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Saturday, June 19th, 2010
To be immortal is banal -- except for man, every creature is immortal, not knowing of death. The divine, the terrible, the incomprehensible, is to know oneself to be immortal.
Bryan Nelson's post at Mother Nature Network on the 10 animals with the longest life spans has some beautiful photography, including this magnificently anthropomorphic* picture of turritopsis nutricula, believed to be the only animal with no natural limit to its lifespan. (Thanks for the link, John!)
 Related in only the very most tenuous and impressionistic manner, Katy Butler's piece in this mornings New York Times Magazine on dealing with her father's dementia and unnaturally prolonged death, and with a medical establishment devoted unreflectively to such prolongation, sent a chill down my spine. To be, like Ms. Butler's mother, "continent and lucid to [one's] end," seems to me a fine thing, a fate I will hope for for myself and those I love, a fate I will try to work for.
*(or "cyclopomorphic" I guess -- a grimacing Cyclops with a frizzy beard.)
posted morning of June 19th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, June 18th, 2010
 Saramago is the Portuguese name of the wild radish Raphanus raphanistrum. José Saramago's family name was de Sousa, but when he was born his birth certificate was mistakenly inscribed with his father's nickname. His parents were illiterate and did not discover the error until José enrolled in school.
Life is like a candle burning; when it comes to the end it blazes brightly before it goes out. I believe that I'm now in the period of blazing before I go out. I can see very clearly that I will not go on living much longer. Now I'm in a phase where if I believe that I can carry out some task and that I can do it well, I want to do it. After it all stops and my books remain, I think they will continue to be read.
(quoted in Francesc Relea's article on the national weekend of mourning in Portugal.)
 (Take a look at the slide show included in the El PaÃs obituary; it features some extravagantly beautiful pictures.)
posted afternoon of June 18th, 2010: 5 responses
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José Saramago, 87 years old, died early this afternoon, at home in Lanzarote. This man and his voice will be missed.
posted morning of June 18th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, June 17th, 2010
I've gotten a little bogged down in the translation process for Réquiem -- I thought I would try writing out some summary data as a way of helping myself get a handle on the story: Slavko (to be precise, his narrator Felipe; having no information to the contrary I am identifying the author pretty closely with the narrator) discovers on June 14, 1986 (he is 16 years old, like I was that year) a strange power: by stealing a book from the shop of his family's friend Fernández and reading the book, he can cause the book's author to perish. The first to go is Borges (as you can see from the date) -- you have to be able to forgive this as an accident, after all he could not have known beforehand what his theft would entail -- and a few days later a local author, a young dentist whose name is never given named BenjamÃn Castro; Felipe stole his book of poetry seeking to confirm whether Borges' death had been his fault. Then in awe of his power, he does not exercise it for several years. But one thing leads to another...
Slavko kills Bioy Casares, by stealing a copy of Morel's Invention on March 8th, 1999. This precipitates the end of his relationship with Susana M (who he believes was already interested in the faculty dean anyways).
The next to go is José Ãngel Valente, on July 18th, 2000, after Felipe steals a collection of his poetry. Here we see Felipe going off the deep end -- he embarks on a career of murdering authors just before he publishes an essay about the author -- Juan José Arreola dies on December 3, 2001; Arturo Úslar Pietri (February 26, 2001), Camilo José Cela (January 17, 2002), "and the majority of the authors whom we've seen disappear in the last few years" (not clear on the precise date of the story -- it was published in Piedepágina in 2008 but may well have been written, and set, a few years before that) -- people begin to notice the sequence of coincidences, the head of his department eventually calls him out. The ending is a nice twist that I don't want to give away...
This story interests me a bit by the way it draws on and amplifies the theme of the recent Latin American issue of Zoetrope (which is where I found out about Zupcic), the passing of an older generation of Latin American authors and the coming into their own of new authors with new voices and styles.
posted afternoon of June 17th, 2010: 2 responses
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Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
 A few years old, but new for me: in September 2004, R. Crumb and Jerry Zolten produced a one-hour show on Penn State's wpsu-fm, spinning and chattering and nit-picking Crumb's collection of old blues and gospel records. Lots of great music and talk.
I haven't been able to find the mp3 of the show online anywhere but prx.org -- I'm not sure what the nature of that site is, they make you sign up for a free account if you want to listen, it seems benign enough though... Track listing below the fold.
Track listing:
- Cecil Scott and his Bright Boys, "Lawd Lawd" -- played over the title announcement
- "Texas & Pacific Blues" by Frenchy's String Band. The melody I know from "Richland Woman Blues".
- Macon Ed and Tampa Joe (a fiddler who might be Peg Leg Howell -- happy coincidence that yesterday's shuffle has Howell on it), "Warm Wipe Stomp"
- Eddie Head and his family, "Down on Me"
- Rev. J.C. Burnett & congregation, "I’ll Stand & Wring My Hands & Cry"
- The Need More Band (Bobby Leecan and Robert Cooksey), "Washboard Cut Out"
- "Humming Blues" -- ukulele blues by Red-Onion Joe (Joe Linthecome)
- Lottie Kimbrough, "Rolling Log Blues" (with one or both of the Pruitt Twins on guitar)
- Louie Lasky, "How Do You Want Your Rolling Done?"
