Mid-semester blues

(http://www.cartoonbank.com/2008/whale-writer/invt/132245/)

Zachary Kanin’s cartoon pretty much sums up my mid-semester, great-big feeling of simultaneous possibility and hopelessness. These ideas of mine will surely become a marvel of contemporary poetry if only I can GROW SOME FINGERS!  Also see: Kanin’s giggle-worthy cartoon entries for this week’s culture diary at the Paris Review blog.

I have been absent, but not silent– I promise (ye three readers)

Hey, guys, so, I’ve been working on some translations for the past few months. Here they are:

Drunken Boat Translation Issue 2011: Poems by David Leo García, translated by Sara Sams

More to come! Seriously, spring break must be for blogging, because I won’t let it be solely for grading.

 

 

 

When does the sun die in Arizona?

I can’t get “Lament for Pasiphaë” out of my head, mostly because the sun won’t stop shining here. I fell in  love  with Lauridsen’s composition of Graves’ Midwinter Songs circa 2006 with my college choir, and usually get a hankering for them around this time of year (how hard the year dies…). Living in this movement in particular, I can’t help but feel like this is the most lovin’ Pasiphaë’s ever gotten, what with her condemning womanly lust. The tender line tempted her pity is matched by the most caring of musical dedications. After accidentally reading about some random, traveling a-hole’s slutscapade, I feel really happy about there being beautiful men in the world who can create such body-shaking sadness/sympathy for Pasiphaë… Then she who shone for all resigned her being– kersplat, my heart.

Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!
My eye, dazzled with tears, shall dazzle yours,
Conjuring you to shine and not to move.
You, sun, and I all afternoon have laboured
Beneath a dewless and oppressive cloud–
a fleece now gilded with our common grief
That this must be a night without a moon.
Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!

Faithless she was not: she was very woman,
Smiling with dire impartiality,
Sovereign, with heart unmatched, adored of men,
Until Spring’s cuckoo with bedraggled plumes
Tempted her pity and her truth betrayed.
Then she who shone for all resigned her being,
And this must be a night without a moon.
Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!

–”Lament for Pasiphaë,” Robert Graves

Also, weird: a high school does an excellent rendition (worth staring at the accompanying photos of high school yearbookdom).

Re-blogging

I’m going to start the new year with a hereby half-kept promise of more poetry, music, and books; hopefully re-blogging these two incredible interviews will help me get started on the right foot [my ankle's healing, by the way!].

1) Harper’s Scott Horton interviews Eric Siblin about his new book on the Catalan cellist that discovered Bach’s now-famous (then-dusty) cello suites. Highlights:

“His [Pablo Casals] pioneering recording of the cello suites was made towards the end of the 1930s when the Spanish Civil War was convulsing his homeland. That monumental recording, which has never gone out of print, has remained the touchstone for every cellist since. Had the civil war not been raging in Spain, I doubt there would have been the same degree of urgency, desperation, and hopefulness in that epic recording.”

This reminded me that the right music at the right time can have enough power to induce simultaneous happiness and sadness, to release tension and build it with the same notes. An excerpt from the book confirms a similar phenomenon; it’s also beautifully written and makes me want to reconsider musicology. Maybe it’s always impossible to describe music with words, but coming close, even, is so artful:

“Three notes establish a gut-wrenching sadness. There’s a slight tremor on the fingerboard, the bow a harbinger of difficult news. The cello, wavering at first touch, recovers its equilibrium and reports a painful chronicle. After the buoyancy of the first suite, the mood has shifted. The key is minor, the three notes a tragic triad. The tones move closer and closer to a harrowing vision, weaving spider-like, relentlessly gathering sound into tighter concentric circles that come to an abrupt stop. Nothing fills the empty space. A tiny prayer is uttered.” [VIA Harpers, from The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece]

And here is a rare jewel I found on Youtube (thanks for the videos, no thanks for publishing all snippy comments):

2)David Byrne and Arto Lindsay interview Brazil’s Tom Zé for Bomb. Highlight:

“DB Tom, you have talked about the structure of your music and described it as layers, or blocks, or chunks. Do you see it as woven like fabric, or in layers like geological rock formations? You described the structure of music in ways I hadn’t heard before.

TZ In experimenting, I discovered that by using three strings on the guitar and the bass and having their function change from being harmonic, from being above the rhythm section, to come down and contaminate the rhythm section, that in a sense they spoiled the sound but they also made it more delicious. In a way, I had actually come up with a technique.

Combining this technique with other experiments such as using pairs of cavaquinhos… [a steel stringed instrument about the size of a ukulele] …and having them play outside the tonality of the song…I had to fish around, it had to be just outside or I wouldn’t be able to sing in key… but I realized that if I combined these two experiments I would have the beginnings of a style. I wondered what I would do with the middle, and I remembered that Beethoven claimed that the orchestra would only really resound if all the thirds could be heard.

So, using a house as a metaphor and modifying the usual way of describing music in Portuguese where the rhythm section is usually called the kitchen, I decided to call that the floor, calling the cavaquinhos the ceiling.”

