tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-204538742024-03-15T21:09:40.166-04:00Dreamers RiseNO FLAG, NO ANTHEMChrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.comBlogger866125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-31810979994688788062024-03-02T13:54:00.001-05:002024-03-02T13:54:09.173-05:00Fate<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL0_o1vuSaS7PLxQ6stR4jNmMlkA5N8sa6OD4Ir1zAUIAcNY-M2ws7X0pRAYm_91NNjRHE4FOpn_FkFv7kc4JaGpyTJqIMCtMtP5GpfcJWAkxEdzx-WH6R6jqz22R8UBFNApQMNvk_qOoG1C4LZQ7OWwZhK95KKdUPCYW3_hdDu12A-TyqNZpW/s1134/429757590_984152009788382_5516365323290927303_n.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1134" data-original-width="843" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL0_o1vuSaS7PLxQ6stR4jNmMlkA5N8sa6OD4Ir1zAUIAcNY-M2ws7X0pRAYm_91NNjRHE4FOpn_FkFv7kc4JaGpyTJqIMCtMtP5GpfcJWAkxEdzx-WH6R6jqz22R8UBFNApQMNvk_qOoG1C4LZQ7OWwZhK95KKdUPCYW3_hdDu12A-TyqNZpW/s320/429757590_984152009788382_5516365323290927303_n.jpg"/></a></div>Since it's in Lithuania there's virtually no chance that I will ever visit it, but it cheers me no end to know that there is now an <a href="https://stasysmuseum.com/en/">entire museum</a> devoted to the work of the artist Stasys Eidrigevičius. Perhaps there will be a catalog someday. <BR><BR>
The museum's website observes, "It must be fate, but did you notice the initials of Stasys Eidrigevičius embedded in the word MUS.E.UM?"Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-72753264675451735742024-02-19T09:24:00.004-05:002024-02-20T06:57:28.080-05:00Prickly issues<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrSHtLhq4tZmUA7JEMgx5nWs0pTE9AXjpaZ-p8zfGJjXM2dWHvLeEc7WO3fEbK5GVt6fubrTmdNu06L231pZAA4Fay_zk2uFczNt3y7DbKalYZyDggCaa4B_qiTQKMzXCxyVNLKY0ATT5vftGJHBYlg3X_hAzfE16TGw2fI_v0xHV3i2_Y1d3R/s589/hans-the-hedgehog.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="589" data-original-width="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrSHtLhq4tZmUA7JEMgx5nWs0pTE9AXjpaZ-p8zfGJjXM2dWHvLeEc7WO3fEbK5GVt6fubrTmdNu06L231pZAA4Fay_zk2uFczNt3y7DbKalYZyDggCaa4B_qiTQKMzXCxyVNLKY0ATT5vftGJHBYlg3X_hAzfE16TGw2fI_v0xHV3i2_Y1d3R/s320/hans-the-hedgehog.jpg"/></a></div>The poet Donald Hall was born and raised in suburban Connecticut, but he spent many of his summers at his maternal grandparents' <a href="https://ateaglepond.org/">farm in New Hampshire</a> in the 1930s and '40s, an experience he recollected in a memoir entitled <i><a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n20/katherine-rundell/consider-the-hedgehog">String Too Short to Be Saved</a></i>. Though he was capturing a disappearing way of life, and remembering it fondly, he largely avoided the lure of nostalgia. There are golden afternoons spent haying and tending chickens in the book, but there is also alcoholism, mental illness, and suicide among the neighbors. He would later own up to embellishing a bit; in a reprint he confessed that the abandoned railroad on Ragged Mountain that he described didn't actually exist. It was another passage in the book, though, that initially perplexed me. Hall describes a day on the farm in the company of his grandfather:<BLOCKQUOTE>We walked slowly uphill to the barn, which looked like a rocky ledge of Ragged in the gray light. When we were nearly to the milk shed, he suddenly pointed upward at the branches of the great maple next to the old outhouse. "Look!" he said. "There's a hedgehog!" I followed the angle of his finger and saw what resembled a bird's nest at a fork in the branches, indistinct in the late light. "Let's see how you are with a shotgun these days," he said.
</BLOCKQUOTE>The animal is dispatched, not by Hall, who misses four times, but by his grandfather. In a later chapter, when the grandfather is dead, Hall returns to the farm, spots three more "hedgehogs" in the trees, and brings them down.<BR><BR>As any naturalist can tell you, there are no wild hedgehogs in New England or anywhere in the Americas, nor do they readily climb trees (<i>pace</i> Maurice Sendak), nor are they considered agricultural pests (though they were once popularly <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n20/katherine-rundell/consider-the-hedgehog">thought to suckle milk from cows</a>). There are, of course, <i>porcupines</i>, but no one who had grown up in New England (and was later educated in part in the UK, where there <i>are</i> hedgehogs), would be likely to confuse the two. So what gives?<BR><BR>As it turns out, Hall was simply following vernacular tradition. Although "porcupine" (unlike "opossum" and "skunk") is a European word dating to the Middle Ages, few English colonists to New England would have ever seen an Old World porcupine, as the closest ones live in Italy, and faced with a spiny creature they simply borrowed the familiar name "hedgehog." The usage was common enough to have been written into law; as late as the early twentieth century the state of New Hampshire was paying bounties for killing "hedgehogs." The bounty was repealed in 1979, by which time the word had been corrected to "porcupines."<BR><BR>Another word for hedgehog is "urchin," from Latin <i>ericius</i> (see Spanish <i>erizo</i>, French <i>hérisson</i>). Today that word refers to a street waif, but its original meaning is preserved in the name for the spiny echinoderms known as "sea urchins." <BR><BR><i>Image: "Hans My Hedgehog," from</i> The Juniper Tree.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-58922672072681969612024-02-05T10:29:00.002-05:002024-02-05T10:34:07.761-05:00Who was Rará?Cortázar's short story "Carta a una señorita en París" (Letter to a Young Lady in Paris) is narrated by a man who has a peculiar propensity to spontaneously regurgitating a baby rabbit from time to time. A little musicological puzzle has popped up in it. In the first paragraph, the narrator moves into a borrowed Buenos Aires apartment, where he is reluctant to disturb (though he will) its "closed order, constructed even in the finest networks of air, networks that in your house preserve the music of lavender, the fluttering of a powder puff, the interplay of the violin and viola in the 'cuarteto de Rará'," whatever that last phrase may refer to. That's my rough translation; the word translated as "powder puff" is <i>cisne,</i> which literally means "swan," hence the "fluttering." Paul Blackburn's version, published in <i>End of The Game and Other Stories</i>, reads as follows:<BLOCKQUOTE>
... it offends me to intrude on a compact order, built even to the finest nets of air, networks that in your environment conserve the music in the lavender, the heavy fluff of the powder puff in the talcum, the play between the violin and the viola in Ravel’s quartet.
