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[12 Aug 2009|09:24am] |
David Simon, primary force behind The Wire, in a recent interview in The Believer:
Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.
I'm left wondering if the distinction he makes here has any bearing on the divide among my LJ friends over this series.
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| Tenuousness... |
[27 Jan 2009|10:26pm] |
Tenuousness is a song by Andrew Bird that contains these lyrics:
From proto-Sanskrit Minoans to Porto-centric Lisboans, Greek-Cypriots and harbor sots who "hang around", in quotes, a lot.
... which song made me think of my dear Journalists as I listened last evening in the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Download it here for a limited time only, if such such a load of twee offends ye not.
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| 'ex libris' redux, for thelican |
[15 May 2008|01:13pm] |
First, consider these two quotes from the perspective of a synesthete:
“The noise of the passing carriages begins to sound like thunder, in the stench of the street I detect thousands of different smells, while the lights of the eating-house and the street-lamps fill my eyes with blinding flashes of lightning. All my senses are at a fever pitch and abnormally receptive.”
— Oysters, Anton Chekhov
“He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror. ”
— The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe
Then observe this fine new blog my pal Paul has set up with Wyatt Mason over at Harper's Magazine.
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[25 Mar 2008|02:47pm] |
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A survey of sorts: how many of you use RSS to subscribe to website updates? Which websites?
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| Plus ça change... |
[29 Feb 2008|02:50pm] |
In the Donald Barthelme collection The Teachings of Don B., there's a short piece
called Languishing, Half-Deep in Summer... that, although it was originally published July 30, 1979, perfectly captures my experiences with online dating (Nerve.com) in the middle of this decade.
We seem to invent a great deal of technology only to find new, even more absurd, ways to do what we've always done.
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| Flotsam |
[08 Nov 2007|02:33pm] |
Of possible interest to my friends here:
... enjoy.
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| an example of remarkable intertextuality |
[07 Oct 2006|03:48pm] |
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There is a character in Barthelme's Overnight to Many Distant Cities called Sweat Papa Cream Puff who speaks in the manner of the old jazzmen interviewed in documentaries about old jazzmen. The wife of the protagonist of this particular short piece, Claire, winds up with S.W.C.P. Shortly thereafter one finds this passage (all three of the triangle's points are present):
Freud said, Claire said, that in the adult, novelty always constitutes the condition for orgasm.
Sweet Papa looked away.
Well you know the gents they don't know what they after they own selves, very often.
When do they find out?
At the eleventh hour let me play you a little thing I wrote in the early part of the century I call it "Verklärte Nacht" that means "stormy weather" in German, I played it there in Berlin oh about—
Claire placed her arms around Sweet papa Cream Puff and hugged the stuffing out of him.
I'm not sure why I like this so much, but I do.
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| Barnes Interviews Joyce |
[17 Mar 2006|10:36am] |
I've just been sent this link to an interview of James Joyce by Djuna Barnes. Some of you may be interested. If there's still unslaked thirst thereafter, consider this 1922 review of Ulysses by Edmund Wilson.
Lastly, have a lovely day, but, for fuck's sakes, don't drink any green beer.
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[13 Dec 2005|01:31pm] |
Blainerunner's list of favorite American works after 1950, sans Nabokov, Pynchon, or Delillo:
1. 'the gold bug variations', powers
2. 'the fermata', baker
3. (tie) 'rabbit redux' and 'the centaur', updike
4. (tie) 'sabbath's theatre' and 'the counterlife', roth
5. 'neuromancer', gibson
6. 'the corrections', franzen
7. 'london fields', m. amis
8. 'three poems', ashbery (technically, not a novel)
9. 'the changing light at sandover', merrill
10. 'wonder boys', chabon (i loved this novel despite not loving it)
... mine (in more or less chronological order):
The Old Man and the Sea, E. Hemingway
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
Catch-22, J. Heller
Where I'm Calling From, R. Carver
Survivor, C. Palahniuk
Cock & Bull, W. Self [1]
The Marabou Stork Nightmares, I. Welsh [2]
Pastoralia, G. Saunders
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, D.F. Wallace
Oracle Night, P. Auster (could be any Auster, really)
[1,2] An Englishman & a Scotsman, but I get them if you get Martin Amis.
... anyone else?
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| Désoeuvrement |
[08 Dec 2005|10:25pm] |
I first encountered the word désoeuvrement while translating a piece written by friend who is a French poet. I didn't know the word, which is unremarkable because my French is imperfect, so I looked through various French-English dictionaries and learned that it is a synonym for unemployed or idle.
