Sideways Station

Handelitis and The-sun-is-shining Road

Every now and then I have an attack of musical fever and have to listen to a piece of music a hundred and thirty-seven times in a row. Examples of past episodes are Dylan singing Blind Willie McTell, Carlos Gardel singing Milonga Sentimental, Tupelo Honey sung by Cassandra Wilson as well as Uri Caine and Paolo Fresu performing Si dolce è il tormento.

Sometimes I get a more serious case and I want to listen to everything a peformer ever played or sung or a composer ever wrote. The most recent occurrence was an attack of Handelitis. Hepatitis has various forms: A, B and C. So does Handelitis and I came down with Handelitis O, because I specifically felt a compulsion to attempt to listen to every Opera he had ever written.

It was only in the late 20th Century that Handel's operas began to be performed regularly again, because previously there were so few singers who had been trained so as to be capable of taking on the parts written for castrati.

The explanation generally given for the spread of castrated singers is Paul's injunction in 1 Corinthians that women should be silent in church ("mulieres in ecclesiis taceant" in the Latin Vulgate). As a result women were not allowed to sing in choirs in church. But who was going to sing the top line in the harmony ? For a while boys were used. But as music became increasingly complex it was discovered that boys' voices inconveniently broke before they had time to become proficient enough to master the parts. If they were castrated, they maintained their upper range and also developed the power of adult lungs as they grew. Gradually the demand for castrati increased and families with a talented musical child often found it a good investment for him to undergo an unexpected accident. (Because in most cases these were presented as accidents.(As William A. Frosch puts it in this interesting article: There were a surprising number of children who were attacked by wild swans or geese, gored by wild boars, or who were kicked or fell in ways that damaged or destroyed their testes.)  This all because somebody said women should not be heard in church. It might be worthwhile thinking about this the next time you are on the point of voicing a very strong opinion:  you can never really tell what effect it might have in 1500 years' time.

However one feels about it, it would seem that the castrati had voices of unequalled beauty. (I found one quote according to which, when asked by Pope Paul VI what the Church could do for music, Stravinsky answered "Give us back the castrati".

The most famous of them, Farinelli (real name Carlo Broschi), given the kind of media promotion we have today, would have made many of our superstars look like midgets. After making half of Europe swoon in the theatre, he ended up being employed on an exclusive contract by the Queen of Spain who had come to believe that his voice could cure the severe depression of her husband King Philip V. 

One of my favourite Handel arias, from the opera Ariodante, is generally known as Dopo Notte. It is one of the most rejoiceful pieces of music I know. The text gives the feeling clearly :

Dopo notte atra e funesta, splende in ciel più vago il sole e di gioia empie la terra

(After a black, doom-laden night, the sun shines brighter in the sky and fills the earth with joy.)

This aria was written for a singer called Carestini, who was not far behind Farinelli in terms of fame. (That's his portrait at the top of the post). I decided to find something out about him and was astounded to learn that he was from a place called Filottrano (population 9,449 in 2004). Filottrano is about 25 kilometers from Ancona, a place I have lived in and which I have been going back to all of my life. And yet, I had never heard Carestini mentioned. It seemed to me that since Filottrano can't have that many famous people, the main square must be named after him. But it turns out it isn't. There is no road named after him in the town. I may be wrong but I have searched hard and I have not found one single street in Italy named after one of its famous castrati. "Not one" is, I think, putting it accurately, because I found that half a street had been named after a castrato. In Andria, Farinelli's birthplace, there is a via Carlo e Riccardo Broschi. Riccardo, who he shares the street with, was his brother, a composer and the person most people think was responsible for having Carlo operated on (he had a very promising voice and the family was in financial straits).

I am wondering why there is such reluctance to name streets after these people. When I walk around towns and read the names of the thoroughfares it often occurs to me some of the people in our addresses haven't really done that much to be remembered.  Is it embarrassment about the practice that brings this about ? Or are mayors wary of the inauguration ceremony in which they would have to cut a ribbon with scissors. Perhaps they think it would bring bad luck. (I can think of one politician at least who would be terrified at having a road named after a castrato in his home town). Perhaps we will have to wait for a woman mayor in Filottrano before we have a via Carestini. But I remember that I once wrote something here where I argued against naming streets after famous people. So my suggestion is the following: use some of the words from the wonderful aria written for him, call it via Splendilsole (The-sun-is-shining Road).

