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Monday, July 5th, 2010
Honestly. Blu's animated grafittis just keep getting better, more powerful, more beautiful. Today via The Wooster Collective I see he has (they have?) a new piece, Big Bang Big Boom — a "short unscientific story about evolution and his consequences":
  Update: Also, Blu's first book is in the stores (well, at least one store). You can get Blu 2004-2007 from Studiocromie, 24 €. (And of course the shipping -- outside of Europe you will pay 25 € to have the book sent to you. Inside Europe it is 19 €, still quite steep.) The World's Best Ever takes a look inside; and more photos at ekosystem.org.
posted afternoon of July 5th, 2010: Respond
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In two or three pieces in Alma del suburbio, Carriego approached the epic; others were closer to  social commentary. In Canción del barrio he crossed from Almafuerte's "sacred cosmic rabble"* to the humble middle class. In this second and final step we will find his most famous (if not his greatest) works of poetry. This journey brought him to what we might without deprecation call a poetry of quotidian misery -- a poetry of sick-beds, of failure, of time running in its course, wearing us down and sapping our will to live; a poetry of the family, of affections, of daily habits, even of gossip. It is worthy of note that tango would evolve along the same lines.
-- Borges, foreword to Versos de Carriego
Here are Carlos Gavito and Marsela Duran, tangoing to Eduardo Rovira's "A Evaristo Carriego." The orchestra is the Boston Pops.
 * (or "omnipresent sacred rabble" maybe? di Giovanni renders it "cosmic holy rabble".)
posted morning of July 5th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, July 4th, 2010
At the opening of "Juan Muraña" (the fifth story in Brodie's Report), Borges refers back to a biography of Evaristo Carriego which he wrote in 1930 (and which I see was translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in 1984*) -- his old classmate Trápani mentions the book by way of asking what Borges knows of "malevos," a word which I am not finding  in the dictionary but which Hurley translates as "fighters and thugs and underworld types." ("Gangsters" seems like it might work just as well...)
I took the opportunity to have a look at Borges' foreword to Versos de Carriego, a selection which he edited in 1964** -- it is giving me another bit of nuance about the Argentine literary tradition Borges is coming out of. Previously I had been thinking the knife fighting in his Argentine stories was a reference to gauchesca literature, the literature of the pampas; but in this foreword he writes, Esteban EcheverrÃa was the first chronicler of the pampas; Evaristo Carriego, it appears, was the first chronicler of the arrabales [suburban slums around Buenos Aires].
There is knife fighting in gauchesca literature, but the knife fighting in the stories in Brodie's Report all takes place in the slums around Buenos Aires; the reference here is not to gauchos but to malevos.Below the fold, a little more from the foreword, which makes Carriego's work sound fairly important to the evolution of Argentine literature. Carriego's complete works are online at Proyecto Biblioteca Digital Argentina.
From the foreword:
Carriego could not have carried out his works without the enormous freedom of vocabulary, of theme and of meter which Modernism granted to the literatures of the Spanish tongue, both on this side and on the other side of the ocean; but the Modernism which was his stimulus was also his enemy. A good portion of Heretic Masses is given over to involuntary parody of DarÃo and of Herrera. But beyond these pages, and beyond the rest, the discovery (let's call it that) of our suburbs is the most valuable contribution of Carriego.
And
I know little of his political inclinations -- a likely guess is that he was vaguely, eloquently an anarchist. [which cf Borges' statements about his own politics in the foreword to Brodie's Report.]... He worked ceaselessly, driven by the soft mania of the tubercular. ... He died twenty-nine years of age, at the same age and of the same disease as John Keats. Both men had a hunger for fame -- [this last bit I am finding very hard to understand, not sure whether from a language problem or a complexity problem:]
la pasión era lÃcita en aquel tiempo, ajeno todavÃa a las malas artes de la publicidad.
* di Giovanni wrote an essay on "Evaristo Carriego: Borges as Biographer," which one can read in part at Google Books.
** (Also included in Prologos is a foreword to Roberto Godel's Birth by Fire -- In "Juan Muraña," Borges mentions that Godel was in school with him and Trápani.)
