how to gather cinnamon

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“Cinnamon they collect in a yet more marvellous manner than this: for where it grows and what land produces it they are not able to tell, except only that some say (and it is a probable account) that it grows in those regions where Dionysos was brought up; and they say that large birds carry those dried sticks which we have learnt from the Phenicians to call cinnamon, carry them, I say, to nests which are made of clay and stuck on to precipitous sides of mountains, which man can find no means of scaling. With regard to this then the Arabians practise the following contrivance:— they divide up the limbs of the oxen and asses that die and of their other beasts of burden, into pieces as large as convenient, and convey them to these places, and when they have laid them down not far from the nests, they withdraw to a distance from them: and the birds fly down and carry the limbs of the beasts of burden off to their nests; and these are not able to bear them, but break down and fall to the earth; and the men come up to them and collect the cinnamon. Thus cinnamon is collected and comes from this nation to the other countries of the world.”

(Herodotus, Histories, 3.111, trans. G. C. Macaulay. Referenced in Piers Moore Ede’s review of John Keay’s The Spice Route, in The Times Literary Supplement, 6 January 2006.)

from “life and its shadow: the art/life dichotomy”

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“. . . what differentiates the artist’s book from normal books is that the artist’s book always transcends its subject matter, including its own text. Within the category of artists’ books there exist many varieties of book-related works. One subcategory is the ‘bookwork,’ usually a one-of-a-kind or multiple which comments through its very existence on the question: ‘what is a book?’ For example, there is Alison Knowles’s Big Book (1967), which was discarded when it wore out but which had pages, a spine and copyright notice, a fold-out page, a telephone line to the outside world, a grass tunnel in which one could sleep, and many other features not usually found in books or other works of art. Less literally a hybrid of environment, book, and perhaps residence, one could cite a piece by Susan Share, Stream of Consciousness (1979), in which the pages were cut and folded so as to form a paper spring, not unlike a child’s ‘Slinky’ toy. When the work was allowed to move from one space to another beside it, it suggested a paper waterfall. Stream of Consciousness had no words. The fold used was a ‘leporello,’ a zigzag fold found in many oriental books and some Western ones. If I ask myself, ‘Is it the text which makes a book a book?’ I must answer ‘No – its bookness comes from its shape, from the experience of moving from page to page – that is what gives a book its identity.’ This work defines its physical space and reality neatly and efficiently. It may be art but what gives it its meaning is its relationship to the living and interactive world around it.”

(Dick Higgins, in Sculpture Magazine)

5. hemulen

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“The Hemulen woke up slowly and recognized himself and wished he had been someone he didn’t know. He felt even tireder than when he went to bed, and here it was – another day which would go on until evening and then there would be another one and another one which would be the same as all days are when they are lived by a hemulen.

[ . . . ]

Suddenly the Hemulen thought that all he ever did was to move things from one place to another or talk about where they should be put, and in a moment of insight he wondered what would happen if he left things alone.”

(Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November, trans. Kingsley Hart)

wichita lineman no. 6: sergio mendez & brazil ‘66, “wichita lineman” (1969)

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As mentioned in Cassandra Wilson, this is another version of the song sung by a woman, whose name, alas, I cannot discover on Allmusic.com. She is the anonymous singer of Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, who, in 1969, released their cover of the song on Ye-Me-Le. It was enough of a hit that it was rereleased as one of Twenty Easy Listening Classics. Ye-Me-Le is mostly covers of popular pop tunes of the time – it’s followed up by “Norwegian Wood”. This version feels a bit perfunctory, maybe with some historical reason: I have 11 other cover versions from 1969.

It’s quick: 2:47. There’s a spritely intro full of Latin percussion for ten seconds, then things slow down, for the verse, speeding up again after the chorus. What’s nice is that this start-stop dynamic is carried through the song: you can neatly divide it into three sections. Just before the third section starts, there are orchestral flourishes. The third section is followed by the glorious full-speed ending, with scat singing, probably improvised. This is the best part of the song – it could go on for another three minutes and I’d be quite happy. Probably this would have been a better song-as-a-song if they cut the first two choruses and verses and started with the orchestra at about 1:30.