</BLOCKQUOTE><i>Ravel?</i> Why Ravel? For that matter, what was the "Rará quartet" or the "quartet by Rará" alluded to in the original. The allusion has baffled several commentators ("I have obtained no reference to this musical piece, if it exists" — <i><a href="https://readingcortazar.blogspot.com/">Descifrando a Cortázar</a></i>), and only one critic seems to have hazarded an explanation. Monica Kanne, in her <a href="https://munin.uit.no/bitstream/handle/10037/10986/thesis.pdf?sequence=2">thesis</a> <i>Estrategias de la traducción: Un estudio de estrategias de traducción y su aplicación práctica</i> glosses it as "una pieza musical (del año 1949) del compositor italiano de música clásica contemporánea Sylvano Busotti (1931-)," that is, "a musical piece (from 1949) by the contemporary Italian classical music composer Sylvano Busotti" (actually Sylvano Bu<b>ss</b>otti, who has since died). <BR><BR>
At first glance, this seems plausible. Although I haven't been able to trace a <i>Rara Quartet</i> by Bussotti, he did compose a <i>Rara Requiem</i> and direct an art film entitled <i>Rara</i>. He would have been only in his teens when Cortázar's story was first published (in his collection <i>Bestiario</i>) in 1951, but he was in fact precocious; the IRCAM database of contemporary music <a href="https://brahms.ircam.fr/en/sylvano-bussotti#works_by_date">lists compositions</a> as early as 1937 (when he was six!), though I find no record of an early string quartet. Still, it's a bit of a stretch that Cortázar, living in Buenos Aires at that time, would have had any exposure to the work of a teenaged Italian composer. As it happens, though, there's a simpler explanation: Blackburn's translation is correct, because "Rara" was a nickname of Maurice Ravel. (Per biographer <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/i/ivry-ravel.html?scp=3&sq=maurice%2520ravel&st=cse">Benjamin Ivry</a>, "Ravel was known in his own circle as Rara.") Blackburn may have known that already, or Cortázar may have explained the reference (the two conducted a long correspondence). Author or translator or editor (or all three) decided that the allusion was too obscure and clarified it. Ravel's String Quartet in F Major is easy enough to find:<BR><BR> <DIV ALIGN="CENTER">
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<BR>
There are even excerpts of a version for <i>ondes Martentot</i>, a kind of precursor of the theremin:<BR><BR>
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<iframe width="320" height="180" src="https://youtube.com/embed/G3ESumjv96U?si=mK3Lb8FsI4ysV0us" frameborder="0"></iframe></DIV>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-14986598540054710742024-01-29T09:09:00.006-05:002024-01-29T12:14:48.023-05:00The Drifter<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiLBBNumuvXyq8YQOLv6TOVWY12ZE23laycFTGkGoqI0ENHGGqsArgQt9i2W8xG70HLc3wRM2bHTf4JTEtjiamiC1h9h49r5IxlcbdxfCMh7Yp43Vkcg3KE36drsW0pkU143_425j5Bhur12oQQ3VNho-022JJsJgzpU2-9eWyfgRejRXy77CJ/s600/mary%20celeste%20copy.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiLBBNumuvXyq8YQOLv6TOVWY12ZE23laycFTGkGoqI0ENHGGqsArgQt9i2W8xG70HLc3wRM2bHTf4JTEtjiamiC1h9h49r5IxlcbdxfCMh7Yp43Vkcg3KE36drsW0pkU143_425j5Bhur12oQQ3VNho-022JJsJgzpU2-9eWyfgRejRXy77CJ/s320/mary%20celeste%20copy.jpg"/></a></div>When I was growing up there was a commercial artist in our neighborhood named Gordon Johnson, whose specialty was paintings for advertising work and book illustration. He often worked from photographs that he had local people pose for, and this scene of the sighting of the <i>Mary Celeste</i> probably depicts people I knew, though at this point I'm no longer sure who they were. It was done, if I remember right, as part of a series for an insurance company. I have a print copy somewhere, but the image above was found online.<BR><BR>The <i>Mary Celeste</i> incident is one of the great nautical enigmas. An American merchant sailing ship is found in the Atlantic Ocean, a bit west of Portugal, with no ship's boat, a full cargo, a logbook a few weeks out of date, and no obvious evidence of fire, shipwreck, mutiny, or piracy. No trace of the crew or the passengers (which included the captain's wife and young daughter) is ever found. The ship is boarded by sailors from the Canadian brigantine <i>Dei Gratia</i> and brought to port in Gibraltar. After lengthy legal proceedings it is eventually reclaimed by its owners and put back into service. (Later proprietors sank it as part of an insurance scam, but that's another whole story.)<BR><BR>
Various explanations and impostures have been put forth over the years, some of them fairly bizarre. An early one was offered, anonymously and fictionally, by a young Arthur Conan Doyle, who mistakenly called the ship the <i>Marie Celeste</i> (as many have done since) and imagined a tale of conspiracy involving a psychopathic ex-slave with a grudge against the white race and the missing ear of an African stone idol. Perhaps the most amusing solution was put forward by one J. L. Hornibrook:<BLOCKQUOTE>
There is a man stationed at the wheel. He is alone on deck, all the others having gone below to their mid-day meal. Suddenly a huge octopus rises from the deep, and rearing one of its terrible arms aloft encircles the helmsman. His yells bring every soul on board rushing on deck. One by one they are caught by the waving, wriggling arms and swept overboard. Then, freighted with its living load, the monster slowly sinks into the deep again, leaving no traces of its attack.
