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Sunday, May 10th, 2009
(Not today; yesterday -- today the sun is shining.)
Snufkin got a feeling that he wanted to write songs. He waited until he was quite sure of the feeling and one evening he got his mouth-organ from the bottom of his rucksack. In August, somewhere in Moominvalley, he had hit on five bars which would undoubtedly provide a marvellous beginning for a tune. They had come completely naturally as notes do when they have been left in peace. Now the time had come to take them out again and let them become a song about rain.
This is nice: last night I was reading Moominvalley in November with Sylvia, and we came across the passage above. Later on, and without being conscious of the coincidence until this morning, I sat down and finished writing out a song I have had in the back of my mind since two weeks ago (when I first thought of it I wrote down the first two bars) -- I'm tentatively calling it "Rainy Day".
An interesting thing with the key of this piece -- when I started out I was thinking it was in D minor; but then something happened in measure 5. If the three-note run at the end of that measure is D-E-G♮, then the song ends up resolving on D; if it is E-G♮-A, the resolution is on A, and the key is A phrygian. I am not sure what the accidental sharps on C and G are doing to the key. Hoping to record this later on, it's pretty hypnotic (like listening to a heavy rain outside, was the genesis of the working title.)
posted morning of May 10th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, May 9th, 2009
In the Paris Review interview of Pamuk (from 2004):
Pamuk: I was [in Snow] underlining the clerical nature of the novelist as opposed to that of the poet, who has an immensely prestigious tradition in Turkey. To be a poet is a popular and respected thing.... After Western ideas came to Turkey, this legacy was combined with a romantic and modern idea of the poet as a person who burns for truth.... On the other hand, a novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.
Interviewer: Have you ever written poetry?
Pamuk: ...I did when I was eighteen and I published some poems in Turkey, but then I quit. My explanation is that I realized that a poet is someone through whom God is speaking. You have to be possessed by poetry. I tried my hand at poetry, but I realized after some time that God was not speaking to me. I was sorry about this and then I tried to imagine -- if God were speaking through me, what would he be saying? I began to write very meticulously, slowly, trying to figure this out. That is prose writing, fiction writing.
At Orbis Quintus, paledave links to a bunch of other Paris Review interviews.
posted evening of May 9th, 2009: Respond
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I'm very taken with this idea from "Pierre Menard" about total identification with the author. I've written before about striving for that reading fiction and essays, but haven't really thought about it in connection with poetry. But just now I had the thought (while experimenting with FB statusses), Why not try the final bit of Bolañ's "Resurección" in the first person -- substituting myself for "poetry"? I slip into the dream
like a dead diver
into the eye of God (Thanks to Jorge for the structuring of the translation.)
posted evening of May 9th, 2009: Respond
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I'm surprised by how quickly all of the vines in our garden are growing -- every day I go outside and I can see the growth since the previous morning. Must have something to do with all the rain we're getting. So: In front of the house are a climatus and a hyacinth, both planted just last year; on the side of the house are a 3-year-old grape vine, a climatus of about the same age, and a vine I don't know the name of. I'm hammering together a new piece of trellis for the side vines this morning. And when I finish that, maybe I'll work some more on a carving project I gave up on a few months ago! Pictures later...
posted morning of May 9th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, May 7th, 2009
I happened on a nice site today; literatura.us has a good broad selection of short stories, essays and poetry in Spanish. Mostly Latin American, and all the usual suspects -- Cortázar, Borges, Cardenal, Neruda... -- and a lot of other authors that I know and more that I don't. Also there is a limited but well-chosen selection of stories from other languages translated into Spanish; I just about fell over laughing when I read the title of "Un dÃa perfecta para el pez plátano." I don't quite understand what this website is -- it is created by Ramón Paredes, who is a grad student at CUNY and is the author of Marinelly y otros mujeres -- is it just a selection of literature that he finds vital? Whatever, I'm very glad to have found out about it.
posted evening of May 7th, 2009: Respond
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 Congratulations are due to Ellen's class at 1199, which participated in the "Selected Shorts: All Write!" program at Symphony Space today. The way the program was set up, students from all over the city and urban area submitted poems and short stories; the ones that were selected for inclusion were read onstage by professional actors. Afterwards the students all went up onstage to introduce themselves. From Ellen's class, Jeanne Dieng's poem "White" was selected as was the collaborative poem "I Remember, an Homage to Joe Brainard":
I remember having the same outfit as my sister every holiday.
