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Monday, March 23rd, 2009

🦋 FMLN

By way of Saramago's Notebook, I see that Mauricio Funes, of the FMLN, has been elected President of El Salvador; ARENA will leave office peacefully after 2 decades in power. This strikes me as fantastic news. In El País, Moíses Naím speculates as to whether the new center of power in Latin America will be Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. It is natural to think an FMLN victory would give Chávez more influence; and Lula's recent meeting with Obama can be seen as the end of "a long period of disengagement between the US and Latin America."

Saramago notes that Mauricio Funes shares his surname with Funes the Memorious, and advises him:

...Thousands of men and women [have witnessed] at last, the birth of hope. Do not disappoint them, Mister President. The political history of South America breathes deception and frustration, whole peoples tired of lies and deceit; it is time, it is urgent that all that change.

posted morning of March 23rd, 2009: 1 response
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Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

🦋 Painting the hallway

Ellen decided a couple of weeks ago that we should repaint the main hallway of our house. We've been slowly getting going, doing some taping and picking colors and painting some sections of the big wall next to our staircase -- today suddenly it seems like we're really underway. I built a platform that will support a stepladder on the staircase, for taping the intersection of that large wall and the ceiling -- I did this taping and pretty much finished painting that wall. Next we have the first-floor hallway, the second-floor hallway, and then the molding... Hopefully we will be done with this by May and we'll post some pictures.

posted evening of March 22nd, 2009: Respond
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🦋 The bathroom sink

You know that little metal disc in the drain of the bathroom sink, that you lower by means of a lever next to the water faucet to block the drain? Until today I did not know how that disc worked. For the last couple of days the bathroom sink has not been draining properly -- I wanted to open up the drain so I could clear out whatever was blocking it, but that disc was in my way -- tried pushing and twisting at it, figuring there was some kind of threading or catch, to no avail.

Well -- a good idea in this sort of situation is to look behind the visible assembly and see how the functionality is implemented. Turns out that lever by the water faucet is linked to the back of the drain pipe; if you unscrew the nut where it is attached, you can pull the lever out; then it is easy to remove the disc. This nut is much easier to deal with than most plumbing joints as it is not welded in place or anything.

So, I got that out and pulled a gigantic mass of hair out of the drain pipe. (Hair that has been stuck in the drain of the bathroom sink turns out to be one of the most unappealing substances around.) And the sink is working again! Took some figuring out, but not at all difficult of a repair in the end.

posted morning of March 22nd, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, March 21st, 2009

🦋 Sweet Like Sugar

So here are two things I read recently and a chain of thought they have prompted:

• I've been reading Patrick Kurp's blog Anecdotal Evidence for the past few days, since Levi Stahl linked to it from his Twitter feed with a pretty beguiling quote about the ghostly presence of books; and yesterday I looked in Kurp's archives to read his first post.

  More than 30 years ago, at a state university in Ohio, I briefly shared a dorm room with a French horn player. ... I entered our room one day and found him sitting in the corner, cackling over one of Shelley's verse dramas and eating confectionary sugar from the box with a long ice tea spoon.

  Well: I'm chuckling as I read this and picturing myself as the roommate; but in the next paragraph I see that Kurp is setting up his former roommate as a representative of the "misuse of books", for which he feels a righteous distaste. Hm: I read the rest of the entry and go about my day, not sure how I feel about this.

• Later on (at another newly discovered blog), I was reading Robyn Hitchcock's notes from the release of Moss Elixir 13 years ago. He had just left A&M, and was dissatisfied with the music he had recorded there; and here is how he expressed that dissatisfaction:

  I always associate the word "production" with some kind of sheen--a sugar buzz patina that has the listener lying on their back, almost licking the record.

This is kind of troubling to me. Much of my relationship to books, to music, to movies is dilettantish -- I consider much of what I write on this blog to be the moral equivalent of cackling over Pamuk's prose while I eat spoonfuls of sugar, of licking the inexhaustible candy coating off of Robyn Hitchcock's music -- having to think about Patrick Kurp (for whose writing and thinking I have a great deal of respect) sitting in judgement of me is bad enough, but thinking about the musician I love taking offense at my manner of loving his work -- well, it gives me pause.

Is dilettantish enjoyment of art worthwhile? Is it reprehensible? Will it interfere with my development into a thoughtful human being? Does it make me a moral monster? I don't have an answer to these questions. My immediate reaction is "no" to all of them -- OTOH much of what I write on this blog seems worthwhile to me, and I would have a really hard time separating out what is "worthwhile" from what is "dilettantish". I was trying to figure out this morning how the sugar-buzz reaction to art could be seen as reprehensible, as morally negative -- all I could come up with was a vague sense that it befouls the intellectual space around the work of art in question, makes it more difficult to respond to the work in a valid way -- but there are tons of unexamined assumptions underlying that vague sense.

