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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
At Edge of the American West, there is a fun thread about anticipating new books by your favorite authors. There was no criterion really specified for how to choose the authors you list; here is what I used: an author all or most of whose back catalog I have read*, and if I read about a new book of whose being published, I would run out to the bookstore and buy a copy. Most books I've bought in my life have been used; buying just-published books is a pretty new experience. I think this is a complete list of the books that I've bought on the day of their publication: Mason & Dixon, The Keep, Against the Day, Other Colors. (And come to think of it, I've pre-ordered a couple of books from Amazon or similar, so received them at the time of their publication. So probably should add to the list Monk's Music, and Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk which I await anxiously, and the two volumes so far of Moomin comics.)
 *Except Saramago, I've only read two of his books.
posted afternoon of May 15th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire; it tells you how to desire.  I just found out about this documentary today from A White Bear. Looks fantastic! You can watch it on YouTube, albeit broken up into 10-minute chunks. Slavoj Žižek is also the subject of the documentary Žižek!, which you can also watch broken up.(This YouTube user Mariborchan, from Maribor, Slovenia, has uploaded plenty more Žižek videos and other philosophical lectures.)
posted evening of May 14th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
It occurs to me that I ought to read the rest of the Divine Comedy when I finish the Inferno, then read La Vita Nuova, and then I would probably have enough background to understand and like The New Life. Who knows, maybe I'll do it. I wonder if Dante's other works are available in reputable translations?
 Update: Hmm, well seems like given that I like the terza rima, the Dorothy Sayers translation may be the only way to go for Purgatory and Paradise. All the other translations appear to be in prose or blank verse. ...Except Lawrence Binyon, which also has rhyme. Guess I will go to a bookstore and look at some of them side by side.
posted evening of May 13th, 2008: Respond
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"Pape Satàn, pape Satàn, aleppe!"
Plutus began in a gutteral, clicking voice.
The courteous sage who knew all reassured me: "Don't let fear harm you; whatever power he has
Cannot prevent us climbing down this rock.
It seems to me like that "Pape Satàn, aleppe!" line was the first thing I ever knew from the Inferno. I think Eliot quotes it somewhere, probably in The Waste Land, and that my researching his quote in high school was the first thing that ever brought Dante to my attention. Could be misremembering though. It baffles and delights me how Dante, a pious Christian, can sprinkle pagan deities and ideologies throughout his afterlife. He basically has to do it, because all his literary reference points are pre-Christian; I like that he does not seem embarrassed about it.
posted evening of May 13th, 2008: Respond
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Roy and Tom are going to be at the Voice every ThursdayMonday [duh...] now, with a weekly round-up of the right wing blogs.
posted morning of May 13th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, May 12th, 2008
Reading the Inferno today and I was having a little trouble with figuring out what it should sound like. So I took the obvious path and started reading aloud. And what a revelation! I think I am going to read this whole book aloud -- the sound is lovely and I'm understanding it better. I think I "get" terza rima now, the way it leads you through the canto; Pinsky's introduction was helpful in this regard, but what really made it concrete was to listen to the reading. My sense of reading poetry aloud has been heavily influenced by Heany's reading (or "declamation"?) of Beowulf, which I've been listening to a lot in the last couple of weeks.
Try reading this aloud:
"My son," said the gentle master, "here are joined
The souls of all who die in the wrath of God,
From every country, all of them eager to find Their way across the water -- for the goad
Of Divine Justice spurs them so, their fear
Is transmuted to desire. Souls who are good Never pass this way; therefore, if you hear
Charon complaining at your presence, consider
What that means." Then, the earth of that grim shore Began to shake: so violently, I shudder
And sweat recalling it now. A wind burst up
From the tear-soaked ground to erupt red light and batter My senses -- and so I fell, as though seized by sleep. -- See how the meter leads you on through the passage. I'm finding it impossible to stop reading in the middle of a canto.
posted evening of May 12th, 2008: Respond
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"We live for the strike of a match." Here's video of him recording on NPR for the Bryant Park Project -- more audio here -- Laura Conaway writes about another episode of BPP mentioning "I Often Dream of Trains" here. Will try and embed it later on. Here's audio of him on KQED's California Report. Also: he will be playing at Symphony Space in November, with Captain Keegan.
...Also: Here is a live performance of "Creeped Out", from Irene Trudel's show on WFMU. Hitchcock has an interview in this episode of "Paul Morley's Guide to Musical Genres" on BBC2.
posted afternoon of May 12th, 2008: Respond
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I've been thinking about doing a "top 100 books" post, where the criterion for inclusion would be "the hundred books that I would recommend for you to read, in the order that they come to mind, and that I'm able to write a paragraph supporting why I think you should read them." This seems to me like a better paradigm than the traditional "top 100" list where the author(s) of the list are asserting that their judgement is a good guide to objective reality. So, not sure if or when I'll actually get to it but the thought has been going through my head. It will probably take a few weeks of working on it once I actually start, anyway. I may decide to make a birthday project of it, depending on what my weekend looks like.
posted afternoon of May 12th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, May 11th, 2008
There is a comparison to be made between Into the Wild, and Vagabond -- the structures of the two films are not identical but they have a similar project in mind. Sean Penn is (obviously) no Varda, oh well. I am interested to read Krakauer's book; my expectation is that a lot of what came off in the movie as sappy, was Penn's additions.
posted evening of May 11th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Into the Wild
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I was driving to Home Depot today, and the car behindin front of me was (I'm assuming) driven by an evangelical Christian. The car had several bumper stickers that helped me make this assumption; the one I'm thinking about now said, This car
is washed in the
BLOOD
of Christ It was weird -- it looked vaguely like a horror movie promo. (It also made me wonder about transubstantiation occurring in the car wash.)
posted evening of May 11th, 2008: Respond
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