Monthly Archives: February 2013

Art and Culture, GeekWorld, Humanities, Media

Collecting

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Imbolc                                                                       Valentine Moon

Tumblr.  Addictive in a sense I don’t fully understand yet.  I’ve selected bloggers on Tumblr, largely where folks post images of one sort or another, who present art.  Over 100 of them at last count.  At any one time only a handful might be posting, so keeping up, or at least staying roughly abreast is doable.  The range of images that folks select is wide, one of  the charms of Tumblr for me, a chance to both get inside people’s heads as they choose images to post and an opportunity to see art that I wouldn’t have found on my own.  In that sense it’s a very eclectic museum.

(folder: architecture)

The addictive part for me is that I’m saving images, image after image, in those files I talked about reorganizing a while back.  Many, many art folders:  art contemporary, art Russia, art Symbolist, artist Blake, artist Matisse.  Cinema and television.  Natural world.  Cities.  War.  Travel.  So on.

Like a squirrel delighted with finding an abundance of acorns, I pluck these images up in my digital cheeks and carry them over to the small holes I’ve dug in my hard drives memory to cache them.  The folders have begun to grow fat with image after image.  Perhaps a hundred images or more in some instances.

(folder, art photography.  the pope’s apartment the night before his announcement about his retirement.)

My question is, why am I doing this?  Part of it is a desire to see again striking images or historically significant images or funny images or moving images.  That’s true, but mostly, like the squirrel, I dig the hole, then go on to dig another hole, often forgetting the one I dug before.  This is what oak trees count on.  How oak forests grow.  Of course, I know where all my folders are and I can open them whenever I want, but my point is that I’m more engaged in stuffing them full than utilizing them.

Utilizing them for what?  My first approach to answering this question will come on Thursday when I start reading the catalog for the Pre-Raphaelite show at the National Gallery.  I have a folder filled with Pre-Raphaelite art and will find images, I imagine, of most of the pieces in the show.  Perhaps I’ll curate them myself, re-organize them in different ways, trying to emphasize different aspects of this 19c phenomenon.  Perhaps I’ll use the images for comparison, for tracing the history of certain themes and techniques.  Or, I might just open the folder and look at them, one after the other, taking in their color, their subject matter.

(folder History England.  a 1920 poster for the tube.)

This is an activity only possible with the internet and large hard drives.  And a lot of time.  It feels important; that’s why I’m writing about it.  But why?  No idea.

Latin, Minnesota, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

GO D Park

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Imbolc                                                                       Valentine Moon

Saw the full Valentine Moon rising over Gold Medal Park near the Guthrie yesterday late afternoon.  Some clever vandal has knocked out the L on the large metal sign there so it reads GO D MEDAL PARK.  This is the park given by plutocrat and former CEO of UnitedHealth Partners, William McGuire.  Why both rich people and the public seem to think the wealthy have a fine aesthetic that should get public spaces for expression continues to be beyond me.  The saving grace here is that a well-known landscape architect designed the park, Tom Oslund.

Back to the Latin this morning, resuming my work on Ovid and about to start up on the novels again, reading the last of the Eddas today and tomorrow.  Still a good bit of reorganizing work to do, but the vast bulk of it in here (study) has been accomplished.

Art and Culture, Asia, Feelings, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses

Percussive

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Imbolc                                                                           Valentine Moon

Woke up.  Turned on the phone.  Nothing.  Frozen.  Onto the internet.  Tried several fixes. Nothing.  Over to Verizon. No joy there either.  I’d had my HTC Thunderbolt for four years, so I opted to get a new phone, an HTC DNA.  Another Android phone, in the same lineage as the Thunderbolt so I already understood its basic use.  Not cheap, not outrageously expensive.  Did add one feature to the plan, text messaging.  Yes, after four years of owning a smartphone I’m catching up with today’s elementary school kids.

Later on Kate and I went into the McPhail Center, a place for music learning and performance, now located very near the new Guthrie and the Mill City Museum.  We were there for a performance by the Bakken Trio featuring the gamelan.  The gamelan is an Indonesian instrument, a percussion instrument played by several people.  It includes gongs, zithers, xylophones and upside down bronze pots that each have a tone and are struck with a mallet.

