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Saturday, June 12th, 2010
Nice music for listening to while translating (if that verb is not going too far).
The rare kind of random selection of tunes that makes you think it ought to be saved as a playlist and distributed as a mix tape.
- "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" performed in practice by me and John. I think this would be a really good song to cut a recording of. (edit:) We recorded a better take of Hollis Brown, a medley with "Alabama Bound" -- I have included this in the mix.
- (edit:) I am adding a track here, though it was not in the shuffle, Ray Wylie Hubbard's version of "Choctaw Bingo".
- Weird and entertaining dialog between Robyn Hitchcock and Grant Lee Phillips as part of their Elixirs & Remedies record, about getting Grant a bloody drink.
- A guest appearance by Robyn on Departure Lounge's Win them back (which is almost exactly "Heart of Gold").
- "I'm only you" from Storefront Hitchcock. Ahhh....
- "All around the watertank" by Old and in the Way (song that belongs on the fiddle mix)
- "(A Man's Got to Know His Limitations,) Briggs" from Obliteration Pie
- "Wang Wang Blues" by Fletcher Henderson's orchestra.
- Kim Rew, "The Radio Played 'Good Vibrations'"
- "I Miss You More" by local band 13 Scotland Rd., who are totally deserving of wider attention -- check out their web site.
- Venus 3!!! playing "Red Locust Frenzy".
Files beneath the fold.
 Here are the files: Hitchcock-heavy random 10. Artists represented:
- Me and John (who still need a band name) (Update: We have a name! We are Mountain Station.)
- Robyn Hitchcock in various configurations
- Old and In The Way
- Fletcher Henderson and his orchestra
- Kimberley Rew (who is almost a various configuration of Robyn Hitchcock in my limited understanding)
- 13 Scotland Rd.
- (added) Ray Wiley Hubbard.
Nice! (Realizing that the greatness of this mix tape depends on the listener not minding that almost all of the songs are by Robyn Hitchcock -- to me this seems more like a selling point than a hit against it.) Most of the Hitchcock music represented here can be had by purchasing Olé Tarantula and Storefront Hitchcock (either of which purchases is easily justifiable on the merits). I think a better take of "Hollis Brown" should happen this afternoon -- God willing, it will replace the one that's currently in the mix. (Done!) Another change that needs to be made to the pure random-10-ness of this mix is, "Choctaw Bingo" should be inserted between the first and second tracks. The combination of this mix and the fiddle mix is making me think shuffling recordings of songs I am playing in with songs I am listening to, could be a really productive way to go about making music...
↻...done
posted evening of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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If they were single threads, if they did not yet form parts of a common weft: some of the stories here collected were printed in newspapers, magazines. Wading into this pool, those primary forms have changed in shape and in color.(from the front page of Bocas de tiempo)
Bocas de tiempo I see characterized as a memoir in snatches of poetry, something like Summertime; sort of a poetic essay. Maybe more like Breytenbach than like Coetzee. (Funny that it seems wrong to characterize it as a collection of short stories, it needs to be some other genre presented as short stories.) But "memoir" doesn't quite describe it, since it's about a lot more than the narrator's/author's life. It is in translation as Voices of Time: a life in stories (which I have not read) and I'm wondering about trying it as Mouths of Time. (The artwork in the book, which Galeano describes in his foreword as "[tiendas] miles de años de edad, pero [pareciendas] hechas la semana pasada, " is alas not available that I know of online.*)
Time which speaks
We are part of time.
We are its feet and its mouths.
Time's feet walk, they are our feet.
Soon, you know what I'm talking about, sooner or later time's wind will erase our footsteps.
A journey across nothing, nobody's footsteps? Time's mouths recount its voyage.
And more journeying:
The Voyage
Oriol Vall, whose business is the recently born in a hospital in Barcelona, he says that the first human gesture is the embrace. Coming out into the world, at the beginning of their days, they reach out as if searching for someone.
Other doctors, those who busy themselves with the already born, have told me that the aged, at the end of their days, they die seeking to lift up their arms.
That's how it is, for all the approaches we might try to the subject, all the words we may pile on it. This is what everything comes down to, shorn of all explication: between your two wings is where the journey occurs.**
 And more traces:
Footprints
This pair came walking down the beach, in the east of Africa, the rainy season bathing them. This woman and this man still look enough like monkeys; truth be told they are already walking upright and have no tail. A nearby volcano -- today it is called Sadiman -- has been spewing gusts of ash from its mouth. The dust has preserved the traces of the pair, until this time, across all time. Beneath the gray mantle have remained, intact, the footsteps. These feet tell us -- today -- they tell us this Eve and this Adam came walking together, when at a certain point she stopped, looked away, walked a few paces from him. Then she came back to his side. Human footprints -- the oldest ones -- have left the mark of doubt.*** Some few years have passed. The doubt is still with us.
* Not that I've necessarily spent any time looking for it.
**I wonder about this reading: This is what I initially thought was meant by "Entre dos aleteos, sin más explicación, transcurre el viaje." The authorized translation has, "Between two flutterings, with no more explanation, the voyage occurs." -- the 'flutterings' being the raising of arms at birth and at death. I imagine that is the correct reading...
