After reading this review-essay by Richard Hibbitt in the Cambridge Quarterly on recent translations of Rimbaud, I’m quite eager to read Clive Scott’s Translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Look, for example, at this visual effort.
When we drove home from Florence and emerged from the Mordor mists of western North Carolina, I heard a song on the UNC-Asheville campus radio station, which I quickly glossed for the Clancerian audience as one of these cheeky young bands who try to emulate, as it were, the AOR/ADR/DMSCA/PSCDWEEF/ (examine Christgau for explications) sound of various seventies enthusiasts.
The fey whiskeyboned dj soon told us it was from the Marshall Tucker corpus—A New Life, I believe. Cue end of “Araby,” yet again.
On our porch:
Their chief exports are morphetics, and they have no natural predators except for birds, who love them.
Is fascinated with mirrors, particularly the passenger’s side mirror on my wife’s Civic. I see a male quizzically and somewhat aggressively pecking at its image there, sometimes even immediately after I pull up in the driveway. When I lived in Florida, one similarly assaulted my then vehicle’s mirror, but that one had a chrome-like exterior which was peeling off, and I assumed it was attracted to the shine.
This eminence rouge (Pipilo erythrophthalmus) is also an aggressive scratcher of the ground, and I’m concerned that it’s seeing mirror fauna (see Borges; also Wolfe) in the ultraviolet. (Hawks, I read, may able to see rodent urine trails in UV.)
A fun example from this highly entertaining Jeffrey Goldberg article:
Before opening the door, she instructed me not to write down anything I saw—the third time that this particular directive had been issued. In some ways, the home office is not unlike the headquarters of the National Security Agency—both contain a large number of windowless rooms and both are staffed by people who are preoccupied by the movement of strangers in their midst. The N.S.A.’s headquarters, though, seemed to me more aesthetically appealing; the Wal-Mart home office resembles a poorly funded elementary school.
I just finished this work, part of the Viriconium collection by M.
John Harrison. Anne Redpath’s “Houses near
Las Palmas” may metaschematize it for a certain type of reader:
The mood is inescapably nouvelle vague Dying Earth. (Gaiman notices this in the introduction. And a wearier Moorcock also.) Or pehaps Roger Ferri’s “Pedestrian City” works better:
It’s hard to say. But I’m looking forward to A Storm of Wings and the other books, which apparently diverge.
I see, so I’ll have to wait until next month and drive to Williamsburg to see it. I noticed that it somehow made it to Gainesville. By “local,” I mean “Raleigh,” of course.
I read Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia yesterday in O’Flaherty’s impressive scholarly edition. That “Uebersetzer” means both “ferryman” and “translator” and thus lends itself to Charonic puns was a tidbit I’d heretofore not consumed. I’d like to write my own scholarship in something like Hamann’s style, though sadly this is not feasible. Metaschematics is as fine a method as we have in literary studies, though I’m not sure how many practitioners there are. Derrida, in a way. Blanchot. Early Bloom. Rieff.
Is is just me, or do they look as if they are offering their daughters to the sun?
Yes, I’ve been reading Voegelin a bit.
One of the panels I attended at the recent Narrative Conference was a roundtable discussion on Against The Day. Several eminent Pynchon scholars participated. I haven’t finished the book (been reading it slowly and enjoying it), but I’m wondering about immediate popular culture influences. Deadwood seems obvious, though this could simply be an artifact of having watched it recently, but I seem to hear it in the dialogue and it’s hard to imagine Pynchon not catching on to the HBO renascence. Bilocation seems to be another reference to Priest’s The Prestige, which I had mentioned earlier.
I’m trying to track down an expression I found in Patrick O’Brian. The OED doesn’t know anything about it, though I did, while looking, discover that Beckett is quoted for two senses of the unmentionable word that forms the first half of this mysterious compound.
The spam was about Samonsite repair, by the way. Or so it claims. It seems Russian in provenance.
I’m just back from this year’s Narrative Conference in D.C. I saw and heard many things. I walked in sleet to eat a Five Guys hamburger, which was quite tasty. I learned from Robert J. Thompson that St. Elsewhere was a far more textured show than I had ever thought. (While googling around a bit about the show’s ending, which I had wanted to ask Thompson had there been time if he knew if the writers had ever claimed that they had planned it from the beginning, I found Brian Weatherson’s argument against the “Tommy Westphall” thesis, certainly worth a read).
In the time of Diocletian, mining engineers were called philosophi. As well they should be. (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 209).