The gamelan’s music organizes around rhythm and melody, having as a particular feature density of tone achieved by the layering of one rhythm on top of another simultaneously.  There are no harmonics.

Joko, an Indonesian gamelan artist who teaches gamelan, has lived in the Twin Cities now for 18 years.  He said that a full gamelan orchestra is the largest percussive ensemble in the world.  (see image above for an Indonesian setting).  Gamelan concerts typically run 8 hours and gamelan musicians in Indonesia may play 8 hours during the day and another 8 at night.  Geez.

I wanted to see this because I’m fascinated by how other people do things.  In this case, music.

The concert itself featured quartet pieces by Ravel and Debussy, both influenced by a traveling program focused on Javanese culture, plus a work by a contemporary composer, Louis Harrison.  Impressed with the gamelan music and its difference from the Western tradition Debussy and Ravel both incorporated it.  Especially in pizzicato and in movements with narrow tonal ranges.

(Ravel)

Both Debussy and Ravel are in the romantic tradition and, for some reason I can’t explain, I don’t like romantic classical music.  I say for some reason because in painting and literature I find myself a romantic by nature and inclination.  There were some beautiful melodies, especially in the Ravel, his String Quartet in F Major.

The Harrison piece, though, Philemon and Baukis (for violin and gamelan), was wonderful.  It was airy and spacious, filled with the rapid changing of tempos typical of gamelan music. Harrison builds and plays the gamelan himself.  Philemon and Baukis, btw, is a story found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  It was the only piece in which the gamelan played.

Following the concert we ate at Sea Change.  We had a miserable experience there a few years back, but tonight was pleasant.  Then back home to the burbs.

Over the meal Kate and I discussed a possible (probable) move into the city at some point before infirmity strikes us so we can enjoy the city life again.  I’m hesitant about it, having spent 19 years adapting myself and my life to the exurbs, but aging has its own relentless pressures.

Cinema and Television, Family, Politics, Travel

the quiet american

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

In the spirit of catching up on the films of the last few decades Kate and I watched the Quiet American, a 2002 adaptation of Graham Green’s 1955(!) novel.  It depicts, through the eyes of a British journalist, the early activity of the CIA in creating the South Vietnamese army and government.  Astoundingly prescient.

Raised many different feelings.  Yearning for Southeast Asia, a wonderful, yet strangely far away part of the world.  A place I feel intimately tied to through my sister and brother’s long tenancy there and my 2004 visit.  Disgust at the role of the American government in its most banal anti-communist clothing.  Memories of the 60’s as the dark fruit of the 1950’s seeds began to ripen, then rot.  Kate’s distaste for war.  “Killing doesn’t solve anything.”

A period for my generation that defined us as young adults.  Either for or against, little middle ground.  Those division persist among us.  Even in my high school class there are only a few of us who were anti-war.  The rest, the blue collar middle-class of those days, patriotic in a militaristic, flag-waving way.  Long ago but not far away.

Asia, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story

Moving forward by taking no action

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Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

This last week was a bust as far as Latin or the book.  It was spent in the emotional and rigorous task of restoration, order to books, objets d’art, the new furnace.  Hardly wasted effort, but the effect on forward progress was substantial.

You may notice that I’ve added a quote by Lao-Tze over the weather.  In it he advises the way of wu wei, of non-action, or, better of going with the flow, following the path life offers rather than overburdening it with goals, timelines, projects.  It’s not a huge difference from the Dalai Lama’s notion that the world does not need more successful people.  This week I’ve allowed the pace of the week to set my pace.  The result has been less frustration, less impatience.

When the way opens again for work with Latin and the novels, I will be ready to do that.

Though.  There is that tiny, niggling fact that I have northern European roots, not Chinese. Wu wei to my Teutonic ancestors would not have made much sense.  Set the goal, plow ahead, damn the obstacles.  Blitzkrieg.  Dynamite. (Nobel) The onward rush of history, it’s progress through material reality.  These are not the thoughts or inventions of people who follow the Watercourse Way.

Nor, for that matter, is the other ethnic blood in my veins, Celtic.  Hot-blooded, quick to laugh, quick to anger.  Impatient with oppression.  Creative and dreamy.  Living in this world and the other world.  In one case the rational tank rolls over barriers; in the other the emotional maelstrom cooks up revolution and poetry and love.

