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Thursday, June 18th, 2009
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 this performance, on "Duets with Deni", just takes my breath away:
Looks like I've got some catching up to do with this guy's career!
 * 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
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
 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
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, agarrarÃa los vellos de la marta en la punta de una rama de fresno flexible empapados sumergidos en óleo bermejo y precisamente en este lugar iniciarÃa una lÃnea 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 mismÃsimos 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 metafÃsico para introducir uno de los elementos de confusión y también un sospechado sugerido signifÃcado 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
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Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
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.
There are two books in Seven-Tenths -- the main body of the text is a mix of science writing and memoir, some oceanography and ethnography mixed in with stories of how Hamilton-Paterson came to find out what he's writing about, and some ecological advocacy mixed in with fatalism and worry. There's a lot to it, a lot to think about and some really engaging writing. 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
 Nice. (Thanks for the link, Dave!)
posted afternoon of June 9th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, June 6th, 2009
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
I don't have a lot of exposure to Tennyson, somewhere I picked up a vague idea that his poetry would not be worth my spending any time on, and I have not. But I sure like this image: it is from his poem "In Memoriam A.H.H." and James Hamilton-Paterson quotes it at the end of a chapter concerning the sea floor. According to Hamilton-Paterson, the subject of "In Memoriam A.H.H."* is the Dogger Bank, a section of sea floor off northern Britain which was discovered around the time Tennyson was writing to have been dry land during the last ice age; he visualizes Tennyson "fast in the grip of transience and loss" as he memorialized the lost land.I have not been blogging this book too much but it is just chock-full of memorable lines.
* (If I am understanding correctly -- it's a very long poem, Hamilton-Paterson might well just be referring to the section he quotes.) -- No: I am misreading here. The poem's ostensible subject is Tennyson's departed friend Arthur Henry Hallam; Hamilton-Peterson must just be saying the discoveries regarding the Dogger Bank play a part in the imagery of the poem. Wikipædia calls the poem "one of the greatest poems of the 19th Century"; reckon I should take the time to read it and understand it.
posted afternoon of June 6th, 2009: Respond
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Well: today, Ellen and I have been married for 16 years. Our marriage can get its driver's license now! Happy Anniversary, Ellen! An interesting thing about this year is, right now it's almost precisely 8 years that Sylvia has been in our family; so this is a tipping point: from now on, more than half of our time as a married couple will be as parents.
posted morning of June 6th, 2009: 5 responses
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Friday, June 5th, 2009
 So I happened in today's XKCD upon the knowledge that Codex Seraphinianus is not the only or the first such book, written in an invented language and alphabet -- I mean I suspected vaguely that there were other similar books, but the cartoon gave me the name of one, and the Wikipædia article on that one gave me some more names. Best thing: at the bottom of that article is a link to a complete download of the Voynich manuscript, scanned in at pretty high quality.
 Update: Some thoughts from ciphermysteries.com about decoding the Voynich manuscript.
posted evening of June 5th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, June second, 2009
 A statue of José Saramago has been erected in his childhood home, the small town of Azinhaga in Ribatejo, Portugal. Saramago was in Azinhaga this weekend for the unveiling of the statue; he writes:
There I am, sitting in the middle of the plaza, with a book in my hand, looking at the people passing by. They made me a little bigger than life-size, I suppose to make me look better. I don't know for how many years I will be there. I have always said that the destiny of statues is to be continually removed, but in this case, I like to imagine that they will leave me in peace, someone who in peace has returned twofold to his land, as a person and, starting now, as bronze also. Even if my imagination has at times caused me to fall into such absurd deliria, I never dared to think that they would one day erect a statue of me in the land where I was born. What have I done, that this might occur? I wrote some few books, I carried with me, for all the world, the name of Azinhaga, and more than anything I never forgot those who bore me and reared me: my grandparents and my parents. I spoke of them in Stockholm before an illustrious audience and was understood. That which we see as a tree is just a part of it, doubtless important, which would be nothing without its roots. Mine, the biological ones, are named Josefa and Jerónimo, José and Piedade, but there are others who are places, Casalinho and Divisões, Cabo das Casas and Almonda, Tajo and Rabo dos Cágados, and also others named olive, weeping willow, poplar and walnut, rafts sailing on the river, fig trees laden with fruit, pigs raised on the pasture, and some, still sucklings, sleeping in the bed with my grandparents so they would not freeze to death. Of all this I was made, all of this entered into the composition of the bronze into which they have transformed me. But look, it was no spontaneous generation. Without the willpower, strength and tenacity of Victor Guia and José Miguel Correia Noras, the statue would not be there. It is with the deepest gratitude that I give them here my embrace, extended to all the people of Azinhaga, into whose care I deliver this other child which is me.
posted evening of June second, 2009: Respond
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