At this point, some of you who do not know the aria might like to hear it. There are versions on YouTube which have a much clearer sound, but the one I have chosen, sung by Vivica Genaux, is my personal favourite and I am very grateful to the person who recorded this because the aria, for reasons I can't understand, has not been included on any of her CDs. I have never heard anyone sing it with such ease and accuracy, and her ornamentations in the repeat, the da capo, are amazing. (Anyone who can sing this is outstanding, but most singers have a slight hesitation just before they take on the trickier bits which reminds me of the way horses sometimes hold back a second before jumping a fence in show jumping).
Just so that you can hear what her voice sounds like when you can really hear it, here she is singing Sta nell'Ircana from Alcina.

And finally another aria by Handel which has given other people Handelitis. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing As with rosy steps from Theodora, an oratorio which contains what Handel considered to be his best chorus (better than the Hallelujah Chorus). This clip is from a Glyndebourne production which is wonderful from every point of view.

Some final notes: nowadays castrati arias are sung both by women and by men (countertenors) with a equivalent singing range. Both approaches have their supporters.

Vivica Genaux has recorded a CD entitled Arias for Farinelli which contains music composed specifically to show off his vocal abilities.

Philippe Jaroussky, a French countertenor, has recorded a CD entitled Carestini, the story of a castrato. You can see a trailer for the album here.

For the film Farinelli,  an interesting attempt was made to reproduce the possible sound of his voice by merging the sound of a soprano and a countertenor. You can hear a piece of a Handel aria given this treatment here.

But now I must stop before I get a relapse.

Volcanic money

I remember that the first time I was given this 100 rupiah banknote in Indonesia I thought to myself, "Is this really the best way to promote confidence in currency stability?"

You can't read the writing clearly in this picture, but I can assure you that the island towards which the sailboat seems to be sailing is Krakatoa or Krakatau, which has erupted several times. The most famous eruption was in 1883. According to Wikipedia its power was equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT - about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the Little Boy bomb that devastated Hiroshima.

I think it would have been even more interesting if they had also added the motto on the US dollar bills "In God We Trust", perhaps just underneath the volcano.

However, this could have been a useful logo (with the addition of thick fog) for some of those incomprehensible financial instruments which began to explode last year.

This banknote was printed from 1992 to 1999 if I am not mistaken. But if you really want to test people's nerves, you could always issue something with a picture of Mount Tambora, also in Indonesia. Mount Tambora's eruption in 1815 was the biggest in recorded history. It caused climatic abnormalities and 1816 became known as the Year Without Summer. Crops and livestock perished in much of the Northern hemisphere, causing the worst famine of the 19th Century.

Maybe there will be a Central Bank brave enough to print a Mount Tambora note with the motto "Keeping our fingers crossed".

Leopardi's Infinity

 Giacomo Leopardi is generally described as the greatest Italian lyric poet. I would like to add something to that but I can't think of anything. So I shall just repeat: Giacomo Leopardi - the greatest Italian lyric poet.

In any case, that is much more than you need to know to appreciate his poem L'Infinito. I see the title often translated as The Infinite, but I am not sure that means anything in English, so I am going to opt for Infinity. Here then is my attempt at rendering some of its sound and meaning in English.

Infinity

I always have felt fondness for this lonely hill
and for this hedge which screens off
such a large part of the furthermost horizon.
But as I sit and gaze, in my thoughts I envisage
beyond it boundless space and utter silence
and deepest still, so that it almost makes
my heart take fright. And as I hear
the rustling of the wind among these plants,
I start comparing that unending silence
with this noise and I am reminded of
eternity, and seasons gone and dead and
of the season now alive and of its sounds. And so
in this immensity my thoughts sink and drown
and shipwreck feels sweet in this ocean.

(Translation by Phillip Hill)

Listen

And here is the Italian original -

L'infinito

Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle,
e questa siepe, che da tanta parte
de l'ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
silenzi, e profondissima quiete
io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco
il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
infinito silenzio a questa voce
vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno,
e le morte stagioni, e la presente
e viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
immensità s'annega il pensier mio:
e il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare

In the neighbourhood where I used to live a few years ago I often ran into an Italian teacher at the local newsagent's. I never found out her name, but I think her initials must have been F.R. because she was frumpish, fractious and frosty. I felt really sorry for her students and since she complained about them constantly I often found myself defending them. Once she said that they had  downloaded a version of L'Infinito from the internet in which the last verse had been changed from e il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare (and shipwreck feels sweet in this sea) to e in questo mare il naufragar m'è dolce (and in this sea shipwreck feels sweet). I told her that I  thought the students' version was just as good as Leopardi's and she almost walloped me with her lumpy and voluminous handbag. But writers make changes too, as you can see from one of Leopardi's manuscript versions in the picture at the top.