Using the house as metaphor. Awesome. Signing off, leaving you with the good creative work of others for now! Happy 2011.

Jackson Hotel by Lynda Hull

Jackson Hotel by Lynda Hull : The Poetry Foundation I love this, especially here (and–funny how it seemed a little bit like winter here last night):

I want to still the dancer’s hands

in mine, to talk about forgiveness

and what we leave behind– faces

and cities, the small emergencies

of nights

Rui Pires Cabral

Of course I find the most appropriate time to update this blog is during my busiest night yet as a graduate student– papers galore to grade, translations to re-enter, and applications upon applications for glorious after glorious Piper global opportunities. But– but! I remembered, while writing these meandering essays about why, blah blah blah, I must travel, blah blah blah, a poem I found by Rui Pires Cabral in an international poetry anthology gracing a Parnassian bookshelf. Here it is, in all its translated-from-Portuguese deliciousness:

POLISH RESTAURANT

The night is sustained by its décor
like a dead man linked to his machines.
Customers leaf through books, all Poles
from the same block. We suddenly
realize: there is something beyond words
that resists deciphering. In foreign cities
we make better use of our senses, we are bolder
in our intuitions. And after the soup and the warm
tea, going out into the street, we can discover
that we are still alive and that, after all,
we have never known any other condition.
This is the hour that reveals us.
And what we call reality
heads off with us in the same direction.

–translated by Alexis Levitin, copyright 2003 Averno, Lisboa

SO. GOOD.

NYC to Tempe

It seems more like I flew to Tempe in a whirlwind of dusty images  rather than via the truer, slower cross country drive. To re-cap the flashes and thoughts that have been collecting speed since my arrival (perhaps a few even had enough momentum to make it into a Sedona vortex–see Sedona Vortex Map), I’m going to do a photolist. I love lists. It’s the easiest blog-genre around, and that’s how I’m going to ease back into this business of– is it journaling? It’s that more than anything else, I suppose. Without further ado, my trip (NYC–>TN –> AZ):

Ernst, The Barbarians, Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org

This painting by Max Ernst sticks out to me from the other million pieces Mom and I tried to take in during one visit to the Met. As a leader of the DaDaist movement, I’m glad to revisit this after a Lit Translation session in which we talked about the “violence of meaning” and the lure of escaping exactly that with art post WWII. Of course this is dated a bit before, 1937, and there obviously is some sort of symbology here– a meaning that is most certainly violent. These Barbarians are in such an odd, fantastical, menacing dance. So much emotion can be blended with oil.

Goodbye, NYC. This farewell should be as gloomy and romantic as this photo, last snapped crossing Brooklyn Bridge in a cab:

Obligatory Gloomily Romantic NYC Shot from Cab

First stop… Germany, Pennsylvania:

Alemania, Pennsylvania

The gas station restroom asked us to “Please Outen the Light.” Next was home, but not for long– then we hit the road that Elvis took:

I-40 W (a long, long road)

Rock’nRoll Museum in Memphis, as seen crossing the Mississippi River (goodbye, Tennessee)

Into Arkansas– a land of unexpected beauty, the kind that looks boring in photographs (farmland, sky, farmland, sky, farmland, sky). Then, just as fast, Oklahoma, where the buffalo

… are put in cages for the tourists to see.

We also got to mingle with ghosts at the Cherokee trading post. It was actually a sad place for some obvious reasons, and I think mom wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. Of course I harassed her into taking photos with grandpa.

Nice, Sara.

Sometime soon we hit the panhandle of Texas, whose most memorable aspect is its own infiniteness. So. Much. Space. Forever. And we were only in the panhandle! Below: the signage of Tejas in billboards and the “Largest Cross in the Western Hemisphere” (I think only the cross in TN comes close…).

Sign of Texas

Largest Cross in Western Hemisphere!

And, finally, New Mexico, which blended into Arizona with its daunting red slabs- most of which can’t be represented here, damning the thief of camera from Albuquerque necessary. What’s left– Route 66ish.

Roadside mercy

New Mexico storms are the scariest

Last stop for gas...

Which desert is it, anyway?

Check out my new header, please, and discern which half is Andalucía and which half is Arizona. Thanks to a nifty photostitching application, I was able to blend the two and consider how similar the two landscapes can be. Of course, there’s the question of cactus and olive tree, ancient red slabs and windmills, but still– the gentle rolling hills, at least, could almost roll right into one another. I’m currently attempting to revive the blog started (left) in Spain and left to die in NYC. Hopefully being back in the desert (right) bodes well for the page.

Andalucia & Arizona

Of Equal Importance

On home-page of the English Language Andalucia newspaper I never read, one after the other:

Home-made bomb explodes in Basque country

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010 | NATIONAL NEWS

Bomb in Basque country blamed on ETA sympathisers

Penelope Cruz is pregnant

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010 | NATIONAL NEWS

Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem are expecting their first child

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