READIN

Saturday, March 21st, 2009

🦋 Sweet Like Sugar

So here are two things I read recently and a chain of thought they have prompted:

• I've been reading Patrick Kurp's blog Anecdotal Evidence for the past few days, since Levi Stahl linked to it from his Twitter feed with a pretty beguiling quote about the ghostly presence of books; and yesterday I looked in Kurp's archives to read his first post.

  More than 30 years ago, at a state university in Ohio, I briefly shared a dorm room with a French horn player. ... I entered our room one day and found him sitting in the corner, cackling over one of Shelley's verse dramas and eating confectionary sugar from the box with a long ice tea spoon.

  Well: I'm chuckling as I read this and picturing myself as the roommate; but in the next paragraph I see that Kurp is setting up his former roommate as a representative of the "misuse of books", for which he feels a righteous distaste. Hm: I read the rest of the entry and go about my day, not sure how I feel about this.

• Later on (at another newly discovered blog), I was reading Robyn Hitchcock's notes from the release of Moss Elixir 13 years ago. He had just left A&M, and was dissatisfied with the music he had recorded there; and here is how he expressed that dissatisfaction:

  I always associate the word "production" with some kind of sheen--a sugar buzz patina that has the listener lying on their back, almost licking the record.

This is kind of troubling to me. Much of my relationship to books, to music, to movies is dilettantish -- I consider much of what I write on this blog to be the moral equivalent of cackling over Pamuk's prose while I eat spoonfuls of sugar, of licking the inexhaustible candy coating off of Robyn Hitchcock's music -- having to think about Patrick Kurp (for whose writing and thinking I have a great deal of respect) sitting in judgement of me is bad enough, but thinking about the musician I love taking offense at my manner of loving his work -- well, it gives me pause.

Is dilettantish enjoyment of art worthwhile? Is it reprehensible? Will it interfere with my development into a thoughtful human being? Does it make me a moral monster? I don't have an answer to these questions. My immediate reaction is "no" to all of them -- OTOH much of what I write on this blog seems worthwhile to me, and I would have a really hard time separating out what is "worthwhile" from what is "dilettantish". I was trying to figure out this morning how the sugar-buzz reaction to art could be seen as reprehensible, as morally negative -- all I could come up with was a vague sense that it befouls the intellectual space around the work of art in question, makes it more difficult to respond to the work in a valid way -- but there are tons of unexamined assumptions underlying that vague sense.

So: not sure what to make of this. I am going to muddle on listening to music, reading books, writing my blog, and much of that listening and reading and writing will be done from the standpoint of a dilettante. I hope some worthwhile thought will come out of it.

posted afternoon of March 21st, 2009: 2 responses

🦋 Google News archive

Not sure quite what to make of this but it looks like it might be a very useful tool...

I was Googling™ around for information about Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic after I saw an amusing advertisement for it at cleek's place -- and happened on this page from the St. Petersburg Daily Times of August 30, 1918. A-and apparently, Google has a huge news archive (and/or index into offsite archives) that I didn't know about. I'm not sure how fully built up it is -- but this bodes well for future searching.

posted morning of March 21st, 2009: Respond

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

🦋 The Practical Uses of Discomfort

Robyn Hitchcock speaks with Paul Byrne of Movies.ie about making Rachel Getting Married (which sounds like a whole lot of fun) and about Sex, Food, Death, and Insects.

Byrne: During [Sex, Food, Death, and Insects] you said at one point, "At heart I'm a frightened, angry person -- that's why my stuff isn't totally insubstantial, I'm constantly deep down inside in a kind of rage..." And it made me think, well, here you've got people like Gillian Welch and... Jonathan Demme's a fan... you've been playing music for a long time, The Soft Boys and everything, and I was thinking does that make it easier? Because for a lot of artists, to have some kind of recognition, some outlet, you know, eases the soul a bit, I don't know whether, is it still true that you have that rage in you? I guess you only said it last year so maybe it is still true...

Hitchcock: I haven't had enough therapy to get rid of it completely, you know, just enough to find it... Yeah, everybody is at some level of discomfort. Even the people you mention. And some people are in more pain than others, some people know what to do with their discomfort. You know, I mean I could be playing with my hair, I could be, you know, picking on an E♭ or something like that, I could be smoking except it's illegal to smoke now; there's all these manifestations of what to do with your own dis-ease... For me, I turn it into music, and a lot of other people I know; that's how we metabolize. We breathe in life and we breathe out music; it keeps us sane and it seems to be somehow good for the environment, you know, like plants take in CO₂ and produce oxygen, we take in the anxiety of life and give out music. And I'm very happy to be able to do that.

posted evening of March 19th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 American Character

USA Network has published a lovely book and accompanying web site: Character Project is a journey around the country by 11 photographers (11 journeys actually) documenting the land and the people. Some really striking images. h/t The Wooster Collective.