I still think the second version is as good, because ending the poem with the world "sweet" gives the poem a sense of release. But as I have looked at it more carefully to translate it I have now realized that "mare" the last word can also be read in Italian giving full value to its two syllables, so as to make the word almost sound like the sea itself and you can almost hear the sound of sinking or launching into the sea. Because of this I have taken the liberty of replacing the word sea for mare with ocean, which has a sonority which is closer to the original.  

One word it is difficult to translate is sovrumani in line 5 of the original . Sovrumani could I think most accurately but very clumsily be rendered as  "more than human". Utter is the most satisfactory solution I could find. It sounds right to me and utterness is definitely more than human.

The penultimate line has s'annega - literally "drowns itself". I didn't feel this was reflected well by "drown" because of the overtones of "to be drowned out" which it  is possesses. "Sink" might have sounded too comfortable, - the idea of sinking into an armchair. Combining them into sink and drown seems to me to give a clear equivalent of the Italian as well as a few needed syllables.

Below you can listen to the Italian original read beautifully by Mimmo Pelini. For more of his poetry readings in Italian go to tatusc on YouTube.

Sideways Anti-Aging Formula (Free !)

This post is for people who have already grown as old as they want to be. As a result they don’t react as positively to questions about their age as the five-year old in the poem and sometimes can become extremely glum.
Some people seem to go actively looking for this kind of reaction. They can then express their own glumness  and start up a real glumfest. You can see walking glumfests every day on the streets, usually made up of two people so deeply enveloped in their dissatisfaction that they pay no attention to the world around them. If they did they might notice an interesting fact: the world is not really base-10.
We have fallen into the habit of counting things in tens. Perhaps because we have ten fingers – (although two of them are really weird). But there are lots of other possibilities. There are very few things in nature which actually divide into ten. Also we generally don’t use base-10 for anything to do with time. There were 10-day weeks in China and Ancient Egypt and the decimalist maniacs in the French Revolution also tried to introduce a 10 hour, 100 minute day, but most of us are used to  60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, 7 days and so on.  So why is it that whenever we reach a multiple of ten in our age we feel it is a defining moment ? It is almost as if you become a different person when you reach 30, 40, 50 etc.  
I think I have had an insight and I am going to share it with you: I believe our real ages are expressed using base-12 arithmetic. If you can't remember what base-12 arithmetic is read this.

Let me demonstrate how this works. I am going to take the example of someone aged 49, say. Ask them what their age is. Inform them that, using base-12 arithmetic, they are actually 41 and going on 42. I've found that, more often than not, people will react by saying, "That is the age I ought to be." (Apart from a handful of people who believe they should always be 18). 

Here are some examples of base-10 and base-12 ages
 
 Base-10     Base-12
 30            26
 36            30
 40            34
 48            40
 50            42
 60            50
 72            60

Some of you may have encountered a problem: what do you do after you reach the digit 9 ? For example if 39 (base-12) is equal to 45 (base-10) because it's equal to (3x12)+9, what is the next base-12 number? It is not 40, because 40 is 48 (4x12). Usually in base-12 arithmetic, 10 and  11 are represented bythe letters A and B. So the sequence in the case I mentioned would be 39 3A 3B 40 (45,46,47,48).
However saying you are 3A years old doesn’t sound like anything at all. I have thought about this and, in consideration of the fact that transition to a duodecade will be just as traumatic as transition to the next decade, I have come up with the following solution.
When you get to 39 base-12, you stay on 39 for the next three years. This will give you enough time to prepare properly for transition to the next duodecade.

To make this formula work. Apply it every night for a month before going to bed.
(Warning: do not try this on your 11-year olds. They will be most upset to discover they are now 9 again and will only be 10 next year).

