Re:Rereading. Also, Men in Boats Asleep

PATRICIA: Have you ever slept on a boat before?
JOE: No.
PATRICIA: It really affects your dreams. I look forward to it. Even though, sometimes, the dreams really shake me up. Okay. Good night.
JOE: Good night.

—John Patrick Shanley, Joe Versus the Volcano

A few days ago I finished rereading the Odyssey—I think this was the third time to completion. Among other things it brought back to mind a question I've asked myself before, whether it's better to read three great books once or one great book three times (or, indeed, whether they amount to somewhat the same thing). In the past year or so I've fallen out of the habit of having one of the 6–8 books I'm working through at a given time (not counting the Bible and Book of Common Prayer) be a reread. New ground is always so tempting, but I think it's a good discipline. But did I start a new-oldie after the Odyssey? Not yet anyway.

One detail of Homer's plot that I was especially thrilled to rediscover is that Odysseus, the great wide-awake sefarer, sleeps through the whole of his final homeward voyage. The crew that's bringing him back to Ithaca carries him and his parting gifts ashore so he wakes on dry land. There's something very moving about that image, and its other ancient parallels: Jonah asleep in the hold of the storm-tossed ship that's (trying) to take him away from Ninevah and God's calling; and Jesus, asleep in the bow of a similarly wind-vexed boat on the Sea of Galilee, right before his disciples woke him up and he calmed the storm. Three great wanderers, asleep at the wheel.

Urdu Desktop Publishing

The ever-stellar Language Hat linked to this refutation of a recently circulated story about the last hand-lettered newspaper in the world, an Urdu paper published in Chennai, India. Not so, says Iqag Notes:

The vast majority of “printed” Urdu works are hand written. That includes books, newspapers, magazines, posters, and so on. It’s true that there is at the moment an incredibly fast pace of change towards computerization amongst the major newspapers, and a slower pace for books, but this has been only over the last five years. In fact, one of the only things which are almost always computer composed are wedding invitations, because it’s cost effective for these small batches, and because the consumer bears the higher labor costs of DTP vs. caligraphy.

After which follows a fascinating history of efforts to render Urdu script in printed form - old-school typography, lithography (making a facsimile of a hand-lettered page), and desktop publishing.

Lithography was easier and cheaper than block type, and there was no particular reason to look back. That is, until the invention of computers and the various stages of mechanical and computerized typesetting. Still, developing the algorithm for proper rendering of nasta`liq was just not attracting the necessary investment. One factor may have been the fact that those kids from Urdu speaking families who went into computers in India - and even, to some extent Pakistan - were those least likely to be able to read Urdu. Even now, if you are Muslim and go to an English medium school, you take Arabic as your second language, and if you go to an Urdu medium school, the chances of you pursuing engineering are slim.

There's also a fascinating digression about printing the Qur'an:

As for the Qur’an, a trained Urdu calligrapher would be completely unqualified for that. Qur’an’s are written by teams of huffaz (people who’ve memorized the Qur’an) trained in Qur’anic calligraphy. They are repeatedly checked and certified by government bodies in multiple countries. Generally speaking, a publisher who prints a Qur’an with an error of a single diacritical mark can expect to be held responsible for recall and destruction of the entire issue. 95% of the Qur’ans you’ll run across in South Asia are reprints (mostly unauthorized) of the Taj Company edition of the 1930s. These are resized and recut to fit different editions. I watched someone spend two years cutting and pasting by hand to produce a new, large print multi-lingual interlinear edition which he hoped would become a marketplace sensation. Essentially, there are two visual styles in Qur’ans today, the Taj version, and that handed out by the Saudis. Everything else is a rarity. Many South Asians have trouble reading the Saudi version as it lacks visual cues they grew up with.

And this intriguing parenthetical:

(You must realize that most of the non-English publishing in India is done at the expense of the author or the author’s friends or students or disciples. This actually leads to very vibrant literary scenes about which people actually care quite a bit.)