The poet informed me, while we discussed possible word choices for an English equivalent of désoeuvrement, that the word means someone who does not know what to do with his life, his days, his hours, and who lives in despair of the absence of direction and the absence of the desire for a direction — the latter-most sentiment a fine example of Gallic philosophical precision. He was amazed to learn that there is no single English word for this condition, and, after considering the commonality of the emotion, so was I.
We lack, in English, many useful words. I understand that modern fashion has rendered the concept of zaftig nearly obsolete, but why did we lack a word for it when styles were different? Doppelgänger is an understandable omission, but what of raison d'être? There are, when one but looks, dozens of examples from which to choose.
One possible cause for the jejune state of English vocabulary is the omnivorous nature of the language itself, so well suited to robbing other languages of verbs and nouns and hybridizing them in a lingua-genetic experiment, nouning verbs and verbing nouns all the while, that it need not bother to craft subtle neologisms from native Anglo-Saxon roots.
Globalization and the adoption of a globalized version of English will guarantee, faute de mieux, that we continue in this vein forevermore. I look forward to the coming flood of Hindi and Mandarin Chinese additions that we will receive as the center of human culture moves to the center of human population.
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| request: an island list |
[05 Dec 2005|07:39pm] |
I sent email to my circle of writers asking, "Ten books each, please, that you find absolutely exemplary -- not just good, but residing within your personal literary canon." This is what I tabulated therefrom. Please add yours...
A.L.
Wind up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
Naked Lunch, Billy Burroughs
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
Civilwarland in Bad Decline, George Saunders
Rabbit Run, John Updike
New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell
Ekumen by Ursula K. Leguin
J.R.
1. Le Città Invisibili, Calvino *
2. Lolita, Nabokov
3. Monday or Tuesday, Woolf
4. Don Quijote de la Mancha, Cervantes *
5. À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust *
6. Poemas de Pablo Neruda *
7. Complete Scores, The Beatles
8. Complete Stories, Kafka
9. Ficciones, Borges *
10. Finnegan's Wake, Joyce (because it's the last one of his that I haven't read, and it would take awhile)
* I would bring these in the original because I read those languages more slowly than English.
L.M.
Catch-22
The Cyberiad
The Great Gatsby
Slaughterhouse Five
As I Lay Dying
100 Years of Solitude
The Master & Margarita
The Old Man & The Sea
Of Mice & Men
The Lord of The Rings
Addenda: "I haven't read [ some of? ] the greats, so I imagine The Brothers Karamazov, Mrs. Dalloway, Lolita and Ulysses might bump some of these off the list, and if I could include plays, I'd likely use Arcadia and Hamlet..."
P.F.
1. Bible
2. Complete Shakespeare
3. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
4. The American by Henry James
5. Short stories of Samuel Delany
6. Don Quixote (never read but want to)
7. Ulysses (because it would kill time)
8. A collection of Robert Benchley comic stories.
9. My Dinner With Andre (film, sure, but why not? Pretentious but great.)
10. The big kid's novel collection by Daniel Pinkwater
R.K.
1. Ilf and Petrov, "The Twelve Chairs" and "The Golden Calf"
2. Kafka, "Complete Stories"
3. Dostoyevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov"
4. Italo Calvino, "Marcovaldo"
5. Andrei Platonov, "Chevengur"
6. Nabokov, "Lolita"
7. Huxley, "Brave New World"
9. Lewis Carroll, "Alice and Wonderland" and "Through and Looking-Glass"
10. Chekhov, short stories.
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| A Request for Criticism |
[28 May 2005|03:54pm] |
You See Her
You see her standing in the opposite queue, the one merging with the queue in which you stand. Radiant and shy, first smiling at you and then looking down, she is the sort of French girl for whom you would march to war. Hesitating a moment and measuring your timing, you make certain that you are immediately behind her as you mount the train, not following her but following her, you take a window seat facing her across a small folding table.
In your elation with the seating arrangements you congratulate yourself on succumbing to the impulse to purchase a first class ticket, even though your class warrior’s sense of guilty solidarity would normally place you firmly in second class.
She has a small stack of fashion magazines, a pair of stylish thick-framed plastic glasses, and a little black dress with which she struggles to keep her lacy black and green brassiere concealed. Her green eyes shine, reflecting the sunlight coming in through the window. She absentmindedly chews on a strand of golden hair. You try not to stare, looking down instead, but you wind up staring at her greenish gold toenails, which match the green metallic glint of the lace on her bra and the stitched highlights on her otherwise black shoes. You imagine her getting dressed in the morning, carefully matching design elements, decorating herself in shades of metallic green and gold like a painting by Gustav Klimt.