</BLOCKQUOTE>I thought about the incident during a trip to a library, when, while looking for something else, I spotted the title <i>Mystery Ship</i> stamped in gold on a green binding and opened it on a hunch. The book, written by a historian named George S. Bryan and published by Lippincott in 1942, was indeed about the <i>Mary Celeste</i>. I brought it home on a lark and found that it was actually quite good, though it's apparently long out-of-print and mostly forgotten except by nautical historians. Bryan looked carefully at the original documentary evidence (much of which he reproduces), went over the various explanatory theories point by point, reprinted a good portion of the Conan Doyle, and dispelled much of the nonsense that had accreted over the years. (The ship's cat was <i>not</i> dozing contentedly when the <i>Mary Celeste</i> was found, there were no live chickens on board, nor were there half-eaten meals still warm in the mess.) His own tentative conclusion was that the ship was deliberately abandoned because the captain had reason to believe that it was in grave danger, either from shipwreck or from an imminent explosion of its cargo (which consisted almost entirely of barrels of alcohol). The line that may have tethered the single ship's boat failed to hold, and the passengers and crew drifted into oblivion.<BR><BR>
I was aware of the story of the <i>Mary Celeste</i> from a fairly early age, though I never knew it in detail. This painting no doubt shaped how I imagined it. I've had a weakness for eerie nautical stories ever since.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-83192766967811681632024-01-24T18:41:00.001-05:002024-01-24T18:41:17.772-05:00Notebook: James Boswell Imitates a Cow<i>John Brewer, describing a night at the Royal Drury Lane Theatre in 1769:</i><BLOCKQUOTE>During the hour before the curtain rose the theatre was filled by what a bemused German visitor, von Archenholz, called ‘noise and bombardment’: the audience chatted, cheered and sang, threw fruit at one another, flirted and preened themselves. A few years earlier James Boswell, waiting with a Scottish friend for a Drury Lane performance to begin, ‘entertained the audience prodigiously by imitating the lowing of a cow.’ As he later proudly remarked, ‘I was so successful in this boyish frolic that the universal cry of the galleries was “<i>Encore</i> the cow! <i>Encore</i> the cow!”’<BR><BR><i>The Pleasures of the Imagination</i></BLOCKQUOTE>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-65080327502764333642024-01-02T17:08:00.001-05:002024-01-09T15:05:09.301-05:00Notes for a Commonplace Book (30)<i>Henry David Thoreau:</i><BLOCKQUOTE>
I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me. Very significant are the flight of geese and the migration of suckers, etc. But when I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here, the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, beaver, turkey, etc., etc., I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country. Would not the motions of those larger and wilder animals have been more significant still? Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all its warriors. Do not the forest and the meadow now lack expression? now that I never see nor think of the moose with a lesser forest on his head in the one, nor of the beaver in the other? When I think what were the various sounds and notes, the migrations and works, and changes of fur and plumage which ushered in the spring, and marked the other seasons of the year, I am reminded that this my life in nature, this particular round of natural phenomena which I call a year, is lamentably incomplete. I listen to a concert in which so many parts are wanting. The whole civilized country is, to some extent, turned into a city, and I am that citizen whom I pity. Many of those animal migrations and other phenomena by which the Indians marked the season are no longer to be observed. I seek acquaintance with nature to know her moods and manners.
Primitive nature is the most interesting to me. I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I learn that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. <BR><BR>
<i> The Journal</i> (1856)</BLOCKQUOTE>The above is a fuller version of a passage quoted in Dan Flores's sobering 2022 book <i>Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals & People in America</i>. A few of the animals Thoreau mentions have since recovered (at least to an extent) in the Northeast, but by and large his lament is still valid. We live in an impoverished world. Sadder still, many of us aren't even aware of how much we've lost.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-6389321308815878882023-12-14T18:47:00.002-05:002023-12-14T18:48:40.439-05:00Forthcoming<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIPs9k-Xbm4F1Cx-on27fiMBz1nmSoX45LLb15-AzoV7qh290Ur0nxJiMDOerC-ydpiZIQwxI7ftwzZf4HtvmPpfaC74V7QIR81Q0Ci1vLnlF8E6dRs4xpgRje3-7Pe0NLrdCz9SehdmAwlQgqqwq0KT2GUrrHjNK2YTnHi-wSn1ofQHbCqXLJ/s855/volcanes_SOLOWEB.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="855" data-original-width="552" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIPs9k-Xbm4F1Cx-on27fiMBz1nmSoX45LLb15-AzoV7qh290Ur0nxJiMDOerC-ydpiZIQwxI7ftwzZf4HtvmPpfaC74V7QIR81Q0Ci1vLnlF8E6dRs4xpgRje3-7Pe0NLrdCz9SehdmAwlQgqqwq0KT2GUrrHjNK2YTnHi-wSn1ofQHbCqXLJ/s320/volcanes_SOLOWEB.jpg"/></a></div>Something for me to look forward to: this <a href="https://www.nordicalibros.com/product/atlas-novelado-de-los-volcanes-de-islandia/">Spanish translation</a> of a book by the Italian writer Leonardo Piccione. The publisher's description (roughly rendered) states:<BLOCKQUOTE>
The 47 stories contained in this volume are linked in various manners with the volcanoes of Iceland, and reveal them from the adventures of the first colonizers of the island to the deeds of extreme explorers, from the old Norse sagas to the NASA missions in the "lunar" canyons of the highlands, alternating science, poetry, chronicle, and legend.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
If nothing else, the book design, judging from <a href="https://www.nordicalibros.com/product/atlas-novelado-de-los-volcanes-de-islandia/">the interior spreads</a> shown on the publisher's website, is stunning. The Nórdica Libros edition is due in February 2024; there's no word on an English-language version yet, as far as I can tell. The title translates as "Fictional Atlas of the Volcanoes of Iceland."
