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Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
Here are three ways a novel can be good: It can appeal to the ear, with fluency of prose and well-chosen words; it can appeal to the mind, with elegant structure and finely crafted plot; and it can appeal to the heart, pulling the reader away from himself and into the personalities of its characters. The first part of In Hovering Flight was appealing mostly to my ear and my mind; but with the return to the present moment in part II and the focus on Scarlet's thoughts, it is starting to get to my heart as well.
posted evening of October 14th, 2008: 2 responses
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Monday, October 13th, 2008
 In Hovering Flight is making me dream of drawing birds and owls. The best-realized descriptions so far are of Addie sketching -- when she was in the first session of class, drawing the stuffed owl, was the first time I could begin to get a clear picture of her.
posted evening of October 13th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, October 12th, 2008
I liked reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty, for the fluidity of the prose and for the nicely structured narrative; but in the end I was disappointed. Her other books really spoke to me, allowed me to enter into the story in spirit; here I was just me, sitting in front of the screen watching the action but with no way of identifying with the actors.
posted afternoon of October 12th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, October 10th, 2008
That story is not true.
You never sailed in the benched ships.
You never went to the city of Troy.
-- Stesichoros, "Palinode": quoted in Phædrus.
I've been reading some of the introductory material to Autobiography of Red this morning -- it is really interesting and makes me want to read this book sometime. Carson asserts (actually I am not sure if she is writing this introductory material in her own voice: maybe "Carson's narrator asserts") that "Stesichoros released being" by separating Homer's incantatory adjectives from the nouns to which they were attached, by inventing descriptive language.Here we touch the core of the question "What difference did Stesichoros make?" When Gertrude Stein had to sum up Picasso she said, "This one was working." So say of Stesichoros, "This one was making adjectives."
posted afternoon of October 10th, 2008: 1 response
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My brother showed me Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red -- I am interested right away just by the coincidental similarity of its title to My Name is Red -- but I just wanted to quote its opening sentence: He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
posted morning of October 10th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, October 6th, 2008
 Lots of good stuff at the Disko Bay Expedition (which is almost over) this morning -- audio of Robyn jamming with his shipmates; pictures of Paradise Lost (Marcus Brigstocke, who played Satan, reports of KT Tunstall as Eve, "Sheâ??s a pushover â?? no wonder all humanity is bound to suffer for all eternity, banished from paradise forever if the likes of Tunstall are left in charge.") Feist paints a picture of towns in Greenland and the visual voyage; and best of all Brigstocke reports they have solved the global warming problem -- "It turns out it was the sun."
posted morning of October 6th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, October 5th, 2008
The centerpiece of last night's dream was a new book by Saramago -- wait no, seems like it was an early book of his, but one I had not known about previously. It was pretty fully-formed, wish I could remember how it went! The title was something like "The Sour Grill" and it was explicitly about Portuguese cuisine, something about the national character being rooted in the cooking. A long book! I believe I had checked it out from the library and it was now overdue.
posted morning of October 5th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, October third, 2008
Dave Marc Fischer says Pynchon will be publishing a new book soon, a "noir detective story." This would be terrific! Seems like all my favorite living authors are coming out with new stuff! (via Conversational Reading.)
 Update: Penguin Press has confirmed it will be publishing the book; they are not talking about its contents.
posted afternoon of October third, 2008: Respond
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 First, just got to say this image (of houses in Uummannaq, shot by Nathan Gallagher) is one of the prettiest things I've seen all week. Uummannaq is the last human settlement they will see on their voyage north, as Robyn says it is "the last place we will visit on this trip that has an ATM."
Francesca Galeazzi did a performance piece yesterday, walking out onto the snow field of the Jakobshavns fjord with a cylinder of 6kg carbon dioxide and releasing it into the unspoiled beauty of the wilderness. My first reaction to this is visceral disgust -- sort of, "You find a spot that's untouched and you 'pollute it' just to show that you can? What's the point, just to show yourself as a human and an asshole?" But her follow-up post from this morning makes what seems to me like a really good point: Some of my fellow voyagers were upset about my piece because they could visualise that black â??nastyâ?? cylinder full of CO2 in a way that they couldnâ??t, if I told them that every time they drive their car for 30 miles they emit the same amount of carbon dioxide. So I wonder if the societal shift that I was advocating with my performance could be achieved if we would find a more direct way to visualise the Carbon impact of the resources we use! This contextualizes the performance piece in a really useful way -- I think my original reaction is kind of the response she is looking for, and that she's trying to extend that visceral disgust to everyday polluting activities.
posted morning of October third, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
 A boatload of artists is visiting the cold waters of the north, to see what they can of Greenland and its environment before that environment vanishes. You can read their ongoing account of their expedition, with pictures and video, at capefarewell.com; and more images at their Flicker page.
posted morning of September 30th, 2008: Respond
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