plantations that conceal underground thousands of seeds at different moments of the process of germination, endless deserts with the position of each grain of sand G(a)0 G(b)0... G(nn)0 transported by the wind, cities at night with lighted windows and dark windows, cities during the day with red and yellow and green traffic lights, production graphs, price indices, stock market figures, epidemics of contagious diseases with the position of each virus, local wars with volleys of bullets B(a)0 B(b)0... B(z)0 B(zz)0 B(zzz)0... suspended in their trajectory, bullets which may strike the enemies E(a)0 E(b)0 E(c)0 hidden among the leaves, airplanes with clusters of just-released bombs suspended beneath them, airplanes with clusters of bombs waiting to be released, total war implicit in the international situation (IS)0 which at some unknown moment (IS)X will become explicit total war, explosions of supernovæ which might change radically the configuration of our galaxy...
I'm interested in what it means to take an instantaneous slice of reality this way. As Calvino/Qfwfq noted in the first volume of Cosmicomics, in the story "The Light-Years," every object is, to observers, a sphere expanding at the speed of light -- the observer perceives the object at the instant when the skin of that sphere crosses his/her location. The instant t0 has to be identified with Q0's location in space, and the subscript zero as applied to zebras, hippopotamuses, bullets, international situations, if it is to mean the same thing as the subscript zero applied to Qfwfq and his instant, has to refer to the surfaces of their spheres, all intersecting at locus Q. But at the moment when this happens (again, as pointed out in "The Light-Years"), that zebra over there is no longer Z(n)0, it has gone on to become some Z(n)a which will at some later tx become visible to Qx...
↻...done
posted morning of October 8th, 2011: Respond
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Friday, October 7th, 2011
 Cluster of prisms, rising into the sunset
The last section of Time and the Hunter, "t zero" is a great relief after the frenzied anxiety of "More of Qfwfq" and the dizzying (for me insuperable) complexity of "Priscilla." The calm voice of the narrator from the first volume is back. He wants to talk about duration here -- how events follow one another in their stream, what a slice of that stream might look like if it could be frozen in place. Less attention is paid here to character and plot -- indeed the stories in this section read more like essays than like works of fiction.
posted evening of October 7th, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, October 6th, 2011
 Cluster of prisms seen from HobokenThis trilogy of stories makes up the middle section of Time and the Hunter -- exploring Qfwfq's relationship with his beloved Priscilla through the eyes of the trillions of cells which make up their multicellular beings. I am finding these stories pretty difficult to process -- there is a hint of beauty and insight lurking in the text but the shrill verbosity of it is keeping me from finding any clarity. Some exceptional passages to be sure. Take for instance Qfwfq's deterministic understanding of his passions and desires as serving the needs of his cells --
This is how we live, not free, surrounded by freedom, driven, acted on by this constant wave which is the combination of the possible cases and which passes through those points of space and time in which the range of pasts is joined to the range of futures.... The ancient tide rises at intervals in me and in Priscilla following the course of the moon...
And the scene at the end of "Meiosis," the two of them as camels, is utterly fantastic.
posted evening of October 6th, 2011: Respond
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The 2011 Nobel prize for literature goes to the poet Tomas Tranströmer.
Men in overalls the same color as earth rise from a ditch.
It's a transitional place, in stalemate, neither country nor city.
Construction cranes on the horizon want to take the big leap,
but the clocks are against it.
Concrete piping scattered around laps at the light with cold tongues.
Auto-body shops occupy old barns.
Stones throw shadows as sharp as objects on the moon surface.
And these sites keep on getting bigger
like the land bought with Judas' silver: "a potter's field for
burying strangers."
posted morning of October 6th, 2011: Respond
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Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
The mood of the four Qfwfq stories in Calvino's second Cosmicomics collection, Time and the Hunter (1968) is quite different -- more frantic, more insistent. There is a strong, extremely dark environmentalist element to these stories. In three of the four, Qfwfq manifests as a modern-day human --  in the previous volume, there were passing, humorous references to modernity but most of the action was focused in the geological (or astronomical) past. Anyways: it was fun to be reading "Crystals" this morning as I rode NJTransit in to Manhattan and come across Qfwfq's description of taking the train each morning (I live in New Jersey) to slip into the cluster of prisms I see emerging beyond the Hudson, with its sharp cusps; I spend my days there, going up and down the horizontal and vertical axes that criss-cross that compact solid, or along the obligatory routes that graze its sides and its edges.