I have shared this with you free of charge because I couldn’t think of any way of selling it to you, although. learning from other Internet entrepreneurs,  I think I might produce something called Sideways Anti-aging Pro. This will be exactly the same as the free version, but you will have the privilege of paying money for it.
So provide me with money or buy my book at Lulu.com and I will arrange to send you a sticker or a signed certificate. This is all negotiable.

However, I am also developing what I think will be a marketable product.
It will be based on the mathematical constant pi, which has fascinated people through the ages.
Basically it is, as you all know,  the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.
This number cannot be expressed finitely using the decimal (or the duodecimal) system of notation. 

So you could say that it goes on for ever, without repeating itself.

I thought that we could sell it as a life-extending, alternative medicine, with the following slogan: “Pi, the number that goes on forever: so can you !”. 

I was thinking of putting the sequence on rice paper (with the numbers tapering off, becoming smaller and smaller), so that one could swallow it. It would look a bit like this:

Of course, we can't offer you eternal life, because since pi goes on forever , there is no way you would have time to swallow it all in your own lifetime, however small we printed its numbers. So we will have to stop at a few million figures and call it Pi extract.

Notwithstanding this little hitch, I think that, with effective marketing, we could make it a real success. After all, throughout history people have been willing to take all kinds of weird concoctions to achieve longevity. And pi is a concept which intrigues a great many people. For example, I found a page entitled "We are in digits of Pi and live forever" produced by a gentleman who writes:

"Pi is a transcendental number... It is a never-ending, patternless sequence of digits.Somewhere inside the digits of pi is a representation for all of us -- the atomic coordinates of all our atoms, our genetic code, all our thoughts, all our memories. Given this fact, all of us are alive, and hopefully happy, in pi. Pi makes us live forever. We all lead virtual lives in pi. We are immortal."

He also asks us to note that he has written a book on this subject in which he also explains "how our thoughts reside in the vibrational patterns of a cube of Jello."

(This is a concept which I am not quite ready for yet, so I will add nothing about it.)

Of course, since we have just been reminded that pi is transcendental we could also market it as Transcendental Pie -

I also think we could do a better job than the example above, which was baked at Delft University to mark Pi Day , generally celebrated on 14 March, according to the rather illogical 2nd-things-first style used in America (3.14). If one used the European system which arranges dates into day-month-year format (small-medium-big), Pi day would fall on 31 April, which has interesting mathematical properties of its own, in that it doesn't actually exist. 

If you have found this all hard to follow, make sure to miss my next Mythematical post, which will be entitled Binarise ! How to count to a million on your fingers (without using Viagra).

Mexican Bus Ride (re-post)

Mexican bus ride was the US title given to a Buñuel film called Subida al cielo (Ascent to Heaven). What follows is about a Mexican bus ride of my own and has nothing to do with the film, I just liked the poster and it is always worthwhile mentioning Buñuel, but you can see an excerpt here.

 

My ride started in Cuautla, in the state of Morelos. Its main claim to fame is that it was the birthplace of Zapata, and it still has his train, which it takes out for a walkabout every now and then.

A Mexican friend of mine once told me that when she was a kid her mother had taken her on a week's vacation to Cuautla and they had gone to the cinema every night and every night had seen the same film. That is the kind of thing you do in Cuautla.

I had the following interesting experiences in Cuautla, - buying a voltage convertor, being offered live chumiles to eat (I declined), hearing a train whistle and thinking I was going to see Zapata's train and finding out it was a toy train full of kids,

                                                                

 voltage convertor                                                                       chumil

                                                                                                (let's pretend it is,it's really a jumil)

                                                                   

  Zapata's train                                                                        Not Zapata's train

encountering a butterfly, going to a shoe-shop and watching a friend buy sandals, looking for a beer and getting directed to a saloon-style cantina for real men only, managing to get out of the cantina two hours later, being asked to hold a baby, but most of all catching a bus.

I can't remember whether the bus (to Puebla) was the Estrella Roja or the Oro line. We climbed up through the mountains on a bumpy, narrow road. Somewhere which looked like nowhere a boy got on and started selling lollipops. "Paletas, paletas," he went up and down the aisle. He must have sold one, because I heard him say "Gracias". Then he sat down next to the driver and looked with a gentle gaze at the road. The driver caught my attention because he talked to the kid, who couldn't have been more than twelve, respectfully as one would talk to an adult. After about twenty minutes the boy got off. Another place which looked like nowhere. He crossed the road and stood and waited for a bus going the other way, shuttling I supposed all day from one nowhere to another.

