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If there is a scheme,
perhaps this too is in the scheme,

Charles Reznikoff


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Sunday, September 11th, 2011

🦋 Death and the Maiden

I was thinking of posting some of my own memories from ten years ago; and I was also thinking of posting links to some of the excellent commemorative writing I see elsewhere. But ultimately I find I cannot commit myself either to being a part of the media frenzy around this date or to distancing myself from what was after all an important moment in my life and in the world around me. Instead let's just be quiet and listen to some music.

posted morning of September 11th, 2011: 5 responses
➳ More posts about Music

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

🦋 Identification with Walt Whitman

(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,
Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen'd.)
We had a great time last night watching More or Less I Am -- such a great idea for a show, and put together pretty flawlessly and on a shoestring budget... I was struck throughout the poem (which I have not read since high school, IIRC) by how strongly and explicitly Whitman invites the reader into his head and vice-versa. I kept thinking of how a second-person pastiche might start out,
You celebrate yourself, and sing yourself,
And shall assume what you assume;
For every atom in yourself is yours is me is you.
Interesting... there were a enough spots in the poem where the poet identifies himself with the reader, the act of identification seems to be a primary theme of this poem. I ought to spend some time with it.

posted afternoon of September 10th, 2011: Respond
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Friday, September 9th, 2011

🦋 Collage

Es que la tarea, la tarea del arte es esa, es transformar, digamos, lo que nos ocurre continuamente, transformar todo eso en símbolos, transformarlo en música, transformarlo en algo que pueda perdurar en la memoria de los hombres. Es nuestro deber ese, tenemos que cumplir con él, si no nos sentimos muy desdichados.

--Entrevista a Borges

Ian Ruschel composes a tribute, Buenos Aires: Las Calles de Borges -- via Open Culture, which has a number of intriguing-looking Borges links. (Thanks for the link, Lep!)

posted evening of September 9th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Jorge Luis Borges

Monday, September 5th, 2011

🦋 Tattoo'd

photo by Anton Kusters

I’m in the front seat, riding with Soichiro in his car on his way to Shinjuku. “One cuts off one’s finger to make a point”, Soichiro explains while driving. “Usually to show the sincerity of an apology after doing something wrong.”

“You cut off a single digit of your own finger in a ceremonial way, while facing your boss, and then you present the severed finger on a folded napkin to him. It reinforces the power of your apology. It shows that you’re serious about what you’re saying.”

Somehow, i don’t feel like questioning that.

The BBC's Today in Pictures feature shows some of the exquisite tattoos worn by members of the Yakuza. (Thanks for the link, AWB!)

posted morning of September 5th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Pretty Pictures

🦋 Left Behind

I want to try posting a rough translation of the first canto of Gerbasi's "My Father the Immigrant". The loose rhythm and magical language of the poem are seeming to come across into English pretty naturally.

My father, Juan Batista Gerbasi, whose life inspired this poem, was born in a winemaking region on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy; he died in Canoabo, a tiny Venezuelan village hidden away in the wilderness in Estado Carabobo.
We come from the night; and into the night we go.
We leave behind the earth, enveloped in her vapors;
the dwelling place of almond grove, of child and of leopard.
And leave behind our days: lakes, snowstorms, reindeer,
dour volcanoes, enchanted forests
where the blue shadows of fear live.
And leave behind the graves beneath the cypress,
lonely like the grief of distant stars.
And leave behind our glories, torches blown out by secular gusts.
And leave behind our doors, muttering darkly in the wind.
And leave behind our anguish in celestial mirrors.
And time we'll leave behind, time with man's drama:
Progenitor of life, progenitor of death.
Time, which raises up and wears down columns,
Which murmurs from the ocean's multitude.
And leave behind the light which bathes the mountains,
which bathes our children's parks, our altars white.
But also the night with its mournful cities,
quotidian night, no longer even night,
that brief respite, trembling with lightning bugs,
or passing through our souls in savage strokes.
Night which falls again against the light,
awakening the flowers in moody valleys,
remaking the waters' lap among the mountains,
launching horses into clear blue streams;
meanwhile eternity, gleaming golden,
makes its silent way through heavenly fields.

posted morning of September 5th, 2011: 2 responses
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Sunday, September 4th, 2011

🦋 Coffee Margarita

So ever since I tried A Softer World's delicious Black Mischief, I have been playing around with putting coffee in my cocktails; I like the taste and caffeine content alters the intoxication in a pleasant way. Today I think I found a winner, though I'm sorry not to be able to come up with a clever name for it à la Emily Horne. (If you've got any ideas, please suggest them in comments!)

The idea is simple enough; it is essentially a margarita with coffee in place of lime juice, and with a smaller proportion of Triple Sec than you would put in a lime juice margarita (because coffee is not sour). So you fill your glass halfway with iced coffee, add some ice, then a (generous) shot of tequila and a few drops of Triple Sec. A slice of lime is optional; I tried it with and without and it tasted good either way, but somehow the lime seems appropriate. This is a good drink to linger over; the first time I tried it I drank it too fast, because the flavor was so nice, and got inappropriately soused.

posted evening of September 4th, 2011: 1 response
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🦋 Immigrant Father

The epigraph to Zupcic's collection Dragi Sol* is from Vicente Gerbasi's poem My Father the Immigrant:

¿Qué fuego de tiniebla, qué círculo de trueno,
cayó sobre tu frente cuando viste esta tierra?


