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Me and a frog (August 30, 2004)

READIN

Jeremy's journal

Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.

Lorrie Moore


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Sunday, June third, 2012

🦋 The Lives of Things

Here is the utterly beguiling epigraph Saramago chose for his short stories:

If man is shaped by his environment, his environment must be made human.
It is from Chapter 6 of Marx and Engels' The Holy Family, a critique of the Young Hegelians which was their first collaborative effort. Saramago's method of carrying out this transformation of the environment, while I cannot imagine it to be just what Marx and Engels had in mind, is somehow exactly the right thing.

posted evening of June third, 2012: Respond
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🦋 Omnivalence

In Pontiero's translation, Saramago calls silence the "universal synonym, the omnivalent" -- a basis, a bottom layer to the intricate sediment of meaning which accretes as sounds are given voice and associated with their meanings. As these fluid meanings set and stick and harden, deepen, language diverges, attaining "a variety of words which never say the same thing, however much we might want them to. If they were to say the same thing, if they were to group together through affinity of structure and origin, then life would be much simpler, by means of successive" erosions of the sediment. Perhaps it is implicit here that this destructive simplification is/was a goal of Salazar*, the "poor wretch" sitting in the termite-eaten chair in its last moments as chair, but I may be reading this in.

*And a million thanks to Pontiero's introduction for elucidating this supremely important detail -- when I was reading this story in Spanish last year, I could mostly understand and make sense of the words and sentences, but was unable absent this critical bit of backstory to put them together into anything like a meaningful whole. Wikipædia says,

In 1968, Salazar suffered a brain hæmorrhage. Most sources maintain that it occurred when he fell from a chair in his summer house. In February 2009 though, there were anonymous witnesses who confessed, after some research about Salazar's best-kept secrets, that he had fallen in a bathtub instead of from a chair. Despite the injury, Salazar lived for a further two years; as he was expected to die shortly after his fall, President Américo Thomaz replaced him with Marcello Caetano. When Salazar unexpectedly recovered lucidity, his intimates did not tell him he had been deposed, instead allowing him to "rule" in privacy until his death in July 1970.

posted afternoon of June third, 2012: Respond
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🦋 Yarnstorming South Orange

I spent this morning reading Saramago in Spiotta Park, where the geniuses of Rebel Yarns had conspired to give the park a surrealistic makeover as part of the South Orange Maplewood Artists' Studio Tour. Click thru for pix.

posted afternoon of June third, 2012: Respond
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🦋 Easy to set up, easy to break down

Mountain Station's set last night at Desmond's Tavern went off very nicely. The 8:00 set was Grain Thief, whose music was entirely copacetic to ours (and who has just quit his job to pursue music full time -- best of luck to you, Patrick!) -- when we arrived around 8:15 he was playing a tune from our songbook, "Angel From Montgomery". We had about 7 people show up to hear our set, plus Patrick and several of his friends stuck around to hear us; felt like a nice crowd.

Our gear took only about 5 minutes to set up and we launched right into our set, and played for a good 45 minutes or so. The list was a good mix of songs we've been playing for a long time with new songs:

  1. Drowsy Maggie/ Dancing Barefoot
  2. Meet Me in the Morning
  3. Swallowtail Jig/ Galway Girl
  4. Red Overalls
  5. Cole Durhew
  6. The L&N don't stop here anymore
  7. Highway 61
  8. NJ Transit
  9. Praying Mantis
  10. Get up high, come down easy
A great advantage to the size and acoustic nature of our band -- after we broke our gear down and listened for a while to the 10:00 act (Queen Orlenes, whose lead singer is the spitting image of a young Grace Slick and has the voice to match), we headed out and were able to take a walk -- no amps to lug around! -- in the technicolor glory of New York at night. We went down to Madison Square Park and chilled out over a burger and fries at the Shake Shack, before we headed back out to Jersey.

posted morning of June third, 2012: Respond
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Friday, June first, 2012

🦋 She was sinister but she was happy.

Am Am(sus)
Finding aptly chilling epitaphs in Robyn Hitchcock lyrics,
Am Em
All I want to do is fall in love while there's still time
Am Am(sus)
Sitting crosswise on the centerpiece and shining off the mantlepiece
Am Am(sus) Am
A skull, a suitcase and a long red bottle of wine.

I was playing in a pubful, of afternoon drinkers
And I asked them as I strummed my guitar, who's got all the chunes
And he crawled along a centipede and rode on his velocipede
Cutting paper napkins into little crescent moons

Tom and Kevin citing happily the sages of their destiny
His living words were dying words he smiled and he said "Yeah"
Searching sadly for that bluegum you can take my eyes I've used 'em
Searching sadly for a quaint old fashioned way to say goodbye

She Was Sinister But She Was Happy (more lyrics at the link) by The Modesto Kid

posted evening of June first, 2012: 1 response
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Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

🦋 Silver, Nitrate, Shipping

"Very well," had said the considerable personage to whom Charles Gould on his way out through San Francisco had lucidly exposed his point of view. "Let us suppose that the mining affairs of Sulaco are taken in hand. There would be in it: first, the house of Holroyd, which is all right; then, Mr. Charles Gould, a citizen of Costaguana, who is also all right; and, lastly, the Government of the Republic. So far this resembles the first start of the Atacama nitrate fields, where there was a financing house, a gentleman of the name of Edwards, and -- a Government; or rather, two Governments -- two South American Governments. And you know what came of it. War came of it; devastating and prolonged war came of it, Mr. Gould."
Somehow I had gotten in mind from The Secret History of Costaguana, that Nostromo held specific allegoric reference to the building of the Panama Canal. That does not seem to be quite right... Certainly the story of the Canal is a relevant line of thought for approaching this book; and the Atacama, too -- nitrate was of huge importance when Conrad was writing this.

posted evening of May 29th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Nostromo

Monday, May 28th, 2012

🦋 All Cretans are Liars

In his 7th chapter, "The Dethronement of Cronus" (full text of the book is here), Graves slips in a fun quick reference to Epimenides' paradox:

Some say that Poseidon was neither eaten nor disgorged, but that Rhea gave Cronus a foal to eat in his stead, and hid him among the horseherds. And the Cretans, who are liars, relate that Zeus is born every year in the same cave with flashing fire and a stream of blood; and that every year he dies and is reburied.

posted afternoon of May 28th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings

🦋 Bookshopping

Me and Sylvia spent the afternoon in Maplewood yesterday, we went down to [words] bookstore looking to add to her collection of Tintin books (she picked up The Seven Crystal Balls and, hence, will be back soon for Prisoners of the Sun) and came away with some unexpected but promising finds; and went over to the pizzeria to eat some ices and read. I found two books that just demanded for me to own them based on their mere existence -- it seems like there is no way for me to coexist in a world which contains the book The Adventures of Hergé without owning a copy of it; and similarly for the new Penguin edition of Graves' Greek Myths, with an introduction by Rick Riordan. (The bookshop has unaccountably categorized the latter as a "Graphic Novel" -- this worked out well as that was the section I was browsing in.)

We spent some time this morning reading Graves' take on The Gods of the Underworld, comparing the details to the stories she knows from Riordan's novels...

posted morning of May 28th, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, May 27th, 2012

🦋 Walking around the swamp

This morning found the three of us walking along the boardwalk that runs through the Great Swamp preserve -- it's not too far away from us (15 miles maybe), but I hardly ever get a chance to visit. Today was a wonderful day for it. Click thru 4 pix.

posted afternoon of May 27th, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, May 26th, 2012

🦋 Macrocryptography

posted afternoon of May 26th, 2012: Respond
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