She is going through her magazines with a ruthless intensity, stopping occasionally to inspect a layout of the summer’s finest bikinis or a photo depicting some article of deluxe lingerie. In your mind, the story unfolds thusly: she works in fashion, probably as a model, always travels first class, probably to avoid the hoi polloi, and has the snotty, pretentious and under-educated air that you expect from those who live in that world; her father is rich and she was raised in privilege; she only dates professional athletes. In this way you justify your silence, whittling away her apparent perfection until your desire to speak is muted; cowardice is another name for rational inaction.
You open a book and hide your eyes in it.
She leans across the little table, touches your wrist, and asks “What time does this train arrive in the station?”
Consulting your ticket, which you are using as a bookmark, you answer, “18:05.”
“My connecting train leaves at 18:10.”
“So you’ll only have five minutes in the station?
“Unless my train is late...”
“Ah.”
“Yes.”
Turning back to your book, the words on the page are tar pits, flypaper, bowls of molasses, each one grasping you and holding you back as you attempt to forge on. Your eyes wander up to her face, down to her bosom, and back up to her lips, which are still sucking on a strand of hair. You take your journal out of your bag, but writing is no more effective — you are writing about her. You look at her; she looks at you looking; you both look away. In self reproach, you return to your book, but your eyes wander along the window glass, seeking her reflection. You find her reflection in the window glass, looking at your reflection, and you know.
She removes her glasses and begins to polish them with a paper tissue taken from her purse, obviously disappointed with the results. You produce a cloth handkerchief, which she takes with a smile, quietly saying, “Yes, this is better.”
The conductor takes your ticket, stamps it, complains that you forgot to feed the ticket through a special machine at the station. You apologize and explain that you are a foreigner. She hands a small laminated badge to the conductor, who looks at it for a moment, smiles, and returns it.
“Do you work in fashion?” you ask, indicating the magazines.
She blushes and replies, “Oh, no, nothing so glamorous. I just finished my studies at university, but they are much too boring to talk about.”
“I don’t believe that. What did you study?”
“I will receive my placement as a professor of physics and chemistry next month,” she says with a pained look, almost ashamed.
“I studied physics too.”
“Really?”
In this way you make small talk all the way to the station, once or twice convincing her to utter a few words of broken English in an impossibly sexy French accent.
As the train enters the station she asks “Will you stop here or change trains?”
“I must change trains to continue on to Paris.”
“Paris? We will be on the same train.”
She takes your hand and leads you to the next train, where you sit diagonally across from her, placing your luggage on the seat beside you.
“Are you sure you don’t want to face the front of the train?”
“Pardon?”
“How will you see if you sit there?” She vaguely indicates the window seat beside her.
“Oh, yes, you are absolutely right.”
She moves her things to the seat you just vacated, and, leaning close to you, asks “Do I need to fix my makeup?”
Her face is close enough for you to trace the pattern of tiny freckles that dot her forehead and cheeks. You hesitate a moment, startled by the question and her proximity. You shake your head.
“No, not at all.”
She smiles sweetly and says, “You know, for my boyfriend.”
“No, he should be quite pleased.”
You feel the onset of jealousy and disappointment, neither emotion justified, but both predictable.
“Okay. It’s our last night together and I want to look good for him.”
You look at her with your face bent into a question mark.
“I am breaking up with him in the morning.”
“Why?”
She looks off into space and speaks without affect.
“I have another boyfriend, but this thing started and this boy is wrong for me, all the things I hate: a motorcycle, tattoos, but I can’t stop — haven’t stopped — seeing him, even though I have tried to make myself.”
She turns to you and says, in English, “I am an horrible person,” completely eliding the aitch.
“No, you are just young. I did things like that when I was young, everyone does.”
“You think so?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Yes, I am sure. In five years you won’t remember any of this.”
“You mean I’ll forget the second boyfriend?”
“No, I mean you will forget both of them.”
“No.”
“Yes. Write me in five years and tell me whether you remember any of this.”
“Okay, give me your email address.”
You give her your email address.
“You are the only person I have told. My friends don’t know about this.”
“Sometimes it’s easier with a stranger. Where does the boyfriend whom you won’t see tonight think you are?”
“My mother’s house, which is where I was until I boarded the train.”
She excuses herself, gets up, goes to the lavatory, returns shaking her head and gives you a look of disbelief.
