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Sunday, June 20th, 2010
Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what no ears have heard? Listen to the sparrow's cry. Do you want to touch that which no hands have touched? Touch the soil. Truly I tell you, God has not yet created the earth.from the teachings of the Histrionic heretics
Thinking about "The Theologians" is a very fruitful activity -- it is a well that I can go back to repeatedly and never find it dry. I'm wondering what is the "discourse of 20 words" which Aurelianus uses obliquely to condemn Pannonia to the stake. Note here the deep irony of Pannonia's being condemned using words he wrote to denounce Euphorbius. But what is confusing me here is the repetition of "20 words" -- earlier Borges had noted that these 20 were the only words surviving from the work of John of Pannonia; he is attaching a lot of significance to the words -- but he never quotes them! It's a big missing piece in the center of the puzzle...The irony that I'm seeing here in Pannonia's situation is a reflection of the irony in the Church's treatment of dissent.* The first group of heretics, the Monotoni, propose that time is cyclical, that every present moment will be repeated without end; for that Euphorbius is burned. Now the Histrioni teach that time can never repeat itself, that each instant is of necessity unique -- based on this and other crimes, an inquisitorial court is formed to prosecute them. The church's problem is with any intellectual innovation (as Aurelianus himself notes with respect to the first persecution) rather than with the specific content of the teachings. This makes it difficult to sympathize with either of the main characters -- they are after all participating (cynically in Aurelianus' case and in John's case as a true believer, if I am reading correctly) in these inquisitions on the side of power -- I'm left to identify with the narrator as a voice of sarcasm and occasionally with a minor character like Euphorbius. Borges describes the main characters in his afterword as "a dream, a somewhat melancholy dream, of personal identity" -- which makes me wonder who he is trying to identify with.
 *Side thought here -- I have never thought of Borges as a particularly political or satirical author. Is he poking fun at the power relationships in the mediæval Church here, or primarily interested in painting Aurelianus as a tragic figure? It would be worth spending some time working out what I mean by a "political and satirical author"... There is a further irony, I think, in the juxtaposition of John of Pannonia's persecution with the vandalism of the library in the first paragraph of the story -- Volume XII of Civitas Dei was misinterpreted because the rest of the work had been destroyed; and Pannonia's 20 words were used against him because the context of his treatise had been (wilfully) forgotten.
posted evening of June 20th, 2010: 8 responses
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There is something special about Borges' stories which are set in Argentina and Uruguay, particularly I'm thinking of the stories like "The South", "The Dead Man", "Funes", and of the stories in Brodie's Report -- I get a similar feeling from reading these stories as from watching Westerns -- the same sort of longing for cultural identity, construction and description of a cultural identity. In "The Dead Man" we see Borges addressing the reader directly, it takes me by surprise every time I read it. BenjamÃn Otálora has fled a murder charge in Buenos Aires and is working as a gaucho in Tacuarembó:
Here began, for Otálora, a different life; a life of vast dawns, days smelling of horses. This life is new to him, sometimes harsh, but it is already in his blood; just as men of other nations worship and fear the sea, we (and also the man who is interweaving these symbols) long for the infinite pampas echoing with hoofbeats.
We! Also the man who is interweaving these symbols! I don't think Borges refers so clearly and unambiguously to himself in any of his other fictions (leaving aside those pieces like "Borges and I" and "The Other" which are specifically introspective) -- that parenthesis seems to me designed to clear away all the levels of confusion about who is saying "we".
posted morning of June 20th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, June 19th, 2010
I do believe I've got it! favicon.ico is the image that gets displayed in the title bar of the browser (for browsers which support this capability, which is most of them) when a reader is looking at your web page. (Also it is used by things like rss readers as a visual way of identifying your site.) For a long time I have wanted to have a butterfly icon to go with the butterflies that are my background image and the butterfly at the top of the page*. Sort of an homage to Nabokov and to GarcÃa Márquez; plus I just like the little things. For a long time I was using a shrunken-down version of the big butterfly; but at 16×16 pixels it did not (as Sylvia did not tire of pointing out) look particularly like a butterfly ( ); then I tried shrinking the butterfly image which is in the sidebar of Zembla; but again, it is too detailed to make a good icon ( ). I looked at some favicon library sites the other day and found a couple of nice butterflies but nothing that was exactly right for readin. But finally I found this butterfly, at the site of the (lamentably out of business) Brooklyn housewares store Nova Zembla:  
 * If you are not seeing a butterfly at the top of the page, it is because I made that only show up on Firefox, Chrome and Safari -- I couldn't get msie to display it the way I wanted it to, those were the only browsers I tested on. ** (If you are not seeing the new butterfly icon, that may be because your browser has cached one of the old ones. Browsers seem to store favicon's in their cache longer than a lot of other files...)
posted morning of June 19th, 2010: Respond
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To be immortal is banal -- except for man, every creature is immortal, not knowing of death. The divine, the terrible, the incomprehensible, is to know oneself to be immortal.
Bryan Nelson's post at Mother Nature Network on the 10 animals with the longest life spans has some beautiful photography, including this magnificently anthropomorphic* picture of turritopsis nutricula, believed to be the only animal with no natural limit to its lifespan. (Thanks for the link, John!)
Related in only the very most tenuous and impressionistic manner, Katy Butler's piece in this mornings New York Times Magazine on dealing with her father's dementia and unnaturally prolonged death, and with a medical establishment devoted unreflectively to such prolongation, sent a chill down my spine. To be, like Ms. Butler's mother, "continent and lucid to [one's] end," seems to me a fine thing, a fate I will hope for for myself and those I love, a fate I will try to work for.