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-85716238432569625142023-12-04T14:40:00.001-05:002023-12-04T14:41:25.021-05:00Produce department<BR>We're lying in bed and there's a rap on the window glass. I get up and open the window. A middle-aged couple are standing on the sidewalk and the man asks me if I have any <a href="https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/articles/ramps-allium-tricoccum/">ramps</a>. I say yes and go to the front door to meet them. On the way there I pick up a handful of limp scallions, which I offer with an apology, saying that ramps are out of season and that's all I have. He and his wife aren't wearing masks (neither am I) but he tells me they've both had COVID. He gives me a dollar and they leave. On the way down the hall I pass the open door of another room, where a male relative is standing next to a tall wooden cabinet. The cabinet is festooned with hundreds of radishes of different sizes and colors (but mostly red), lovingly and symmetrically arranged. Where some people have knickknacks, he has radishes. And now, back to bed.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-1065794025072033402023-11-28T18:32:00.001-05:002023-11-29T17:55:05.431-05:00(Not) Reading George Eliot<BR>Two hundred pages into my second attempt to read <i>Middlemarch</i> I've thrown in the towel. I went into it with high hopes, having recently enjoyed the 1994 BBC series, which I didn't see when it first ran. I discounted my earlier experience with the book a few years back, which had ground to a halt after maybe twenty-five pages, and I did make good headway for a while this time, and even found myself appreciating Eliot's unhurried, almost dialogue-free narrative style. But after a while I just couldn't stay awake through one more page-long paragraph describing the characters and attitudes of provincial doctors or bankers or marriageable young women. Every sentence glistened with wit and intelligence, but the plot moved at a glacial pace. Now and then an anecdote would perk things up briefly — the most intriguing being the episode of Dr. Lydgate's passion for a French actress who stabbed her husband to death on stage — but it just wasn't enough. In fact I think I would have enjoyed the two hundred pages I did read even less if I hadn't been able to imagine the splendid BBC cast fleshing out the written page. It made me want to head back to Dickens, or, for whatever reason, to Turgenev's <i><a href="https://dreamersrise.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-old-country.html">Hunting Sketches</a></i>. In fact the idea of brief "sketches" is now very appealing. Ah, well.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-18141171064725099972023-10-31T12:41:00.002-04:002023-10-31T13:00:41.134-04:00Welcoming committee<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcIOp8NshEEOH5PwQG2bWHU1KBcrwaAkBjdfnBxy7TKxWEvBO9-KrU-Z60kNB4pW4UX7BEzPfLHkp-Tejd6IWHT1JQLcGpeQVMxYreR244O7kDJaXikShwVfxmUEaeGE4F2UyDMe0mwdMyyjTnanC8AnZvK4sUIqdvFOYy3Di99uty-yuDU__J/s4000/P1620899.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcIOp8NshEEOH5PwQG2bWHU1KBcrwaAkBjdfnBxy7TKxWEvBO9-KrU-Z60kNB4pW4UX7BEzPfLHkp-Tejd6IWHT1JQLcGpeQVMxYreR244O7kDJaXikShwVfxmUEaeGE4F2UyDMe0mwdMyyjTnanC8AnZvK4sUIqdvFOYy3Di99uty-yuDU__J/s320/P1620899.jpeg"/></a></div>We're in the process of completing our second relocation of the year, having most recently moved from temporary digs in Portsmouth NH to our new permanent address just over the Maine border. On one of our last mornings in New Hampshire I went for a morning hike and saw this bobcat crossing the trail just ahead of me. I quickened my pace a bit, figuring the cat would likely disappear into the brush before I could set up a shot, but it seemed to be in no great hurry and even turned around to look back at me for a moment. I've seen bobcats a few times before, but this is the first time I've had one pose. After a few seconds it moved off.<BR><BR>The mid-fall Maine weather has been far warmer than advertised, with temps grazing 80, and for several days the side of our house swarmed with ladybird beetles and assasssin bugs. The latter weren't living up to their name, perhaps because they know that the beetles are somewhat toxic; the two species crawled around each other, pursuing their separate interests.<BR><BR>
Then last night, around 8:30, an owl started hooting outside and kept it up for roughly a half-hour. The noise kept setting off our dog, and finally I took him out for a look. The bird, probably a great horned owl, was clearly visible in the top of a tree just across the street and was undisturbed by our presence. It flew off eventually but made a brief return just after dawn.
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-24242027598070435492023-09-25T09:45:00.001-04:002023-09-25T10:25:19.595-04:00Hard Times<BR>Sarah Orne Jewett was known for her portrayals of the lives of the farmers and fisher-folk of her native state, but she wrote at least one story that recognizes that nineteenth-century rural Maine, with its abundant water power in the form of rivers, was also a center of industrial production. "The Gray Mills of Farley," published in 1898, tells of events in a company town dominated by a cotton mill. The mill's labor force has arrived in successive waves: first, young people from neighboring farms, then experienced English millhands, poor Irish immigrants, and finally, the newcomers, French-Canadians who are willing to work cheaper and are viewed with suspicion by the older hands. The town is grim and poor, if not, when times are good, utterly desperate. <BR><BR>
Jewett largely focuses on the mill's "agent," who is in charge of its day-to-day management and effectively mediates between labor and capital. No stereotypical brutish overseer, he was born in the town, was orphaned at a young age and grew up poor, but gained a commercial education and has returned to run the mills. Jewett describes him as "a single man, keen and businesslike, but quietly kind to the people under his charge." As the story begins, he meets with one of the mill's directors and reports that the mill has done well and will be able to issue a healthy dividend of nine percent to its investors. He adds, however, that he hopes the board will declare a dividend two or three points smaller than that and return some of the earnings to the labor force, whose wages had been cut during a previous downturn and never restored. He notes that the market is currently glutted and that it may be prudent to keep a reserve within the community. His proposal is politely but firmly dismissed; the directors feel no responsibility for the welfare of the workers, who, in their view, should consider themselves fortunate to be employed at all.<BR><BR>
Sure enough, a downturn comes and the mill hands are laid off. Penurious to begin with, they are soon barely above starvation. As the months drag on the agent digs deep into his own pocket to help out as many families as he can, and provides an allotment of land and free seed potatoes so they can raise a bit of food. The local Catholic priest (again, portrayed sympathetically) dips into the takings of the collection plate and puts some men to work laying the foundation for a new church. The workers are resentful but have little recourse; many of the French-Canadians depart, returning home or seeking work elsewhere.
