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Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
I like to sing and to play violin; what I am aiming for is a style of playing where I can sing, play rhythm in between the lines of the verse, and play melody on breaks and between verses. I only have two songs where I can really do this, viz. "The Louisville Burglar" and "John Hardy was a Desperate Man"; I have mapped out how to do it for "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "Stagger Lee", and I think those two will come fairly quickly with practice; in Blues, I am close to knowing how to do it for "Sweet to Mama" and "Rising Sun Shine On". With this and a couple more songs, I would have a set -- but I need to find a partner, preferably either a guitarist or a banjo player. Jerry is not satisfied with the progress we've been making together and wants to play on his own. Hopefully I will be able to find somebody at one of the folk music jams around here.
posted evening of March 25th, 2008: Respond
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Listening this evening to MS John Hurt playing "Stagger Lee", and it hit me that his guitar part would translate really well to violin. Going to try it out when I go downstairs later on.
 ...Yep -- really fun.
posted evening of March 25th, 2008: Respond
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Today I recommended Never Let Me Go to Heebie-Geebie, who is leading (under duress?) a small reading workshop at her college. I think it would be a great book for the workshop; I thought I might also take a look at what some reviewers have said about it. Two I found very insightful: Louis Menand in The New Yorker -- Menand is not enthusiastic, exactly, but he seems to like Ishiguro and to get what he is writing about, and makes me really interested in reading the rest of Ishiguro's novels; and M. John Harrison writing in The Guardian, whose final paragraphs just made me tear up: By the final, grotesque revelation of what really lies ahead for Kathy and Tommy and Ruth, readers may find themselves full of an energy they don't understand and aren't quite sure how to deploy. Never Let Me Go makes you want to have sex, take drugs, run a marathon, dance - anything to convince yourself that you're more alive, more determined, more conscious, more dangerous than any of these characters.
This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been. (James Browning's review in The Village Voice, which I think is the closest of the three to a "rave", seems pretty incoherent to me and gets some details of the story wrong.)
posted evening of March 25th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, March 24th, 2008
Wow. I had no idea there was such a thing. We are living in marvelous times!
posted afternoon of March 24th, 2008: Respond
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So the plumber (from the heating company) came and let us know, the pressure relief valve is leaking because the water main pressure is too high -- 120psi*, when the house wants it to be between 80 - 100psi. We called Donald (at the water company) and he was like "Oh, well of course you need to have a pressure regulation valve on your main." Turns out we don't have any such thing. So, another plumber (from the plumbing company) is coming (hopefully this afternoon), to install the valve. In the meantime, this guy adjusted the relief valve so that it will hold 120psi without leaking.
 (Later on:) The second plumber came, installed the valve, everything's fine.
*psi is a lovely acronym in that it could also be spelled ψ.
posted afternoon of March 24th, 2008: Respond
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Hm. Well, I turned the main water supply off last night. Turned it on this morning, and the pressure relief valve is not leaking. I'm not sure what to make of that -- it could mean the problem was a transitory surplus of pressure in the main line; or it could (more likely, I think) mean giving the valve a chance to rest made it stop leaking, which probably means the leak will come back after a little while. I don't want to call a plumber and have him come over here while there is no leak, I don't think that would be useful. So, deputizing Ellen to check on the pipe through the day (assuming it is still not leaking at 8:30, when I go to work -- otherwise I will take a personal day and interact with plumbers.)
 ...Aaand, we're dripping! A very slow drip right now, I'm assuming it will get worse as the day goes on. I have called the heating company and the plumber should be here later this morning.
posted morning of March 24th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
So I've been having this idea, one which I've posted about here several times, that the most important part of my experience of reading Pamuk is a conscious identification of myself with the author and with the narrators. Now I've also posted in the past about how I love singing along with the music I listen to. Hmm -- singing along is a kind of identification with the singer, right? I wonder... I also wonder whether my identification-with-the-author idea is already ground well trodden among people who think professionally about novels. Reckon I have probably alienated most of the people I could ask about that.
posted evening of March 23rd, 2008: 2 responses
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Aargh... Some water is dripping out of a pipe next to the combination boiler/water heater in our basement. It is not dripping out super-fast, but probably a few cups every hour, which is a lot in the scheme of things that is our plumbing. The pipe appears to be the output of the water heater portion of the mechanism; as near as I can tell it is a pressure relief valve, described in detail on this page; the likely candidates for causing the leak are - That the valve itself is broken (but this seems unlikely since a new valve was probably put in when the boiler was replaced a few years ago);
- that the water pressure regulator* attached to the main water line coming into our house is broken (this seems more plausible);
- that the main water supply pressure for our block has really unusually high pressure today (possible I guess?); or
- that something done during our bathroom renovation broke the system somehow (seems likely and unnerving, except I can't see any logical way that would work -- the water pressure is an input to the system not at all dependent on the devices attached to the system when they are all shut off.)