"Not much profit for that much time", I said to the driver.

"He's doing OK", the driver said. And he asked me where I was from. When I told him I lived in Rome, he said "Estàs muy lejos de tu rancho."- ("You're very far from home"- although I liked the suggestion that I might actually have a ranch). And then he started talking about things. He had been all over Mexico, all over Central America, and through the United States, driving buses. He collected a stone from every place he went to. "Which is the place you would most wish to have a stone from ?" I asked him. "Palos", he said, "where Columbus set sail."

He told me "My brother is an engineer, my sister is a lawyer, but when I see a bus go by, I want to drive it."  He was reading a poet I hadn't heard of. Later I discovered that he was very famous in Mexico, though much less outside Mexico: his name was Jaime Sabines, and he quoted some things to me. Here is a poem about the moon by Sabines.

When we drew close to Puebla, he pointed out three volcanoes, la Malinche, Iztaccíhuatl, and the very lively Popocatépetl. I thought that, considering it was boiling away, Popocatépetl had a useful rhyme with kettle. And then as we drove into the elegant city and down to the bus terminal, he said, "Gringos don't know how to whistle" and this is more or less what he said by way of explanation.

 

                                                      

 

 

The Pharmacy on Reforma (Puebla, Mexico)

Listen to the poem


"This," says the pharmacist reading
the label, "is good for eyesight,
indigestion, back ache,
the liver, children and old age.
Or," she adds, reading my face, "else
we have
three tubes of toothpaste
for the price of one."

(This poem is from my book The Observation Car, which is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/2588218)

How to say "extinction" in Chumyl: "The Linguists", a film.

If you are interested in language and languages you might like to know that you can currently see the film "The Linguists" at Babelgum. This is the link.
The film, presented as "a very foreign language film",  is about David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, two researchers who travel the world to document vanishing languages. Most of the action takes place in Siberia, India and Bolivia and focuses on the Chulym, Sora and Kallawaya languages. In one of the first scenes one of the linguists says that one reason to study language is to "figure out the possible ways the human mind can make sense of the world around it". 

A number of strange and funny events which are not connected with language happen to the two linguists during the film. And researching vanishing languages has quite a few unexpected sides. It quickly becomes clear that vanishing languages tend to be spoken by vanishing people, which means that many of them are extremely deaf. Sometimes the two researchers spend days arranging an interview only to discover that their interviewee turns out to be speaking something completely different from what they had expected. In India, they discover that being able to dance with people is an important research skill which is not taught at university.

The film emphasises the stigma attached to speaking minority languages and the sadness of loss of culture, which is embodied in the last speaker of Chemehuevi, who finds no alternative but to speak to himself in it. 

All ethnographic enterprises raise doubts about the possible arrogance and invasiveness of making other human beings objects of investigation. But Anderson and Harrison seem to make a special effort to return the results of their work to the communities concerned.

One thing I really missed was the fact that there was hardly any follow-up to the idea that languages help us to "figure out the possible ways the human mind can make sense of the world around it". I would have liked to hear more about this and more about the features of the languages studied themselves. But I did read somewhere that "the documentary was shot over the course of more than five years and culled from hundreds upon hundreds of hours of footage shot on five continents" so maybe the answers I am looking for got left in the editing room.

One review suggested that it would make sense to trim the film, which lasts 1.03.46, down to an hour for easier distribution. My suggestion goes the other way: put back all the interesting parts you left out and make it a four-part series.

(Just in case I have misled anybody, the picture under the title is more about how to say "three" in Sora than how to say "extinction" in Chumyl.)

Wee Klinks 3

It's raining today where I live and it rained so much yesterday that when you ask someone for the time water pours out of their sleeve when they look at their watch. There are glum expressions all around me, but I am actually fond of rain. I think the reason must be my childhood memories from South-East Asia. The way the earth suddenly surrendered up its smells, but even more than that the sound of the rain falling on the bamboo umbrellas everybody had. Being under your own umbrella and listening to the rain beating down was like having your own wonderful sky-drum.

Because of this I was very much attracted to this set of pictures on Flickr all about umbrellas. If you are not lucky enough to have rain falling where you are today, you can always watch the pictures to the accompaniment of this soundtrack. Or maybe you would prefer to imagine you are dictating an important letter to someone writing with a scratchy pencil.

