I just listened to three cello pieces done by the Portland Cello Project and loved them. Titles: Turkish Wine, Mouth for War, Halo 3 Theme.
Le pain des rêves
Quote from Louis Guilloux’s La confrontation (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 60–61:
Mon dieu que faut-il de plus à un homme qu’un toit pour le garantir de la grêle? Le feu, sans lequel le toit n’est rien. Çà et là je voyais fumer des cheminées. Mais le feu et le toit ne sont rien sans le pain. Il y avait partout des champs prêts pour les semailles. Oui, mais … et les rêves? Qui manque de pain ne rêve plus d’autre chose et quelle est la première des choses? Le pain ou le rêve? Et qu’est-ce que tout cela sans la laine? Surtout sans la main qui travaille et qui donne, qui caresse et qui protège…
Rise of monotheism
On Jan Assmann’s Of God and gods: Egypt, Israel, and the rise of monotheism (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Assmann keeps talking about Moses as a symbolic, not historical character, which is fine, but I find more exact to speak of the story about Moses, of the authors of that story… About violence: Assmann tackles the passage about Phinehas in Numbers 25, and wants to show that one alluring aspect of polytheistic culture was the participation in feasting, i.e. sacrifices, to the gods of Moab (p. 116). But more than that was involved in the story of violence attributed to Phinehas. The background to the telling of the story is that the sharing of other gods in the ancient world was by the same token the sharing of women, the contracting with other families who had their own privileged access to gods and goddesses (clear for instance from their proximity to temples), and therefore the “sharing” of access to land and labor. Exilic Israel authors of the sixth and fifth c. BC, in this kind of stories, made virtue out of necessity, i.e., turned the impossibility of the conquest of lands and therefore the uselessness of adopting other gods, into a virtue or blessing, and finally a mark, as well defended as the normal conquest (by war, alliance, translation or translatability of gods). But this type of thinking, and reinforcement stories, could only follow other starker needs: to explain how and why their ethnic god still protected them and had a role to play.
Orchard
Vieux verger? Talus, et de l’autre côté? clairière dans ces herbes folles. Vieux troncs pourrissants, sureaux à sarbacanes, et ruisseau possible dans le lointain, c’est-à-dire argent et “surpassing” fluidité au fond d’un village plein. Champ au-delà: lin comme dans “derniers champs de lin”. Et ces quelques violettes inattendues. Qu’est-ce qui est inattendu? La rondeur des feuilles, le vert ni trop sombre ni trop clair qui équilibre mon idée du vert, la façon dont ces feuilles forment parapluie, et les fleurs elles-mêmes à découvrir dans le bouquet. Loin / dans un endroit innommable, une marge. Et le parfum? Le vent? C’est ce qu’il faudrait dire.
Country road, take me home!
Far away in Santa Cruz, we talk, walk, joke about old bones, share a hamburger, potato salad and pie, feel hearts beat and expand and dance.
Real presence
Catholic and Protestant views of real presence are still opposed and played with by the most surprising of authors, who surely would rebel against the idea of being cast in theologians’ roles. But here is for instance Segal, a specialist of ancient theater:
The major interpretative division that affects (and afflicts) classicists … is that between a historicist and a linguisti-semiotic model. In the former the text contains a message (however complex) about a world outside itself that the critic can discover. In the latter the text is a construct of conventions and operations which relate to other families of texts (other such constructs) rather than to a final historical truth. Meaning, in the semiotic model, is not something immanent in the text itself; it is a construct dependent on the context(s) into which the interpreter decodes the text’s networks of relations (psychological, political, sociological, etc.).[1]
It is a language of theologians! The fire and smoke—more of the second than the first—of structuralism, post-structuralism and post-modernism have dissipated. The fundamental problem remains: does the rose have a smell, that I recognize and yet find potent and mysterious in the act of smelling it (and calling others to share), or is it all a figure of un-reachable realities (still, Lutheran or Kantian realities)? Real presence or pure figuration?
[1]Article in the collection by Hexter and Selden, Innovations of antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1992), 444–45.
The brilliance of quoting
Montaigne’s passage below still applies, surprisingly, to modern and post-modern critics:
The injudicious writers of our century who scatter about their valueless works whole passages from old authors, in order to increase their own reputations, do just the reverse. For the infinitely greater brilliance of the ancients makes their own stuff look so pale, dull, and ugly that they lose much more than they gain.
blogs and Facebook
I had a little romance with Fakebook that didn’t last long. The enforced brevity of messages, apparent dispersion of interests (concentrated along predictable axes), flattening impression I got when reading even very interesting notes and comments on the pages of some engaged and engaging people, not to mention the absence of control over security and privacy, plus the time spent reading junk, were problematic. The hearsay that FB removes from its pages any information regarding the proper way to request complete erasure of one’s account (photos, data, etc.) led me to do that: request a complete erasure of my account rather than deactivation.
The way to erase your account is: go to this link and proceed. Then wait fifteen days before checking again (I believe any attempt to check before two weeks, including going back to the link above, which takes you to FB, will nullify your request to erase your account).
Dialects and tongues
Old problem, on the difference between a language and a dialect: in 1945, the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich formulated the much quoted metaphor (in Yiddish): ׀א שפראך יז א דיאלעקט מיט אן ארמײ ון א פלוט “Der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt,” ײווא בלעטער (Yivo-bleter) 25.1 (1945), 13. The attribution of this quote is much disputed, however. I have seen it attributed to J. Fishman, the socio-linguist, who was an early student of Weinreich and may have originated the saying in a conversation. Anyone in the know care to comment?
Korfoù dour
em fenn c’hoazh. Fiñv an avel a vounta an den dreist da daolioù houarn ar c’hafe, war an aod, pell, dirak ar Reoù. Un devez goañv, na riv na domm, damm stouvet an oabl.