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Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
I told Bill I will be happy with whatever Robyn plays tonight; and that's true, short of Beatles covers, which I'll suffer through if I have to.* But... it would totally make my year if he would play "Birds in Perspex". (Listen to it here -- aah, beautiful.) He seems in interviews to have sort of repudiated the album "Perspex Island" but it's hard for me to figure out why, precisely. So I guess I will just cross my fingers, and maybe get lucky.
 *(Not that I don't like the Beatles or anything, I just don't think Robyn does a very good job of covering them. OTOH he's done some great covers of Lennon's and McCartney's solo work so who knows.)**
**(Note: this thesis is now null and void.)
posted afternoon of April 9th, 2008: Respond
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This just seems like a really poorly composed headline to me: Petræus Urges Halt in Weighing New Cut in Force ...Wait, he urges what? A... halt in... weighing... a new cut in... force! Ok, so Congress is weighing a new cut in force. So Petræus is not urging them to reject the cut, he's urging them to stop talking about it! But you need to parse the headline for about 30 seconds to figure that out. (Not happy about the content of the article either but that is more a quibble with the times than with the Times.)
posted afternoon of April 9th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Hmm. I seem to be using too many exclamation points of late... Not sure why (maybe excitement directed toward tomorrow's concert?) -- will try to keep that under control.
posted morning of April 8th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, April 7th, 2008
Minivet has a blog! With lots of playful etymology! Also, he links to an excellent feature from the NY Times.
posted afternoon of April 7th, 2008: 2 responses
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Sunday, April 6th, 2008
I didn't know about the Leningrad Cowboys until my dad sent along this clip today. Utterly fabulous. There are many songs of theirs on YouTube, and they have a couple of movies: Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses, Total Balalaika Show. Awesome.
 (Speaking of Scandinavian bands, it's always worth while linking to Hurra Torpedo's cover of "Total Eclipse of the Heart": you
will never think about 80's power pop in quite the same way.)
posted evening of April 6th, 2008: Respond
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Robert Fagles died this week, 74 years old. I am sorry to hear about it. I just loved his translations of Homer -- reading them really opened my ears to what epic poetry should sound like. I heard him read from Ulysses one Bloomsday several years back; if I remember right he signed my Iliad. (Sure where it is, I am however not; since then I got the big hardcover printing of his Iliad and Odyssey when they were published together. I wonder where I put the paperback copy? I may have loaned it out.) One of these days I will get to reading the Æneid, and I will be glad there is a Fagles translation available. (I remember making a start on Fitzgerald's translation, in my teens -- somebody gave it to me for my birthday one year -- and finding it impenetrable.)
 Looking at his Wikipædia entry, I see he also translated the Oresteia, the Theban plays of Sophocles, and the poems of Bacchylides. Of these, I loved Lattimore's Oresteia when I read it long ago (in a way I did not love his translations of Homer); I never would have thought a new translation was needed. And yet I would probably recommend Fagles unread to someone who asked what translation they should get. Lattimore's Sophocles did not make much of an impression on me; I ought to read Fagles'. Bacchylides I have never heard of (to the best of my recollection).
posted afternoon of April 6th, 2008: Respond
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Sylvia and her mom are using the computer to write an invitation to her upcoming sleep-over party. Sylvia: "Mom, could you spell something wrong? I want to do a spell-check!" ... "Dad, look! We're going to have 'lots of foon'!" This game is occupying her for a long time. (Speaking of games: she's very taken with the physics simulations which Thoreau linked a little while back. Thanks, Thoreau! Among other cool details she noticed that you can make David's pants fall off if you aim the cannonball correctly. She's still trying to smash David but I suspect it is not part of the software.)
posted morning of April 6th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Tyler Cowen says of Pamuk's books that "The Black Book is the one to read last, once you know the others." I wonder how true this is, and why. I am, coincidentally, reading The Black Book last (leaving aside that I never finished The New Life -- Cowen thinks I would understand it better if I had knowledge of "how Dante appropriated Islamic theological writings for his own ends," which is certainly possible), and it does seem like a good position in the reading order for it. On the other hand I have recommended it to some friends who have not read any Pamuk, principally on the basis of their liking Pynchon -- this book seems to me to have a lot in common with Pynchon's writing, which I don't think any of Pamuk's other books do, particularly much. I think Snow is a great book to have read first -- principally because I relate very strongly to the lines from its first few pages that I quoted here -- Ka driving into the blizzard is (in certain ways) like me starting to read Snow.
posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
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Ragebunny's painting "Violin Birds" arrived in the mail a couple of days ago. Nice! It is labelled "artist's proof" -- I don't know quite what this means but, well, it makes it seem special, so that's all to the good. I took it in to the frame shop today and selected framing materials -- an orange mat surrounded by a black mat, and a thin camel frame, and UV-protecting glass -- and am looking forward to the result.
posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
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You became someone else when you read a story -- that was the key to the mystery. The chain of mystery in The Black Book is spiralling wider and wider in Chapter 24. The story seems to have taken Galip's paranoid break with reality smoothly in stride and assimilated that into the "reality" of the book. Galip's identification with Celâl is a done deal; and now we are seeing Celâl as having discarded his own identity in favor of Rumi's*. In addition Celâl has asserted in the previous chapter, that being able to tell stories, to command the attention of an audience and (I am reading in) thus to weaken your audience members' identities and to intermix your own self into them, is a primary element of human existence, something without which a person is anguished and "helpless in the face of the world!"Meanwhile the unknown caller is competing with Galip for Celâl's identity, and Galip has a moment of suspicion that he has been lured into "a deadly trap."
 *I have not read nearly enough Rumi -- I reckon I am going to be missing a lot of nuance in this portion of the book. The story about Shams of Tabriz in Chapter 22, for example, is widely divergent from what I read about him in the closest reference work to hand; I don't know what to make of this. ...Well here is a program about Rumi which speaks of a disputed account of Shams being murdered by Rumi's disciples. So the Wikipædia article is just incomplete I guess. (The Wikipædia article on Rumi does mention the murder, and does not even say that it is disputed.) That program also links to some readings from Rumi in Persian and in translation.
posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
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