posted evening of October 4th, 2011: Respond
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 5 years ago I illustrated a post about The Russian Debutante's Handbook with a funny-looking picture of Gary Shteyngart. Ever since then, I've had a steady trickle of Google hit referrals (why yes, I do check my referrals log rather obsessively; what makes you ask?), one or two nearly every day, looking for the text "funny looking Gary Shteyngart" or some close variation thereon. Always wondered why... He is funny looking to be sure; but --
My curiousity got the better of me today and after a little research I found that Shteyngart wrote a short note about his love-hate relationship with America for Granta 84, under the title "Funny-looking." So, one mystery solved and an entertaining read as well. Take a look -- the full text of the article is readable in Amazon's "Look Inside" feature. I scanned around the web to see if it was reprinted anywhere; the only place I found it was on a white supremacist site where (I guess -- did not really spend very long over there) it was reproduced to demonstrate the degeneracy and sickness of The Jew. Speaking of Gary Shteyngart: he is giving a reading at Seton Hall next month! That should be fun.
posted evening of October 4th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, October third, 2011
"The Spiral" is the twelfth and last story in the original Cosmicomics collection, the book Calvino published in 1965. Qfwfq has fallen in love again; this time his avatar is a proto-gastropod somewhere in the Cambrian period, with radial symmetry but with no eyes to observe his own form or that of his beloved. "Form? I didn't have any; that is, I didn't know I had one, or rather, I didn't know you could have one." But one thing leads to another as he imagines, in his eternal darkness, the millions of other suitors who must be vying for her hand, and to distinguish himself begins to secrete a shell... But my error lay in thinking that sight would also come to us, that is to me and to her. ...I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: that the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others. Qfwfq's predicament here is cute, and funny; but what really interests me about this story is the short meditative interlude in between his decision to grow a shell and his realization that it will do him no æsthetic good -- Calvino pulls the camera way back and still speaking in Qfwfq's voice, walks through long lists of the ways that beauty manifests in our world, a Dutch girl lying on the beach, a swarm of bees following its queen, coal smoke puffing from a locomotive, histories of Herodotus and tracts of Spinoza... and states clearly that all this beauty is foretold in the first mollusc's shell. When I summarize it this way I'm not entirely sure I buy it -- but in the story it rings crystal clear.
posted evening of October third, 2011: Respond
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Saturday, October first, 2011
 From a presentation of Qfwfq at Teatro Bergidum, León (Autumn 2006)
That day I was running through a kind of amphitheatre of porous, spongy rocks, all pierced with arches beyond which other arches opened; a very uneven terrain where the absence of colour was streaked by distinguishable concave shadows. And among the pillars of these colourless arches I saw a kind of colourless flash running swiftly, disappearing, then reappearing further on: two flattened glows that appeared and disappeared abruptly; I still hadn't realized what they were, but I was already in love and running, in pursuit of the eyes of Ayl.
I had forgotten from my previous read of Cosmicomics, what a sweet, lovable character the narrator Qfwfq is -- my memory of him was as a pretty abstract, cold presence. I take from this that my reading a decade and a half ago was less concerned with characters, with identification, and more principally so with the language and logic games that I remember well from the previous read.
(A note on rereading Calvino -- it is a pleasure to find that in his note "Why Read the Classics?", Calvino says that "classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, “I am rereading…†and never “I am reading…â€")
posted afternoon of October first, 2011: Respond
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Some names from WB Yeats' memory:
Came Blanaid, Mac Nessa, tall Fergus who feastward of old time slunk,
Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle on his beard never dry,
Dark Balor, as old as a forest, his mighty head sunk
Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death-making eye.
Discussing "The Wanderings of Oisin," Judith Weissman calls "this list of unforgettable and irreplaceable names... the poem's most powerful passage; the names themselves call Oisin back to what he remembers..." This statement stuck in my head last night while I was reading Cosmicomics and I was struck by the incantatory nature of the names of Qfwfq's family members...My introduction to Calvino was 14 or so years ago, on a weekend trip -- Ellen's writing group was staying for the weekend at Joyce and Jim's place in New Paltz (or, well, possibly this was when they were living in Coxsackie -- there were a number of such weekend retreats); I found a copy of Cosmicomics in the guest bedroom and spent much of the weekend holed up in there reading. It is a difficult book to put down. I started reading it again last night and am finding the stories just delightful, all over again.
posted morning of October first, 2011: Respond
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