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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
I've been thinking about asemic writing over the past few weeks, and I was happy to notice this passage (which I had forgotten completely) when I was rereading "The Immortal" this morning:
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Quienes hayan leÃdo con atención el relato de mis trabajos, recordarán que un hombre de la tribu me siguió como un perro podrÃa seguirme, hasta la sombra irregular de los muros. Cuando salà del último sótano, lo encontré en la boca de la caverna. Estaba tirado en la arena, donde trazaba torpemente y borraba una hilera de signos, que eran como letras de los sueños, que uno está a punto de entender y luego se juntan. Al principio, creà que se trataba de una escritura bárbara; después vi que es absurdo imaginar que hombres que no llegaron a la palabra lleguen a la escritura. Además, ninguna de las formas era igual a otra, lo cual excluÃa o alejaba la posibilidad de que fueran simbólicas. El hombre las trazaba, las miraba y las corregÃa. | |
Those who have been reading my story attentively, will remember that a member of the tribe had followed me -- like a dog might follow me -- up to the formless shadow of the walls. When I emerged from the final cellar, I found him in the mouth of the cave. He was stretched out on the sand, where he was languidly tracing and erasing a row of symbols like the letters in a dream, letters which one is on the verge of understanding when they flow together. At first I thought it was some kind of barbarian alphabet; but then I saw how absurd it was, to imagine that men who had never arrived at the spoken word would get to writing. Furthermore, none of the shapes was the same as any other; that excluded, or rendered unlikely, the possibility that they were symbolic. The man was drawing them, then examining them and updating them.
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I've been thinking about asemic writing as a path to expressive, semantic writing, and I'm happy to think about this Immortal (who will be revealed in a few pages to be Homer) languidly tracing and correcting his asemic symbols, contemplating the possibility of communication.
posted evening of May 26th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, May 24th, 2010
Ellen and I had dinner Saturday at an extremely promising new restaurant, Munchie's on Irvington Ave. and Ward Pl. Main dishes are standard Jamaican fare, oxtail, escovitch, various forms of stewed and jerk and curried meat. We had the very good curry goat and the less-good (pretty dry and not flavorful) jerk chicken. What really stood out about the meal for me was the excellent quality of the side dishes -- rice and peas, steamed cabbage, mango salad -- they were just great and kept us there and interested in every bite. Definitely recommend giving this place a try! Although maybe don't order the jerk chicken. Also they are open for breakfast. I hope they last -- I got the sense from being there that the proprietors are really into what they are doing. It is great to have Caribbean food back in town after the closing of the lamented Trinidadian place on First St.
posted evening of May 24th, 2010: 2 responses
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Sunday, May 23rd, 2010
Breyten Breytenbach is blowing me away with the depth of his insight and the eloquent rhythm of his elocution in his Intimate Stranger. It is a prose work, or something like a prose work -- I'm sort of tempted to call it poetry written in really long lines which look like paragraphs... Here he is explaining some of the difference between poetry and prose:
...Poetry is a precise and tactile tongue, even though it can be called ‘universal’ because it always speaks poetry; irrespective of the language it inhabits or hides in. “Poetry is my mother tongue.” (Yang Liang)
Visual art is a language with its own alphabet. Music is a language replete with intent and with meaning and yet without words. These and other forms of artistic expression are the primary or original languages. They differ from our everyday working verbal tools -- philosophy, science, theology, sociology and politics -- in that they're not dependent on a consensus of lexical or contextual meaning. The languages of creativeness certainly also mean (they may even make sense and sentences), but the meaning is carried by the totality of means at their disposal: color, texture, echo, absense, shape, etc. They are both non-elusive and endlessly allusive.
