Night in Galicia

I’m not sure where to begin in describing Vladimir Martynov’s song-cycle, Night in Galicia, but I will nevertheless make some attempt.

The Galicia in question, by the way, is the region which maps over western Ukraine and parts of Eastern Poland, not the one in Northwestern Spain.

The song lyrics are drawn from two poems by Russian futurist writer Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922). Khlebnikov was a visionary thinker and poet whose ambitious objectives included the creation of a universal language and mastery over the laws of time.

I have discovered the fundamental Laws of Time, and I believe that now it will be easy to predict events as to count to three. If people don't want to learn my art of predicting the future… I shall teach it to horses - V. Khlebnikov.

The two poems in question: Night in Galicia itself, and Forest Melancholy, were, in turn, inspired by certain ‘thaumaturgic songs’ of supposedly archaic origin first recorded by the 19th Century folklorist I.P. Sakharov. ‘There is almost no possibility of grasping the meaning of these words,’ Sakharov wrote… ‘This is a kind of mixture of the heterogeneous sounds of a language no-one knows and which, perhaps, never existed.’ Here are a couple of brief extracts which give some translated flavour of these lyrics:

Evening narrows its gaze,
its great eyes straining,
it hides in lakes grown blue in its dream.
Perched on the old mossy bough of an elm,
I held doves in my hands,
And like tumbled boulders,
my braids of glee
hung free. So it was on an aspen in autumn.

Like a black wind, she sways,
red coals are her necklace.
She sings and she laughs,
in the fire’s glow - reckless.
She sings and moves and floats dreaming,
her hair sweeps aside clouds of midges,
a light shaft, she plays on pine branches,
and moonwards stealthily slides.

On the CD, these words are wailed, half-spoken, shouted and sung with great abandon by members of the D. Pokrovsky folk ensemble. They are accompanied by a classical string section, who are called upon to saw at their fiddles as though they were a band of itinerant peasants. Martynov builds this music using folk-music idioms, but shapes them with contemporary-classical compositional methods in a way that echoes Khlebnikov’s avant-garde appropriation of the traditional songs. The end result is an intoxicating blend of oral/musical tradition and self-conscious art, of the coarse and the sublime, of the primitive and the modern.

Like bird calls the scanned ‘AAA-OOO-EEEs…’ reverberate in the nightly silence of the wood. Nymphs answer to signals from demons, messages are exchanged, wind and wood goblins intermix. Male and female voices merge and intensify a capella into the polyphonic texture. Energetic string fifths set contrasts, calling out for an archaic order. And suddenly more familiar harmonies are heard, leading us gradually out of the nightmare into the morning and ending a thrilling, mysterious and moving ritual. (Record-company blurb).

Free Book Giveaway

I have some books I’d like to get rid of: books I tried reading but didn’t enjoy, or books I feel sure I won’t want to revisit. I’m disinclined to hawk them around the local second-hand stores, as they’d most likely not want them to begin with, or, if they took them off my hands, would have them languishing for years on their dusty shelves. Nor have I the patience to list them on one or other of the on-line swap sites. I was tempted to use the bookcrossing approach, where one leaves labelled copies of books in public places, hoping that they will be picked up by kindly strangers… but, in the end, I thought why not just try the directest method and list them here to be claimed by any interested passers-by on a first-come, first-served basis.

To claim one of the books listed below, leave a comment including an e-mail address that states which book you want. Then send me an e-mail which includes a mailing address. I’ll pay the postage, and will dispatch the item within a week. If there’s a good take-up, I’ll repeat the exercise in a month or two’s time. I’ll restrict the offer for now to one book per mailing address.

1. Impressions of Africa, by Raymond Roussel, published by John Calder. This is a recent paperback reprint of a 1960s edition. The translation is by Reyner Heppenstall and Lindy Foord. I bought the book in Edinburgh last November, and only managed to read it about halfway through. It’s a proto-surrealist classic, apparently. Roussel was an author much admired by the leading lights of the OuLiPo. ISBN: 0714502898, 318pp.

2. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, by Marcel Benabou. This slim paperback was published by the University of Nebraska Press. It’s a kind of brief literary autobiography by an Oulipian author. I ordered this from amazon maybe eighteen months ago. I liked the title, and found the book okay, but nothing I’m in any hurry to read again. David Kornacker did the translating from the French; there’s an introduction by Warren Motte. ISBN: 080326139X, 128pp.

3. The Royal Family by William T. Vollman. This is the hardcover first edition of the novel, intact dustjacket included. Vollman is an outrageously talented writer, but this novel is ugly and far too long: you might enjoy it though, who’s to say? This was another amazon purchase, from two-and-a-half years back. It was published by Viking. ISBN: 0670891673, 780pp.

4. Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy by Brian Richardson. This history, published by the Cambridge University Press, offers a good but occasionally dryish survey of all aspects of the book-trade during this well-mapped historical locale. This was yet another amazon purchase. Mine is the paperback edition. ISBN: 0521576938; 232pp.

5. Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic. Subtitled a Lexicon Novel in 100,000 words, of which my copy is an example of the ‘male’ edition. I thought this would be my ideal type of book, but, as it turned out, I didn’t take to it at all. I picked up this copy at the Anglo-American bookstore in Rome, last February. The publisher is Vintage Books - it’s a softcover. ISBN: 0679724613; 338pp.

6. The Visible and the Invisible (followed by Working Notes) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I’d read a few popular accounts of recent theories of embodied cognition, and thought I’d go back to one of the oft-mentioned sources of this kind of line of thought. Why I chose this particular book, Merleau-Ponty’s last, I don’t recall. In any case, it was a mistake, as I was quite unequal to the challenges of this philosophical text. It’s translated from the French by Alphonso Lingis, and is a publication of the Northwestern University Press. ISBN: 0810104571, ca. 200pp.

7. City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer. I think this was the first trade edition of the book. It’s a softcover, and was published by the Wildside Press. The four tales in this book, which all deal with the imaginary city of Ambergris, were generally well-reviewed, but I only really found one of them, ‘Dradin in Love’ much to my liking. The overall imaginary-city effect is much less intense than that achieved by M. John Harrison in his ‘Viriconium’ books, which I’m re-reading just at the moment. I forget where I ordered this copy from: amazon or WH Smith, most likely. ISBN: 1587154366; 224pp.

8. The Fencing Master, by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I enjoyed this historical tale, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, but have no inclination to read it again. It’s the British edition, published by the Harvill Press. I think this one came from WH Smith on-line. ISBN: 1860466656; 212pp.

9. Lost Classics by various authors, edited by a bunch of people including Michael Ondaatje. This hardcover volume compiles essays by sundry literary types like Margaret Atwood, John Irving, Edmund White, etc., each describing a favourite book that the essayist feels has been unfairly neglected and undeservedly forgotten. The publisher is Bloomsbury. I bought it during a visit to the UK two years ago. It never had a dust-jacket. ISBN: 0747553920, 304pp.

10. Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata. Having breezed my way through several of Haruki Murakami’s novels, I aimed to widen my next-to-non-existent exposure to Japanese lit. by giving Kawabata a try. Alas, I can’t say these stories were to my taste. They are translated from the Japanese by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman. The North Point Press was the publisher. ISBN: 0865473250; 238pp.

Martini

Here are four of Italian graphic artist and painter Alberto Martini’s dramatic illustrations for the Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

Martini (1876-1954) produced an estimable body of affectedly morbid prints, illustrations and other graphic work. With his feeling for the grotesque and the macabre, his work sometimes seems more akin to German than Italian art.

In later years he concentrated more on painting - his canvases, which are poorly represented on-line (although there are a few here) often partook of a pastel-tinted surrealism, a style which, to be fair, Martini cultivated independently of the Surrealist movement proper.

Martini’s Poe illustrations are the subject of a typically sumptuous volume published by Franco Maria Ricci of Milan, which is how I found out about them. Martini also illustrated Dante and Shakespeare, amongst others.

Clicking on these images will open larger versions of the same.

The Lives of Lee Miller

I finished reading The Lives of Lee Miller the other day: Anthony Penrose’s biography of his remarkable mother.

Miller (1907-1977) was a woman of many parts and passions: as a model in New York, she gained notoriety as the first real person to feature in an advertisement for ladies’ sanitary products.

As a photographer, she worked with Man Ray in Paris, as an independent society portraitist in New York, and as a photojournalist in the midst of the London Blitz and the Allied advance into France and Germany.

Besides that, Miller was an intrepid traveller, making bold forays into the Egyptian desert, and through the wreckage of post-war Hungary and Romania.

She loved to socialise: she drank too much, smoked too much, and took dozens of lovers. Among her friends were many of the most prominent artists and writers of the time: Picasso, Max Ernst, Cocteau, Leonora Carrington, Paul Éluard, Dubuffet, Henry Moore…

In later years, her fascination with photography faded, to be supplanted by interests food and music: with characteristic gusto she became a gourmet cook and an enthusiastic concert-goer.