Now let's see if I can do some script-comparisons—admittedly risky for scripts I can't read. Here's a headline from The Siasat Daily, rendered as a jpg with InPage's DTP software:


And here's an Urdu headline from BBC Urdu, which uses a Unicode font—it doesn't mimic the calligraphy as well—it's flatter, like standard Arabic type, but it's searchable:

سفر فیصل آباد، چیف جسٹس کا بھرپور استقبال

I'd like to find an image of a contemprary handwritten Urdu news article, but haven't figured out how to locate one yet.

Maiores Comediantes

I'd known about the French affection for Jerry Lewis, but evidently it extends to Brazil as well—as this cartoon, from the front page of the always-lovely Folha de S. Paulo from about a week ago. I clipped it from the pdf at newseum, and just now looked at the article it referenced: Brazilian editors rate the national and international comedians. Chaplin heads up most of the lists; Keaton figures most of the time. But a couple, including the editor of the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone, put Jerry on top.

I watched my first Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis feature this past weekend: Living it Up. I have to say that it didn't do much to raise Lewis' comedic star in my opinion. Maybe the annoying nasal vocalizations just come out better in French or Portuguese. Or, come to think of it, maybe he's been dubbed. (I tried watching one of the dance sequences with the volume turned off, and it was definitely easier to focus on Lewis' undeniable skill). Then last night my mom and I finished watching an old Keaton silent feature, College, which was a delight, but less so than your average Chaplin.

Youtube: Brazilian comedians Mazzaropi, Ankito, Grande Otelo; and also Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis.

On M.I.A.

M.I.A., "Bird Flu"


M.I.A., "Boyz"

I heard second second track yesterday on KCRW ... a preview of M.I.A.'s sophomore album, due out later on. As usual, the UK/Sri Lankan rapper (um, chanter?) is up to her in-your-face, low-resolution tricks. But musically I find it a lot more interesting than a lot of the stultifyingly repetitive dancehall-beat stuff I've heard (largely reggaetón but not exclusively) over the past few years. Beyond that, there's the M.I.A. aura, aggressively transcultural, sort of an anti-Peter-Gabriel. And the lyrics are, for a get-on-the-floor dance song, a tremendous celebration-cum-feminist-critique of rowdy masculinity and its geopolitical consequences.

One thing that comes up for me, perhaps irrelevantly, is the sticky authenticity question. On the one hand, as Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker review of her debut album put it, she's giving voice to the third-world street (and its first-world urban echoes), delivering music "from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands. It could be the sound of a carnival, or a riot". (it's a great line by Frere-Jones, but I don't know how much M.I.A. herself talks about trying to be or not to be anybody's version of an authentic voice).

But M.I.A.'s whole approach, from music to videos to her artwork and anti-fashion attire (like a can't-stop-looking-at-it 1980s nightmare, with giant Reebok logos spraypainted on in a sort of piracy of piracy itself), is extremely canny, intellectual, and in ways more first-worldly than third-. Which is what lifts it over the bar and onto KCRW or into the New Yorker, where someone like me hears it and likes it—or at least can't stop listening—and feels a bit more authentic, hip in the way that certain NGOs are hip, for doing so ("pull up tha PEE-ple, pull up the Poor").

Le Bac

France 2's Le 20 Heures newscast has been doing their annual in-depth coverage of le Bac, the graduation exams that French secondary students take before (and to qualify for) moving to university or various skilled vocations. There seem to be about as many bacs as there are, say, college majors—tests in construction or wetlands management or cooking as well as the sciences, math, psychology, etc. The tests are spread out over a week or two, which makes for lots of coverage of students preparing (preferred shot: group of students lounging on the lawn like so many high school seniors, but boning up on their last-minute Sartre).

The odd thing to me is the level of scuriny the exam gets every year on the news. It seems comparable to what my friends and I gave when we were taking the SATs—chatting about possible questions, quizzing each other about how we did after it's over. But then again, we were the ones directly involved. With the bac, which has a much more centralized (c'est France after all), one-time-only nature, there's more of the sense of a rite of passage.

Yesterday was the philosophy bac, which I think is one of the media's favorites. Students have to write essays on topics like "can there be happiness" ... so every year France 2 gets a bunch of real philosophers to take the test along with the students, and then compares their answers ("the pursuit of happiness is problematic and ends in futility"). Imagine if we in the US had our public intellectuals all write SAT essays every year to lead on the nightly news (and in a legislative election week)!