Every sentence of this slim book contains a vast structure of meaning and I'm having to back up and reread a lot as I take it in... What do you do with a sentence like "What's left is the ash of the poet's craft which will be remembered embers to be recalled and read like runes and stones and bones still smoldering in the streets of wind and water, so beautiful and so bleak." -- other than admire it, run your tongue over the words, repeat it to yourself as you stare off into the distance? This is the first work of Breytenbach's I've read -- previously I had only heard of him from Coetzee's Summertime. I'm in love with his authorial voice, at least in this work where he is speaking directly to me the Reader -- "fishing for memory in time"; "inventing consciousness"; he says the working title was On the Art of Being Intimate with Strangers, and I certainly get the impression that he is being intimate with me. I wonder what his poetry is like, if I will be able to get the same feeling from work that is not explicitly addressing me.
posted morning of May 23rd, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
How exciting! On the occasion of my birthday Saramago has posted a  cryptic and tantalizing note on his blog (which he has retitled "Saramago's Other Notebooks"):
Aside from the conversations of women, it is dreams that sustain our world in its orbit...
The piece is a quotation from Balthasar and Blimunda... I don't know why he picked today to post it but it fits in nicely with my frame of mind today. So I will consider this (until proven otherwise) my birthday gift from Mr. Saramago.
posted morning of May 18th, 2010: Respond
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 So I your host begin my fifth decade this morning. A lot has happened for Ellen and me during my fourth decade: Sylvia came to be a part of our family; we moved from Queens to South Orange, and bought our house; I changed jobs a couple of times; Sylvia grew older; I started playing violin; we made lots of new friends and lost contact with some old friends; Sylvia grew older... A big thing for me in my fourth decade had been the establishment of this blog. (Thanks for reading it!)
I'm sort of taken aback by what a long time ten years is. (Let alone forty years! I can't even begin to grasp that duration of time. And yet I have lived it.) Looking forward to lots happening in the next ten...
posted morning of May 18th, 2010: 3 responses
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Monday, May 17th, 2010
 National Geographic has developed a pretty cool technology called MyShot, which (among other things?) turns photos into infinite mosaics -- the photo is "infinite" because at every level of zoom a mosaic is constructed with a static set of component images. Neat! (Though I wish you could pan, and that the zooming was smoother/bidirectional.)
A doggy mosaic below the fold. (On some browsers anyway -- let me know if it does not show up on yours.)
posted evening of May 17th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, May 16th, 2010
I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-going people were short of money about that time, or were short of faith and preferred cork jackets, I don't know; all I know is, that there was but one solitary bidding, and that was from an attorney connected with the bill-broking business, who offered two pounds in cash, and the balance in sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher bargain. Consequently the advertisement was withdrawn, at a dead loss—for as to sherry, my poor dear mother's own sherry was on the
market then—and ten years afterwards the caul was put up in a raffle down in our part of the country, to fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend five shillings. I was present myself, and I remember to have felt quite uncomfortable and confused, at a part of myself being disposed of in that way. The caul was won, I recollect, by an old lady with a hand-basket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it the stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence, and twopence half penny short—as it took an immense time and a great waste of arithmetic, to endeavor without any effect to prove to her. It is a fact which will be long remembered as remarkable down there, that she was never drowned, but died triumphantly in bed, at ninety-two. I have understood that it was, to the last, her proudest boast, that she never had been on the water in her life, except upon a bridge; and that over her tea (to which she was extremely partial) she, to the last, expressed her indignation at the impiety of mariners and others, who had the presumption to go "meandering" about the world. It was in vain to represent to her that some conveniences, tea perhaps included, resulted from this objectionable practice. She always returned, with greater emphasis and with an instinctive knowledge of the strength of her objection, "Let us have no meandering."
Not to meander myself, at present, I will go back to my birth. -- David Copperfield What an amazing passage! I love the humor and the (positively Shandean) self-referentiality, I love the information about a superstition I knew nothing of, but most of all I just love the rhythm and flow of the text. I was reading this passage to Sylvia earlier (the reading Dickens with Sylvia plan is going into effect, she was pretty into it for a couple of pages and then lost interest -- dunno how far we will get) and thinking, out loud is the absolute best way to read this book. Listening to it is nice too, as I was finding with Bleak House, but listening to a person is way better than listening to a tape.
posted afternoon of May 16th, 2010: Respond
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Trying to do something with the violin by itself -- no voice, no guitar. Here's what I came up with:
It almost works, I think -- there are places where it is a little hard to follow the melody without lyrics but they are short in duration, the song comes back quickly.
posted afternoon of May 16th, 2010: 2 responses
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posted afternoon of May 16th, 2010: Respond
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posted afternoon of May 16th, 2010: Respond
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