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Saturday, June 20th, 2009

🦋 Historical Background

I started reading Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K this morning. It is a dark, fascinating book, drawing me in to its violent, damaged world immediately from page 1 onward. I'm wondering a bit about the precise historical setting of the novel -- it was published in 1983 and I'm assuming without any confirmation, that it is set in the present, i.e. the late 70's or early 80's. (And Michael is 31, so would have been born around 1950.)

I realize suddenly how limited my knowledge of South African history is -- I remember as a young teenager reading in the paper and in magazines about apartheid, and thinking it was important that it should end, and self-identifying as an opponent of apartheid; but it was all pretty abstract. I did not realize that a hot civil war was being fought -- and I would not have thought of it that way prior to reading this book. But it seems from the book like at the point where the narrative starts, war is an established, ongoing state of affairs -- people are used to living in wartime.

This is the second book of Coetzee's I am reading that is not Disgrace... I went to the library this morning thinking (among other things) of checking out Disgrace; but looked at the first couple of pages and it did not really seem like what I wanted to be reading right now. (Also checked out Saramago's History of the Seige of Lisbon.)

posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: 2 responses
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🦋 Hyvää Juhannus!

Rigtig god midsommer! (A day late -- but yesterday was Midsummer's Day, tomorrow is the solistice...)

Doesn't feel quite midsummery here in NJ; it is gray and damp and kind of chilly... Our plants are happy with this weather though.

posted morning of June 20th, 2009: Respond

Friday, June 19th, 2009

🦋 Headshots

Martha's latest work is up on YouTube:

posted evening of June 19th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Pepitas

So who knew there was a flourishing garage rock scene in Portugal in the 60's? I did not know that -- I guess if someone had suggested it to me, I would have scratched my head, said "Yeah, I could believe that," and gone about my business. Today though, badger sent me a link to Portuguese Nuggets vol. I -- a record's worth of psychedelic tunes from Lisbon 40 years ago. It's a great record -- I haven't been able to hear any distinctively "Portuguese" quality to distinguish the music from American psychedelia; this could easily be a limitation of my ear, but it sounds very similar to the American Nuggets records I've heard. Either way I'm happy with it -- the music is lovely and the beat is strong.

Highlights include "Mama" by Victor Gomes & Sideriais; "(Let me stand next to your) Fire" by Pop Five Music Incorporated -- I am liking this version better than Hendrix right now -- and Tartária by Os Tártaros; the only really skippable tracks are Os Chinchilas' "I'm a Believer" and Conjunto Mistério's "Tired of Waiting". Weirdest track, and the only one featuring hurdy-gurdy, is Hully Gully do Montanhes by Conjunto Académico João Paolo.

(The same site with the Nuggets download, aaaaadaddddd, has a ton of other interesting-looking music available; e.g. Bosporus Bridges: Turkish Jazz and Funk 1969 - 1978.)

posted evening of June 19th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009

🦋 Come for the Robyn Hitchcock, stay for the John Wesley Harding

So I heard a while back about this tape of a John Wesley Harding concert which featured some performances by Robyn Hitchcock, called "A Bloody Show: Live at Bumbershoot 2005" -- and I had kicking around in my consciousness some occasional recommendations that I listen to Harding, and of course the obvious Dylan tie-in. So I put it on my NetFlix queue and forgot about it until it came in the mail yesterday.

Popped it in the player without much idea of what to expect -- I guess I was expecting some Dylan-influenced singing with guitar kind of thing. But wow! This thing is nothing like anything I could have expected. It is completely sui generis and is touched with brilliance. Harding is singing ballads that he has written (strongly and clearly derivative from particular folk ballads) with two other singers, either a capella or accompanied by a string quartet, sometimes Harding is playing guitar;* Robyn is narrating the performance reading excerpts from Harding's book Misfortune -- I had not known he was a novelist -- and great stage patter, from various of the performers.

The ballads are beautiful; I cannot find any recordings of them on the web so can only recommend that you watch the concert tape. Two lovely Harding performances are on YouTube, though. The song "Misfortune" is the first track on this concert tape, and is kind of what I had been expecting ("Dylan-influenced singing with guitar kind of thing"), and is just great:

* And more instrumentation -- a hurdy-gurdy is featured on "The Lady Dressed in Green"! And there's a full rock band on a few tracks at the end!

posted evening of June 18th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

🦋 The elephant on his journey

Saramago is taking a few days off to go hiking:

Readers will recall that the names of two villages which the expedition passed through on its way to Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo were never mentioned by the narrator of the story. These villages, as far as they were described, were simply invented to fill a need of the fiction and had no real-world correspondents. Thus it will appear appalling to lovers of historical ricor, that Salomón is preparing himself today for a journey that, while not being literally the one he took, surely could have been it, even if of that one there remains no precise record. Life carries many coincidences in her pockets and one can not exclude the possibility that, in some one or another case, the lyrics might fit with the music. It's certain that our story doesn't say Salomón crossed the lands of Castelo Novo, Sortelha or Cidadelhe, but nonetheless it is impossible to say that that didn't happen. We are making use of this tautology, we the José Saramago Foundation, to think up and organize a journey which will begin today in Belén*, in front of the monastery of the Jerónimos and which will bring us to the frontier, up there, where the Austrian cuirassiers wanted to transport the elephant to the archduke. But the itinerary is arbitrary, the reader will protest, but we prefer, if you will permit us, to consider it one of the innumerable possible routes. We will hike that way two days and we will tell the story of what happens to us. Who is coming? The Foundation will be there in full, a couple of staunch friends of Salomón are coming along, Portuguese and Spanish journalists, all good people. Stay well. Until we come back, farewell, farewell.