So: not sure what to make of this. I am going to muddle on listening to music, reading books, writing my blog, and much of that listening and reading and writing will be done from the standpoint of a dilettante. I hope some worthwhile thought will come out of it.

posted afternoon of March 21st, 2009: 2 responses

🦋 Google News archive

Not sure quite what to make of this but it looks like it might be a very useful tool...

I was Googling™ around for information about Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic after I saw an amusing advertisement for it at cleek's place -- and happened on this page from the St. Petersburg Daily Times of August 30, 1918. A-and apparently, Google has a huge news archive (and/or index into offsite archives) that I didn't know about. I'm not sure how fully built up it is -- but this bodes well for future searching.

posted morning of March 21st, 2009: Respond

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

🦋 The Practical Uses of Discomfort

Robyn Hitchcock speaks with Paul Byrne of Movies.ie about making Rachel Getting Married (which sounds like a whole lot of fun) and about Sex, Food, Death, and Insects.

Byrne: During [Sex, Food, Death, and Insects] you said at one point, "At heart I'm a frightened, angry person -- that's why my stuff isn't totally insubstantial, I'm constantly deep down inside in a kind of rage..." And it made me think, well, here you've got people like Gillian Welch and... Jonathan Demme's a fan... you've been playing music for a long time, The Soft Boys and everything, and I was thinking does that make it easier? Because for a lot of artists, to have some kind of recognition, some outlet, you know, eases the soul a bit, I don't know whether, is it still true that you have that rage in you? I guess you only said it last year so maybe it is still true...

Hitchcock: I haven't had enough therapy to get rid of it completely, you know, just enough to find it... Yeah, everybody is at some level of discomfort. Even the people you mention. And some people are in more pain than others, some people know what to do with their discomfort. You know, I mean I could be playing with my hair, I could be, you know, picking on an E♭ or something like that, I could be smoking except it's illegal to smoke now; there's all these manifestations of what to do with your own dis-ease... For me, I turn it into music, and a lot of other people I know; that's how we metabolize. We breathe in life and we breathe out music; it keeps us sane and it seems to be somehow good for the environment, you know, like plants take in CO₂ and produce oxygen, we take in the anxiety of life and give out music. And I'm very happy to be able to do that.

posted evening of March 19th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 American Character

USA Network has published a lovely book and accompanying web site: Character Project is a journey around the country by 11 photographers (11 journeys actually) documenting the land and the people. Some really striking images. h/t The Wooster Collective.

posted evening of March 19th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Otros libros de Castellanos Moya

By way of Scott Esposito, I see that two more novels of Horacio Castellanos Moya will be published in translation this year: She Devil in the Mirror and Dances With Snakes. Exciting! and searching around for more information about the novels, I notice Dr. Albrecht Buschmann of the Universität Potsdam maintains a fairly extensive site devoted to Castellanos Moya's work: Horacio Castellanos Moya: Hechos, Libros, Temas (bilingual in German and Spanish, with the occasional page translated into English). The site appears to be dedicated to reading his work as a literature of the survivor: "Reading the more important novels of Horacio Castellanos Moya may leave the impression that all of his protagonists are damaged goods... Figures with mutilated identities, deteriorated memories, who interact frequently with a choice between themselves exerting violence or being made into victims of violence, when they try to survive. For this is certainly what they intend to do: survive."

posted evening of March 19th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

At Orbis Quintus today, I found Maureen Freely's new Washington Post piece on translating Pamuk, on trying "to recreate the narrative trance that makes the novel so hypnotic in Turkish." It's a lovely essay, a look into the translator's creative experience -- at the "shadow novelist [who is] present in every translator. Though she must serve the text, she can recreate the author's voice only if she gets so close to the heart of the novel that she can convince herself it briefly answers to hers." (Now I'm just dying to hear from Gün and from Göknar...)

At the same page is an audio clip of a conversation between Freely and the Post's writer-at-large Marie Arana.

posted evening of March 18th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

🦋 Playlist

Thanks Jer for sending me this link! Robyn Hitchcock posted a playlist on Rhapsody a couple of years ago (October '06), which I didn't know about until today. It's got a nice mix of old and new, stuff I know and stuff I've heard of and stuff I have not.

Robyn's Picks

1. "Wang Dang Doodle," by Howlin' Wolf
2. "Say Man," by Bo Diddley
3. "Champagne Supernova," by Oasis
4. "Lucifer Sam," by Pink Floyd
5. "Finest Worksong," by R.E.M.
6. "In Liverpool," by Suzanne Vega
7. "Look At Miss Ohio," by Gillian Welch
8. "Happiness," by Grant Lee Buffalo
9. "Slow Dog," by Belly
10. "God," by John Lennon
11. "The Red Telephone," by Love
12. "Kicks," by Lou Reed
13. "The Lark in the Morning," by Steeleye Span
14. "Station To Station," by David Bowie
15. "To Turn You On," by Roxy Music
16. "Lately I've Let Things Slide," by Nick Lowe

posted evening of March 17th, 2009: Respond
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