Unlike me, most people I know are really upset with the rain and are dreaming of summer. Unless they are worrying whether they are going to be able to afford a holiday. It could be an idea to provide one's own accommodation so here's a page which might be helpful. It explains in detail how to build your own yurt.  If you start now you might be able to finish in time for the summer break and it would also help you to keep in mind all the bargain prices I am sure there are for vacations in Central Asia.

On a completely different note (almost every bar) here is Django Bates's Interval Song. Django Bates is a very creative and healthily irreverent British musician. The Interval Song will allow you to practise your fifths, your perfect and augmented fourths and your major and minor seconds, thirds, sixths and sevenths. (I'm assuming you can all handle octaves already). This should keep you busy while you are building your yurt. The song is from an album entitled You Live and Learn (Apparently). The title song tells us "You live and learn (apparently) and what you learn is this, around each corner is a new mistake." Something which I think we (and even more spectacularly our decision-makers) demonstrate on a daily basis.

If you want to make sure whether the intervals are right and you don't have a piano handy here is a virtual keyboard to play around with.

Another site I have come across is called Oriental Architecture. It provides a photographic survey of Asia's architectural heritage. and has over 14,000 photos from twenty different countries and plentiful information on 740 sites, most of which I know nothing about.

Finally, the other day I heard someone say something very much like this:

If one examines predialectic theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject postsemioticist desituationism or conclude that consciousness is dead. Thus, the characteristic theme of Hamburger’s  analysis of nihilism is the role of the reader as writer.

“Class is part of the failure of language,” says Lacan. Wilson holds that we have to choose between cultural rationalism and neoconceptualist narrative. But the subject is interpolated into a reality that includes reality as a reality.

To be honest I can't fully recollect what the person said, but I know that the effect it produced on my brain was exactly the same as these two paragraphs (no, worse because he read out about forty paragraphs). If you like reading this kind of stuff or can think of other uses for it (I have always been tempted to leave a few copies lying around in meeting rooms just to see what would happen) the two paragraphs quoted above were produced using the Post-Modernist Generator. Every time you load the page it flourishes a new text with titles like "

The Absurdity of Sexual identity: Foucaultist power relations and subcultural objectivism

and

Deconstructive neodialectic theory and capitalist dematerialism.

The two headings came out in giant letters by mistake, but that is probably the assertiveness they want to have. In about an hour the Post-Modernist Generator can churn out a whole bookful of fascinating articles. I'm sure there is some university which will be willing to publish them.

End of Klinks.

A Party of One (re-post)

Listen to the poem       

(best seen if you stand back and squint a little and imagine it as a set of slightly cubist paintings with runny paint and everything a little crooked)

Tonight I dine alone but,
better said,
I am a party of one.
I have brought all my music
with me
in my head
and I have
poems read to me
by poets I have never met.
They flit between the waiters
and bend their verses round the oil,
the pepper and the vinegar.
Except for one, Li Po,
on his third jug of wine
but not quite ready yet.
And people who have been
my lucky strikes, my seams of gold,
send me pneumatic photographs.
I ought to toast them,
but they pop up between the rolls of bread
already toasted into the attitudes
and expressions I most like recalling.
I answer them with postcards
which I write onto the night
framed in the windows open to the air.
Thirty feet down, on the beach,
the cats look up at us, their noses
spiralling amazing patterns
all around the smells
which dangle tinkling
down from the teasing kitchen.
And then Li Po gets up at last,
stands on a table
with a smidgeon of unsteadiness
and faultlessly recites his famous poem
in which he dances with his shadow and
lit by the moon.
And when it's done, I pay the bill,
leave tips on every table,
walk through the door into the syncopating sky
and quavering stars and down the
crotchety and wooden steps in triple time
out to the beach.

        And then the waiters crowd in two rows in a corner like

             an old-time much-mustachioed football team

to watch

        the poets, waving caps and scraps of paper and cravats,

leaning in tumbles out of all the windows

to watch

        the cats jump in a ragged line upon the wall and turn the

    wattage of their eyes to maximum

to watch

        the fish come silverishly swimming in a hurry into shore

to watch

        our party dance.

We're good we are,
just me, the moon
and Li Po's drunken shadow.

