Attacking The Digital Windmills
“Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.”― Lois McMaster Bujold
I started reading Don Quixote last week…finished book two last night. It is a novel that has been on “the list” of must read novels for me forever and with the “new” translation by Edith Grossman that came out a few years ago…heralded as a stunning achievement by its own right…it was calling my name (and, my friend Mike who read Les Miserables with me suggested it as well).
It is true, I fall on the side of the luddite when it comes to new technology. I am highly suspect of it, sentimentally harking back to a day when you couldn’t help but leave your phone at home and when the knowledge of the world was not a click away (side note: the first radio broadcast was 101 years ago today out of Pittsburg and the first high-def TV broadcast was transmitted out of London 85 years ago today). I am a staunch lover of analog things: reading a book cover to cover: that is a great experience.
THAT BEING SAID, when it comes to reading literature translated from another language…or just from the distant past that whose cultural (and other) references are as foreign to me as another language: the kindle has become something of a phenomenon. I was told when beginning Les Miserables that reading it on kindle was the only way to do it, with its 200+ pages of footnotes. With a kindle, when a footnote occurs, and with a simple finger-press, the information pops-up to greet the reader. A simple second swipe and you are back to the text. Some of Hugo’s chapters have dozens of footnotes packed within just a few pages…footnotes that are pretty crucial to wrap around in order to understand what is being read. It would have been even slower reading if I had to toggle to the back of the book every twenty seconds, just to go return and try and get into the plot again.
And then there are the functions that allow you to look up the history of the references of any character you come across (which is amazing while traversing a huge book of hundreds of characters) as well as your personal underlinings and side-notes….
With Don Quixote, many of the jokes thus far are translated through the footnotes, and it is a laugh-out-loud novel if given the chance. The mistakes the man from La Mancha makes…the allusions to other incompetent knights of the past…the use of language to accent his craziness: it is all in the footnotes and are a joy to read with the ease of access.
My friend Trev Huxley recently gifted me the kindle form of a massive book of letters between his grandfather Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmand. It is a brick of a book in its physical form, with hundreds of pages of footnotes helping explain and color the wonderful, futuristic and deeply prophetic conversations these two people engaged in (buried within the start and finish is the introduction of the word “psychedelic”). Even with these letters, written in English by two people from the 20th century, the digital format presents a pretty incredible experience.
The Art of Conversation: Studs Terkel Radio
I stumbled across this website recently and was absolutely blown away at what is available on it. Studs Terkel is a muse for this newsletter, with his super conversations, well rounded and well researched stories and his impeccable and wide-reaching artistic taste; I find his life work to be very inspiring. The interviews that have been digitized are fantastic…I got sucked in to one with bluesmen Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry….talking about Big Bill Broonzy. Amazing stuff and a big ole rabbit hole.
Sylvia Plath: Will the poet always be defined by her death?
“Since Sylvia Plath died in 1963, she's been turned into a crudely tragic symbol. As she inspires more biographies, will we ever get closer to the 'real' Plath…Plath has become a crude symbol of the girl outsider who rejects conventional standards of femininity to take her life, and death, into her own hands.”
Baton Rouge Gallery Announces Call to Artists for Surreal Salon 14
We need more surreal salons. “Baton Rouge Gallery – center for contemporary art (“BRG”) is proud to announce it is now accepting submissions for Surreal Salon 14, the juried exhibition that celebrates pop-surrealist/lowbrow art…Submissions will be reviewed via a blind jurying process that will ensure that works are selected based solely on their artistic merit (the juror will not see an artist’s name until after selections for the exhibition have been made).”
WHO KNOWS? RADIO AND THE PARANORMAL
Attempted to get through the latest chapter from the Conjuring franchise…failed. And then this article popped up. I would love to hear these shows. “This program was produced for the Mutual Broadcasting System from March 16, 1940 through August 29, 1941…The weekly 15-minute program explored the world of psychic phenomena.”
I Hear New Worlds: Chris Carter's Favourite Albums
“From a clandestine love of ABBA to a mind-expanding teenage encounter with Pink Floyd, via Joe Meek, Wendy Carlos and Tangerine Dream, Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle writes on the music that changed his life”
THE MONOGRAM
By: Odysseas Elytis
I’ll always mourn – hearken – for you,
alone, in Paradise
Fate will switch elsewhere the lines
on your palm, like a yardmaster;
within some moment Time will affirm this.
How else can it be, since pairs love each other
Heaven will unveil our innards
and innocence will strike upon the world
with the might of death’s blackness
II.
I mourn the sun, and I mourn the years ahead
without us, and I sing of the rest that evanesced,
if they’re true
The bodies conversed while the boats bespattered gently,
the guitars scintillating under the water,
the “believe me”s and the “don’t”s
in turns once in the air, once in the music
The two little pets, our hands
that desired to secretly mount one another;
the flowerpot with the geranium by the open gates;
and the pieces of sea that reached us all together
above the stone hedges, behind the fences;
and the sea-anemone that sat on your arm
and you were thrice affright of purple for three days, up there over the falls.
If these are true I sing of
the wooden beam and the square arras
on the wall showing the Mermaid with the loose hair;
the cat that glanced at us in the dimness.
Oh child with the incense and the red cross,
during the eventide at the inaccessible of the rocks,
I mourn the cloth I touched and the world came to me.
III.