Besides the simple fascination offered by Miller’s whirlwind life and times, the book also offers a poignant record of a son getting to know his mother. For many years, the two had fought each other bitterly, only becoming reconciled after Penrose’s marriage, and the birth of his child.

This was one of those rare books that would have been not one bit less fascinating had it been twice as long.

All but the seventh of the eight images above are Copyright © the Lee Miller Archive.

Shrigley

The works of Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley are superficially inept, often pathetically so.

Behind the the badly-drawn cartoons, the banal photographs, and the carelessly-assembled sculptures, however, there is ample evidence of a fascinating personality at play.

I’ve only ever seen his work in books, and on-line, and wonder, if I were to see them in a clean, well-lit gallery space, if I wouldn’t feel that they didn’t really belong there.

In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter to me if he is considered a faux-naïf fine artist, or a fourth-rate cartoonist with pretensions: I just like what he does.

His work straddles the line between funny (peculiar) and funny (haha) with aplomb, and seems to me to occupy some of the same conceptual space as Ivor Cutler’s songs and monologues, albeit in a different medium.

Mr. Shrigley is represented by the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, the Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris, and the Nicolai Wallner Gallery in Copehagen. All of these images will be Copyright © the artist.

Unrelated

Our weather here is now as fine as can be, and although my impatience would prise open the buds yet unburst on the trees, the greenness is returning to this place and spring flowers are everywhere, jumbo bumblebees buzzing between the blooms. Cafés and bars have put out their canopied tables outdoors, and the harbours are witness to a resettlement of boats. The days are long and full of light and the nights rapidly narrowing away almost to nothing.

I'm listening to Camper van Beethoven - one of my favourite bands from years ago. Their early LPs were re-released on CD a few months back under the collective title Cigarettes and Carrot Juice. There was always one word, and only one word in what is perhaps their most famous song (Take the Skinheads Bowling) that I could never quite discern. Now, a web-search reveals it to be ‘clocks’, and I find myself visited by a certain anticlimactic feeling: after all, I was uncertain about that word for fifteen years.

Babying or management or revelry or dessert or gin: a recent search referral to this site that reads like a little poem.

Once memory, desire and language have been conquered, could the Party still claim to have power? To elaborate: power here is the ability to direct memory, desire and language, to steer them where they need to be against their propensity to go astray. As long as steering is necessary, the power is not absolute: dissent is still possible, people haven’t been conquered. Yet as soon as the power becomes absolute, the need for it to be applied disappears. What good is power that can never be used? - Alex Baylin.

On forgetting one’s homeland.

For a long time, you've neglected your homeland, and forgotten your own, those things whom blood or love gave to you. You live in Rome; nor do you give any thought to returning home, so much has the charm of the immortal city overcome you. Thus the band of Ithacans, who'd been sent ahead, abandoned their country for the delight of lotus, and abandoned their leader too - Alciato, Emblem 115.

My favourite joke for a long time was the one about the dyslexic devil-worshipper who sold his soul to Santa.

Etymology is not always useful in clarifying a concept. In this case it is. The Latin, absurdum, literally means out of deafness. A possible explanation is that the absurd is what people say who are deaf to reason. The term would in that case be more or less synonymous with the irrational. But a more interesting interpretation suggests itself: The absurd is a view of reality that comes out of deafness itself-that is, an observation of actions that are no longer accompanied by language. Such actions are, precisely, meaningless. Individuals with normal hearing can easily replicate this experience by turning off the sound on television: The actors on the screen now go on busily as before, but much of the time it is impossible to say what their actions mean. The effect usually is comic. By the same token, actions that had self-evident meaning when accompanied by language suddenly appear to be problematic. Deafness problematizes. Some psychologists have suggested that deaf people tend to he suspicious. They learn willy-nilly what Nietzsche recommended as a philosophical discipline: the ‘art of mistrust.’ If Nietzsche was right, one might conclude that deafness, because of its problematization of ordinary reality, carries with it a certain cognitive gain (which, of course, would not make the condition any less unfortunate).

The absurd is an outlandish, a grotesque representation of reality. It posits a counterworld-just what Zijderveld intended when he desscribed folly as ‘reality in a looking-glass.’ Not so incidentally, the etymology of the word grotesque is of some interest too. The word comes from the Italian, grottesca, and refers to strange paintings that appeared on the walls of grottoes. This etymology suggests a picture: One leaves the ordinary world of sun-lit reality and enters a dark grotto, and then, suddenly, one is confronted with startlingly strange visions. If this experience is of sufficient intensity, one is enveloped in this other reality and, at least temporarily, the ordinary world outside loses its accent of reality. The picture of a grotto graphically conveys what Alfred Schutz called a finite province of meaning. - Peter L. Berger.