What fire of darkness, what circle of thunder,
Fell over your visage when you beheld this land?
(making no claims for the quality of that translation/transliteration; I have not read the rest of the poem yet so I don't have any context) -- Gerbasi, a key figure of Venezuelan poetry in the 20th Century, was a son of Italian immigrants; Zupcic's father is an immigrant from Croatia. Several of the stories in this collection are told from the point of view of a Venezuelan named Vinko Spolovtiva, concerning his (absent) Croatian father.

* Dragi is Croatian for "Dear", the salutation at the top of a letter. The story "Letters toward writing a novel" consists in part of letters written by Zlatica Didic to his siblings, and his son, narrating, comments, "There is a word which opens most of the letters: Dragi. According to Bozidar, who translated them, this means something like "dearest". I decided not to translate it: it has a sweet sound, a nice sound. Nigmar thinks it looks like a sunstone -- that seems right to me."

posted afternoon of September 4th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Epigraphs

Saturday, September third, 2011

🦋 Official memory, family memory

One of the most arresting passages in Feeding on Dreams -- and one which incidentally made me think of Saramago's All the Names -- is this distinction between official, archival memory in the First World and in Latin America:

Languages are built on shared silences, assumptions never spelled out in dictionaries, what we omit, fail to explain, because we're often unaware that an explanation might be required to clarify what we mean. One day, Dorothée, a student at the University of Amsterdam who had been translating an article of mine about Chile's Disappeared for a local paper, came with a question. "There," she said, jabbing her finger at a paragraph. "Hay una contradicción."

I could find nothing wrong with the offending phrase, no contradiction. It claimed that dictators want to sweep people from the minds of humanity, store them in an archive in order to forget them. "That's the word that doesn't work," Dorothée insisted, pointing to the Spanish word archivar, meaning to classify a document in an archive. For her, when you officially put something away, you're consigning it to memory, making it retrievable. If the State, el Estado, wanted to obliterate opponents, as in Chile with the Desaparecidos, she said, then it would obviously take them out of the archives. As a Dutch citizen, she expected public servants to preserve an agreed-upon past, which existed as irrefutably as the dams that kept the sea at bay. Whereas for most Latin Americans anything filed in a public archive is secreted by an adversarial and shadowy State that you should never trust, anything filed away is on the incessant verge of oblivion.

Memory is important throughout this book, shading into and conflicting with nostalgia, being lost and refound and disputed and defended; in one of the diary entries from Dorfman's 1990 return to Chile which make up the core of the book, a MAPU comrade of his is telling about a reunion dinner with his Pinochetista parents —

...His mother noticed that he was dragging his left foot slightly as he shuffled towards the living room. "What happened to you, hijo?" she asked. "Did you hurt yourself?"

"You know perfectly well why I'm limping, Mamá. I was tortured, that's why. I'll never walk normally again, you know that."

Tortured? His mother looked at the other members of the family as if to excuse the wayward child and his pranks. Of course the boy hadn't been tortured, hasta cuándo was he going to engage in that sort of political propaganda, let's not dwell on such unpleasant topics...

posted evening of September third, 2011: 1 response
➳ More posts about Feeding on Dreams

🦋 Lutherie

(in which I take a carving chisel to my fiddle and fail to destroy it)
Ever since I got my Stroh fiddle last May, I have felt like the bridge was not quite accurately fitted to the violin, in in two regards. The way it transmits sound to the resonator is via a brass extension -- the bridge rests on the metal, so vibrations from the strings pass into the brass and move the resonator cap. But the brass ledge is not quite as wide as the feet of the bridge; they extend into the air a few millimeters on either side, so some fraction of the sound is being lost. Not a whole lot I can do about that; but furthermore, the bridge was slightly too tall -- when the strings were at full tension it buckled slightly. This meant the feet were not fully in contact with the brass, and sound was being lost that way as well.

So all this year and a half I have been meaning to whittle a little bit of height off the top of the bridge. It seemed like it would be a really easy repair to make; the odds of screwing up were low and in a worst case scenario, I would only need to replace the bridge. Still I felt squeamish about taking a knife to the fiddle... Tonight after a year and a half of procrastinating, I finally did it -- it was quick and easy and the sound post-repair is noticeably cleaner and brighter than before. Nice! As far as the width of the brass, I think to fix that would involve finding a new brass extension of the correct size -- a narrower bridge would be a poor solution. But for now I am quite content with the fix; doing this kind of work on the instrument brings me into closer contact with it and makes it more fully my fiddle.

Update: This did not really work very well. See this post for an analysis of why not, and what I ended up doing.

posted evening of September third, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Fiddling

Thursday, September first, 2011

🦋 Language kidnapped

Ariel Dorfman's saga of exile in Feeding on Dreams is also a saga of language, language lost and rediscovered. Heinrich Böll puts into words the younger man's predicament when the two authors meet in Paris, a few years after the coup in Chile:

What he shared with me was the problem that German writers had faced after the Third Reich. "Hitler contaminated the language," he said. "We could no longer write the word comrade, the words joy and exultation and brotherhood. It was kidnapped, the language itself, by the Nazis. That was the task we could not avoid, that is what you must worry most about. Not allowing them to control the language with which you will tell the story of your times. This is something that needs to be done now, before you overthrow Pinochet. It cannot wait till tomorrow or it may be too late."

posted evening of September first, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Ariel Dorfman

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