<BR><BR>In the end, a reprieve comes. Business conditions improve and the workers are called back. But the positive note on which the story ends is tempered by a recognition of the harsh realities of industrial labor.<BLOCKQUOTE>"Jolly-looking set this morning," said one of the clerks whose desk was close beside the window; he was a son of one of the directors, who had sent him to the agent to learn something about manufacturing.<BR><BR>
"They've had a bitter hard summer that you know nothing about," said the agent slowly.</BLOCKQUOTE>
"The Gray Mills of Farley" can be found in the Library of America volume of Jewett's <i>Novels and Stories</i>.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-12670183703501961592023-09-09T14:59:00.003-04:002023-09-18T10:27:30.535-04:00The Harbor of Lost Ships<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj510NIFxikOCEFfOzj83XEGQB2nu9f_lgyCz96-HoIUKS36bHGhOhgqvxp1op2Ka_wu43IFbHu8XTuF3cduw1talHbXO0ggX2yUx_KFO6K__WxhcjJhcyg4buPjqFTkD8LZmMkdTBG_4BEh2jiU4h9tZveCqqN5LtIxqQ-5GpXRasqarfhlsUt/s450/9781662601903-2.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj510NIFxikOCEFfOzj83XEGQB2nu9f_lgyCz96-HoIUKS36bHGhOhgqvxp1op2Ka_wu43IFbHu8XTuF3cduw1talHbXO0ggX2yUx_KFO6K__WxhcjJhcyg4buPjqFTkD8LZmMkdTBG_4BEh2jiU4h9tZveCqqN5LtIxqQ-5GpXRasqarfhlsUt/s320/9781662601903-2.jpeg"/></a></div>
<i>
Brad Fox, paraphrasing William Beebe's "final, disorganized notes on marine subjects," here describing the fate of shipwrecked sailors:</i>
<BLOCKQUOTE>The sea angel Amphitrite swoops down for the sailors who have served her faithfully, and takes them to the court of King Neptune, who judges whether they've lived by the laws of the sea, whether they've been worthy.<BR><BR>Others end up in a harbor in the far north where lost ships go. Some vessels crossing in the northern seas encounter these ghost ships, appearing and disappearing, flagless, unresponsive to salutations or threats. The Harbor of Lost Ships is locked in by high, barren, icy cliffs. In their shelter lie thousands of hulls, pressed together. Their ghostly crews walk the wharfs or stand still, as if they would sail off the next day, trimming sails and swabbing decks in the icy mist.<BR><BR>
<i>The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths</i>
</BLOCKQUOTE><i>Update (September 2023):</i> Not long after coming across the above passage, I picked up Sarah Orne Jewett's <i>The Country of the Pointed Firs,</i> one chapter of which recounts a tale of a voyage to the extreme north (somewhere above Labrador, or thereabouts) where sailors encounter a mysterious town populated by drifting "shapes of folks." The town, "a kind of waiting-place between this world an' the next," vanishes like mist when the sailors approach. Jewett's description is too long to quote here.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-69140715393150466502023-08-06T05:46:00.003-04:002023-08-06T05:47:35.773-04:00August notebook<BR>Here's a little object lesson in the compartmentalization of modern life. One afternoon we went out for a drive and as we headed to our car we looked back and saw our striped cat watching us from the window of our second-floor apartment, as she sometimes does. It took a moment before we realized that it wasn't our window at all, but the window of the adjacent apartment, whose occupants we haven't met, and that the striped cat wasn't our striped cat but an apparently identical one belonging to our neighbor or neighbors. Unlike the numerous dogs in the building, who see each other outside and hear each other barking from time to time, the two cats live parallel lives in cubicles a few feet apart, presumably in utter ignorance of each other's existence.
<BR><BR><DIV ALIGN="CENTER">***</DIV><BR>
Mysteriously, we've been followed by dragonflies ever since we moved in. When we drive out of the parking lot we often see one hovering over our windshield, as if checking us out, and sometimes we find what we can only assume is a different dragonfly greeting us when we get out of our car at our destination. They're said to be an omen of good luck — and a symbol of Japan, whatever that might entail for us. Today a meadowhawk (many dragonflies have wonderful, vivid names) approached me while I was out walking, settled on my hand, and stayed there for some time. It chose my camera hand, but I managed to slip the other in my left pocket for my cell phone and take a picture.<BR><BR><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrd-KYL54UEYMjrvOhDDyJo54lb1RSKS4aCkEBEU85w6QTkkQTL7OMe-WoqtY48VWF4xz1EyHzc3Ca18wZQRPvw0YWeXbuqh8991Wr0GPE_KaZJnuxlOuLoJw_y67rLLaZ6Z6dJZffbq7e_AOuGkV_VCv9v1aRYG_Ty5YqQwMwPIbNFpNv-HCV/s4032/IMG_0966.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrd-KYL54UEYMjrvOhDDyJo54lb1RSKS4aCkEBEU85w6QTkkQTL7OMe-WoqtY48VWF4xz1EyHzc3Ca18wZQRPvw0YWeXbuqh8991Wr0GPE_KaZJnuxlOuLoJw_y67rLLaZ6Z6dJZffbq7e_AOuGkV_VCv9v1aRYG_Ty5YqQwMwPIbNFpNv-HCV/s400/IMG_0966.jpeg"/></a></div>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-11264310594900068982023-07-27T14:24:00.008-04:002023-07-27T17:56:15.245-04:00Sweet Thames Flow Softly<BR><iframe width="432" height="243" src="https://youtube.com/embed/Tgwtl-s0CNI" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<BR><BR>I've always enjoyed this Ewan MacColl song, which I first heard on Planxty's eponymous debut album, but this gentle version (featuring some additional verses) is special. The lead vocalist is Christy Moore, as on the Planxty LP; he is accompanied here by the late Sinéad O'Connor and by guitarist Neill MacColl, who is Ewan's son. (His mother, still living, is Peggy Seeger, half-sister of Pete.)Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-15318970795474077212023-07-17T12:34:00.007-04:002023-07-17T19:19:00.492-04:00Displacement<BR>About six weeks ago we moved out of the house where we had lived since 1990, leaving the town where we had roots stretching back much longer that, and settled, at least for now, into a one-bedroom apartment some two hundred miles away in order to be nearer to our family. Most of our stuff (including a piano and at least 90% of our books) is now in storage and more or less inaccessible. As it worked out, we left town on the very evening that an unprecedented wave of wildfire smoke moved down from Canada and into the New York metropolitan area. We actually missed the worst of it, which came the next day, but even so it made for an otherwordly five-hour drive. And the summer has continued in an ominous vein, with unprecedented heat in the Sun Belt, torrential downpours and flooding in the northeast, and further incursions of smoke.<BR><BR>
One of our biggest worries was our cat, who is nervous and averse to being handled (except, of course, when she wants to be handled). We managed to grab her and get her into the cat carrier, then listened to her heavy breathing as we drove along. She never meowed and after a while we worried that she had simply succumbed from stress. Stopping along the way was out of the question. In fact, though initially traumatized, she came out of hiding after a day or so and now seems perfectly content. We suspect that she prefers apartment life; maybe she finds there's less to be responsible for. The dog, of course, can deal with anything as long as he's with us.<BR><BR>I've sought out new haunts, and found a few; more adventuresome outings will have to wait. In the meantime I'm burning through the three volumes of Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles, borrowed from the excellent local library, and watching <i>Chimes at Midnight</i>.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-60997616879261347062023-07-09T19:48:00.002-04:002023-07-09T19:59:15.377-04:00Perpetual Care<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiptj2pEQ16QUU_ZdRX18z400wFskoHlQ1GBQ6HEznfeudpXcobE4JSbY6W1PG94Hq1MLxkzHFxurUPKRGPjzveITg6r1gY653O7D1fJCWy2yvPsajrbCVp_NURNgiOUZjOmCWlmsqVA6OxfmKH6NDZ9qR1WFRnQCY07XtNFk11sq302j2hvvg_/s4000/P1590702.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiptj2pEQ16QUU_ZdRX18z400wFskoHlQ1GBQ6HEznfeudpXcobE4JSbY6W1PG94Hq1MLxkzHFxurUPKRGPjzveITg6r1gY653O7D1fJCWy2yvPsajrbCVp_NURNgiOUZjOmCWlmsqVA6OxfmKH6NDZ9qR1WFRnQCY07XtNFk11sq302j2hvvg_/s320/P1590702.jpeg"/></a></div>
<i>
A cemetery, New Hampshire.</i>
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Miscellaneous sightings from June wanderings. From top: self-portrait with <a href="https://professionalmoron.com/2019/01/25/kodama-tree-spirits/">kodama</a>; white morph of <a href="https://dreamersrise.blogspot.com/2020/05/cypripedium-acaule.html">pink lady's-slipper</a>; trailside shrine with Buddhas and rabies tag; forest fungi.