“No makeup? You are crazy!”
She leans across your seat, hovering above your lap, and begins applying mascara, eye shadow and lip-gloss while studying her reflection in the window. You watch in mute adoration.
“What do you think?”
“I think that before you put on makeup you were very beautiful, and, now that you have put on makeup, you are still very beautiful.”
“Good answer.”
She pulls a piece of paper and a pen from her pocket book, writes her name and email address on the paper, and gives it to you.
“Can you understand my writing?”
“Yes, of course, it’s no problem.”
She leans close again, crossing the armrest and looking into your eyes.
“I wish I could come with you to Paris tonight. I—”
The conductor announces her station over the loudspeaker. She leans a little closer, gives you a lingering kiss on the mouth and then rushes off the train.
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| river run past Eve and Adam's |
[11 Mar 2005|11:09am] |
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Le vent nous portera, Noir Désir |
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It was on this day in 1923 that James Joyce wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver, that he had just begun "Work in Progress," the book that would become Finnegans Wake sixteen years later.
"Yesterday I wrote two pages – the first I have written since the final 'yes' of Ulysses."
Nora didn't care for Joyce's writing, nor was his patron enthusiastic. He wrote that he was attempting to go beyond "wideawake language, cutanddry grammar, and goahead plot, to which she replied:
"I do not care much for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darknesses and unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language systems. It seems to me you are wasting your genius."
Ezra Pound agreed with her, writing that "nothing short of a divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization," but Samuel Beckett defended him with what may be the best capsule explanation of late Joyce that I've read:
"You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read... It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself."
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| The Comedian |
[20 Feb 2005|06:51pm] |
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music |
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Six Gnossiennes (I. Lent), Erik Satie |
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The comedian had grown an absurd little mustache, dressed himself in tattered rags, applied a half-liter of schmaltz and combed his hair back into an oleaginous halo in an attempt to synthesize a new comedic persona from the raw materials of Chaplin, Keaton and Jean-Gaspard Deburau.
He set himself up on a wooden soapbox in the middle of the public square, a place otherwise reserved for the shame of the pilloried, and began his routine: he jerked and seized and moved in an exaggerated palsy, shaking his arms over his head and shouting, squealing, pushing himself into a frothing, impotent rage. He worried, whenever he would break from the experience long enough to consider his actions, that his performance might be too kitsch to be taken seriously and too serious to be taken for comedy; his time at Vienna’s Kunstakademie had helped him to balance these concerns and appreciate the nature of art as the intersection of artist and spectator.
In a few months, after many careful refinements, the comedian had collected a small but loyal following among the poor and downtrodden of Munich. His greatest discoveries were the need to remain in character on and off stage (his admirers required of him absolute discipline, without which they would lose interest and return to the hofbrau), that no level of histrionic frenzy was too great and that the lumpenproletariat loved him in proportion to the offensiveness of his statements. He continued to polish his act, cultivating his audience with ever-greater fury, ultimately reaching a feigned delirium.
Though he had read Nietzsche, the comedian did not recognize that staring into this abyss and combatting these monsters would transform him into his own character, nor had the Academy taught him that the audience does as much to the artist as he does to them. His comedy was mistaken for drama; his ludicrous statements were held up as eternal truth; he sank into the despair of the misunderstood artist, pushing his act harder and further, beyond the edge of sanity, but they followed him there and pushed him further still.
The comedian’s success was without limit, but his swooning devotees remained ignorant of his true artistic intent. After a successful performance in Paris, he visited Père Lachaise to place flowers Deburau’s grave and felt himself the loneliest man there, living or dead. He made arrangements for a performance of Brahms’s Cello Sonata in E Minor, the only piece with sufficient tristesse to soothe him.
In an attempt to end his career and return to a quiet life of painting landscapes, he began making statements that violated not only the moral and logical framework of European Humanism, but also the internal logic of his own artistic framework. His efforts were ineffectual, his followers following even his most nonsensical edicts. When, in a terminal act of burlesque, he fellated the barrel of his otherwise ornamental Luger, he was merely playing his part to the final curtain call: the clown perished to complete his transformation from comedian to tragedian.
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| Syncretia and Tea |
[09 Feb 2005|11:29am] |
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music |
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Romanian Folk Dances - III. Andante |
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The natives rumble their caldron-drums in celebration of the completion of a solar cycle measured by orthogonal lunar sub-cycles while Bartok's 3rd Romanian Folk Dance plays, Andante, over the rollicking ancient rhythm: a contrapuntal poetry of cultural collision.
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