Here are some video clips from yesterday's mid-day news. The evening one had the actual questions but I can't find it:

Le bac démarre avec l'épreuve de philosophie ( JT 12/13 - 11/06/2007 )
Cinq écrivains et l'épreuve philo du bac ( JT13h - 11/06/2007 )

Last Night. True Story.

In the dream I was driving. Down the road. In the car. And next to me ... was Ira Glass.

Not bad, I hope, for a first attempt at audio embedding (gracias a the Internet Archive and OdeoStudio). Well actually, second. The first attempt didn't record the voiceover at all. A third attempt might have done something about the audio levels, but that's enough going on for one day.

Also in hindsight the comments I make about television doubtless owe an arm and a leg to Rob Long's wonderful weekly Martini Shot commentaries on KCRW, most recently and specifically this one.

Spring, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

For the past few years I've had a sheaf of memory-poems kept by my dresser; I'll read/recite one every morning while I'm getting ready, sticking with each one till it's memorized. Here's one from a long time back (and coming late in the season—just a week and a half before the solstice):

SPRING

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

[via Bartleby.com]

I'm hoping to include these memory-poems from time to time in the new nblinks incarnation. I probably should look around to see the exact legality of quoting full poems before I start busting out the Czeslaw Milosz or Seamus Heaney.

Wonder Bread and the Mountaintop

For the past few weeks I've been reading a collection of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speeches, essays, sermons, books, and other writings. Obviously, plenty of inspring and moving stuff (what else did I expect?) — and also, given the nature of public speaking, a lot of repetition. It's a delight seeing phrases and pieces from the "I Have a Dream" speech popping up years ahead of time.

One thing that's surpised me is the extent to which MLK quotes from white intellectuals—James Russel Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Paul Tillich, Victor Hugo. I'm not sure if I can recall him quoting Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, or Booker T. Washington. I wonder if this was because of philosophical differences with those African-American luminaries, or more that he consciously needed, in speaking to the majority culture, to win their trust by referencing majority figures?

I did have a kind of amusing surprise as I read the text of King's final, deeply prophetic "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech—delivered the night before his assasination. I was familiar with the moving, slightly eerie climax, which is in the video clip above. But earlier on in the speech, he's sort of rambling along about the latest boycott the SCLC is supporting:

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain.

For me those two elements—Jesse Jackson and Wonder Bread were this strange, almost jarring intrusion of the present-day into an iconic American speech.

(I had a similar bit of cognitive dissonance when I first saw, last year, footage of Bob Dylan singing at the March on Washington. It was as if they'd taken the familar film of King's speech—those guys in the white hats standing behind, etc.—and Zelig'd the pop icon into the scene.)

Tunisian Nights

This week I watched the movie, which among its other highlights features this priceless blurb on the DVD cover:

"A Tunisian answer to DIRTY DANCING!"
— Stephen Holden, THE NEW YORK TIMES

I wasn't aware that Dirty Dancing had particularly addressed a question to Tunisia, but evidently Satin Rouge is the first and foremost response.

The IMDB summary contains a nice whilst:

After the death of her husband, Lilia's life revolves solely around her teenage daughter, Salma. Whilst looking for Salma late one night, Lilia stumbles upon a belly dance cabaret and though initially reserved and taken aback by the culture of the place, Lilia gets consistently drawn back to it. She befriends one of the belly dancers and is encouraged into dancing for the audience. Lilia also starts a romance with one of the cabaret's musicians, who unbeknown to both of them, is also romancing Salma.

I haven't seen Dirty Dancing so I can't tell whether Satin Rouge covers all the bases. It's definitely more risque/rebellious than, say, Strictly Ballroom. And the mother-daughter romance twist, especially at the end, felt a little like a French version of Monsoon Wedding: beautiful, witty, but more than a little creepy.

From director Raja Amari's bio info, I glean that she studied belly dancing at Tunis's top conservatory, but had never witnessed it in the cabaret context till she started work on Satin Rouge. So the forbidden aspect was not the type of dance, but the venue, which I found interesting.

I'll also note that it's the sole Tunisian film that my library system has, excluding stuff like Patton or Humphrey Bogart's 1943 vehicle (literally—it's a tank!) Sahara.