I remember dying my hair light brown and it turned out green.
I remember a 600 pound lady that lived in my building who always paid me to run to the store for her. (I went at least five times a day.)
I remember when my great-aunt drank lemon squash and said, "Ah, that hit the spot!"
I remember that I only had one uniform to go to school. Every Wednesday evening I had to wash it and iron it to wear to school the next day.
I remember when we got our first TV. All the neighborhood kids came over to watch cartoons. It was black and white.
I remember tying my shoe laces for the first time. The bunny ears were my favorite and the easiest to do.
I remember when I got the keys to my first apartment, smelling the fresh wood and pine.
I remember when I was five, walking with my sister to Martin's Park in East Orange (it is called Paul Robeson Stadium now) to ride the merry-go-round.
I remember back home in Haiti at my school every Monday they had inspection. They looked at our nails, shoes, our uniform with a red skirt and white blouse. The blouse had to be clean. It was embarrassing for some.
I remember the cool breeze of August brushing your bare skin.
I remember my first time in America. I came with the expectation of picking money off the ground.
posted evening of May 7th, 2009: 1 response
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the flower of my dream
is red and gold and ocher
evaporating Last night I was at work, trying to craft the perfect search for news articles containing images of flower petals; that is to say, the search which would return every valid hit and no false positives. This was quite tricky but did not seem as impossible as it does to my waking eye. The closing image of the dream was a computer screen; columns of text surrounding a picture of a flower, deep red petals radiating outward from a yellow center. The petals were peeling slowly up off the screen and floating into the æther.
posted morning of May 7th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
I was looking at the beginning of "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" (in Anthony Bonner's translation) this evening and was a bit surprised to find two statments that both appeal to me strongly, and neither of which I have noticed in previous readings. Borges attributes to Menard the opinion that "censuring and praising were sentimental operations which had nothing to do with criticism." (Menard Ârecuerdo declaraba que censurar y alabar son operaciones sentimentales que nada tienen que ver con la crÃtica.) This is a fairly commonplace idea and a useful one; I like the way it is stated here a lot (the adjective "sentimental" is just right), and it seems like there is a mnemonic quality to this formulation. And the narrator says that part of what inspired Menard's project was "that philological fragment of Novalis... which outlines the theme of total identification with a specific author." According to Daniel Balderston (in Out of Context: historical reference and the representation of reality in Borges), the fragment referred to is:
I only show that I have understood an author when I can act in his spirit; when, without diminishing his individuality, I can translate him and transform him in many ways.*
Well this is lovely. Something to chew on and over for a while.
 *EfraÃn Kristal also quotes this line in his Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, as does Daniel Balderston in Menard and His Contemporaries.
posted evening of May 6th, 2009: 1 response
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Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
At the dark doorways
they dinned and hammered;
there was clang of swords
and crash of axes.
The smiths of battle
smote the anvils;
sparked and splintered
spears and helmets.
In they hacked them,
out they hurled them;
bears assailing,
boars defending.
Stones and stairways
streamed and darkened;
day came dimly --
the doors were held.
Speaking of forthcoming books by authors who no longer walk among us: Painterofblue sent along a link to an interview with Christopher Tolkien about his father's book The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, which is coming off the presses today. I had heard that this book would be coming out; what I did not know is that it's an epic poem. This seems extremely daring to me, and it could possibly be great.* It sort of magnifies my perception of how important world-creation and history-creation was to Tolkien; I would not have thought of it but obviously if you're making up the history of a civilization, you've got to give it epic verse.Elizabeth Hand reviews the book for the Washington Post, and says, "Perhaps more than any other single work of Tolkien's, this one provides a direct experience of the fierce intellect and imagination that produced 'the author of the century,' as British scholar T.A. Shippey called him."
 * Thinking a little more about this: in epic verse, the difficulties I had with LOTR would fall away completely (assuming the verse was well done) -- it's no longer an issue whether I can believe the dialog and the motivations, and I'll be able to pay attention exclusively to the imagery and themes -- I liked LOTR best when I was reading this way.
posted evening of May 5th, 2009: 1 response
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 Ellen has a new article up at South Orange Patch, about the house tour she went to on Saturday. Every spring there is a tour of some notable houses in town -- looks like fun!
posted evening of May 5th, 2009: Respond
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This week's New Yorker includes a posthumous short story, 