posted evening of March 19th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Otros libros de Castellanos Moya

By way of Scott Esposito, I see that two more novels of Horacio Castellanos Moya will be published in translation this year: She Devil in the Mirror and Dances With Snakes. Exciting! and searching around for more information about the novels, I notice Dr. Albrecht Buschmann of the Universität Potsdam maintains a fairly extensive site devoted to Castellanos Moya's work: Horacio Castellanos Moya: Hechos, Libros, Temas (bilingual in German and Spanish, with the occasional page translated into English). The site appears to be dedicated to reading his work as a literature of the survivor: "Reading the more important novels of Horacio Castellanos Moya may leave the impression that all of his protagonists are damaged goods... Figures with mutilated identities, deteriorated memories, who interact frequently with a choice between themselves exerting violence or being made into victims of violence, when they try to survive. For this is certainly what they intend to do: survive."

posted evening of March 19th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

At Orbis Quintus today, I found Maureen Freely's new Washington Post piece on translating Pamuk, on trying "to recreate the narrative trance that makes the novel so hypnotic in Turkish." It's a lovely essay, a look into the translator's creative experience -- at the "shadow novelist [who is] present in every translator. Though she must serve the text, she can recreate the author's voice only if she gets so close to the heart of the novel that she can convince herself it briefly answers to hers." (Now I'm just dying to hear from Gün and from Göknar...)

At the same page is an audio clip of a conversation between Freely and the Post's writer-at-large Marie Arana.

posted evening of March 18th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

🦋 Playlist

Thanks Jer for sending me this link! Robyn Hitchcock posted a playlist on Rhapsody a couple of years ago (October '06), which I didn't know about until today. It's got a nice mix of old and new, stuff I know and stuff I've heard of and stuff I have not.

Robyn's Picks

1. "Wang Dang Doodle," by Howlin' Wolf
2. "Say Man," by Bo Diddley
3. "Champagne Supernova," by Oasis
4. "Lucifer Sam," by Pink Floyd
5. "Finest Worksong," by R.E.M.
6. "In Liverpool," by Suzanne Vega
7. "Look At Miss Ohio," by Gillian Welch
8. "Happiness," by Grant Lee Buffalo
9. "Slow Dog," by Belly
10. "God," by John Lennon
11. "The Red Telephone," by Love
12. "Kicks," by Lou Reed
13. "The Lark in the Morning," by Steeleye Span
14. "Station To Station," by David Bowie
15. "To Turn You On," by Roxy Music
16. "Lately I've Let Things Slide," by Nick Lowe

posted evening of March 17th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, March 15th, 2009

🦋 Sad News

Richie Shulberg (aka Citizen Kafka) passed away at home last night. I'm really sorry to hear about this, meeting him always lifted my spirits. Richie is the guy who got me interested in old-time music and bluegrass -- I first met him in the late 90's when he was leading a weekly jam at a bar in Chinatown, and I associate the months I attended this jam session with the beginning of my developing a musical ear and a musical style. Every time I have run into him since then he's asked after my music and my life, and spent some time talking with me -- my memory of him is of somebody who always took an interest. He will be missed.

Here are Richie (in the yellow shirt) and the Wretched Refuse String Band, playing Jalopy in Brooklyn last spring:

posted afternoon of March 15th, 2009: Respond

🦋 The judgement to tell the false from the true

I've been meaning to post this passage from The Amber Spyglass, which I found deeply moving and which I think sums up the entire trilogy in a couple of paragraphs. I don't have much to say about it beyond that, so will just quote. (Note: if you are reading or planning to read the series and do not like spoilers, don't read this entry.) The setting is the world of the dead; Lyra and Will are planning to create an opening which will allow the ghosts of the dead to escape into the world of the living, that they might be annihilated, allowed truly to die.

Long quote below the fold.

posted morning of March 15th, 2009: 5 responses
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🦋 Tolkien's voice

How I come to be reading The Hobbit now: Sylvia and I are pretty close to finishing up The Amber Spyglass now; I was casting about for what book to read next and realized that His Dark Materials is reminding me in some key ways of Tolkien's trilogy. That made me think about how much I had loved The Hobbit as a kid -- if memory serves I loved it much more deeply than the trilogy, it seems like I read The Lord of the Rings less whole-heartedly, with an eye mostly toward keeping up with my D&D-enthusiast friends... Anways -- so I asked Sylvia if she would like to read this next, she said she would (unsurprising -- she's really getting into fantasy novels nowadays), and I thought I would look through it beforehand.

And I'm falling in love all over again. I had forgotten how attractively witty and cultured Tolkien's narrative voice is -- it reminds me a lot of Grahame's voice in The Wind in the Willows. I wonder if this is true of the trilogy as well -- I expect it is, and suddenly I'm looking forward to rereading those books, and thinking I might get a lot more out of them than I did back in my childhood.

posted morning of March 15th, 2009: 4 responses
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