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Happy together (Sept. 8, 2001)

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Jeremy's journal

Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled -- the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool -- the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.

Gary Shteyngart


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Sunday, October 9th, 2011

🦋 Post it

John Kenn's stunning Post-it Monsters blog is coming out as a book: it will be available next month.

posted morning of October 9th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Pretty Pictures

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

🦋 Road Trip

Ellen and I watched The Stone Raft (2002) tonight. A good, solid movie and a faithful adaptation of the book. It did not give me the sense of being in the presence of genius, as the book did; but then it also did not take weeks to watch. There is a lot of beauty in the movie and I would certainly recommend it. This book was half road trip/buddy story/love story, half weird unresolvable meandering about the metaphysical/​metahistorical status of Spain and Portugal; the team that turned it into a movie made the wise choice to focus on the more filmable aspects of the book. And the dog! What a sweet dog!

posted evening of October 8th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about The Stone Raft

🦋 Odense Harbor

It is a leap backward that we take from 1830 to 1810. We are in Odense, that old city, which takes its name from Odin.

The common people there have still a legend about the origin of the name of the city. Upon Næsbyhoved's Hill there once stood a castle; here lived King Odin and his wife: Odense city was not then in existence, but the first building of it was then begun. The court was undecided as to the name which should be given to the city. After long indecision it was at last agreed that the first word which either King or Queen should speak the next morning should be the name given to it. In the early morning the Queen awoke and looked out from her window over the wood. The first house in the city was erected to the roof, and the builders had hung up a great garland, glittering with tinsel, upon the rooftree. "Odin, see!" exclaimed the Queen; and thenceforward the city was called Odensee, which name, since then, has been changed by daily speech to Odense.

O.T.: A Danish Romance
Hans Christian Andersen

Jens Galschiøt will today be sinking his statue of Hans Christian Andersen into the harbor at Odense, Andersen's home town, to become covered with barnacles and seaweed, to watch the ships come and go and to "keep an eye on the mermaids." If you're in Denmark, it sounds like a great time -- go drink some funeral beer with Galschiøt and watch his creation disappear beneath the waves.

posted morning of October 8th, 2011: 1 response
➳ More posts about Readings

🦋 Each second is a universe.

I'd like to quote at length a paragraph from "t zero," below the fold -- so we can observe and appreciate and meditate upon the crystalline beauty of the writing and of the ideas, you and I, and so that I can briefly mount one of my favorite hobby horses.

posted morning of October 8th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Cosmicomics

Friday, October 7th, 2011

🦋 Frozen instant


Cluster of prisms, rising into the sunset

The last section of Time and the Hunter, "t zero" is a great relief after the frenzied anxiety of "More of Qfwfq" and the dizzying (for me insuperable) complexity of "Priscilla." The calm voice of the narrator from the first volume is back. He wants to talk about duration here -- how events follow one another in their stream, what a slice of that stream might look like if it could be frozen in place. Less attention is paid here to character and plot -- indeed the stories in this section read more like essays than like works of fiction.

posted evening of October 7th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Italo Calvino

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

🦋 Mitosis, Meiosis, Death


Cluster of prisms seen from Hoboken

This trilogy of stories makes up the middle section of Time and the Hunter -- exploring Qfwfq's relationship with his beloved Priscilla through the eyes of the trillions of cells which make up their multicellular beings. I am finding these stories pretty difficult to process -- there is a hint of beauty and insight lurking in the text but the shrill verbosity of it is keeping me from finding any clarity. Some exceptional passages to be sure. Take for instance Qfwfq's deterministic understanding of his passions and desires as serving the needs of his cells --

This is how we live, not free, surrounded by freedom, driven, acted on by this constant wave which is the combination of the possible cases and which passes through those points of space and time in which the range of pasts is joined to the range of futures.... The ancient tide rises at intervals in me and in Priscilla following the course of the moon...
And the scene at the end of "Meiosis," the two of them as camels, is utterly fantastic.

posted evening of October 6th, 2011: Respond

🦋 Because, through his condensed, transluscent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.

The 2011 Nobel prize for literature goes to the poet Tomas Tranströmer.

Men in overalls the same color as earth rise from a ditch.
It's a transitional place, in stalemate, neither country nor city.
Construction cranes on the horizon want to take the big leap,
      but the clocks are against it.
Concrete piping scattered around laps at the light with cold tongues.
Auto-body shops occupy old barns.
Stones throw shadows as sharp as objects on the moon surface.
And these sites keep on getting bigger
like the land bought with Judas' silver: "a potter's field for
       burying strangers."

posted morning of October 6th, 2011: Respond

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

🦋 A nice open mic

The Studio 12 open mic at Tapastry restaurant in Montclair is a great scene -- based on my and John's experience there tonight it is one of the few open mics I've ever been to that I would invite non-musician friends to... A really friendly crowd and a lot of good-to-great music. We played a 15-minute set, a pretty satisfying length of time to be on stage -- our set list:

  1. Running to Stand Still, medley into Arms of Love
  2. Meet Me in the Morning
  3. Drowsy Maggie, medley into Dancing Barefoot
It sounded from on stage like we were doing very well. John taped it on his Zoom, so we'll see how that comes out -- maybe we'll post some clips.

posted evening of October 5th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about Mountain Station

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

🦋 Qfwfq lives in New Jersey

The mood of the four Qfwfq stories in Calvino's second Cosmicomics collection, Time and the Hunter (1968) is quite different -- more frantic, more insistent. There is a strong, extremely dark environmentalist element to these stories. In three of the four, Qfwfq manifests as a modern-day human -- in the previous volume, there were passing, humorous references to modernity but most of the action was focused in the geological (or astronomical) past.

Anyways: it was fun to be reading "Crystals" this morning as I rode NJTransit in to Manhattan and come across Qfwfq's description of taking

the train each morning (I live in New Jersey) to slip into the cluster of prisms I see emerging beyond the Hudson, with its sharp cusps; I spend my days there, going up and down the horizontal and vertical axes that criss-cross that compact solid, or along the obligatory routes that graze its sides and its edges.

posted evening of October 4th, 2011: Respond

🦋 Funny-looking Gary Shteyngart: referrers fun

5 years ago I illustrated a post about The Russian Debutante's Handbook with a funny-looking picture of Gary Shteyngart. Ever since then, I've had a steady trickle of Google hit referrals (why yes, I do check my referrals log rather obsessively; what makes you ask?), one or two nearly every day, looking for the text "funny looking Gary Shteyngart" or some close variation thereon. Always wondered why... He is funny looking to be sure; but --

My curiousity got the better of me today and after a little research I found that Shteyngart wrote a short note about his love-hate relationship with America for Granta 84, under the title "Funny-looking." So, one mystery solved and an entertaining read as well. Take a look -- the full text of the article is readable in Amazon's "Look Inside" feature. I scanned around the web to see if it was reprinted anywhere; the only place I found it was on a white supremacist site where (I guess -- did not really spend very long over there) it was reproduced to demonstrate the degeneracy and sickness of The Jew.

Speaking of Gary Shteyngart: he is giving a reading at Seton Hall next month! That should be fun.

posted evening of October 4th, 2011: Respond
➳ More posts about The Russian Debutante's Handbook

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