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Saturday, February 20th, 2010
 ...A nice title to pick up when the weather outside is so cold... But it does not look from the first few pages like it is intended as a low-key beach read.
How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat-question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty, suppurating wound. Agenbite of inwit*.
'I see the Defense Force is up to its old tricks again,' he remarks to his father. 'In Botswana this time.' But his father is too wary to rise to the bait. When his father picks up the newspaper, he takes care to skip straight to the sports pages, missing out the politics -- the politics and the killings.
His father has nothing but disdain for the continent to the north of them. Buffoons is the word he uses to dismiss the leaders of African states: petty tyrants who can barely spell their own names, chauffeured from one banquet to another in their Rolls-Royces, wearing Ruritanian uniforms festooned with medals they have awarded themselves. Africa: a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons lording it over them.
'They broke into a house in Francistown** and killed everyone,' he presses on nonetheless. 'Executed them. Including the children. Look. Read the report. It's on the front page.'
His father shrugs. His father can find no form of words spacious enough to cover his distaste for, on the one hand, thugs who slaughter defenceless women and children and, on the other, terrorists who wage war from havens across the border. He resolves the problem by immersing himself in the cricket scores. As a response to a moral dilemma it is feeble; yet is his own response -- fits of rage and despair -- any better?
This is the first of Coetzee's books that I've read to address directly the question of living in South Africa under Apartheid. Interesting -- this passage in particular sounded to me like it could apply very well to our own times as well:
Their talk of saving civilization, he now tends to think, has never been anything but a bluff. Behind a smokescreen of patriotism they are at this very moment sitting and calculating how long they can keep the show running (the mines, the factories) before they will need to pack their bags, shred any incriminating documents, and fly off to Zürich or Monaco or San Diego, where under the name of holding companies with names like Algro Trading or Handfast Securities they years ago bought themselves villas and apartments as insurance against the day of reckoning (dies iræ, dies illa).
You can read the beginning of Summertime at The NY Review of Books website.
 * Interesting: ayenbite of inwyt is mediæval Kentish dialect for "prick of conscience" -- it is the title of a 1340 translation (which Clara Thomson described as the work of "a very incompetent translator") of a French treatise on Christian morality; full text here. ** I don't know if Coetzee is referring to particular historical incident here.
posted morning of February 20th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, February 18th, 2010
The river of my village does not make one think of anything.
Whoever is on its banks is only on its banks.
My dad sent along a link to a cool new bike path in Lisbon, painted with the words of Fernando Pessoa/Alberto Caeiro's ode to the Tagus. You can follow Vimeo user Abilio Vieira as he pedals the length of the poem. Here is Richard Zenith's translation:
The Tagus is more beautiful than the river that flows through my village,
But the Tagus is not more beautiful than the river that flows through my village
Because the Tagus is not the river that flows through my village.
The Tagus has enormous ships,
And for those who see in everything that which isn't there
Its waters are still sailed
By the memory of the carracks.
The Tagus descends from Spain
And crosses Portugal to pour into the sea.
Everyone knows this.
But few know what the river of my village is called
And where it goes to
And where it comes from.
And so, because it belongs to fewer people,
The river of my village is freer and larger.
The Tagus leads to the world.
Beyond the Tagus there is America
And the fortune of those who find it.
No one ever thought about what's beyond
The river of my village.
The river of my village doesn't make one think of anything.
Whoever is next to it is simply next to it.
I'm a little bit puzzled by one thing: The direction Mr. Vieira is riding is obviously the intended direction for reading the poem; if you were going the other way the words would be backwards and it would be difficult to read. But traveling in this direction, one sees the stanzas of the poem in reverse order, (sort of) as if one were reading up from the bottom of the page -- the order of lines within stanzas is preserved. I wonder what the thinking behind this was. Also, why the mirror-image "s" in "O Tejo desce de Espanha"? Just carelessness?
 Update: Mr. Vieira has a blog entry about the bike path. it is the ciclovia do Tejo, running 7 km from Belém to Cais do Sodré along the northern bank of the Tagus. ...I'm finding myself fascinated by this coincidence: The Portuguese which Mr. Zenith translates as "Whoever is next to it is simply next to it" is "Quem está ao pé dele está só ao pé dele" -- the repeated pédele pédele seems just like the perfect text for a bike path...
posted evening of February 18th, 2010: Respond
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Via Keith Lango, a fascinating chase sequence from Dutch studio il Luster Producties:
posted evening of February 18th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle spread its wings?)...