Wu wei is a corrective, another way of being in the world.  And we need it.  It leavens our energetic attempts to mold the world with a willingness to listen to how the world might mold us.

It’s for another time, but the long run application of Taoist and even Confucian principles have produced a moral and ethical sink in contemporary China.  They are not the whole way.  We need each other.

 

Poetry

Rumi – A repost

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“It is an astonishing fact that, after more than 700 years, Jalaluddin Rumi is the most popular poet in America. This is largely due to American authors, such as the poet Coleman Barks who has rendered literal translations of Rumi into free verse “American spiritual poetry” in a manner which has reached so many different sectors of American society. One finds Rumi quotes following the titles of newsletters, on the bottom lines of e-mails, and in many different kinds of published articles. Many people have memorized their favorite lines — usually those rendered by Coleman Barks, because his versions communicate far more successfully than literal translations. The reasons for such a response are unclear, but it likely has to do with a certain “spiritual hunger” in America (perhaps due to an absence of a mystical and ecstatic dimension in general American spirituality).
Yet this popularization has had a price, and the price is a frequent distortion of Rumi’s words and teachings which permeate such well-selling books. The English “creative versions” rarely sound like Rumi to someone who can read the poems in the original Persian, and they are often shockingly altered— but few know this, and the vast majority of readers cannot but believe that such versions are faithful renderings into English of Rumi’s thoughts and teachings when they are not.
The public has been deceived by the publishers of many of the popular books, who proclaim their authors as “translators” of Rumi— when, in fact, very few of them can read Persian. Coleman Barks, from the very beginning, called his renderings “versions.” And he has consistently clarified, in both his books and poetry readings, that he doesn’t know Persian and works from the literal translations of others […] And he has been (and allows himself to be) promoted as “widely regarded as the world’s premier translator of Rumi’s writings…” Where did the idea come from that poets could “translate” spiritual poetry into English without knowing the original language?”

— “Corrections of Popular Versions of Poems from Rumi’s Divan,” author unknown, from the Dar Al-Masnavi website

”[…] the intent of giving examples of defective interpretations (which include some of their most glaring errors) is to show how badly Rumi’s verses have been mangled by well-meaning individuals who tried to make dry, academic, and old-fashioned-sounding literal translations more poetic and attractive.”

Click on the link to read the complete article, which includes examples of poorly “translated” versions of Rumi’s poetry.

On Coleman Barks’ “versions” of Rumi’s poetry, Majid Naficy has notedthat “Barks not only ‘frees’ Rumi from the historical limitations of his time, but he also tries to disconnect Rumi from the Islamic society in which he lived and the Persian language in which he wrote his poetry.”

(via touba)
Our Land and Home

Installed

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Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

The furnace, the new one, clocks in at 98.2% efficiency.  Higher than advertised because there are fewer bends in the new exhaust.  This is a dual stage furnace with a low, always on setting, and a high setting that comes on when the thermostat calls for more heat.  The fan runs with a variable speed motor that is so much more efficient than our old one that its savings on the electric bill will pay for the higher cost of the whole furnace.  Feels good to have it installed.

(this guy no longer works here.)

Now, one month at a time, for 12 months interest free, we’ll pay it off with a combination of the increased draw from our IRA (thank you stock market) and diverting our monthly allowance for mutual travel.  A year from now we’ll own it and have made roughly $270 dollars in appreciation in our cash bank, a Vanguard mutual fund, since the money for the furnace will not have to be withdrawn.  Pretty slick.

As he who talks with tradesmen (and women, too, but there aren’t any I’ve met in the heating and cooling trades), I dutifully went up and down stairs on various occasions, conversing with the guys.  Like I knew what I was talking about.  Yeah, right.

A snowy day with a hot new furnace installed.  A good Friday.

Our Land and Home

The Sounds of Furnace (installation)

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Imbolc                                                             Valentine Moon

Clanking and whacking.  Sheet metal tortured and screaming.  Saws whining.  Dogs barking.  Ah, the sounds of furnace installation.

Snowing today and the temps are in an upswing, but we still have some heating season left to get familiar with the new furnace.