*(or "cyclopomorphic" I guess -- a grimacing Cyclops with a frizzy beard.)
posted morning of June 19th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, June 18th, 2010
 Saramago is the Portuguese name of the wild radish Raphanus raphanistrum. José Saramago's family name was de Sousa, but when he was born his birth certificate was mistakenly inscribed with his father's nickname. His parents were illiterate and did not discover the error until José enrolled in school.
Life is like a candle burning; when it comes to the end it blazes brightly before it goes out. I believe that I'm now in the period of blazing before I go out. I can see very clearly that I will not go on living much longer. Now I'm in a phase where if I believe that I can carry out some task and that I can do it well, I want to do it. After it all stops and my books remain, I think they will continue to be read.
(quoted in Francesc Relea's article on the national weekend of mourning in Portugal.)
(Take a look at the slide show included in the El PaÃs obituary; it features some extravagantly beautiful pictures.)
posted afternoon of June 18th, 2010: 5 responses
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José Saramago, 87 years old, died early this afternoon, at home in Lanzarote. This man and his voice will be missed.
posted morning of June 18th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, June 17th, 2010
I've gotten a little bogged down in the translation process for Réquiem -- I thought I would try writing out some summary data as a way of helping myself get a handle on the story: Slavko (to be precise, his narrator Felipe; having no information to the contrary I am identifying the author pretty closely with the narrator) discovers on June 14, 1986 (he is 16 years old, like I was that year) a strange power: by stealing a book from the shop of his family's friend Fernández and reading the book, he can cause the book's author to perish. The first to go is Borges (as you can see from the date) -- you have to be able to forgive this as an accident, after all he could not have known beforehand what his theft would entail -- and a few days later a local author, a young dentist whose name is never given named BenjamÃn Castro; Felipe stole his book of poetry seeking to confirm whether Borges' death had been his fault. Then in awe of his power, he does not exercise it for several years. But one thing leads to another...
Slavko kills Bioy Casares, by stealing a copy of Morel's Invention on March 8th, 1999. This precipitates the end of his relationship with Susana M (who he believes was already interested in the faculty dean anyways).
The next to go is José Ãngel Valente, on July 18th, 2000, after Felipe steals a collection of his poetry. Here we see Felipe going off the deep end -- he embarks on a career of murdering authors just before he publishes an essay about the author -- Juan José Arreola dies on December 3, 2001; Arturo Úslar Pietri (February 26, 2001), Camilo José Cela (January 17, 2002), "and the majority of the authors whom we've seen disappear in the last few years" (not clear on the precise date of the story -- it was published in Piedepágina in 2008 but may well have been written, and set, a few years before that) -- people begin to notice the sequence of coincidences, the head of his department eventually calls him out. The ending is a nice twist that I don't want to give away...
This story interests me a bit by the way it draws on and amplifies the theme of the recent Latin American issue of Zoetrope (which is where I found out about Zupcic), the passing of an older generation of Latin American authors and the coming into their own of new authors with new voices and styles.
posted afternoon of June 17th, 2010: 2 responses
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Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
 A few years old, but new for me: in September 2004, R. Crumb and Jerry Zolten produced a one-hour show on Penn State's wpsu-fm, spinning and chattering and nit-picking Crumb's collection of old blues and gospel records. Lots of great music and talk.
I haven't been able to find the mp3 of the show online anywhere but prx.org -- I'm not sure what the nature of that site is, they make you sign up for a free account if you want to listen, it seems benign enough though... Track listing below the fold.
Track listing:
- Cecil Scott and his Bright Boys, "Lawd Lawd" -- played over the title announcement
- "Texas & Pacific Blues" by Frenchy's String Band. The melody I know from "Richland Woman Blues".
- Macon Ed and Tampa Joe (a fiddler who might be Peg Leg Howell -- happy coincidence that yesterday's shuffle has Howell on it), "Warm Wipe Stomp"
- Eddie Head and his family, "Down on Me"
- Rev. J.C. Burnett & congregation, "I’ll Stand & Wring My Hands & Cry"
- The Need More Band (Bobby Leecan and Robert Cooksey), "Washboard Cut Out"
- "Humming Blues" -- ukulele blues by Red-Onion Joe (Joe Linthecome)
- Lottie Kimbrough, "Rolling Log Blues" (with one or both of the Pruitt Twins on guitar)
- Louie Lasky, "How Do You Want Your Rolling Done?"
- Cheikha Tetma -- did not catch the song title
- Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Walk Right In"
- Geeshie Wiley, "Last Kind Word Blues"
- Mississippi Jook Band, "Skippy Whippy" -- played over closing announcements
↻...done
posted evening of June 16th, 2010: 2 responses
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On this date in 1904...
posted morning of June 16th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
(Hoping the posting of random playlists does not wear on my readers' patience...) Tonight's shuffle went very nicely indeed:
- "Cryin' Holy Unto the Lord", The Charles River Valley Boys
- "Dead Cats on the Line", Vassar Clements (This is originally by Tampa Red.)
- Dialog of patter between Robyn and Grant Lee, about "the rubber thing". At the end of this interlude, Robyn counts in "1, 2, 3, 4--" to the next song they are going to play, and the playlist moves to
- "The Dozen" by Big Bill Broonzy, in exactly the rhythm and tempo that Robyn had counted out. This is one of the most pleasant things that has happened to my ears all day.
- "Señor Blues", Taj Mahal
- "A Globe of Frogs" -- live performance, off of Give it to the Thoth Boys
- "Beaver Slide Rag", Peg Leg Howell and his Gang
- "The Truth", Kimberley Rew -- shades of "The Man With the Lightbulb Head"!
- "Grooving on an Inner Plane"
- "I'm Thinking Tonight of my Blue Eyes", the Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band with Mother Maybelle.
posted evening of June 15th, 2010: 4 responses
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"Amanecer en la pampa", 