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Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-41888683689047509392023-05-24T18:03:00.000-04:002023-05-24T18:03:32.038-04:00Reading Matter<BR>Over the past few weeks we've been in the midst of major preparations for an upcoming relocation, but a few days ago I realized that I had gotten a bit ahead of things and packed up almost our entire library, leaving only a handful of books, all of which I'd read before, with two weeks still to go. Fortunately, our local library just had a book sale (partially with our donations), and at this point they're giving away what's left. I stopped by, took a look around, and saw more than I expected. Any other time I might have loaded up, but I had to focus on immediate needs only. I passed, therefore, on two volumes of Chekhov stories, Charlotte Brontë's <i>The Professor</i>, a Mary Braddon novel I knew nothing about, Iris Murdoch's <i>The Sea, The Sea</i>, a Dickens novel I don't own, and several other tempting volumes, and settled on three. The first two were obligatory; Seamus Heaney and Mark Strand have long been two of my favorite poets, and the books I found were slender, which is definitely a plus right now. I've read parts of <i>Sweeney Astray</i> in other Heaney collections, but was only vaguely aware that Strand had written a brief prose work on Edward Hopper.
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The real find for me, though, was an apparently unread copy of the Bantam edition (c. 1970) of Herman Hesse's last novel, which has been on and off my "to read" list for years. I've actually never read much Hesse, but I'm old enough to remember the time in the 1960s when no sensitive young person's backpack would be complete without a couple of Noonday Press editions of his work. Why this one in particular? Because the premise ("a chronicle of the future about Castalia, an élitist group formed after the chaos of the 20th-century wars") seemed promising, because Gide, Mann, and T. S. Eliot all admired it, and maybe most of all because how can one resist a title as sonorous as <i>Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game)</i> (or in German, <i>Das Glasperlenspiel</i>)?
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgitb1jHRU_zz0zCroFC8yQOcoNehcHnriUu_n-0DdYU8gdidaGiusG96VoPeg1jJnCLW_LKkXu8MTFJnKqD4UWfeZOp6hYWJ9cAQryYZZR3KQ4qsNAe409jF0c0IMz_dpmkjcMMN0rXwObOkYvO8hb8rujLNqcrPKORHoGkM6wXzeExq1gvw/s2054/Scan.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="2054" data-original-width="1192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgitb1jHRU_zz0zCroFC8yQOcoNehcHnriUu_n-0DdYU8gdidaGiusG96VoPeg1jJnCLW_LKkXu8MTFJnKqD4UWfeZOp6hYWJ9cAQryYZZR3KQ4qsNAe409jF0c0IMz_dpmkjcMMN0rXwObOkYvO8hb8rujLNqcrPKORHoGkM6wXzeExq1gvw/s320/Scan.jpg"/></a></div>
I left a couple of bucks for a donation to the library. It's a no-lose proposition. If <i>Magister Ludi</i> turns out to be a snooze, at least it will help me fall asleep at night.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-67591552537015639882023-05-17T18:32:00.001-04:002023-05-17T18:33:09.101-04:00Song<BR>It's morning<BR>
Nobody's up but the crows<BR>
Memphis Minnie and Joe McCoy<BR>
are singing "Can I Do It For You?"<BR>
as if they were here in the room<BR>
not as if they were dead and buried<BR>
these fifty years<BR><BR>
As if every breath and every smile<BR>
and every finger's touch on the strings of a guitar<BR>
hadn't risen up<BR>
wrapped in wisps of smoke<BR>
and disappeared long ago<BR>
into the bustle of a forgotten morning<BR>
a thousand miles from here<BR><BR>
The sun's just a yellow gash<BR>
on the cusp of the horizon<BR>
but already the day is opening out<BR>
pale and wide and unforgiving<BR>
but the worst of winter is done<BR>
and somebody somewhere is making coffee<BR>
or falling in love<BR><BR>
Or anyway falling into their clothes<BR>
and Memphis Minnie and Joe McCoy<BR>
are playing "North Memphis Blues"<BR>
because that's what you do<BR>
on some cold morning<BR>
when nobody's watching<BR>
the smoke rise into the airChrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-65819554956808759812023-04-17T17:28:00.003-04:002023-04-17T17:28:55.595-04:00A Small Rain's A-Gonna Fall<BR>A lovely and curious turn of phrase with a story behind it almost slipped my notice when I was re-reading Rafi Zabor's novel <i>The Bear Comes Home</i>. Two men, Jones and Levine, stand outside a jazz venue that Levine is constructing within the body of the Brooklyn Bridge.<BLOCKQUOTE>They stood on the large square landing atop the roughed-out stairway and looked riverward across to Brooklyn. It was an indecisive afternoon: the <b>small rain down had rained</b> and now, south on their right to the Battery, a white winter sun alternately masked and unmasked itself behind migrating cloud. The grey underside of the bridge soared out over the river and diminished toward its farther landing, the water beneath the bridge dull as lead except where the sun found it and tipped the surface. (Emphasis added.)</BLOCKQUOTE>The words "the small rain down had rained," which puzzled me at first, are an allusion to this haunting little fragment of 16th-century song lyric:<BLOCKQUOTE>
Westron wynde when wyll thow blow<BR>
the smalle rayne downe can Rayne<BR>
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys<BR>
and I yn my bed Agayne
</BLOCKQUOTE>The interpretation of the lines and even the parsing of the syntax is somewhat uncertain, but "the small rain down can rain" should probably be read as meaning "the small rain can rain down." The ultimate source of the phrase may be from Deuteronomy (KJV): "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass." Thomas Pynchon's first short story was entitled "The Small Rain," and Pynchon scholar Richard Darabaner (1952-1985) believed that he borrowed the title directly from Deuteronomy.
<BR><BR>There's a discussion of "Westron Wynde" at <a href="https://earlymusicmuse.com/westron-wynde/">Early Music Muse</a>.
Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-35062773798255344562023-03-31T07:07:00.013-04:002023-03-31T07:07:00.212-04:00Freedom down the bending avenue<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhli2Q4HFx5lma_LLz9FGBK9V-Q7FJXhZfUelWC-Nbmrx6uX7w6zv9UVWu5ZNUISI_V6OcucdCtzl4o56CTePVrfDAjwVxs3-0MoBfsKXj2LF3NMgZRZlnqVc5lBNLRdgcAzheQPqaS9Wv97tXhA1Jv3oHHEGFg7TIqDUsvxWFuRyZrZi5gOA/s1080/peter_case_0d100f3c_thumbnail_2048.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhli2Q4HFx5lma_LLz9FGBK9V-Q7FJXhZfUelWC-Nbmrx6uX7w6zv9UVWu5ZNUISI_V6OcucdCtzl4o56CTePVrfDAjwVxs3-0MoBfsKXj2LF3NMgZRZlnqVc5lBNLRdgcAzheQPqaS9Wv97tXhA1Jv3oHHEGFg7TIqDUsvxWFuRyZrZi5gOA/s320/peter_case_0d100f3c_thumbnail_2048.jpg"/></a></div>Songwriter Peter Case has a new record just out from <a href="https://www.sunsetblvdrecords.com/">Sunset Blvd Records</a>. Entitled <i>Doctor Moan</i>, it's his first album of original songs since <i>HWY 62</i> in 2015, and his first ever on which the piano, rather than the guitar, serves as his primary instrument. The shift isn't entirely unprecedented, since two years ago he alternated a bit between the two instruments on a collection of covers of folk songs and blues called <i><a href="http://dreamersrise.blogspot.com/2021/03/airwaves-midnight-broadcast.html">The Midnight Broadcast</a>,</i> but still, it's a move into new songwriting territory. It's not <i>entirely</i> a clean break, as there's one tuneful guitar-driven track, "Wandering Days," that wouldn't have been out of place with his work with the Nerves in the mid-1970s. Most of the record, though, draws as much from the postwar generation of jazz pianists like Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and McCoy Tyner, as well as bits of classic gospel, soul, and blues, as it does from pop and rock. (As it happens, Case has been sitting in on piano now and then at the <a href="https://www.coltranechurch.org/">Saint John Coltrane Church</a> in San Francisco, and he's been known to sneak in a few bars of "Blue Monk" during warm-ups.)
<BR><BR>My favorite track so far, "Have You Ever Been in Trouble?" is built around a few gorgeous dark chords and makes delicious use of the piano's lowest keys. Like much of his songwriting, it explores the world of the down and out (in the West Coast style familiar from Charles Bukowski and Tom Waits) while at the same time weighing the possibilities for redemption. The bridge here is particularly lovely, both tonally and lyrically:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<i>There's freedom down the bending avenue<BR>
Do you see someone coming?<br>
Something you can do?<br>
There's one thing I know for sure is real<br>
The moment you surrender<br>
The wounds begin to heal<br>
Here's your reprieve
<br>
Ask and you'll receive</i>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
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<BR>"Downtown Nowhere's Blues" engagingly captures the denizens of a joint called the Round-the-Clock Diner:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<i>Out front by the curb they're making noise<br>
A bunch of old men that act like boys<br>
Big T turns to me while I'm try'na chew<br>
Says "If I had a dog half as ugly as you<br>
I'd make him walk backward through Downtown Nowhere"</i>
</BLOCKQUOTE>
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<BR>There are some interesting reverberations between these two songs: "Have You Ever Been in Trouble?" speaks of "the Holy Ghost / Coming down the alley / Just like a megadose," while a woman in "Downtown Nowhere's Blues" who is on "a microdose of LSD / [...] fiddles with the jukebox and her destiny." Different paths, different revelations.<BR><BR>
Other than Case's piano and the one guitar-based track, the instrumentation on <i>Doctor Moan</i> is sparse but effective; it features Jon Flaugher on bass and Chris Joyner on organ. The cover art depicts the vintage Steinway upright Case used to record the album. This is definitely a record worth checking out.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-65314900469254263682023-03-16T18:11:00.000-04:002023-03-16T18:11:17.713-04:00The Hearts of Literary Men<i>Dard Hunter:</i>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Legend has it that Emperor Wu (A.D. 1368-98 ) tried to procure a suitable paper for the printing of money and to this end consulted with the wise men of his realm for advice. One of the learned group suggested that counterfeiting could only be prevented by mixing the macerated hearts of great literary men with the mulberry-bark
pulp. The Emperor is said to have taken this suggestion under advisement, but at length he decided it would be a grave mistake
to destroy the literary men of China simply for the purpose of
using their hearts as ingredients for paper. In talking over the
problem with the Empress she suggested that the same result
could be achieved without interfering with the lives of their scholarly subjects. The Empress brought forth the thought that the
heart of any true literary man was actually in his writings. Therefore, the wise Empress asked the Emperor to have collected the
papers upon which the great Chinese authors and poets had set
down their writings. The manuscripts were duly macerated and
added to the mulberry bark and it was thought that the dark grey tone of the money papers was due to the black ink used in the calligraphy upon the paper.<BR><BR>
<i>Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft</i><BLOCKQUOTE>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-56613456686172879512023-03-10T13:49:00.001-05:002023-03-10T14:22:56.963-05:00Dream House<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuBRZ7J9ikj4O02FXxsk0AAcAuVeF_zigg88io0OBNwkBT433xtlUWeJYCl4pK8hzHwamDTjxqz8ASsEWYTWgDflRSC79n05TbBjiM7ZrHciTm7lN_Ocpm1A8GyrNA8mXIBK6PAxMiVvKNpHi1K_QhR5lp2rEI20TKBAyWtNMJedYBz1fAmQ/s1315/house.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1315" data-original-width="971" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuBRZ7J9ikj4O02FXxsk0AAcAuVeF_zigg88io0OBNwkBT433xtlUWeJYCl4pK8hzHwamDTjxqz8ASsEWYTWgDflRSC79n05TbBjiM7ZrHciTm7lN_Ocpm1A8GyrNA8mXIBK6PAxMiVvKNpHi1K_QhR5lp2rEI20TKBAyWtNMJedYBz1fAmQ/s320/house.jpeg"/></a></div>In an era of computer animation wizardry it's nice to see older technologies like stop-motion animation being reinvigorated and put to use for intelligent visual storytelling. A few months ago we were pleasantly surprised by Guillermo del Toro's <i>Pinocchio</i>, and just last night we stumbled upon this little gem. Written by Enda Walsh, <i>The House</i> is made up of three narratives supervised by three different directors, with the common thread being the title building and how it embodies both the nightmarish aspects of home ownership and our insistent need for a place to hang our hats. (For reasons I won't go into, we found it uncannily appropriate to our circumstances.)<BR><BR>
