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Thursday, January 29th, 2009
Sergio Chejfec turned out not to be the highlight of the evening. His work -- the portion of it that is excerpted in BOMB -- is lovely and introspective; but because it is introspective it did not lend itself to being read aloud. You want room for your mind to wander while you're reading it. My favorite thing I heard this evening was the poetry of Nicanor Parra, read by his translator Liz Werner from the recent book Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great. For instance, from the poem "Something Like That": THE TRUE PROBLEM of philosophy
is who does the dishes
nothing otherworldly
God
the truth
the passage of time
absolutely
but first, who does the dishes
whoever wants to do them, go ahead
see ya later, alligator
and we're right back to being enemies Also very nice to listen to was Lina Meruana's short story "Ay" -- she writes a flowing, engaging narrative that pulled me in. She only read the first half of the story but it was enough to make me want to read the rest of it on the train coming home. Raúl Zurita was also there, reading some oddly dream-like poems about the coup of 1973 and about Akira Kurosawa; he has one of the most pleasant reading voices I've ever heard -- it was almost hard to get past the immediate sensory delight of listening to him speak, to get at the content of the poems. Zurita also has a piece in this issue of BOMB about Nicanor Parra, sort of bringing me full circle.
posted evening of January 29th, 2009: Respond
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I'm looking forward to hearing Sergio Chejfec reading this evening, and hope to buy a copy of his book. And I just found out, he is blogging, and has been since 2006! His blog is Parábola Anterior -- mostly in Spanish, the top article AOTW is translated into English by Margaret Carson (who translated My Two Worlds and will be at the event tonight). At LanguageHat's site, I asked how his name is pronounced; Bill Walderman notes that the name is the Polish spelling of Heifetz.
posted afternoon of January 29th, 2009: Respond
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Here is the structure of blues as I hear it:
| 2 bars melody, I I or I IV | | X bars fill |
| 2 bars melody, IV IV | | X bars fill |
| 2 bars melody, V I | | X - 1 bars fill, 1 bar turnaround |
I usually expect X = 2, a 12-bar pattern. (The fill is usually all I chord, turnaround is V.) I can picture a slow 15-bar blues with X = 3 -- I may have played this on occasion, not sure. I was really surprised when listening to Mountain Blues & Ballads, to hear Gene Autry's "Black Bottom Blues" -- something just seemed wrong about it and I couldn't figure out what. Come to realize, it's a 9-bar blues -- X is 1! I didn't even know that was possible! A-and later in the same collection, a fiddle blues called "Tipple Blues" (not sure just now, who the artist is -- this is essentially the same melody as "Deep Elem Blues") which unless I'm mistaken, is 10 bars -- X is 2 on the first line, 1 subsequently. So cool, the form is a lot more versatile than I had realized.
 (And funny, the thing is I'm pretty sure if I covered "Black Bottom Blues", I would play 2 bars of fill -- that's etched deeply on my brane as the correct amount.)
posted morning of January 29th, 2009: 2 responses
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Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
I commented at The Great Whatsit today that I was not finding the second and third books of the His Dark Materials series quite as  overwhelmingly great as I found the first. But as of the reading I did with Sylvia tonight -- chapter 2 of The Amber Spyglass -- I want to take that back, and just say the middle book is a lull between two masterpieces. The beauty of the narrative here is just enough to take my breath away. I am realizing that these books could be made into a truly fantastic series of movies if only the studios were not so attached to live action and CGI -- I think they are a perfect match for anime (or maybe I mean "for Studio Ghibli", which is about the sum total of my exposure to anime). Reading about Will talking to Balthamos and Baruch, especially the fight against Metatron, was bringing visions of Spirited Away flickering across my mind. Metatron is even a perfect name for an anime bad guy! I also noticed a couple of coincidences of imagery with Cien Años de Soledad, which I take as a very good sign -- I am absorbing enough of the book even without knowing the language well, for it to be on my mind when I'm not reading it. When the narrator noted that Will's knife could cut between worlds but could not "abolish distance within worlds," I immediately flashed on Melquíades' statement that "la ciencia ha eliminado las distancias"; and when Will's boots were sinking into the soft sand in the hot, humid new world, my mind jumped to "aquel paraíso de humedad y silencio,... donde las botas se hundían en pozos de aceite humeante..."