The lyric here (sung in English) is quite honestly disposable. As mentioned previously, the position of the singer does get switched up in the first two lines (“He is a lineman for the county / And he rides the main roads”) but this isn’t followed up in the rest of the song. She goes back to the original “you” in “I can hear you through the wires”, and soon afterwards “I know I need a small vacation”. There doesn’t seem to be a connection made to the song’s switch to the third person later, which Cassandra Wilson makes. I don’t think this is particularly thought-out – it’s an easy cover version.

There’s undoubtedly something to be said about the cultural context of this version, but I don’t feel qualified to say anything about how Brazilian musicians covering “country” songs would have been received in the United States in the late 1960s. Were Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 seen as a novelty act? From the evidence of this song, I’d say they saw themselves as entertainers rather than artists, but it’s hard to tell.

Is this cover a novelty song? It’s certainly a jolly rendition of a sad song. I’m not sure that it’s being disrespectful to the song, however, so much as it’s using it as a base to play with. There’s a clear joy in how the song takes off when it leaves the choruses, which I think is the real worth of this rendition. Rather than a novelty, the cover might be being used as a Trojan horse to get that in the door.

wichita lineman no. 5: cassandra wilson, “wichita lineman” (2002)

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Cassandra Wilson’s version of the song (from 2002, like Johnny Cash’s) stands out. First of all, she’s a woman – this is, predominantly, a song that male singers cover. Out of the 63 versions I presently have, there are all of five versions where there’s a woman singing the song. (Those figures aren’t counting background vocals & choirs.) Three of those five stick with the song’s original lyrics. The other two (Wilson’s and that of Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66) switch up the pronouns for the first line to make it more appropriate for a woman to sing. “He is a lineman for the county” the singer of Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 begins the song. But she drops this gender flippery after the first line and goes back to a first-person recitation of the travails of the Wichita Lineman (who, as normal, refers to himself in the third person in the chorus). That cover (of which more anon) is over in a breezy 2:47; the audience probably doesn’t notice that anything has happened, or stop to think about it.

Not so with Cassandra Wilson’s “Wichita Lineman”. She slows the song down tremendously to 5:48 – not the longest recitation that I have, but close to it. Her vocals don’t start for half a minute into the song, and immediately it’s clear that she’s attempting to make this her song: “My man’s a lineman for the county”. This carries through to the chorus: “I hear him singing through the wires / I can hear him through the whine / But my Wichita Lineman is still on the line.” Wilson’s reinterpretation is more radical than simply changing the voice of the song: she’s also changed the auditor of the song. In the original, it’s unclear who’s being sung to until you pops up in “I need you more than want you”; until then, however, the song could effectively be sung to no one; the lineman is pointedly lonely. Wilson excises the you: he’s become a he. She’s not singing the song to him.

The speaker isn’t pretending to be the kineman; she’s his worrisome lover. Wilson tidies some bits up: “I know he needs a short vacation” rather than a “small vacation”. One bit sounds off: “And if it snows, that stretch down south will never stand the strain”. This is the fretful thinking of the Wichita Lineman: why would his lover particularly care about this? She wouldn’t. It works with the original wording because it’s a metaphor for the relationship’s strain coming from the workman’s head.

Here it’s more clearly that particular metaphor – this is underscored by her transformation of “And I need you more than want you” to “I know I need him more than want him”: the speaker is considering the value of holding on to a long-distance relationship, emphasized by the but in the next line: “But my Wichita lineman” is still on the line”. This is a worry that doesn’t seem obvious in the original version of the song, except maybe as a hazy auditor, who might possibly hear the song from a distance. What the lineman’s lover might be thinking doesn’t come into the equation. It’s hard to even imagine the lineman, laconic as he is, imagining his lover’s thoughts.

Which brings us to the one part of the song that might not work in this reborn version: it’s laconicism. You can’t quite take that out of the song and still have it work: part of what makes the song interesting is its pointed lack of words. About half way through the song it runs out of words & has to start repeating them. The listener presumes that this is because the lineman himself is a man of few words. Wilson can’t quite get away from this: while she’s happy to change the individual lines, she doesn’t have the audacity to add more verses. However, she does want to draw out the song – this, by the way is done very nicely, and though I’ve said nothing about the instrumentation, rest assured that it’s very tasteful. So after about three minutes, she has to start repeating herself. And this, I think, is a betrayal of the character she’s created in the Lineman’s Lover: while the lineman lacks words, does it follow that his lover does as well?

It’s a fine rendition, but it’s reached an impasse: there’s only so far that you can take this song.