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Friday, October 7th, 2011
 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
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Thursday, October 6th, 2011
 Cluster of prisms seen from HobokenThis 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
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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
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Wednesday, October 5th, 2011
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:
- Running to Stand Still, medley into Arms of Love
- Meet Me in the Morning
- 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
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Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
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
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 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
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Monday, October third, 2011
"The Spiral" is the twelfth and last story in the original Cosmicomics collection, the book Calvino published in 1965. Qfwfq has fallen in love again; this time his avatar is a proto-gastropod somewhere in the Cambrian period, with radial symmetry but with no eyes to observe his own form or that of his beloved. "Form? I didn't have any; that is, I didn't know I had one, or rather, I didn't know you could have one." But one thing leads to another as he imagines, in his eternal darkness, the millions of other suitors who must be vying for her hand, and to distinguish himself begins to secrete a shell... But my error lay in thinking that sight would also come to us, that is to me and to her. ...I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: that the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others. Qfwfq's predicament here is cute, and funny; but what really interests me about this story is the short meditative interlude in between his decision to grow a shell and his realization that it will do him no æsthetic good -- Calvino pulls the camera way back and still speaking in Qfwfq's voice, walks through long lists of the ways that beauty manifests in our world, a Dutch girl lying on the beach, a swarm of bees following its queen, coal smoke puffing from a locomotive, histories of Herodotus and tracts of Spinoza... and states clearly that all this beauty is foretold in the first mollusc's shell. When I summarize it this way I'm not entirely sure I buy it -- but in the story it rings crystal clear.
posted evening of October third, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, October second, 2011
John came over tonight and we had some fun playing songs we did not know... It was a change from our practice routine because John had left our songbook in Andrea's car, so we did not have words and music written out, so we just jammed on a bunch of songs that we have not played before. Highlights included "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" (which I find incredibly fun to sing but do not have much of a fiddle part to), "Harvest Moon" (which turns out to be really easy to come up with a fiddle part for), "When the Ship Comes In" (fast, with lots of instrumentals -- not sure what song the instrumentals were from but they seemed to fit ok), "Banks of the Ohio" (dedicated to Martha -- again, a lot of fun to sing, not sure what I should do instrumentally), "Rolling in my Sweet Baby's Arms," "Frankie and Johnny." Also, "Long Black Veil," and a medley of "Odds and Ends" into "Johnny 99." The fixed fiddle sounded all right. It was going out of tune more than usual, which I put down to the new strings; the tone is clear and even and the volume is there. An irritating buzz I had noticed in recent weeks is gone -- not sure if that had anything to do with the bridge.
posted evening of October second, 2011: Respond
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Well... that modification I made to my fiddle's bridge last month did not work out so well, as it turns out. Some notes on what came of it and what I think my mistakes were. What I did was to take a small amount of material off the top of the bridge to lessen the vertical pressure on the bridge so that it would not buckle. However, I was not thinking about how the tension of the strings has to remain constant (assuming they are to be in tune, which is desirable); so relieving the vertical pressure on the bridge would put additional horizontal pressure on the tailpiece.  After a couple of weeks I noticed that it was getting difficult to keep my violin in tune; "difficult" soon became "impossible" and I had to sit down and figure out what was going on. Some examination of the instrument made it clear that the tailpiece was no longer fixed stably to the body. So I got a chance to learn about how tailpieces are connected to violins: There is a little piece of vinyl cord called a tail gut, with threaded connectors on each end, that go into holes in the end of the tailpiece. On a traditional violin this cord loops around the end pin; on my Stroh fiddle as you can see to the left, it loops around a bolt in the violin body (usually covered by a metal attachment for the chin rest). Tail guts are cheap, which is useful as I went through a couple before figuring out that the problem was the bridge... Now I have a brand-spanking new bridge (manufactured by Aubert, courtesy of Menzel Violins -- not expensive and vastly better than the bridge that came with the fiddle) and everything is looking shipshape. I'll be jamming with Mountain Station this afternoon and see how it sounds... A few things I learned about my violin: - I need to pay attention to the way the strings are wrapped on the pegs. I sort of knew this as an abstract rule but had not really been following it.
- The bridge is not bilaterally symmetrical. The bass side is higher than the treble side, and putting it on the violin backwards is a mistake.
- It's important to keep the bridge perpendicular to the body of the violin. It has a tendency to lean forward as you tighten the strings, and you need to correct for this.
posted morning of October second, 2011: 1 response
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Saturday, October first, 2011
 From a presentation of Qfwfq at Teatro Bergidum, León (Autumn 2006)
That day I was running through a kind of amphitheatre of porous, spongy rocks, all pierced with arches beyond which other arches opened; a very uneven terrain where the absence of colour was streaked by distinguishable concave shadows. And among the pillars of these colourless arches I saw a kind of colourless flash running swiftly, disappearing, then reappearing further on: two flattened glows that appeared and disappeared abruptly; I still hadn't realized what they were, but I was already in love and running, in pursuit of the eyes of Ayl.
I had forgotten from my previous read of Cosmicomics, what a sweet, lovable character the narrator Qfwfq is -- my memory of him was as a pretty abstract, cold presence. I take from this that my reading a decade and a half ago was less concerned with characters, with identification, and more principally so with the language and logic games that I remember well from the previous read.
 (A note on rereading Calvino -- it is a pleasure to find that in his note "Why Read the Classics?", Calvino says that "classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, “I am rereading…†and never “I am reading…â€")
posted afternoon of October first, 2011: Respond
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