Category Archives: noted

mr. danger

Posted on by

Greg Grandin explains why Hugo Chavez calls Bush “Mr. Danger”: it’s a reference to Rómulo Gallegos’s 1929 novel Doña Barbara, evidently the most famous Venezualan novel. Chavez’s epithet has been repeatedly trotted out as evidence of his craziness – why has nobody in the press bothered to talk to an educated Venezualan, who would presumably recognize the reference? One wonders if all reporting about South America is so elementarily flawed.

variously, mostly translation

Posted on by
  • A collection of Surrealist poetry translated by David Gascoyne.
  • Ekaterina Likhtik’s translation of “La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France”. Not sure what I think of it; certainly it seems naked without Sonia Delaunay’s illustrations & the original typography.
  • David Mendel comments on translations of and by Primo Levi. He complains (as do many British reviewers) of grating Americanisms in the existing translations; why do American reviewers never complain of Britishisms?

    • various new(ish) things at ubuweb

    Posted on by
  • Three radio broadcasts by Glenn Gould
  • Yves Klein’s Selected Writing 1928–1962
  • Performances of Gertrude Stein’s Geography and Plays
  • films by Stefan & Franciszka Themerson
  • Agnès Varda’s film Black Panthers – Huey!
  • A rendition by Ethel Waters of “The Da Da Strain”, an old jazz standard.
  • Primary Texts of American and British Conceptual Art (1965–1971)

    • and many more things I haven’t had time to sift through.

    stars on heads, towards a logic of

    Posted on by

    (Previously.)

    First:

  • If a star is on the forehead, it can be seen when the bearer looks in the mirror.
  • If a star is on the back of the head, it can’t be seen by the bearer.

    • Also:

  • Another person can easily see a star, whether on the front or the back of the head.
  • A conversation with someone standing in front of you is different from a conversation with someone standing behind you.

    • Although:

  • In the age of mechanical reproduction, a photograph of a star on the back of the head can be easily admired by the person bearing the star.
  • Just as well as by many others.

    • two books to track down

    Posted on by

    Both almost invisible on the Internet:

    • Chris Marker’s The Forthright Spirit (Wingate, London, 1951), a translation of Le Cœur net (Paris, 1949), a novel by the film maker. An amazon.co.uk listing here, this site declares that it’s “about two days in the lives of a network of friends & memories, centering around a solitary airmail pilot caught in a rainstorm over the jungles of Vietnam in the aftermath of ‘a major war’. The dust jacket says nothing much about the author other than that he ‘likes radio more than literature, cinema more than radio, and music most of all.'” Dalkey thinks it should be reissued.
    • Barbara Moore, CookPot (ReFlux Editions, 1985), cover visible here, something of a Fluxus cookbook, with recipes by La Monte Young & Carolee Schneemann and probably others. Mentioned in Owen F. Smith’s Fluxus: the history of an attitude; evidently this was originally to be published by Fluxus in the 1970s, then wandered over to Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press, and then Moore printed it herself in 1985.

    variously noted

    Posted on by

    Michel Butor is still not dead and was in New York on Friday. He looks like Santa Claus:

    michel butor looks like santa claus

    (in this picture, his wife is explaining something to him.) Will attempt, with the help of his translators, to get some of his poetry into print in English and possibly an interview – despite his old website, he evidently hates the Internet, good man.

    Also, there’s an article in the New York Times about Brian O’Doherty, which mentions, in passing, Aspen 5–6 which he put together, and which seems like, in retrospect, maybe the best single (well, double, but) issue of a magazine ever.