The first segment begins in folktale fashion with a poor couple who, after an encounter with a mysterious stranger, find themselves in free possession of a rambling mansion in the British countryside, the only requirement being that they surrender the smaller house that is their own. The focus of the segment is on the older of the couple's two young daughters, who, like Chihiro in Hayao Miyazaki's <i>Spirited Away,</i> is more alert to the dangers of temptation then her parents are. Increasingly creepy as it progresses, it is the only part of the film that features human subjects, here represented by doll-like and delicate figures whose faces convey boundless melancholy.<BR><BR>By the second segment, the rural landscape has become urbanized and contemporary, and the house is in the possession of an ambitious developer (literally, a rat) who has furnished it with the latest mod cons in the hopes of making a killing in the real estate market. When the house is ready for showing everything possible goes wrong, and, what's worse, two sinister creatures — are they rodents, or something unimaginably worse? — take up residence uninvited and show no sign of leaving.<BR><BR>
In the final segment, the house has become isolated by rising seas and is now owned by a long-suffering cat named Rosa, who struggles to maintain it and run it as an apartment building with little help from her two tenants, neither of whom pays cash rent. Gentler and more wistful than the other two parts, it ends in a way that is ultimately liberating.<BR><BR>
Here and there I sensed affinities with, but rarely overt allusions to, everything from Kafka's <i>The Metamorphosis,</i> Stanley Kubrick's <i>The Shining,</i> and Miyazaki's <i>Howl's Moving Castle</i> to the scratchboard artist Thomas Ott and Terhi Ekebom's lovely graphic story <i><a href="https://kushkomikss.ecrater.com/p/22089677/logbook-terhi-ekebom">Logbook</a></i>.
The trailer below gives a good idea of the film's visual styles, but, inevitably, exaggerates its pace. The film largely avoids the lamentable tendency of contemporary animation to fill every possible second of running time with frenetic activity. When the story is sound to begin with there's little need for all of that.<BR><BR>
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</DIV>Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-89235151707301443292023-02-19T17:26:00.000-05:002023-02-19T17:26:21.304-05:00"Dark deeds of licentiousness and vice"<BR>"Sometime in March last, a gentleman who lives in Portsmouth N. H., being on a visit to Boston, was induced by a friend of this city, to visit, out of curiosity, the <i>third row</i>, in the Tremont Theatre. In all cities, this part of the theatre is well understood to be the resort of the very dregs of society. Here the vile of both sexes meet together, and arrange their dark deeds of licentiousness and vice. Soon after entering the common hall, this Portsmouth gentleman was struck with the very youthful and innocent countenance of one of the girls in the crowd. He sought an opportunity to speak to her. After some light observations to engage her attention, and not excite any suspicions, but that he was one among the rest, he asked her to walk a little aside, when he inquired how she came to her present condition, &c. He learned that she was from L_______, Vt., that she was very unhappy in her situation, but did not know how to get out of it...<BR><BR>
"We warn parents in the country, to be careful about permitting their daughters to go to factories, and especially about coming to Boston. There are men here who have the appearance of gentlemen, who, by the most seductive pretensions, and consummate artifice, seek every opportunity to ruin the innocent and unwary. They do this too, without the least remorse; they even make a boast of their ruined victims. Trust not, then, your daughters here, unless you can secure the watchful care of some well known friend. O how many who have come to this city, innocent and unsuspecting, have been soon snared in the trap of the deceiver, and here found an early, and a dishonorable grave!"
<BR><BR>
<i>Zion’s Herald,</i> May 9, 1838Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20453874.post-19215134863163782182023-02-01T11:30:00.011-05:002023-02-24T11:18:38.472-05:002 gueles 150 E.P.<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxDpkZUkKG-rZ29yzWTgDp09Np8l1ndTlQlCnrsBgir7Oguy_AE7xm0FE1-lCqERxIZFqkJSjlI7nXtAJjRIhbyKIKel3skMnp9oT1vp1aVxk8V0tfLl2DBrjssrlUfderYvta-lYjEC-FVEoFCsdyEo1EDlINd9MdMsXSEtlF49baHs0YDQ/s2048/328820539_1210625489863599_371175596898339890_n.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxDpkZUkKG-rZ29yzWTgDp09Np8l1ndTlQlCnrsBgir7Oguy_AE7xm0FE1-lCqERxIZFqkJSjlI7nXtAJjRIhbyKIKel3skMnp9oT1vp1aVxk8V0tfLl2DBrjssrlUfderYvta-lYjEC-FVEoFCsdyEo1EDlINd9MdMsXSEtlF49baHs0YDQ/s400/328820539_1210625489863599_371175596898339890_n.jpg"/></a></div>The writer and publisher Alastair Brotchie has died, according to social media announcements by the <a href="https://atlaspress.co.uk/">Atlas Press</a>, of which he was the proprietor, and the London Institute of Pataphysics, of which he was a guiding spirit and "Secretary of Issuance." The date of his "disappearance" is given, according to the <a href="https://www.patakosmos.com/pataphysical-calendar/">Pataphysical calendar</a>, in the title of this post; according to the Gregorian calendar it was on January 27th of this year.<BR><BR>Brotchie's biography of Alfred Jarry has been near the top of my list of books to read for several years, but I've never quite gotten around to it, in part because our local library system doesn't own a copy. I do have a copy of the <i><a href="https://50watts.com/Oulipo-Compendium">Oulipo Compendium</a></i> he edited with Harry Mathews.<BR><BR>Pataphysics, founded by Jarry, has been defined as "the science of imaginary solutions," and you may make of that what you will. Shortly before the pandemic broke out I took a trip into Manhattan, in part to see the outstanding <a href="https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/alfred-jarry">exhibition at the Morgan Library</a> devoted to Jarry. One can only wonder what he would have made of such a venue for his work, but I like to think he would have been amused. I haven't been back to the city since.<BR><BR>My condolences to Brotchie's family and friends.<BR><BR><i>Update:</i> The <i>Guardian</i> now has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/24/alastair-brotchie-obituary?fbclid=IwAR1raGFUySDeLFm_3XNY5iuqf4db2321EFm5BSk67qmaAVhJOdt-4C3N52E">an obituary of Brotchie</a> written by his friend Peter Blegvad.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06485410374923842372noreply@blogger.com0