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Saturday, October 16th, 2010
Benoît Mandelbrot, discoverer of the infinitely detailed set which bears his name and inventor of the discipline of fractal geometry, has died at the age of 85.
posted morning of October 16th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, October 15th, 2010
 The Wrap runs an article by Jeff Reichert on the Bad History That Gerrymandering Often Produces -- Reichert directed the new documentary Gerrymandering, in theaters now. He writes about "detouring into the odds and ends of history" -- "the meat of the film is everything that happens around" the main story, which concerns a redistricting fight in California. The film is strongly influenced by Mason & Dixon; a quote from the novel was hung on the studio wall during production, Captain Zhang's feng shui observation that
Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,-- to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,-- 'tis the first stroke.-- All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation.
posted evening of October 15th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, October 13th, 2010
 Two great new collections are coming out -- the latest entry in the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series is The Witmark Demos: 1962 - 1964, coming out on the 19th with 50 tracks from Dylan's earliest years recording -- including some of his all-time finest work, and including some tracks which have never seen official release before. As Michael Simmons says in his review at Mojo:
I'm betting a lot of young people of the 21st century will find comfort listening to this young man of the 20th as he begins his odyssey. All eras set challenges for young minds - and Lord knows everyone gets the blues. True artists make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons, but it never hurts to know where giants have trod before embarking on a journey of your own. You can listen to several tracks at NPR's First Listen; the sound quality from what I've heard so far is just stellar. Note: Amazon is  offering as a freebie to those who pre-order, a previously unreleased concert tape from Brandeis University, May 10, 1963.Meanwhile from the other end of the sixties, EMI is releasing An Introduction to Syd Barrett, with a mix of tracks from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and tracks from Barrett's two solo records, the latter newly remixed by David Gilmour, who produced the records. (And with magnificent cover art!) You can preview many of the tracks at 3DiCD.
posted evening of October 13th, 2010: Respond
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 I'm so excited! Heard from Lauren that Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go has been made into a movie and is in the theaters -- I go over to check listings and it is playing in Montclair right now! Ellen and I are going to see it this weekend. (...And, making a mental note to myself to try and keep up with what movies are playing that would be interesting to me... It would have been a shame to miss this.)
posted evening of October 13th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
Two things to be watched and listened to in conjunction:
- Björk talking about and to her television:
- Robyn Hitchcock talking about and to his television.
posted evening of October 12th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, October 9th, 2010
Here is a list of Saramago's works which I believe (based on the English and Spanish Wikipædia pages) have never been translated into English, in reverse chronological order. (I am not including his last novel Cain because I believe this is in the process of being translated by Margaret Jull Costa and will be published next year. I am not including his plays or his opera.)
- Cadernos de Lanzarote vol. 2 (2001): memoir
- A maior flor do mundo (2001): children's fiction (and magnificently animated (in Spanish translation) by Juan Pablo Etcheverry)
- Cadernos de Lanzarote (1997): memoir
- Levantado do chão (1980): historical fiction
- Poética dos cinco sentidos: O ouvido (1979): short stories (Update -- Poética dos cinco sentidos is a collection, Saramago has one story in it called "O ouvido".)
- Objecto quase (1978): short stories
- Os apontamentos (1976): columns
- O ano de 1993 (1975): poetry (Horácio Costa terms the contents of this book "fragments of prose-poetry")
- As opiniões que o DL teve (1974): columns
- O bagagem do viajante (1973): columns
- Deste mundo e do outro (1971): columns
- Provavelmente alegria (1970): poetry
- Os poemas possÃveis (1966): poetry
- Terra do pecado (1947): novel
posted afternoon of October 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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 So I started reading one of Saramago's early works in Spanish translation, because I believe it is not available in English*: Objecto Quase (1978) was translated by Eduardo Naval in 1983 as Casi un objeto (online as PDF at www.inabima.org). It is 6 longish short stories told in Saramago's magnificent, inimitable voice -- the same voice we see in Blindness 20 years later, the same voice we see in The Elephant's Journey 30 years later, and I'm surprised to see it so fully developed this far back, ten years before his breakthrough with Balthazar and Blimunda in 1987.
I have started working on an experimental translation of the third story, "Ebb-tide" -- possibly this is hubristic, I can't imagine the Saramago foundation giving me permission to publish it... but I can dream. Even if it goes unpublished, it is a great exercise in understanding his voice. It seems (most of it, so far) almost ridiculously easy to render nicely in English, makes me wonder if I'm missing something... There are to be sure a few passages where I am having trouble figuring out the meaning, but these are distinctly in the minority.
 *English Wikipædia has a stub page for it titled "Quasi Object" but there is no information about translator or publication, it seems like somebody just ran the Portuguese title through a mechanical translator. The page does contain the tasty information that a film adaptation of the second story, "Embargo", was released this year in Portugal. If I'm understanding Wikipædia's layout correctly, Saramago has a number of works of fiction, of poetry and of memoir which have not yet been translated, and I find this a bit surprising.
posted afternoon of October 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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From time to time Elvissa Mackey Lipitz Stein has a dream in which she and her husband and children, and his children by his first wife, and Robert and his parents and wife, and Elvissa's parents and her brother, and a whole crowd of Steins and Mackeys and Lipitzes and Critchfields, all go up on Critchfield Mountain to celebrate an open-air meal under a pink sky.... Elvissa always wakes from the dream with a gratifying sense that everything fits together. She never remembers exactly how it fits, but she has a profound belief that it does fit, and that the most important thing in the world is that she knows.
This week I read Meredith Sue Willis' Out of the Mountains, a collection of short stories set mostly in West Virginia. I wasn't sure what to expect going in -- I've known Ms. Willis for several years as a neighbor and friend, but this is the first book of hers I've read. This has been a mistake on my part -- looks like I should go read her back catalog.Out of the Mountains has a feeling of memoir about it -- you get the sense that Willis' narrator is telling her own stories and the stories of people familiar to her. And indeed in the afterword, she acknowledges that some of the stories are taken from her life. The sense of intimacy and familiarity with her characters is one of the primary reasons I'm recommending the book -- getting inside people's heads this way is a favorite part of the reading experience for me. The other main thing I loved about the book was its structure, which reminded me a bit of Annie Proulx' Bad Dirt -- you meet the same characters and the same families sprawled out across different parts of Appalachia and of America, from the early 20th Century up to the early 21st. It's a broad scope for such a short book -- and I'm not meaning to say the book is encyclopædic -- but it really works, really gives you a sense of the vastness of the well of experience from which Willis' characters' particular experiences are drawn.
posted morning of October 9th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
Two fine galleries of photography of newly discovered or identified species: Alan Boyle of ms-nbc reports on 200 new species in Papua New Guinea -- insects, arachnids, rodents, marsupials and more -- including the bejeweled katydid pictured above; and the Telegraph presents a widely varied census of new marine species, from the Protoperidinium pellucidum under a scanning electron microscope to the bizarre furry crab Kiwa hirsuta (which, as Sheldon notes, will inherit the earth).
posted evening of October 6th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, October 5th, 2010
 David Byrne was in Detroit for a week, working on Paolo Sorrentino's forthcoming movie Divo; while he was there he composed a post about the feeling of being in Detroit -- his writing coupled with the breathtaking photos were enough to take me there briefly.
Speaking of breathtaking photos of Detroit, you should by all means take a look at the slideshows on detroiturbex.com, some amazing images including the string band I've excerpted here. (Thanks for the link, Todd!)
posted evening of October 5th, 2010: Respond
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