"If we make history now we won't be back for breakfast."

in looking back on this year I will recall so many oranges

2009-09-08T10:01:49Z

1. Up to ears in the research of matter so trivial it may well beat the record (i.e. translation and reception history of Grimm's fairy tales in 1820s France), not that I remembered what set the record. Well, 'up to [my] ears' is relative, considering the dearth of information in the departments I actually require. ('Require' is relative, too. I began by hoping to back up a single sentence and finished by drawing up a list of six in-depth questions I wanted answered.)

2. LOOK WHAT THE MAIL BROUGHT:

I say, I haven't re-read a single passage in the book for ... four days? Five? That is a first in two months. (Well, I've just started reading 3/Fourth/II, but for altogether scientific reasons. I wonder occasionally if Bossuet is permanently high or ... no, I'm pretty sure he's permanently high, all I wonder is on what. I also find the line '[Marius] was not in a very good humor at the moment' positively hysterical, what with Marius being in a very good humor on roughly twenty-two days in as many years.)

In other news, the Gans/Savigny quarrel broke out in '27, so why is M. translating it in '32? (We'll get back to this; I merely chanced upon the information because the Grimms studied under Savigny in Marburg. It does all come together occasionally, thank goodness.)

3. Oh, I want to see Przybyszewski's essay on F. and Nietzsche. (It appears in "The Psychology of the Individual". It probably says a lot about my mental horizon that my first association upon hearing that phrase is generally 'Jeeves!'.) I found the first page of an essay that mentions the essay ("Chopin and the Expressionists", Henderson, 1960) and a few minor references in "Chopin: the Man and his Music" (Huneker, 1900), but that is as close as it comes. I've been picking at pieces from the latter book in my search for the history of n° 12 (it does have a few notes on where he was when in '31 and quotes a passage from an alleged diary, but then declares the entry 'a trifle melodramatic and quite unlike Chopin'; it also mentions, alongside 'Victor Hugo, prince of romanticists' et al, 'Henri Heine - he left Heinrich across the Rhine - Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall, who sneered and wept in the same couplet') and rather enjoying it, primarily for its bottom line of F.'s character (be it true or not): 'both proud and timid; he led a detached life, hence his art was bold and violent'.

(Now why, if that is this author's estimation, does it rule out melodramatic diary entries, incidentally? Where - other than In His Art - would an incurably demure person be melodramatic if not in a diary? I speak not in practical defence of the entry in question, not even in reference to the diarist in question, but in pure theory. I happen to know something of the topic. Diaries, that is.)

Hm. Possibly my so-called research would be more fruitful if I did not always try to find out five things at the same time (you completely missed my little Where Was Rouget de Lisle? session, inspired by Zweig's "The Genius of One Night"). Or got sidetracked by the moon of Alabama, etc.

EDIT: Why is this entry public? So much for that expertise. Never mind. It is a passable sample of contents, isn't it? Go to sleep, dear. D'you know, I think another of my clocks has stopped, it's gone awfully quiet, but I can't find which and where; I can track any ticking clock across the room, every ticking clock ticks in its own way, but stopped clocks are all alike; I've crawled into every corner, and-- oh, but I am stupid. It's the faux pocket watch, the lapel pin. There's another mystery solved. Au suivant!

EDIT 2: I would like to inform you that I have been up so long I have caught sight of Diogenes falling asleep. By dawn I will be talking about love (and law, and poverty-- there, I nearly typed 'poetry' instead; what is to become of me?).

"WAR", by Henry Cow

2009-03-31T16:53:44Z

(There is something seriously wrong with the HTML in this entry.) Listening to this song for the first time ever is the best thing I have ever done for the first time ever in all my life*, and what is better is that after thirty, forty, fifty listens (I bought the album - "In Praise of Learning" - on the sixth of this month) it's lost nothing of its strikingness, if that's a word; it's a nexus between thorough historicality (the Weill influence is glaring), if that's a word, and delightful, mad novelty. 'Novelty' is a word, but it's a bad word for songs. Just listen:

PETER          Tell of the birth,
         tell how War appeared on earth!
DAGMAR        Thunder and herbs
         conjugated sacred verbs;
                   musicians with gongs
         fertilised an egg with song;
                   asleep in the sphere
                   her foetus was a knot of fear.
                   She butted with her horn,
                   split an egg and War was born;
                   a miracle of hate,
                   she banged her spoon against the plate.
CHOIR         A HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! etc.
                   O HO HO HO HO HO HO HO! etc.
DAGMAR        Upon her spoon this motto
                   wonderfully designed:
                  "Violence completes the partial mind!"
PETER          Tell of the birth,
                  tell how War appeared on earth.
DAGMAR      Musicians with gongs
         fertilised an egg with song;
                   she butted with her horn,
                   split an egg and War was born!

