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Saturday, March 28th, 2009
I stayed up late last night reading The Fellowship of the Ring; it is starting to really come together for me. In the first several chapters I was feeling a little annoyed at the pace -- granted this is a three-volume, 1500-page story that is being set up, so it is only reasonable that Tolkien spend some time setting it up... Around Chapter VII ("In the House of Tom  Bombadil") is where the story really begins to pick up and feel interesting to me. For one thing I just love the characters Tom and his wife Goldberry -- "characters" might not be the right word here, they are just quick sketches meant to move the story along; but they are lovingly drawn and engaging. I see a potential criticism of this book, of the early part at least, that Frodo and his friends are just moving along from one deus ex machina to the next. Compare Frodo and company getting lost in the Barrow Downs, with Bilbo and the dwarfs getting lost in Mirkwood. The two sequences are built up similarly: the characters follow illusions into the wilderness and are separated and black out, then the main character awakens and finds his companions hostage. In The Hobbit, Bilbo rescued the dwarfs by calling on an inner reserve of strength which we did not know he had, fighting off the spiders with his dagger; in Fellowship, Frodo rescues his companions by invoking the song of Tom Bombadil -- Tom comes and destroys the barrow-wight without breaking a sweat. This avoids being lame by virtue of Tom being such a fun presence -- I was happy enough to see him back in the story for a bit longer, I didn't bother about the ease with which they busted out. And of course this is taking place much earlier in the story, than the Mirkwood episode in The Hobbit.
posted morning of March 28th, 2009: 2 responses
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Friday, March 27th, 2009
There are a lot of funny reactions to the seriously warped Republican Budget pamphlet -- a couple of my favorites play on the diagram that shows a couple of republican policies leading magically to happy white families, after passing through a magical region labeled "Republica Road to Recovery" (and not even going along the road, just idly crossing it):
 Oh and also: Apostropher is where I first caught wind of this; he has a link to a hilarious thread at Fark; and in his comments Waldo rewrites "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered", surely worth doing.
posted evening of March 27th, 2009: Respond
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Coming up! This evening is not quite upon us yet; I need to do things like put Sylvia to bed and tidy the kitchen, before it can truly be thought of as evening; but I am planning once all that is taken care of, to spend a couple of hours listening to and writing about the songs on Goodnight Oslo. (I did this a couple of years ago with Perspex Island, at the beginning of my infatuation with Robyn Hitchcock.) I just noticed (at Hot Rox Avec Lying Sweet Talk) a really nice quote from Robyn, in a 2002 interview with Rolling Stone -- he is asked about what fan reaction he is anticipating to the forthcoming Nextdoorland, and replies:
They'll be initially pleased to hear it, and then they'll say it's not as good as Under Water Moonlight and then about five years down the line they'll probably get to like it on it's own merit," he says. "I can see the different layers of icing -- they'll like licking off the first layer, they won't like licking off the second layer, but once they've got through, the third layer's pretty good.
(And, argh, here Robyn is talking about his fans licking frosting off of his records and he is happy about it -- confusing... Makes me more confident about my initial reaction to his quote about Moss Elixir.)So, stay tuned -- more later.
 (Update: Oh wait, strike that. The disc is in the car which Ellen drove to visit her friend. Oh well, something else... maybe I'll do some reading instead.)
posted evening of March 27th, 2009: 2 responses
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Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
I find very interesting the idea (which I found at La Bloga's interview with Daniel Alarcón, on the occasion of Zoetrope: All-Story's publishing its new Latin American Issue) that Latin American literature has fallen captive (at least as it is seen from North America) to the legacy of GarcÃa Márquez -- that diverse strands of work are "interpreted through the single, constricting and somewhat outdated lens of magical realism." This issue looks like it will do something to push back against that tendency; I'm looking forward to reading it and perhaps to looking at Diego Trelles Paz' anthology of new authors (authors under 40, those born after Cien años de soledad), El futuro no es nuestro. Alarcón and Trelles Paz have more to say about the legacy of Cien años de soledad (which "we would describe -- without exaggeration -- as perfect") in the editor's note to the Latin American issue.
posted evening of March 25th, 2009: 4 responses
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
I was pretty young when I found out about A Coney Island of the Mind -- I bought a copy at one of the bookstores on Telegraph Ave. and it's the first book of poetry I can remember carrying around in high school. I just loved the title! And the poems themselves began gradually to sink in, too... I read them today and they are familiar like old relatives and slightly embarrassing too, like old relatives can be; but it seems to me like there is real beauty in them mixed in with the clumsyness.
