my birthday poem

Written one line at a time by guests on Sunday. Not all sober. Some too young. Manuscript hard to read in places. No admissions. Make of it what you will. E&OE.

He looks good in a cap; And a Tshirt that reads like a map.

We’re consumers of friendship; you are our choice.

We turn on our telly and hear your voice;

He’s had a few girlfriends and taken a few drugs. He’s been in a band about fxxxers and slugs.

But now he salsa dances all day and night. So why does he always seem perky and bright?

Night after night, day after day, we wish we could live a more Gordonish way.

Thank you for being so gay.

We love you just like that, even with your silly hat.

You’re funny, really fun to play with.

Have lots of fun before your fifty. ith.

seriously fragmented

As you’ll maybe know, I’m a big fan of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow; a magically serious book on the surface about late 20th century Turkey;  collusions as much as tensions between liberals and socialists and fundamentalists and lust and business and pride and history and isolation and fairy stories. It evokes many moods, two of them curiously like the fantastical plot twists of the Master and Margarita or the air of parallel reality in the scenes of the castle with beasts in Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

My last post was a celebration of Philippe Delerms’ celebrations of tiny moments of everyday life; and, perhaps related, I have been reflecting on – or rather justifying the brevity and idiosyncracy of -  my own miniscules,  these blog entries.  Comforting then to read Pamuk reporting his friend’s remark about Walter Benjamin: [His] oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this is why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I [Pamuk] smile and say, “One day I’ll write a book that’s made only from fragments too.”*

Fragments more than whole stories or argued essays are places from where sparks of association strike in the reader’s mind. Or in this case the author’s.

My first link is to the richness of Elliot Weinberger’s fragments -  An Elemental Thing for example – the text’s purpose being obscure, no plot or line of argument to guide it, the reader’s mind is challenged to make something of it but, if the challenge is accepted, free to move in many directions.

A second: one can’t help thinking of Taleb’s rails against storytelling/cause finding when we seek to mollify history and downplay the randomness of events.

* Orhan Pamuk Other Colours: Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities p xi

story about Guernica

On the plane from HK to Sydney Qantas offered an episode of Simon Schama’s series on the power of art, this one on Picasso’s Guernica. I wondered how you could fill 40+ minutes on one painting. He didn’t, of course, he told a story involving Picasso’s life and work and Spanish modern history with Guernica as the central intersecting point.

He told the story from the middle out; something like this (the interludes being being background to the events of Guernica and not about picasso) – T2 -> T1a T1b T1c -> interlude -> T2a -> interlude -> T3 -> coda.

There were three themes through this – that Picasso had (apolitically) destroyed the main topics of traditional art – an anti heroic hero painting (boy and horse), a non beautiful, non sublime nude (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) and then an unrecgnisable portrait (of his dealer – cubist); that Picasso had to both discover political engagement and return to the inspiration of old masters (Goya) to paint his greatest work, and, in the words of Schama on the program’s web site: “Picasso connects with our worst nightmares. He’s saying here’s where the world’s horror comes from; the dark pit of our psyche.”

123 faddle

A great waste of time and/or excuse to show off.

There was never any prospect of the Communists gaining control of the country or even the Soviet zone except by force. In the Berlin city elections on October 20th 1946, Communist candidates came far behind both the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats. With that, Soviet policy perceptibly hardened.

I mistakenly typed up p 122 so you may as well get it.

Beyond this level of general common intention, however, the difficulties began. Thus it was agreed to treat the German economy as a single unit, but the Soviets were also granted the right to extract and remove goods, services and financial assets from their own zone. They were further accorded 10 percent of reparations from the Western zones in exchange for food and raw materials to be supplied from eastern Germany.

It’s a great book (Postwar, Tony Judt) but I don’t know that either quote by itself would persuade you. Which just goes to show that you can’t judge a book by the page 123 meme.

i didn’t meme to make you cry

What is the page 123 meme? here’s one guy called Brad’s attempt to track it down. I like the “thigh bone connected to the shin bone we’ll get to the bottom of this by climbing up the ladder of links” approach. Especially that he has to really dig for some of the links – people not linking properly etc – and then in the end he gets back to 2004 and the trail goes cold .

At this point, I’ve made myself pretty sick of this meme. Often it appears to be a means by which people can brag about whatever erudite text they may or may not actually be reading. Even so, I can’t have wasted this much time and not play along.

But, for those like me who have a shaky hold on what a meme might be, I reckon – after skimming the extensive Wikipedia entry – that the blogger’s use (= intellectual game?) is drifting a bit from what Dawkins had in mind (gene – physical idea; meme – equivalent cultural idea).

One of Brad’s commentators calls the page 123 meme “the internet time-wasting sensation” – I thought that was Facebook .. just kidding. And I just noted Brad’s blog is called Footle. Look it up. Or save time by clicking here.

flitting

There is probably a better term.

In vanity i googled “manguel octopus’s garden” to see if my Garden sale blog post still comes up first (it does, despite the fact that according to wordpress stats it has only been read by three people – those three readers if astute will have noticed that I incorrectly claim that the entry – one about what happens when you google the text “manguel octopus’s garden”- is an example of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle when in fact it’s an example of the often confused observer principle: see Wikipedia entry for explanation).

Satisfied my post still rules that obscure roost, my eye settled on the fourth entry found by Google which displayed the excerpt: ” My happy feelings for Alberto Manguel and his yummy bookishness were ..” from somanybooksblog.com, a well maintained blog by Stephanie.

So then I searched her blog for “Manguel”, finding first of several her entry on The Library at Night, ["My love affair with the Library at Night has come to an amicable conclusion."], immediately followed by her Page 123 meme entry. Hence my Page 123 entry.

Silly enough for you?

why am I listening to No ti pierdas by Chambao?

Because of last.fm. Because of the Wisdom of Crowds. Skip the next para if you know all about last.fm and scrobbling.

I bore my friends stupid with how much I like last.fm.

why vegetarian?

.. is such a boring question, asked by >50% of new people I meet at restaurants; and I’m only a vegaquarian [what kind of loser is that ...]. So here’s the answer (shamelessly stolen this Black Orpheus post).

garden sale

You really do get interesting things googling “manguel octopus’s garden”. In this, from books of my numberless dreams, you get just a few seconds each of collette, dessaix, turgenev, manguel – see black orpheus’ comment ..

Update: illustration of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Now – at least for the moment -  this post comes up first on google.

the complex beauty of reading

From the Guardian, 12 April 08’s review of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid

The cultural centrality of reading has already been expertly explored, for example in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. However, Wolf shows how evolutionary history and cognitive neuroscience are casting new light on “the complex beauty of the reading process”. In particular, she highlights the brain’s astonishing plasticity, its “protean capacity” to forge new links and reorganise itself to learn new skills: we are all born with the “capacity to change what is given to us by nature … We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs”. Different languages put their own unique stamp on the brain, creating distinctive brain networks. Reading Chinese requires a different set of neuronal connections from those needed to read English. As the writer Joseph Epstein has said, “we are what we read”. Doctors treating a bilingual person who developed alexia (inability to read) after a stroke found remarkable evidence of this. Although he could no longer read English, the patient was still able to read Chinese.