(This was the first thing posted at Sideways Station. This version is the one printed in my book as is slightly different from the one which I put up in February 2008. The sound quality of the reading is a little better as well, I hope. If you would like to know something more about the poem by Li Po - more commonly known as Li Bai in modern Chinese - here is a page with the poem in Chinese and 42 different attempts at translation into English. For an interesting discussion of the almost impossible task of translating a classical Chinese poem I would recommend Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger.)

(This poem is from my book The Observation Car, which is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/2588218)

Kafka's Somebug

A few months ago I spent quite a while cataloguing my books using LibraryThing, the most interesting tool of this kind I have come across. While most similar systems allow you to fetch bibliographical data using ISBN numbers or searching Amazon, this one makes it possible to search in 690 library data bases throughout the world. As a result I was even able to classify my copy of 中國書法大字典 (a wonderful dictionary of Chinese calligraphy I will talk about one day). Once you have started cataloguing your books you will begin to see  which other members have similar libraries to yours. You also get a host of suggestions with regard to other books you might be interested in. These suggestions are generally  very useful (unlike the mystifying ones generated by some other organisations). LibraryThing seems to attract quite a lot of people who really love reading and as a result there are  any number of fascinating libraries which you can explore. I was delighted to find that 24 other people owned copies of Leo Lionni's Parallel Botany, (another favourite book I will talk about one day). It has long been out of print and sometimes I wondered whether anybody else had it. Among its more arcane features LibraryThing allows you to find out which books you share with only one other member. Some people might also be interested in what it calls its Legacy Libraries (libraries  belonging to famous people of the past). I apparently share 13 books with Marilyn Monroe (including Joyce's Ulysses) but only 5 with Flaubert , the same number of books I have which were also in General Patton's library (Machiavelli's The Prince, On war by Clausewitz, Sun Zi's Art of War, Gibbon's Decline and Fall and Ernst Junger's brilliantly written but very disturbing glorification of warfare - Storm of Steel). He must have really liked the last one, because he wrote very bad poetry which expressed the same kind of sentiment. For a sample go here. 
If you are like me and have devised any number  of systems for arranging your books over the years, only to regularly forget how they worked, LibraryThing is precious because it allows you to attribute multiple tags to your books. As a result, you don't have to worry whether a book should be put in a section for Ancient Borneo, left-handed writers or books your Aunt Mary might like to read because it can sit on those three virtual shelves simultaneously.  If that level of complication is not enough for you, LibraryThing also shows you the tags which other people have used for the books you own ,which gives you a new perspective on your collection and makes it possible to add further dimensions to your system.
While I was engaged in all this I discovered a few sobering things. First of all, for about half of my books, all I could remember was that I had read them.  That was  the sum total of my recollection. So perhaps it would have made no difference if I had watched soap operas or collected miniature whisky bottles instead. What I remember from most of the other books I've read tells me that my mind must have the same kind of geometrical surface which is used for egg containers, because anecdotes and pebble-like information seem to collect there and remain firmly lodged for years, but I am unable to retain anything flat and extensive like the argument the author is trying to get across or the theories the anecdotes are aimed at illustrating (At very best they lie there crushed, crumpled and decipherable only in fragments).
For example, I know that I read Nabokov's Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature with great enthusiasm  and I have often recommended them. What I actually remember about these books, in all honesty, can be summarised as follows:

• He recommends using a dictionary and looking up words in it.
• He says something like "literature should be felt in the backbone".
• He describes what a railway carriage was like in late 19th century Russia (for the purposes of understanding Anna Karenina).
• He talks about the way that Gogol's metaphors go on so long that they become little stories of their own.
• As an entomologist, he tries to understand what kind of bug Gregor Samsa was turned into in Kafka's Metamorphosis.

I probably remembered the last point so clearly because I studied a bit of entomology myself. (As a result of which I can tell you how a Mexican Jumping Bean jumps, but very little else). So I was interested to discover that  in 1989 a TV film was produced from Nabokov's Lecture on Kafka's Metamorphosis with Christopher Plummer in the part of Nabokov. This is part one:



. And this is part 2:



Unfortunately I can't find any clips for the rest of the film/lecture. But if your appetite has now been whetted, and you want to read the rest of it, you can find the text here. After that, order the books  themselves.

(The illustration at the top of the post is from Nabokov's teaching copy of The Metamorphosis.)