↻...done
posted evening of July 4th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, July second, 2010
 Michael Gakuran blogs his visit to Hashima Island, an abandoned coal mining town off the west coast of Japan. Lots of beautiful photography -- this picture reminds me very strongly of My Neighbor Totoro, for some reason.
posted morning of July second, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, July first, 2010
Thanks to a note at The Wooster Collective, I see that Hampton Beach, NH held its annual sand-castle competition last week; pictures of the winning sculptures are up at hamptonbeach.org. My favorite is Marielle Heesels' entry, "Drowning in Love": Bonus readin Family Album content below the fold.
 As it turns out, we were in Hampton Beach once, about 8 years back. In July, 2002 I took a chair-building class at Mike Dunbar's Windsor Institute, just down the road from there in Hampton. One of the earliest pictures from our family album, Sylvia on the beach mugging for the camera:
↻...done
posted afternoon of July first, 2010: Respond
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| Estaba compilando, me dijo, una copiosa antologÃa de la obra de Baruch Spinoza aligerada de todo ese aparato euclidiano que traba la lectura y que da la fantástica teorÃa un rigor ilusorio. | | Fischbein was putting together, as he told me, a collection of the work of Baruch Spinoza, shorn of this whole Euclidian business which hinders the reading experience and which lends the bizarre theory some rigor, some illusory rigor. |
The first page of "Unworthy" has me scurrying to find out a little more about Spinoza, bizarre theories lent an illusory rigor by a Rube Goldberg Euclidian apparatus sounds like just my cuppa tea... I spend a little time looking at his Short Treatise on God, Man and Human Welfare and am finding it... strange. Not "difficult to parse," which has often been my experience reading philosophy, but just wrong-headed. Statements like "So since man has an idea of God it is clear that God must exist formally" have me scratching my head and wondering what Spinoza makes of unicorns and leprechauns, and flying spaghetti monsters... Statements like "Since Nothing can have no attributes, the All must have all attributes" have me shaking my head and muttering that that does not follow, all your capitalization and italics will not make it follow. All this head-scratching and head-shaking and muttering is making it hard to get anywhere with the text. (It was fun to find out, though, that I can nearly read Dutch -- if I squint just right and have the translation to hand -- I had never thought to look much at Dutch before but the description I've heard of it as being halfway between German and English seems just about right.)
 Joseph B. Yesselman maintains a hypertext library of Spinoza's works translated into English. It seems like his Ethics and possibly Tractatus Theologico-Politicus are where I should look for Euclidean apparati.
posted morning of July first, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
John came over today; we played almost exclusively new songs, songs that we've played at most once or twice before, plus the two songs we'll be playing on Thursday at the open mic. Before he came over, I had been working on a tune that was in my head, without being able to figure out what it was -- turns out what I was thinking of was the chorus of "Frim Fram Sauce"; but not knowing that we just played through it together a couple of times, and came up with a bridge. Might be nice to learn the lyrics and try that one out. Other songs we played:
"Frim Fram Sauce" below the fold.
The melody I was working on and trying to remember more fully this evening: "Frim Fram Sauce" as (masterfully) performed by Diana Krall:
↻...done
posted evening of June 29th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, June 27th, 2010
were the de facto theme of tonight's jam with Bob, Janis and Greg. Two songs I had been thinking about this afternoon before I went over there, were They're Red Hot (by Robert Johnson but I'm not sure precisely whose version I am thinking about -- don't think the Dead ever played this song) and "Simple Gifts", a Shaker hymn. As it turned out we tried a couple of verses of "They're Red Hot" and decided to try it again after listening to it more, and Janis and me played a few verses of "Simple Gifts". The playlist:
- "The Deal" started us off with a Grateful Dead sound -- after that we tried "Simple Gifts" and entirely too-slow-if-one-does-not-have-an-organ performance of "Amazing Grace", then back to the Dead/New Riders to speed things up a little.
- "Panama Red"
- "Glendale Train"
- "Rollin' in my Sweet Baby's Arms"
- "Oh Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz" -- I sang this, but I do not really have the range needed.
- "They're Red Hot"
- "Summertime" -- this was great, slow with lots of solos...
- "Harder They Come" -- I never played this before, it was a lot of fun.