It is definitely pressure -- if I turn on a hot water tap upstairs, the leak stops. (Should check whether a cold water tap has this effect, but I think it will.) Of course we cannot get a plumber on Easter Sunday; I guess I will shut off the water coming into the house this evening before we go to bed, and turn it back on in the morning.
 ... Yes, the cold water tap has the same effect. The leak seems to be getting faster, too! Hopefully it will be a simple repair; we'll find out tomorrow, I guess. I'm glad we're doing a lot in the basement these days; I think there have been periods like late last year, where this would have gone undetected for a couple of days.
*(The next day: we don't actually have a water pressure regulator, which is the source of the problem, in combination with the third bullet point above. I was assuming there was one since the linked article made it look like this was standard.)
posted evening of March 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
Another jarring moment of recognition in The Black Book -- in the story Galip is telling in chapter 15, about a Turkish bachelor who obsessively loves Proust, he says, "like all Turks who come to love Western authors that no one else reads, he went from loving Proust's words to believing that he himself had written them." I'm a little blown away by this identity-with-the-author thing that I've come up with to describe my experience reading Pamuk -- it is very much Pamuk's own trope; but it seems to me I started talking about it before I had happened on Pamuk's use of it. This probably means he is describing a universal experience -- and thinking back now that I've constructed this way of relating to the book, I can see how it applies to some reading I've done in the past -- the coincidence just seems pretty shocking to me, that I would hit on it to talk about this particular author, whose work turns out to contain it.
I am a little curious about whether each of the alternate chapters which is a column by Celâl, is the column which is printed on the day of the following chapter. This would mean that each of the narrative chapters takes place a day after the previous one, which I'm not sure that would work. ... And indeed it does not work: Chapter 17 takes place immediately after Chapter 15. Oh well, another hypothesis down the drain.
posted evening of March 22nd, 2008: Respond
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Friday, March 21st, 2008
No need to read Ibn Khaldun; those charged with this task would quickly guess that the only way forward was to rip away our memories, our past, our history, leaving us with nothing but our misfortunes.... But later on, the Western bloc's "humanitarian wing" had declared this reckless initiative too dangerous...and switched to a gentler approach that promised longer-lasting results: the new plan was to erode our collective memory with movie music.Church organs, pounding out chords of a fearful symmetry, women as beautiful as icons, the hymnlike repetition of images, and those arresting scenes sparkling with drinks, weapons, airplanes, designer clothes -- put all these together and it was clear that the movie method proved far more radical and effective than anything missionaries had attempted in Africa and Latin America. (These long sentences of his were well-rehearsed, Galip decided. Who else had had to hear them, his neighbors? His colleagues at work? His mother-in-law? The people sitting next to him in a dolmuş?) It was in the Şehzadebaşı and Beyoğlu movie theaters that they set their plan into action; before long, hundreds of people had gone utterly blind. Viewers who sensed the terrible plot that was being perpetrated on them and rebelled with angry cries were quickly silenced by policemen and mad doctors. When the children of today showed a similar reaction -- when they were blinded by the proliferation of new images -- they were fobbed off with new prescription glasses. But there were always a few who refused to go away quietly. A while ago, he'd been walking through another neighborhood not far from here around midnight when he'd seen a sixteen-year-old boy pumping futile bullets into a movie billboard -- and immediately he'd understood why. Another time, he'd seen a man at the entrance to a theater with two cans of gasoline swinging from his hands; as the bouncers roughed him up, he kept demanding that they give him his eyes back -- yes, the eyes that could see the old images.... We'd all been blinded, every last one of us, every last one...
(Want to write about this quotation in a minute, but I am being called away by Sylvia to read Pippi Longstocking just at the moment. Back in a little while.)
A few observations: Rüya's ex-husband's (I believe he has not been named, though a few of his aliases surfaced in a previous chapter) sort of anti-semitic rant weaves uncertainly between weird craziness and poetry -- reminds me in a way of the Islamicists in Snow. Galip's parenthetical aside is just masterful. (There is a similar aside a few paragraphs later where Galip describes the man as "sinking into the pages of his encyclopedic metaphor".) I like the coincidence here with Blindness -- I wouldn't necessarily give it a whole lot of weight but I think this passage might be a good one to have in mind when rereading Saramago. Also -- not sure if this is valid but I see vaguely a reflection of the remarks that Jeremiah Wright is being pilloried for these days.
posted evening of March 21st, 2008: Respond
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