- Cheikha Tetma -- did not catch the song title
- Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Walk Right In"
- Geeshie Wiley, "Last Kind Word Blues"
- Mississippi Jook Band, "Skippy Whippy" -- played over closing announcements
↻...done
posted evening of June 16th, 2010: 2 responses
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On this date in 1904...
posted morning of June 16th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
(Hoping the posting of random playlists does not wear on my readers' patience...) Tonight's shuffle went very nicely indeed:
- "Cryin' Holy Unto the Lord", The Charles River Valley Boys
- "Dead Cats on the Line", Vassar Clements (This is originally by Tampa Red.)
- Dialog of patter between Robyn and Grant Lee, about "the rubber thing". At the end of this interlude, Robyn counts in "1, 2, 3, 4--" to the next song they are going to play, and the playlist moves to
- "The Dozen" by Big Bill Broonzy, in exactly the rhythm and tempo that Robyn had counted out. This is one of the most pleasant things that has happened to my ears all day.
- "Señor Blues", Taj Mahal
- "A Globe of Frogs" -- live performance, off of Give it to the Thoth Boys
- "Beaver Slide Rag", Peg Leg Howell and his Gang
- "The Truth", Kimberley Rew -- shades of "The Man With the Lightbulb Head"!
- "Grooving on an Inner Plane"
- "I'm Thinking Tonight of my Blue Eyes", the Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band with Mother Maybelle.
posted evening of June 15th, 2010: 4 responses
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The anniversary of Borges' death just passed -- got me thinking of a couple of things, principally that I should get back to my translation of Réquiem by Slavko Zupcic (in which Zupcic "accidentally" kills Borges); and also about which Borges fictions would be the best ones to start out with for a new reader. (This thanks to a Facebook post of Matt Dickerson's, in which he suggested "The Library of Babel" as a starting point.)I was thinking there might be a good argument for starting off with any of:
- "Tlön, Ukbar, Orbis Tertius" -- Donald Taylor mentioned in that thread that he had not yet read the story of "The Library of Babel" but he appreciated the puzzle of it -- I think Tlön and Babel and the other stories in Garden of Forking Paths (part I of Ficciones) are a great starting point if you are primarily interested (or even "strongly interested") in the intellectual-puzzles aspect of Borges' work.
- "Funes, His Memory" -- this was the first thing I thought of, because I had read it quite recently and been really taken with the quality of Borges' voice and of his narrative. This is the first story in Artifices, which is part II of Ficciones and postdates part I by three years. Drawing of character is much stronger here than in any of his earlier stories.
- "The Immortal" -- This is the first story in The Aleph, published 5 years after Ficciones. A wonderful, wonderful story and a good introduction to the role of time and of infinity in Borges' fictions.
In the end I would probably go with "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" just because having it be one's first taste of Borges seems like a sort of canonical experience among people I know who like his work. But probably would suggest that my interlocutor skip ahead to some later work next instead of reading straight through The Garden of Forking Paths. Certainly I would recommend either starting with the translations in Collected Fictions or with those in Labyrinths.
 (Of course I am hoping the person I am recommending these stories to will feel moved to read much more of his work -- these three stories seem sort of like good vehicles for figuring out if you are interested in reading more, I don't by any means think that these three stories in isolation would be particularly enlightening.)
posted evening of June 15th, 2010: 4 responses
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Monday, June 14th, 2010
John and I had a great practice session last night, recorded a bunch of practice takes of tunes -- including a new take of "The Ballad of Hollis Brown", which I have put into the Hitchcock-heavy mix in place of the messy old take of that song. (And the mix is no longer "random"... oh well...) Big news is, our band has a name now! We are Mountain Station, named after the train station near my house. (As John said, cool -- now all we need is a banjo player and a bass...) Here are some other cuts from the practice last night:
posted morning of June 14th, 2010: 2 responses
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Sunday, June 13th, 2010
Two more pieces from Bocas del tiempo:
One Body
Leaning on their white walking sticks, buoyed up by a slug of booze, they made their way somehow or other through the streets of Tlaquepaque.
It looked like they were on the brink of falling over, but no: when she stumbled, he held her up; when he staggered, she straightened him out. The two walked together; the two sang together. They always stopped in the same place, in the shadow of the gate, and sang in their broken voices, old Mexican airs of love and of war. They were playing some instrument, maybe a guitar, I can't remember, it helped them stay near the key. Between songs, they would shake the dish where they were collecting coins from the respectable public.
Later on they left. Their walking sticks in front of them, they passed through the crowd under the sun and lost themselves in the distance, ragged and torn, arm in arm, supporting each other in the torrent of the world.
The Kiss
 Antonio PujÃa chose at random one of the blocks of Carrara marble which he had collected over the course of the years.
It was a tombstone. It had come from some grave, who knows from where; he had not the slightest idea of how it had come to his workshop.
Antonio lay the stone on a stand, and went to work on it. He had some rough idea of what he would sculpt; or perhaps he had none. He began by wiping clean the inscription: a man's name, his year of birth, the year of his passing.
Next, his chisel bit into the marble. Antonio found a surprise, what he had been hoping to find inside the stone: a vein in the shape of two faces touching one another, like two profiles touching at the foreheads, nose touching nose, lips touching lips.
The sculptor obeyed the stone. He went on excavating, gradually, until he completed the relief contained in that stone.
The next day, his work was done. And then when he raised the sculpture up, he saw what he had not seen previously. On the back of the stone was a second inscription: A woman's name, her year of birth, the year of her passing.
posted evening of June 13th, 2010: Respond
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