There is a man in the town where I live who goes by the unfortunate name (to an English-speaker), of Hans Glans. This is right up there with Fanny Tang on my all-time favourite amusing names list.

Pulcinellopedia

In the course of my search for the Codex Seraphinianus (see below), I gathered that Luigi Serafini had one other book to his name, the intriguingly titled Pulcinellopedia Piccola. I scanned thousands of bookshop shelves during my two years in Italy, but never caught sight of a copy.

A couple of years ago, I chanced upon a single image that someone had scanned from the book and uploaded onto a commedia dell’arte-related site. This is the ‘pulcinellasaurus’ that I’ve since made the centrepiece of my Giornale’s logo.

Last year, after another web-search, I was heartened to see copies of the Pulcinellopedia listed for sale at an Italian web-site. Serafini, I learned, was not sole author of the work: one P. Cetrulo was listed as co-author. Frustratingly, the site did not offer international shipping.

Then, another web-search, maybe six weeks ago, brought another site to my attention: Unilibro. They had copies of the requisite item in stock, and promptly dispatched one to me. It arrived a few weeks ago: a white softcover quarto volume whose somewhat grubby exterior seemed to speak of a long, lonely time spent on shelves or in stacks. It had been published in 1984 by Longanesi of Milan.

The book comprises dozens of pencil illustrations, monochrome for the most part, beginning with a puppet-show depicted comic-strip style. After a couple of brief texts, the body of the book begins: a ‘suite’ in nine sections, some comprising many illustrations, others with just one. Anyone familiar with the Codex Seraphinianus will feel on familiar ground here, both with regard to the style of the illustrations, and to the sense of bafflement they provoke.

It is hard to discern any particular narrative in the drawings, or to follow any single thread through the ‘suite’, beyond the simple presence, howsoever disguised or distorted, of Pulcinella himself.

One of the several puzzling aspects of this book is its peculiar epigraph, which runs thus:

uuèn gud is gud
cchiùu blekk’e middenàit kennóttubbì

Which looks to me like garbled English rendered in Italian orthography: When good is good/cue(?) black midnight cannot be. What are they on about?

Clicking on most of the images above will open larger versions of the same.

How I Found the Codex

About thirteen and a half years ago I first learnt of the existence of a strange and remarkable book called the Codex Seraphinianus. I read about it in Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas. In a postscript to a piece therein entitled Sense and Nonsense, which strove to illustrate the grey zone between these acronymous poles, he wrote:

…it is a highly idiosyncratic magnum opus by an Italian architect indulging his sense of fancy to the hilt. It consists of two volumes in a completely invented language (including the numbering system, which is itself rather esoteric), penned entirely by the author, accompanied by thousands of beautifully drawn colour pictures of the most fantastic scenes, machines, beasts, feasts, and so on. It purports to be a vast encyclopedia of a hypothetical land somewhat like the earth, with many creatures resembling people to various degrees, but many creatures of unheard-of bizarreness promenading throughout the countryside. Serafini has sections on physics, chemistry, mineralogy (including many drawings of elaborate gems), geography, botany, zoology, sociology, linguistics, technology, architecture, sports (of all sorts), clothing, and so on. The pictures have their own internal logic, but to our eyes they are filled with utter non sequiturs.

It sounded to me like a kind of Borgesian Orbis Tertius made real, and nothing could have been better calculated to arouse my curiosity. I yearned to somehow examine, or even acquire a copy of this book, but at the time this seemed like errant fantasy. I learned that the Codex had been published in 1981 by the Milanese house of Franco Maria Ricci, FMR for short, and was a very expensive, deluxe item.

Years passed, and sporadically I would think about the Codex, and suffer some pang of craving for it, until there came a point when, after an implausible chain of events, I was offered a job in Rome. Part of my rationale when I accepted this offer was that yes, I stand a better chance of finding this book there than I do here. This in relation to an object I had only read about, never seen.

Little by little I began to learn a little more about the Codex, about Luigi Serafini, its author, and about FMR, its publisher, whose sumptuous volumes proved surprisingly hard to find. Until, that is, on the day before New Year’s Eve ’96, I made a detour to walk past a second-hand bookstore I knew called Libreria Godel, and there on display in its window was a copy of the Codex itself, resplendent in its midnight-black silk binding decorated with a profusion of gilt titling.

