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Readings
I like to read, and I read a lot of books -- the primary impetus for starting this site was to give myself a way of keeping track of what I am thinking about the books I am reading, and to remember the thoughts as time passes.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
Happy Bloomsday! In case you're looking for something to read today, I see the Calypso episode is now complete at Ulysses, Seen. Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls...
Oh wow! Also, Robert Berry (author of Ulysses, Seen) is Twittering the events of Ulysses throughout the day today. (He is doing it on Dublin time.) Right now, Stephen is walking down the beach to Sandymount Strand.
posted morning of June 16th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Ulysses
The cripple in the morning
is the flight, the flight to nowhere,
is the light, the graveyard's light
that's shining, shining in my windows,
it's the bus, the line of buses
stinking sweetly on the roadway,
it's the cat up on the rooftop
where it's watching over the bells.
Half-blindness in the morning
is the frigid bite of dawn,
and forgetfulness's knockers
have no prince, have just a frog,
with the freezing rain foreseen
inside the blossom of my eyes,
inside the corpses of my
promised lands, still warm.
Half-lameness in the morning
is the spirit of the road,
and I've got my eyes wide open,
got my shrunken spirit's cough;
the sun, the half-lit sun, oh
how it's burning in their motors,
it's the end of every heartbreak,
they're in mourning for their games.
The birds get off scot-free,
my reading glasses going blind,
with whole decades slowly
dawning on this Monday.
A tantalizing thought I had on the train home this evening: with fairly minor rewrites, this poem could be set to the tune of David Rawling's "I Hear Them All".
Here are a couple of poems I have written recently. Experimenting with story-telling and with prosody.
Horizon
The best-laid tracks converge, they meet
way out there by the setting sun
confounding engineering dreams perspective in the desert
where the train runs off the vanished rails and crashes, yes,
it's tragic, sad-sack Sam the goldrush pioneer will never see his lover
who was riding west to meet him, look how Jesse and his outlaws
are confused, the hold-up won't play out, they may just ride their horses over the edge behind the train or else perhaps they'll turn back just in time, they'll skirt impending doom and spend their days retelling stories of the one that got away.
Crystal Armies
Fit the image to the meter
We can print it when you're done
When the armies that you're dreaming
Wander sleepy off the page and
Wave their effervescent banners
To the rhythm of your drum.
Marching softly, scarcely there,
You have to strain to make them out
Their dusty footprints on the pages
Almost like a printer's error
When they finally encamp
Inside your thawed out cerebellum
They'll build ghostly fires and sing
About the journeys of their fathers
And you'll scratch your forehead wondering
(In your clarity of vision)
Where the simple, crystal image
Of your verbal armies went.
I'd like to thank Pelele of Muchacha Recostada, who has posted what I believe to be a great poem, Mutilaciones (from 2009) -- my working definition of a great poem is one the reading of which alters how you read and write poetry -- I believe that "Mutilaciones," with its frantic, driving meter and its clarity of vision, will have a permanent effect on my reading of poetry and on my poetic output. "Crystal Armies" is written strongly under the influence of Pelele's piece. I'm working on a translation of "Mutilaciones"* which will be my first time (even dreaming of) translating a metered poem -- I do not think I am going to be able to keep the rhyme, but the meter is coming through very naturally.
My experiences this past week or so with reading Beckett's Comment C'est were leading me to wonder where the distinction lies between poetry and novel -- in his introduction Richard Seaver refers to Beckett's work as a novel, but very soon after I started reading it I had the thought, this is not a novel, it's a long poem. What did I mean by saying that?
A key difficulty I have with long poems (not considering epic narrative verse here) is not being able to put them down and then pick them back up in the middle -- every time I pick up Comment C'est I commence on the first page, because there is not any story line for me to keep track of or characters (besides Beckett himself) or any of the sort of progression and development that I expect to see in a novel. This keeps me from getting anywhere with the book (beyond loving the opening pages anyways), because it is much too long to read all of in a single sitting.
In a sort of funny coincidence, I was having a similar problem with the much shorter long poem Canto de guerra de las cosas, by JoachÃn Pasos -- as I wrote below, it is simply too much imagery for me to absorb all at once... Likely a successful reading strategy for the Beckett piece would involve focusing on little bits of it at a time, not on trying prematurely to integrate the pieces together.
When I hit on that question -- what do I mean by calling the Beckett poetry "rather than" fiction -- my initial response was along the lines of, well, no plot, no characters, no development, the meat of the piece is its language and the imagery called forth. But, well, language and imagery are of primary importance in many of my favorite novels, ones that I categorize as fiction with no questions. Narrative quality is a key point -- Comment C'est is not a narrative in any sense that I can see. But there are poems (again disregarding epic) that tell stories, and that I don't hesitate to call poetry or confuse with fiction... I think where this is headed is that there is a wide space between the two categories, that individual works can be in one category but have attributes of the other. And somehow I always just seem to know instinctively which category the work I am reading belongs in.
Es un poema largo, 19 estrofas, 150 lÃneas, cada lÃnea (casà cada lÃnea) dibujando su propia imagen y cada estrofa surgiendo de estas imágenes en un cuadro complejo y múltiple. Todo junto es demasiado (para mÃ) para mantener...
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time [are] not worthy [to be compared] with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected [the same] in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
-- The letter of St. Paul to the Romans Chapter â…§: 18-22 King James version
For a long time I have been wondering how a translation of JoachÃn Pasos' Battle-song: The War of Things might best preserve the voice of the poet. Throughout the poem he is addressing vosotros, the explicitly familiar, explicitly plural second person which does not exist in English. Turns out the key is the epigraph to the poem.