(I am extremely impressed by a man of his advanced years going off for a multi-day hike. Perhaps he should take as a nickname, "Father William".)

* This is a kind of interesting question: should this be rendered as Belén or as Bethlehem? He is talking about Lisbon -- unless there is a neighborhood in Lisbon called Belén -- I'm not sure quite what he is doing by referring to it as Belén. It's probably something to do with Bethlehem being a generic starting point, a birthplace. Or it might have something to do with the novel, which I'm anxiously awaiting. Here are some pictures of the monastery they are starting from.

...Aw, forget all that -- a little more research reveals that adjacent to the monastery is a structure called "the Tower of Bethlehem," and the district around there is called Belém. That's all he meant by it. Probably the correct/best way of rendering this would be Belém, since that's what locals would call the neighborhood.

posted evening of June 16th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, June 14th, 2009

🦋 Saints and Armaments

Another set of paintings by Ferrari that I found very interesting, showed saints -- rendered in a recognizable style that I don't know the name of to search for examples, one that seemed very familiar from religious iconography -- in the foreground with armaments and explosions in the background. Along similar lines to his "Civilisación occidentale y cristiana" (1965), shown here hanging at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art.

Now I'm really wanting the catalog of this exhibition! Another piece from it that really captured my imagination was "Unión libre," an image of a nude woman with the opening of André Breton's poem of the same title printed over her body in braille:

Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois
Aux pensées d'éclairs de chaleur
A la taille de sablier
Ma femme à la taille de loutre entre les dents du tigre
Ma femme à la bouche de cocarde et de bouquet d'étoiles de
dernière grandeur

posted morning of June 14th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, June 13th, 2009

🦋 Cuadro Escrito

I spent yesterday afternoon at the MoMA with some friends, where I found two exhibitions devoted to word-based art. Both are really engaging and interesting, although by the time I got to the second I was already towards the end of my attention span...

Tangled Alphabets is a show of the calligraphic art of León Ferrari and Mira Schendel. I was particularly taken with Ferrari's work -- Schendel's mostly left me cold, though I could see how it makes sense to exhibit the two together and how Schendel's work sometimes offers a nice counterpoint. I was sorry there was no print available of Ferrari's Cuadro escrito, which seemed like the highlight of the show to me: -- the text is a description of the painting Ferrari would compose "if I knew how to paint, if God in his embarrassment and confusion had accidentally touched me..." There is a catalog of the show, and additionally a bilingual edition of León Ferrari: Obra 1976-2008 -- this latter does not have a whole lot of the calligraphic works but does contain some really interesting texts and paintings.

Downstairs there was an exhibition of printed art and techniques of printing, The Printed Picture -- the primary focus of this was on technology used to render graphic images in printing, but what really caught my eye was a room of typography in different faces and made with different printing technologies.

Si yo supiera pintar, si Dios en su apuro y turbado por error confuso me hubiera tocado, agarraría los vellos de la marta en la punta de una rama de fresno flexible empapados sumergidos en óleo bermejo y precisamente en este lugar iniciaría una línea delgada flaca ya con la intención de cubrirla después maniobrando con la transparencia. Al lado un pozo absolutamente negro y definitivo. Enganchados en las ramas algunos repugnantes amarillos circuncisos como nidos de codesera el cochino pájaro del ártico que utiliza sus mismísimos hijos para alimentar las focas que le placen (nadie supo nunca por qué siguen naciendo) colgantes arracimados a la tela ayer virgen de la cual dejo dos cuartas cuadradas libres y enseguida un caballo formidable pero frustratorio por retaceado blanco corriendo espumante con las crines y las colas desplegadas, un verdadero corcel del malón resuelto con realismo fotográfico pero con cierto aire metafísico para introducir uno de los elementos de confusión y también un sospechado sugerido signifícado opaco bajo el barniz, no simbólico, como para que al verlo alguien ni siquiera se de cuenta que en sus entrañas se refriega preguntándose qué significa ese caballo blanco veloz hacia el monte de Venus entre las hierbas altas oscuras enruladas la gran quebrada magnética y luego el volcán.

↻...done

posted morning of June 13th, 2009: Respond

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

🦋 Burial at Sea

When you considered the dead man's tirade in detail, you thought it vulgar... He had implied that poverty reduced everything to mere stark need, abrogating all but the coarsest emotions. ...You will remember that the dead fisherman (even then puffing through your lungs and coursing in your blood) had not had it entirely his way. Before he faded, you had got a word in, sharp with the triumphalism of the living. ...You informed him that you would use him entirely as you saw fit, together with his compatriots, the scenery, diverting cosmogonies, smells, sounds and words.

Set around this -- pretty separate, not really blending in to the main body of the text at all -- is a narrative of a swimmer lost at sea, unable to locate the boat he dived from after the line that was connecting him to it separates. This second narrative was not really grabbing me as I read the book, I couldn't really relate it to the rest of the book. Well at the end of the main text is a note explaining that the swimmer was him -- so clearly he did make it back to the boat -- and talking broadly about what has been lost in the past century. And then, he writes a 60-page essay in the second person about a fantasy of sailing with lobster poachers and discovering a dead body at sea, intertwined with the narrative of a historical (or fictional? I cannot find any reference online that attests to his existence independent of this book) shipwrecked sailor named Giusto Forbici... I am getting impatient, unable to see what all this is adding to the rest of the book. But, well, the final two sections of this essay sort of manage to wrap everything together, to make explicit and foreground some questions and conflicts about Hamilton-Peterson's role as author that have been hinted at throughout the text.

posted evening of June 10th, 2009: 2 responses
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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

🦋 The Big Lebowski meets Viridiana

Nice. (Thanks for the link, Dave!)

posted afternoon of June 9th, 2009: 2 responses

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