- A few false starts in a row, including "I Shall Be Released"*, "Red Rubber Ball", "My Baby Wrote me a Letter" and "Whiskey Bar"
- "C'est la Vie"
* It would be more than worthwhile to learn "Harder They Come" and "I Shall Be Released", so that we could jam from one into the other -- these two songs go together really nicely.
posted evening of June 27th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, June 26th, 2010
In the interest of drawing connections between unrelated texts... This passage from "Unworthy":
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La imagen que tenemos de la ciudad siempre es algo acrónica. El café ha degenerado en bar; el zaguán que nos dejaba entrever los patios y la parra es ahora un borroso corredor con un ascensor en el fondo.
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The image which one holds of one's city is always a little anacronistic. This café has deteriorated into a bar; that hallway, the one through which we could make out the patio and the garden, is now a faded corridor with an elevator at the far end.
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deserves to be read in conjunction with this song:
(and well also, the song deserves to be listened to in conjunction with that passage -- they magnify one another, is what I mean.)
Another useful point of reference for this passage, and for this song, is the beginning of "The aleph":
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La candente mañana de febrero en que Beatriz Viterbo murió ..., noté que las carteleras de fierro de la Plaza Constitución habÃan renovado no sé qué aviso de cigarrillos rubios; el hecho me dolió, pues comprendà que el incesante y vasto universo ya se apartaba de ella y que ese cambio era el primero de una serie infinita.
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On the hot February morning when Beatriz Viterbo died ..., I noticed that the iron billboards in Plaza Constitución had been cleared of their advertisement for blonde cigarettes (or whatever it had been)... The matter caused me some pain, when I understood that the vast, incessant universe was detaching itself from her memory; this change would be the first in an infinite series.
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posted afternoon of June 26th, 2010: Respond
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| Esa obra era un escándolo, porque la confusión y la maravilla son operaciónes propias de Dios y no de los hombres. | | This work [the building of a labyrinth in Babylon] caused outrage; for chaos and miracles are acts proper to God, not to mortals. |
-- "The two kings and the two labyrinths",
which Borges attributes to an inauthentic edition of the 1001 Nights.
In the foreword to Brodie's Report, Borges claims to be attempting ("I don't know how successfully") the composition of direct narratives, stories which do not mislead -- the implicit counterpart being that his previous volumes of stories have been labyrinths, mazes for the reader to lose himself in. (He draws a parallel to Kipling's work which I don't fully understand, need to look into that a bit more.) This is an interesting claim and I think it bears some thinking about...One way of treating this foreword is as itself a clever bit of misdirection. I have only read Brodie's Report once, in the course of reading Collected Fictions this Spring, did not blog about it at all; my impression was that the stories in this volume would be, after I read them some more and got comfortable with them, my very favorite of Borges' stories, and that while there was a good deal of potential for the reader to get lost in the mazes of these stories, one would need to pull in the themes and storylines of his earlier fictions to make that happen -- that the stories appeared to be straightforward narrative but contained secondary levels in which the path of plot was not as obvious. I'm embarking on a second read now, to try and confirm some of this and to see how they hold up on rereading. Here is some beautiful prose from the foreword:
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He intentado, no sé con qué fortuna, la redacción de cuentos directos. No me atrevo a afirmar que son sencillos; no hay en la tierra una sola página, una sola palabra que lo sea, ya que todas postulan el universo, cuyo más notorio atributo es la complejidad. Sólo quiero aclarar que no soy, ni he sido jamas, lo que antes se llamaba un fabulista o un predicador de parábolas y ahora un escritor comprometido. No aspiro a ser Esopo.
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I have made an attempt, I don't know how successfully, at the composition of direct narratives. I am not claiming that they are simple; there is not a single page on earth -- a single word -- that is simple; for every word must assume the entire universe, whose most noteworthy attribute is complexity.* I would only like to clarify that I am not -- I have never been -- what was once called a fabulist, a preacher of parables, what is now called an "engaged" author. I have no desire to be Æsop.
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*In this regard, see also "Scripture".
Reading further, he is talking about his political beliefs in a slightly combative way, or perhaps in a resigned tone with a bit of self-justification about it. He says, his writing does not contain his personal political views -- except for once, in the case of the Six Days War -- this almost sounds like a response to (or an anticipation of) people who think he was denied a Nobel prize which he deserved, on the basis of being considered too conservative. The Six Days War thing would be useful to read up on... not finding quickly what writing he's got in mind, though I see a reference to it in this MartÃn Zubieta piece at leedor.com.
posted morning of June 26th, 2010: Respond
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