Inside, I asked the gaunt, waistcoated man behind the counter how much the two-volume set would cost. Seicento mila lire he said, at that time about £240. He motioned me to inspect the volumes. In so doing I was hopelessly seduced by their beauty and their contents’ outrageous weirdness. The silk felt so fine, the colour and texture of the Fabriano paper on which it was printed so beguiling to eye and hand that if I had entertained any doubts about buying these outsize quartos, they soon disappeared.

I hadn’t quite enough money to hand, and the draculine fellow was unwilling to split the set, so I had to ask him to put them to one side for me while I went back to Tor Sapienza to round up some cash. The next morning I returned early, money in hand, and was handed the prize I had sought for so long.

Now I've owned the Codex for years, I leaf through it only occasionally. Even so, it remains a talisman of sorts at the notional apex of my modest library. For a long time, I considered finding what I sought in the way that I did as significant. Doubtless I could have tried contacting the book’s publisher directly, but I attached an obstinate importance on including an element of chance in my search, that my finding it didn’t have to happen. It pleased me to know that had events taken any even slightly divergent turn, the Codex might never have fallen into my possession.

Click on the images to see enlarged versions of the same.

Acquisitions

Among the items we purchased this week: a blender…

…to match our coffee-maker and kettle; a portable air-conditioning unit…

…because the ventilation in our apartment is not that good, and it gets unpleasantly stuffy on hot summer days; a new vacuum-cleaner…

…mostly because my wife just liked the look of it; and a DVD-recorder thingy.

Besides that, I have been distracted by an urgent deadline at work, putting in some tiresome extra hours which will, I can console myself, at least cover some of the cost of these nice new things.

She Sells Sea Shells

Another jewel in the Smithsonian library’s digital collection is a work by one Joachim Johann Nepomuk Spalowsky (1752-97), longwindedly entitled Prodromus in Systema Historicum Testaceorum. It’s a beautifully-illustrated treatise on conchology: the study, that is, of marine molluscs…

…Spalowsky was a veritable polymath in the Austrian Empire of the late eighteenth century. Few biographical data are available on him, but he was presumably of Polish Silesian ancestry, being born in Reichenberg, and he was a surgeon attached to the civic regiments of Vienna … His erudition is evidenced by the range of his publications. His inaugural dissertation (1777) treated poisonous plants (e.g. hemlock, monk's hood) and related topics. In addition … he authored works on such diverse topics as birds, mammals and even a disquisition on economics and numismatics, a further sign of his scholarly breadth.

This work remains of importance in containing the original descriptions of several new species and varieties, of which at least two are valid today. Although intended as a ‘prodrome’ or introduction to shelled animals, Spalowsky’s death in 1797 precluded the publication of a more comprehensive review - Alan R. Kabat.

Although the text … is of little interest, the manner in which the hand-colored plates capture the iridescent quality of the shells has never been surpassed. This was achieved through the use of gold and silver leaf, in some cases heavily overpainted with watercolor, for the shiny inside surfaces of shells, such as the Haliotis, or abalone - N. Finley, quoted by Kabat.

She sells sea shells by the sea shore
The shells that she sells are sea-shells, I’m sure.

Until just now I had no idea that this tongue-twister was based on any particular person, but, I now know, 19th Century palaeontologist Mary Anning was its original subject.

I’ve cropped the edges of these images a little. Clicking on them will display larger versions of the same.

In a Hot-Air Balloon

Just as the dog Laika preceded Yuri Gagarin into orbit, the brothers Montgolfier didn’t dare send aeronauts Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes into the blue without first having launched a sheep, a duck and a cock (whose names, alas, history has not passed down to us) high into the air…

Unlike poor Laika, the trio survived their flight, which took place in September 1783, although not, apparently, without injury and distress…

The craft was launched and attained an altitude of about 7,000 feet before falling to the ground a mile and half away. Upon examination of the occupants for any ill effects caused by this lofty height, it was discovered that the duck had a broken wing. Could this have been an effect of exposure to altitude? Actually, several observers had noted that, as the balloon left the ground, the sheep had suffered an anxiety attack and had kicked the duck.

Exactly what experimental rôle the unfortunate duck, an animal presumably capable of sustained flight under its own power, was supposed to play in all this, I cannot say. In any case, this is merely an excuse for me to post these two very decorative images of the Montgolfier balloon, which I found at the London Science Museum’s site:

Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes were the first humans to fly, on 21 November 1783. They ascended in a balloon made of cotton and paper. The brazier which heated the air to provide the balloon's propulsion set the balloon itself alight, so the two flyers had a hazardous trip extinguishing the fire with wet sponges.

The balloon flew for 25 minutes and landed safely on the outskirts of Paris. It managed to reach a maximum height of 3000ft during its brief flight.

Further background info. may be found at these sites.