Thusly I speak of you and me
Because I love you and in love I know
to pervade as a full-Moon
from everywhere, towards your slender leg under the endless sheets;
to pluck jasmines; and I have the power
to blow and carry you half-asleep
through moonlit passages and secret sea tunnels:
trees in a trance lustered by webs
The waves have heard of you,
how you caress, how you kiss
how you whisper the “what” and the “hey”;
around the neck at the cove
we were always the light and the shadow
You always the lil’star and I the dark vessel,
you always the port and I the lateral post the starboard one,
the soppy wharf and the glistening on the oars
Up at the house with the vine covered patios
the climber roses, and the water that chills;
you always the stone statue and I always the growing shadow.
you the ajar shutter, and I the wind blowing it open;
because I love you and I love you;
you always the coin and I the adoration that reimburses it.
Suchly the night, suchly the wind’s roar,
suchly the droplet in the air, suchly the stillness,
the predominant sea all around,
the sky’s dome along with the stars,
suchly your indiscernible breath,
that now I don’t have noting else;
within four walls, the ceiling, the floor
I’m calling you and my voice rings me back;
I smell of you and people getting bewildered
because the untried and the outlandish
isn’t tolerable to the people and it’s too soon, hearken;
it’s still too soon in this world my love
to speak of you and me.
IV.
it’s still too soon in this world, hearken;
the monsters aren’t tamed yet; hearken;
my wasted blood and the sharp-pointed, hearken;
dagger
that hastens through the skies
and bashes the twigs of the stars
it’s me; hearken;
I love you; hearken;
I’m carrying you and I’m leading you and I’m dressing you
with Ophelia’s white bridal gown; hearken;
where are you leaving me, where are you going and who; hearken;
is holding your hand through the deluges.
The huge lianas¹ and the volcanic lava;
the day will come, hearken;
let them bury us and the thousands afterward years
let them turn us into shiny rocks, hearken;
to reflect upon them the pitilessness; hearken;
of people,
and let them throw us in thousands of bits
in the waters one by one, hearken.
And time is a big cathedral, hearken;
where every so often the figures of Saints
are shedding true tears, hearken;
the belfry opens up towards heaven, hearken;
an unfathomable passage for me to cross;
the angels are waiting with candles and requiem psalms;
I’m not going anywhere, hearken;
either nobody or both of us; hearken.
This flower of thunderstorm and, hearken;
of love
we snipped it off for good
and it isn’t workable for it to blossom otherwise, hearken;
on another land, on another star, hearken;
there isn’t the soil or the air
we’ve touched, the same ones, hearken;
and no gardener was fair fortuned in any other time,
through such a winter and under such northerns, hearken;
to flourish even a bud, just us, hearken;
amid the sea
with the desire of love alone, hearken;
we’ve grown a whole island, hearken;
with coves and headlands and blossomed cliffs.
Heed, heed;
who’s talking to the waters and who’s crying; do you hear?
Who’s asking for the other, who’s calling out;
do you hear?
I’m the one calling out and I’m the one crying, hearken;
I love you, I love you, hearken.
V.
I’ve talked about you in times bygone,
with wise governesses and war veteran partisans,
about the cause of your wildcatish sorrow,
about the glint on your forehead like trembling waters
and about why, mind you, I was destined to bind with you
I who I don’t wish for love but I wish for wind,
but I wish for galloping bareback on the reared up sea.
And no one has heard of you,
about you neither the dittany nor the mushroom,
way up on Crete’s highlands, heard anything,
only God accepted to lead me by the hand to you;
a bit here, a bit there, carefully around everything,
your face’s seaside, your bays, the hair
on the hill waving to the left,
your body in a posture like an isolated pine,
eyes full of pride and of translucent
seabed, in the house with the antique display cabinet
the yellow laced needleworks and the cypress wood.
I always waited for you to come into view
upstairs in the attic, or at the back on the porch’s cobblestones
with the Saint’s steed and the Eastern egg,
as if in an abraded wall painting
as big as my small life wanted to be,
like fitting in a lil’candle the thunderous volcanic blaze, you,
who nobody has seen or heard,
nothing in the wilderness or the desolate houses,
neither the buried ascendant at the far edge of the yard,
about you, not even that bedlam with all her herbs,
about you solely me, may be, the music too
that I rout from within me but keeps coning back stronger;
about you, the twelve year old unformed breast
pointing to the future with it’s red crater,
about you the bitter smell like a needle
that finds it’s way through the body and pierces the remembrance
and there behold the soil, behold the doves, behold our ancient land.
VI.
I’ve seen a lot and land in my mind seems prettier,
prettier amid the golden vapors,
the sharp rocks, prettier,
the blue waters of the straits and the roofs peaking above the waves,
prettier, the beams that you cross without stepping
invincible like the Goddess of Samothrace² above the mountains of sea.
Thusly my view of you so that it’s adequate
for time to be exculpated;
in the wake left by your passage
it is following like a verdant dolphin
and playing with the white and the blue, my soul!
Victory, victory while I’m beaten
before love and with it;
to the passion flower and the turkish rose bush³
go, go never mind I perished.
Alone I am, even if the sun you’re holding is a newborn child;
alone, even if I am the mourning homeland;
let the word I sent you hold a laurel leave for you;
alone, the strong wind and alone the well rounded
pebble in the winking of the dark depths
that the fisher pulled out and threw back in the times, in Paradise!
VII.
In Paradise I’ve spotted an island
indistinguishable from you and a house by the sea
with a large bed and a small door;
I’ve cast an echo in it’s groundwork
to look at myself every morning I rise,
half to see you crossing the waters
and half to weep over you in Paradise…