The band plays.

DAGMAR        Stacking the bones
                 on the empty aerodrome;
         tinted turtle green
                 haunts the slender submarine.
                   She shakes her gory locks
                   over the deserted docks.

The band plays, briefly.

DAGMAR     Come follow me
                   out of dark obscurity!
                   Follow my torch,
                   pilgrims at the double march,
                   through meadows and seas,
               abattoirs and libraries.
                   The pilgrims increase
                   boasting, they are led by Peace.
                   They gut huts with gusto,
                   pillage villages with verve.
                   War does what she has to;
                 people get what they deserve.
CHOIR   A HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! etc.
                   O HO HO HO HO HO HO HO! etc.
DAGMAR        Upon her spoon this motto
                  wonderfully designed:
         "Violence completes the partial mind!"

It may not even be the best track on the album, but a)it's the opener and there is nothing like an opener that suggests the exclamation mark in the first verse and sets it in stone in the last, at first glance without a difference, and b)the likely best track on the album is fifteen minutes long. The Fall adapted "War" for "Middle Class Revolt" and not badly so, but this is it. This is it and if you like it there's something right with you.

*Except, possibly, reading "Nine Stories".

GOLD MINE TRASH SEEKS BRAVE DARK WARRIOR

2007-09-26T14:54:00Z

This appeared over at lah_de_dah's the other night, and it's quite simply too good to let it pass.

Write a personal ad for yourself (in which you assume that you are single or otherwise available).

1) It has to make you sound as unappealing as possible
2) It has to be honest - you can't lie at all
3) It can't sound as though you're deliberately making yourself sound unappealing.

Tick, tick, tick. Is it at all possible to follow all three instructions at once? Here we go.

----

Former photography apprentice and nighttime frozen vegetable cutter meandering towards a future in translating, freelance pop journalism and tap-dancing while maintaining a solid stance as professional ranter (can open and close parentheses in oral communication, albeit not indicate either end clearly) with strong emphasis on independent music, cinema, French history and other picaresqueties-- seeks guitarist- and/or rodent-lookalike to ogle and irritate. Will hold hands or at least sleeve-ends, passionately spill coffee over you and walk straight into a bush of thorny roses when seeing you walking up the street. Appreciate intelligence and cultural education within certain limitations so as to avoid feelings of jealousy, inadequacy and eternal devotion. Stay off if you tend to hand out unfounded nicknames, and especially if those take on a life of their own and go places before I ever get there. Would like to go places, actually, but anonymously. Please bring cactus collection for mating purposes. Do not call if you are afraid to drink out of the same glass at two different meals or spell 'orang-utan' with a 'u' (in 'orang').

----

I couldn't work it in but I think the most unappealing thing about me besides my faintly run-down appearance is that I strongly dislike Ernest Hemingway. Do you ever meet a person with brains who doesn't speak of him as if they married and divorced him five times over? I'm a Fitzgerald person, me. There's two ways of being subtly unsubtly depressed, and as long as we're not in 1980 I'll choose the wet and pompous one any day.

(Alternatively, and possibly slightly more to the point, Pop-culturally nerdy Peter Pan-complex victim with no sexual identity and an addiction to overactive spell check functions and checking Amazon prices WLTM - for large ginger ale - anyone willing to commit double suicide on eve of thirtieth birthday. You have thirteen years, one month and thirty-seven days left starting RIGHT NOW, so you best get born.)

Tick. (Tune in later tonight for an account of the second day of the Cinemarathon, tentatively titled "ACROSS THE ATLANTIC", another episode of One Man Against The World As Ruled By MySpace and what I just blew all remaining Paris money as well as my food allowance for the next two weeks on.)