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice
Hm. Time for Lent...(Speaking of Eliot: Sybil Vane at Bitch, Ph.D. links to a LOLcatz take on The Waste Land...)
posted evening of February 17th, 2010: 2 responses
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Monday, February 15th, 2010
Something I really enjoy with learning traditional fiddle tunes, is figuring out which ones of them go together and creating medleys. Usually the impetus for this to happen comes when I'm playing one song and accidentally fall into a different tune, then I work out how I can make that transition happen on purpose. Here are two medleys I've been working on a lot recently: "The Road to Lisdoonvarna"/"Drowsy Maggie" (a little interesting because the two songs, while in the same key, have markedly different rhythm), and "The Red-Haired Boy"/"Bill Cheetham" (which seem like they might as well be actually the same song, they have so much in common).
posted afternoon of February 15th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, February 13th, 2010
 Nearing the end of La Sombra del Viento... I'm getting really agitated about the identity of the being who calls himself Lain Coubert. For a long time I was thinking this was Jorge Aldaya, consumed utterly by his hatred for Carax -- and that's still my fallback assumption; but Carax killed Aldaya in Paris, according to Nuria Monfort's narrative. So either Ruiz Zafón is going to need to explain how Monfort got it wrong, Aldaya/Coubert survived and returned to Barcelona and somehow sustained himself for the next 20 years... Or he will need to bring the supernatural into the story in a more immediate way than it has been -- I mean there have been a lot of ghosts in the book but it has not seemed like a "ghost story" in quite the way it would if Coubert is in fact a supernatural presence. Possibly I am overthinking this.
 (Ooh -- or another possibility just occurred to me as of p. 395, one which would be a pretty fantastic twist if it were to come to pass...)
posted afternoon of February 13th, 2010: 1 response
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 Yesterday was a day full of sights and sounds.
Jeremy E. came to town! We made a plan to spend Friday in the City -- talking about it Thursday night, we were thinking: It's probably going to be really cold and unpleasant out; Jer E. coming from California did not really bring suitable winter clothing; let's do something inside like go to the Brooklyn Museum... But plans change. When we got off the train in Penn Station, and went up onto the sidewalk, we noticed that it was a fantastically beautiful day -- not bitterly cold, and with the unique quality of light that you get on a cloudless day in New York when the sun is relatively low in the sky. So we decided to walk around some... We ended up walking close to ten miles, down to the East Village, around and about the Lower East Side, across to Brooklyn, around and about Williamsburg. The city was our museum.
posted morning of February 13th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, February 11th, 2010
 So YepRoc has no plans to release Propellor Time in the U.S., in physical or digital format. That's no good! If you are on FaceBook (and it makes a difference to you), go join the FaceBook group Persuade YepRoc to release Propellor Time stateside. That'll show 'em!
posted evening of February 11th, 2010: 3 responses
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Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
 If it's Wednesday, it must be time for another post from Christopher Higgs! Mr. Higgs does not disappoint; along with other great visuals we get a link to Kate Westerholt's gallery of cross-stitch samplers. Funny stuff...
posted evening of February 10th, 2010: 2 responses
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Lordy, I thought that was the prettiest sweepingest music that I ever heard. I wanted to holler and jump up and down I just couldn't sit still on that log bench when that tune started snaking around the school house. I let out a yell and leapt off that bench and commenced to dance and clog around and everybody was hollering and laughing and every time he touched the bow to them strings hell would break loose in that school house.
Found a treasure trove today; at folkstreams.net is a huge library of documentaries about... well about folkways; but a great number of them, running into what looks like hundreds of hours, are about American folk music. Learn about the Dallas of Blind Lemon Jefferson in Alan Governar's film Deep Ellum Blues. Listen to Peg-Leg Sam Jackson, one of the last medicine show performers, in Tom Davenport's Born for Hard Luck. Alan Lomax travels through the southern Appalachians, filming dulcimer players, banjo pickers, guitarists, fiddlers and more in Appalachian Journey:
The whole thing is great -- even the last 15 minutes or so, which I found a little gratingly kitschy, has some great music in it. Especially wanted to point out the fiddling of Tommy Jarrell about 20 minutes in. Jarrell is a new star in my firmament, a new sound for me to aspire to.
posted evening of February 10th, 2010: Respond
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