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Sunday, June 21st, 2009
My initial reaction to part 2 of Life and Times of Michael K was to feel kind of let down at the change in narrative perspective -- it seemed kind of like if the the next section after Benjy's narrative in The Sound and the Fury had been told a clinician attempting to diagnose Benjy... But I warmed to it pretty quickly. It is not Michael's story, this section of the novel is the doctor's story; I could express it as a criticism of Coetzee, that he is only telling one person's story at a time, not allowing his characters to interact -- but I think this sort of solitude is part of the fabric of the universe he has built here. As the section goes on, Coetzee seems more and more comfortable in the doctor's consciousness. This passage, from just after they've found that Michael has absconded, is full of rigor and insight and beauty:
It occurred to me that if I followed after him, proceeding down the avenue in a straight line, I could be at the beach by two o'clock. Was there any reason, I asked myself, why order and discipline should not crumble today rather than tomorrow or next month or next year? What would yield the greater benefit to mankind: if I spent the afternoon taking stock in my dispensary, or if I went to the beach and took off my clothes and lay in my underpants absorbing the benign spring sun, watching the children frolic in the water, later buying an ice-cream from the kiosk on the parking lot, if the kiosk is still there? What did Noël ultimately achieve labouring at his desk to balance the bodies out against the bodies in? Would he not be better off taking a nap? Maybe the universal sum of happiness would be increased if we declared this afternoon a holiday and went down to the beach, commandant, doctor, chaplain, PT instructors, guards, dog-handlers all together with the six hard cases from the detention block, leaving behind the concussion case to look after things. Perhaps we might meet some girls. For what reason were we waging the war, after all, but to augment the sum of happiness in the universe? Or was I misremembering, was that another war I was thinking of?
 Also in this section we get (from Noël) the first mention of any concrete dates -- he is 60 years old, and he was a child "in the 1930's" -- this seems to confirm my idea that the novel is set around 1980. And again from Noël, the first mention of race in the novel, in a context that I am having a lot of trouble making any sense of: In response to the doctor's question of why they are fighting the war, he says "We are fighting this war so that minorities will have a say in their destinies." So first off, does "minorities" mean "non-white people" in South African usage? I had figured that was an American idiom -- it certainly doesn't make sense in South Africa where Boers are less than 10% of the population. And what would it mean for someone working for the South African army in 1980 to say that? I'm just confused here.
posted afternoon of June 21st, 2009: 5 responses
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Saturday, June 20th, 2009
Between this reason and the truth that he would never announce himself, however, lay a gap wider than the distance separating him from the firelight. Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong.
What a startlingly elegant description of bad faith!One thing that is puzzling me a bit about this novel (halfway through) is the complete absense of race. I would have thought race and racial tension would be important factors in South Africa of the mid-to-late 20th Century; but so far there has been absolutely no mention of it, everything is class tension among characters whose race is not mentioned but I don't see how it could be other than white. I'm not quite sure what to make of this; one idea is that apartheid means the white characters have no interaction with blacks -- though my understanding was that blacks were transported from the "homelands" into white areas to work -- another possibility is that I'm reading this wrong, and the setting is not historical South Africa but a hypothetical, allegorical location.
posted evening of June 20th, 2009: Respond
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I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see. Two aircraft streaked across the sky from south to north leaving vapour trails that slowly faded, and a noise like waves.
This passage -- like many others in this book -- is beautiful for the way it combines impressionistic rendering of the scene with terse, probing investigation of what is happening behind the scene. "Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep" communicates a mood that I know, puts me right in Michael's head, and does it with optimal efficiency, not a word wasted. Michael's meditation about silence and vastness is interrupted by his wondering by what right the owner's of the land possess this silence -- and the narrator moves outside him, above him, into the broader scene.Coetzee's epigraph for the book sounds oddly familiar, I'm sure I've heard it quoted elsewhere: "War is the father of all and king of all. Some he shows as gods, others as men. Some he makes slaves, and others free." -- Or possibly I am thinking of some other similar quotation; I think this aphorism is composed in the style of some classical writer, but I'm not sure who...
Update: the epigraph is from a fragmentary writing of Heraclitus, quoted by Hippolytus in Refutatio â…¨.
posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: Respond
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OK, this is the post for my list of things I would love to receive as presents. Not necessarily directed at you, don't feel like I'm asking you to give me gifts -- it's more a tool for my own use, since now and then someone will ask me what I want for a birthday or similar, and it will have slipped my mind that I really wanted to own John Wesley Harding "A Bloody Show" or whatever. OTOH if you are already looking to give me a gift, well here are some things I've been thinking about.
- DVD's of John Wesley Harding "A Bloody Show" and "Wisconsin Death Trip" (or also, the book Wisconsin Death Trip.)
- León Ferrari: Obra 1976-2008 and the catalog from the Tangled Alphabets show.
- Any box sets from JSP Records.
- The book La España Negra by José Gutiérrez Solana, and/or a collection of prints of his paintings.
- The DVD of Dirt Road to Psychedelia.
- Borges Laberintos DruÄmelić -- short stories by Borges illustrated with paintings by DruÄmelić.
- Portable USB Turntable
- A Humument by Tom Phillips
- Purgatorio, illustrated by DalÃ
That's all for now, more later as I think of them... I will store this post on my "Reading list" thread due to its list-y nature.
posted afternoon of June 20th, 2009: Respond
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 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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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
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Friday, June 19th, 2009
Martha's latest work is up on YouTube: Catchy!
posted evening of June 19th, 2009: Respond
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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
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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At Orbis Quintus, paledave 
B. Dilly had to 
Runnin' Scared 