posted evening of January 28th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
 So I found this disc, Sabrina's Holiday, in amongst a bunch of other music I haven't listened to in a long time. It's beautiful! And I have no memory of where I got it, no memory of having listened to it before.
I contacted Rique Prince, the band's fiddler, and he said "Oh wow, one of the old hand-stamped copies of our disk!" -- they have in the mean time released a commercial pressing and recorded a second album, I Thought You Knew. Check 'em out! They have several videos up on YouTube.
Also found this web site: Black String Revival is a documentary featuring the Ebony Hillbillies and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The site does not look like it's been updated in a year or so; I have no idea whether the project is ongoing. Either way, there are some useful links on the site. The filmmaker is John Whitehead of Fretless Films, looks like he has some other interesting projects in the works as well. Update: Mr. Whitehead says the project is a labor of love, still in production and he is hoping to begin screening it this spring. Fingers crossed!
posted evening of January 27th, 2009: 2 responses
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As long as I'm posting some nice visuals:
Hermano Cerdo links today to Olivier Kugler's site -- I'd never heard of Kugler but I'm a fan now. The image above is from Kugler's travel diary documenting a (circuitous) trip from the Shetlands to Cuba; and there's a whole lot of other stuff too.
posted evening of January 27th, 2009: Respond
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A spectacular view, from Maui:
 Daily astronomy pictures from NASA. (Thanks for the link, Dad!)
posted evening of January 27th, 2009: Respond
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Finalists for 3%'s 2008 awards are announced today for fiction and poetry. The fiction list includes a couple of books that are on my reading list, nice; and I'm glad to see Death with Interruptions did not make the list -- it seemed out of place on the long list. Interesting stuff in poetry too.
posted morning of January 27th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, January 26th, 2009
David Goldblatt writes in last Sunday's Times an account of picking up the pieces after his widowed father was stabbed to death in 2001. The paperwork first arrived in plastic sacks, and putting it into some kind of order had helped. It felt like an act of salvage. That was the easy bit; then it stopped helping. My partner, Sarah, said: "Are you sure you want to open the boxes? You know what happens when you open the boxes... and... I just wonder if it's helping any more."
Goldblatt's story of sorting and reading through his father's papers is really gripping and gave me a feeling of intimacy with both the father and the son. Well worth the reading. (Link via the Apostropher.)
posted evening of January 26th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, January 25th, 2009
Tonight Sylvia and I started in on the final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. Just at the outset I noticed Mrs. Coulter's monkey dæmon doing two things that I hadn't seen other characters' dæmons doing before this. One is eating; when the monkey is introduced on the second page, he is picking apart pinecones to get the sweet nuts. Dæmons have never been shown yet eating; I was sort of assuming that as spiritual beings (or as expressions of their humans' spirits) they did not need to. The other is acting as a sort of babelfish -- when Ama tries to speak to Mrs. Coulter in her own (unspecified but not fully understood by Coulter) language, Mrs. Coulter instead has Ama's dæmon speak to the monkey, and there is no linguistic barrier to this kind of communication. So, huh. These are two pretty big deals, especially the second, and I wonder why neither one has come up in the trilogy to date. The language thing would be one (incomplete) way of answering the question I asked earlier about communication in this world. But if dæmons can do that, why are there language barriers at all? Possibly (a) only the golden monkey can do this -- he has repeatedly been characterized as different from other dæmons -- or (b) only Mrs. Coulter knows that dæmons can do this.
posted evening of January 25th, 2009: Respond
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