I have not lain with beauty all my life
telling over to myself
its most rife charms
I have not lain with beauty all my life
and lied with it as well
telling over to myself
how beauty never dies
but lies apart
among the aborigines
of art
and far above the battlefields
of love
It is above all that
oh yes
It sits upon the choicest of
Church seats
up there where art directors meet
to choose the things for immortality
And they have lain with beauty
all their lives
And they have fed on honeydew
and drunk the wines of Paradise
so that they know exactly how
a thing of beauty is a joy
forever and forever
and how it never never
quite can fade
into a money-losing nothingness
Oh no I have not lain
on Beauty Rests like this
afraid to rise at night
for fear that I might somehow miss
some movement beauty might have made
Yet I have slept with beauty
in my own weird way
and I have made a hungry scene or two
with beauty in my bed
and so spilled out another poem or two
and so spilled out another poem or two
upon the Bosch-like world
A couple of more poems below the fold.
 Here is "Spirit of the Crusades," from These are my Rivers (1994). It is a concise, powerful image, it hits you with the same force as his early poems but it is, I think, much more disciplined:
Stony Wales
with its slate-grey roofs
in slate-grey Cardiff
and its greystone houses on greystone terraces
and its great high statue of
"The Spirit of the Crusades"
in the Wales National Museum
portraying a medieval knight
in grey metal armor and helmet
with visor down
on a great grey steed
with four grey foot soldiers
in close march around him
(two at the head of the horse
two behind)
wearing World War One helmets
and carrying World War One rifles
with fixed bayonets
And the Crusades are over
but they are still marching
over the sea-locked land
in a dead march
straight through the twentieth century
In 1997 he published A Far Rockaway of the Heart, which might be my favorite book of his poetry for the way it reflects back on A Coney Island of the Mind from the perspective of a much older, more mature poet. I saw Mr. Ferlinghetti reading from this book and got his signature!
Driving a cardboard automobile without a license
at the turn of the century
my father ran into my mother
on a fun-ride at Coney Island
having spied each other eating
at a French boardinghouse nearby
And having decided right there and then
that she was for him entirely
he followed her into
the playland of that evening
where the headlong meeting
of their ephemeral flesh on wheels
hurtled them forever together
And I now in the back seat
of their eternity
reaching out to embrace them
↻...done
posted evening of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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 This weekend Ellen and I watched "Wild Combination: a Portrait of Arthur Russell" and were very taken with it; thanks for the recommendation, Bryan! There was a huge variety of music from Russell's brief career, and it was all brand-new to me. Here is one of my favorite pieces from the film, "Go Bang" by Dinosaur L, produced by Russell:
posted evening of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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 Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 90 years old today. What a milestone! He is one of my favorite poets -- this evening when I have some time I would like to pick out a couple of his pieces to post here. In the mean time you ought to give him a birthday present by heading over to City Lights and buying a book.
Ooh and look at this! Nick Lowe (the Jesus of Cool) turns 60 today! And Olivia is 9 years old. A good day for birthdays.
posted morning of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, March 23rd, 2009
Another Robyn Hitchcock interview, from Yep Roc -- here he is talking, among other things, about the title track from Goodnight Oslo, what it is about and where it comes from. As you get older, I suppose you have to vacate certain comfort zones. Because in the end, they're not comforting, they're stifling. So, you have to move out of your shell -- you cannot stay where you were.
I'm meaning to write an extended post or series of posts about the songs on this record, which I like a whole lot -- trying to find a couple-of-hours block of time that I can devote to that.
posted afternoon of March 23rd, 2009: Respond
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 Orhan Pamuk was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the University of Rouen last week; in his acceptance speech, he reflects on the modernist ideal of the reclusive author, and what he and other authors have taken from Flaubert. h/t LanguageHat.
posted morning of March 23rd, 2009: Respond
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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 PaÃs, MoÃses NaÃm 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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