Back in Grey

At a friend's urging, I've decided to give this a restart, after a two year absence. We'll see how long it lasts, but the goal is to hit a stride that's a little more formal than the fragments of yesteryear, but still slightly casual and anonymous—if you know me, you know me, but if not, hopefully there'll still be lots of interest to the interested reader. But enough with the meta-statements. On to the fascinating.

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I just finished reading "The Intuitionist", by Colson Whitehead, a strange but ultimately winning novel about race and intrigue amongst elevator inspectors. This choice was itself inspired by some great lectures and readings I found online with Harvard's Du Bois Institute -- discussions with contemporary black writers, as well as great lectures on anthropology, sociology, etc.

Also, without quite meaning to, I've started learning a bit of French. What happened was I became a fan of the "Journal de France" newscast they used to run with English subtitles on cable. But now that's off the air, and so I have/get to web-stream it from the source -- thus I'm finding I need to pick up a bit more vocab to have it make any sense.

3/5 Upload

  
Photo of the pseudo-stream in our backyard (can't even see the plastic this way); and a self-portrait in the storm sewer out front.

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[email fragment]

Excellent with the accordion and all. [...] Due to my preadolescent enthusiasm for Weird Al Yankovic, I've long had a soft spot for that most huggable of instruments. Which probably goes at least part way to explaining the disproportionate zydeco representation in my current music library. Not to mention the place of Paul Simon's "Graceland" near the top of the all-time-favorite-albums pile -- with its brilliant mixing the accordions of Soweto, Louisiana, and East L.A.

[...]

Books I've been reading: Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter, about John Brown's family; a collection of short stories by gen-x Spanish-language authors. [Se habla espan~ol: voces latinas en USA] Como se dice epiphany? Not sure, not that I'm good enough to recognize them when they pop up. And I think I'm going to try a Nobel laureate a month for 2005 -- Mr. January has been the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert (depending on how you count he's my second-favorite Slavic poet, or my least-favorite, the one other being Old Man Milosz, RIP [not true -- you forgot Zbigniew Herbert, and one or two more -- ed.]). Mr. Feb will be Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese novelist.

  
A couple of auto-timed self-portraits on the park bench across the street from my house. I worry this might be a violation of the pseudo-anonymity of this blog. But at least there are still the sunglasses.

  
Right now my morning walks have the sun at such a height that, when the clouds break and the pavement's wet, all sorts of great reflections result. I took these a couple of weeks ago.

fog photos

  

Fog and spiderwebs from my 5min. walk a few mornings back.

Boston, PA

Digital camera for Christmas + finally figuring out flickr's online photo stuff = images, maybe. We'll start with the above, a (literal) screenshot from last Sunday night's Journal de France newscast. The story was about major US cities affected by the recent blizzard. Two for three ain't bad.

The uncritical enthusiasm of the European intellectual for tribal culture appears in the exclamation of the architect Le Corbusier on first seeing Manhattan: "It is hot-jazz in stone." It appears again in the artist Moholy-Nagy's account of his visit to a San Francisco night club in 1940. A Negro band was playing with zest and laughter. Suddenly a player intoned, "One million and three," and was answered: "One million and seven and a half." Then another sang, "Eleven," and another, "Twenty-one." Then amidst "happy laughter and shrill singing the numbers took over the place."

Moholy-Nagy notes how, to Europeans, America seems to be the land of abstractions, where numbers have taken on an existence of their own in phrases like "57 Varieties," "the 5 and 10," or "7 Up" and "behind the 8-ball." It figures. Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an industrial culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures.

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

NY Times: Is Alaska's Only Elephant Happy? Some say that Maggie should be moved from the Alaska Zoo to a warmer climate where she could get more outdoor exercise. Zoo officials have responded with plans to build her a treadmill.

LA Times: TAIPEI, Taiwan — The radio show called "Special Communications" was an unlikely hit, given that it consisted of announcers reading strings of numbers for 15 minutes.
Taiwan used the mind-numbing program in the 1980s to send coded messages to its spies in mainland China. But like many Taiwanese propaganda broadcasts, it could also be picked up locally. To the surprise of many at the government-run Radio Taiwan International, the show soon developed a cult following among Taiwanese. [full story]