For an epigraph, Pasos quotes from the Vulgate version of the above verses of Romans; but he prefaces the quotation with "Fratres:" -- "Brethren:", which is not part of these verses. Paul's letter is addressed to his brethren the Roman Christians, so this insertion makes good sense. And if you read Pasos' poem as a continuation of Paul's address to his brethren, then the familiar second-person plural is clear from context.
This morning I had what seems to me like a good idea for a non-literal translation of the poem's third stanza:
Give me a motor, a motor stronger than man's heart.
Give me a robot's brain, let me be murdered painlessly.
Give me a body, metal body without and within another metal body,
just like the leaden soldier's who never dies,
never begs oh Lord, your grace, let me not be disgraced among your works
like the soldier of mere flesh, our feeble pride,
who will offer, for your day, the light of his eyes,
who will take, for your metal, take a bullet in his chest,
who will give, for your water, give back his blood.
Who wants to be like a knife, like one no other knife can ever wound.
(With liberal borrowings from Steven F. White's more literal translation.) This poem reminds me strongly of León Ferrari's paintings of armaments. Remember that the poet is addressing his brethren: He is asking for these cybernetic enhancements not from his God but from his peers.
posted morning of June 4th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Epigraphs
so here it is you open it the book we're talking of the book you slide your eyes across the words across his words across Beckett's
no luck I see disjointed images my ear perks up
slide across the page his stream of consciousness his nasty nasty filthy flow he's talking to myself he's talking shame and talking darkness lack of ease and I I can't encompass it remember it from one page to the next
I say it as I hear it he says says Sam and when he says it your ears perk up eidetic narrative you think in your consciousness it could be only maybe not that might not be what he meant not at all
that's all it wasn't a dream that nor a memory I haven't been given memories this time it was an image the kind I see sometimes see in the mud part one sometimes saw
so trace his image in the filthy filthy mud and let his nasty words caress your ear and eyes and consciousness and think you're getting it then turn the page
something wrong there
nothing clicks you're frantic drooling imbecile it's still part one no Pim part one I mean to say before the flood perhaps before the storm before some character named Pim has entered we don't know him yet nor why we're waiting for him but abide abide and let Sam's words roll on
Midway in between Taltal and Antofagasta, an array of four telescopes stands on a mountain in the Chilean desert, whirling through space under the clear skies of the Atacama. Take a look:
Full-screen display strongly recommended. (via PopSci, via Teresa's Particles at Making Light)
At Ivan Semeniuk’s Embedded Universe, you can read a couple of posts from the week he spent at the VLT observatory two years ago.
I'm heartened to read, in Jan Sleutels' essay "Greek Zombies: On the Alleged Absurdity of Substantially Unconscious Greek Minds," (from Philosophical Psychology, 2006) that he "will not try to establish that the claims made by Jaynes are historically correct... For present purposes it suffices that the data make sense." -- I get the feeling from this of being on the same wavelength as Sleutels, trying to establish the weak claim that Jaynes' ideas are plausible rather than the strong claim that they are an accurate description of history.
Most of the authors whose work appears in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness agree that there are four related but independent theses in Jaynes. John Limber summarizes the theses as: "(1) human consciousness from language, (2) the role of verbal hallucinations in the ancient bicameral mind, (3) the history/timing of the changeover, and (4) the underlying biology" -- these essays seem to focus primarily on defending points (1) and (2). Sleutels is the only author who really devotes much energy to point (3), to Jaynes' assertion that the historical changeover to consciousness consisting of an internal mind-space and a narrative self occurred as recently as 3000 years ago; he is devoting his energy to defending the plausibility of the assertion rather than its accuracy, probably wise.
How does he do? I think he makes his task much more difficult than it needs to be by using language which implies this changeover occurred abruptly, in an on/off fashion. It seems to me that if you are saying consciousness is a social construct, a learned behavior, then that statement necessarily entails a long period, likely thousands of years, in which society is adopting this behavior, constructing this concept, learning this vocabulary. Jaynes and Sleutels both compare consciousness to baseball as a practice which necessarily entails its concept -- i.e. you cannot play baseball without having a concept of the game of baseball, you cannot be conscious without having a vocabulary to describe the mental state of consciousness. But this seems a little limited to me. There is no Abner Doubleday of consciousness. If the internal mind-space and narrative self which Jaynes describes are going to arise out of the process he describes, a process of applying concrete vocabulary metaphorically to abstract states and internalizing those metaphors, I don't see how that could possibly happen in a sudden fashion. When I'm reading Jaynes' timeline I'm thinking of his 1300 bc date as a date for this long, gradual process to come to fruition; he declares himself that well before that time, society had grown to the point where it was difficult and stressful to maintain a bicameral state of unconsciousness, what Sleutels is calling a "zombie" state.
That said, I liked Sleutels' essay a lot; its entertaining title was the least of it. The arguments he is refuting from Ned Block are atrociously poor (assuming he is quoting the best of what Block has to offer). Looks like I ought to find out more about Daniel Dennett. (Also, interesting recommendation from John: The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature by Bruno Snell.)
At YouTube, you can listen to Sleutels giving a lecture on "Greek Zombies" at the 2006 Julian Jaynes Conference on Consciousness at the University of Prince Edward Island.
here it is