***cf. Mary Leaky, writing in National Geographic about the footprints at Laetoli:
You need not be an expert tracker to discern this motion -- the pause, the glance to the left, seems so intensely human. Three million, six hundred thousand years ago, a remote ancestor -- just as you or I -- experienced a moment of doubt.
posted evening of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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My and Mariana's exchange of Spanish books continues -- yesterday I gave her El informe de Brodie (she says she and every other Argentinian student read Borges' stories in her High School classes but has not gone back to them since then) and she gave me Galeano's Bocas del tiempo and El palacio japonés by José Mauro de Vasconcelos (translated from the Portuguese, and with a foreword, by Haydée M. Jofro Barroso).
posted morning of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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 At a street fair yesterday, I happened on Patrick Woodruff selling his wares, including Las aventuras de ¡QUIXOTE! -- bought a copy, it's a lot of fun. Take a look at his deviantart gallery, the pages of this comic are all there.
posted morning of June 12th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, June 10th, 2010
At Shorpy today, Dave publishes an absolutely stunning view of the (as yet incomplete) Williamsburg bridge, shot circa 1902; the photographer is at the base of the bridge on the Brooklyn side looking west:
The bridge would open December of the following year. (And I got a nice shot of it in February of this year, not of course on anything like such a grand scale.)
posted evening of June 10th, 2010: Respond
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 Belle Waring (who is blogging again! Hooray!) alerts us to the ridiculous stance of Apple's iPad App Store, that Buck Mulligan's genitalia may not appear in material distributed to an iPad app -- with the upshot that Rob Berry's Ulysses "Seen" comic would not be sold in the App Store. Berry has agreed to cut the nudity, the expurgated comic will again be available on Apple products...
An interview with Berry and Levitas, at Robot 6. ...Update: Macy Halford at the New Yorker's Book Bench reports that Apple is altering its restrictions on iPad apps and has asked Berry to resubmit the unexpurgated version.
posted evening of June 10th, 2010: Respond
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 Via Elan' Rodger Trinidad, a Russian adaptation of Bradbury's Here There be Tygers:
 For more Soviet sci-fi cartoons, see chewbakka.com.
posted morning of June 10th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
The piece of Pliny's Natural History which Funes is reciting the third time Borges sees him is from the beginning of Book VII*, chapter 26; in Philemon Holland's translation: AS TOUCHING MEMORIE, the greateſt gift of Nature, and moſt neceſſarie of all others for this life; hard it is to judge and ſay who of all others deſerved the cheefe honour therein: conſidering how many men have excelled, and woon much glorie in that behalfe. King Cyrus was able to call every ſouldior that he had through his whole armie, by his owne name. L. Scipio could doe the like by all the citizens of Rome. Semblably, Cineas, Embaſſador of king Pyrrhus, the very next day that he came to Rome, both knew and alſo ſaluted by name all the Senate, and the whole degrees of Gentlemen and Cavallerie in the cittie. Mithridates the king, reigned over two and twentie nations of diverſe languages, and in ſo many tongues gave lawes and miniſtred juſtice unto them, without truchman: and when hee was to make ſpeech unto them in publicke aſſemblie reſpectively to every nation, he did performe it in their owne tongue, without interpretor. One Charmidas or Carmadas, a Grecian,†††was of ſo ſingular a memorie, that he was able to deliver by heart the contents word for word of all the bookes that a man would call for out of any librarie, as if he read the ſame preſently within a booke. At length the practiſe hereof was reduced into an art of Memorie: deviſed and invented firſt by Simonides Melicus, and afterwards brought to perfection and conſummate by Metrodorus Scepſius: by which a man might learne to rehearſe againe the ſame words of any diſcourſe whatſoever, after once hearing.
†††Carneades, according to Cicero and Quintilian.
 * (The same volume to which John of Pannonia will refer in "The Theologians".)
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: Respond
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My sorry condition of being an Argentine prevents me from engaging in the genre -- obligatory in Uruguay -- of dithyramb; my subject is after all a Uruguayan.
Line from "Funes, the memorious" has me looking around to see if there are any examples of old Uruguayan dithyramb chanting... and I do not find that, not exactly*. But check out this more recent Chilean group, Ditirambo.
* And I have a sneaking hunch that Borges is not saying quite what I at first took him to be saying, either -- that the usage is exaggeration or mis-naming, that "dithyramb" is here just a manner of speaking.
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: Respond
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An idea I just had which I think it would be fun to implement: a database table with favorite (striking or profound) brief lines from each book I read -- When you read the archive page for the book in question, those lines, or some randomized subset of them, would be displayed as part of the information in the left hand sidebar. Add to this a setting in the database for "current reading", the book or books that I'm currently reading/thinking about, and a set of lines from those books could be on the front page's sidebar. A little bit like the epigraphs I run at the top of the page, but a bit more fleeting, less a permanent part of the site. For instance I really liked the line, "He does not know -- nobody could know -- my immeasurable contrition, my weariness," from "The Garden of Forking Paths." But it really only seems meaningful in the context of that reading. (This would really free me up in terms of posting short quotations, too -- generally I try only to post a quotation when I have something in particular to say about it. And only to create a new epigraph when I find a really meaningful one. -- So this is a third way.)
Two notes about the translation of that line, * Thanks John for helping with the adjective, "immeasurable" sounds much better than "innumerable" or than "endless", and * Thanks Dr. Hurley for the repetition of "my" at the end, I was leaning towards just using "contrition and weariness" as being the closest thing in format to "contrición y cansancio" -- but somehow that doesn't sound quite right in English.
Implementation: have a button or link on the editing view of the blog that is called "Add Quotation" or something similar -- clicking on it will bring up a dialog box or form where you can enter your quote and the book it is from -- then the the "current reading" books will be books for which I have either posted a quotation or a journal entry over the past say week or two.
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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