Yearly Archives: 2006

May 13, 2006

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)

written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

I enjoyed it.

Something else I’ve watched recently: some of the content from Wholphin, that DVD from McSweeney’s.

Ghost Dog was like Broken Flowers (and therefore, I extrapolate, like all the other Jim Jarmusch movies I’ve yet to see) in that it attempted some quizzical blend of seriousness and silliness. It attempted a recognizably similar blend. McSweeney’s & Co., particularly represented in my mind by the content and presentation of Wholphin, is also all about the blend (or the middle ground) between the serious and the frivolous, but theirs has a somewhat different flavor. Still, it seemed like they have something in common. They both are implicitly saying that being serious is not necessarily a serious business, or that being frivolous is not itself frivolous. This may be an ancient literary/philosophical notion but it seems at least in these two incarnations somehow very contemporary; both Jim Jarmusch and McSweeney’s get mileage out of the fact that this attitude makes them appear youthful and fresh. Jarmusch seems to me someone who is more or less honestly going about exploring his fascination with this attitude, whereas McSweeney’s, at least to me, represents the self-regarding use of this attitude as posture (or, depending on what kind of cynic you are, the commodification of the attitude). Miranda July, who has a short piece on the Wholphin DVD, courts annoyance by being so flagrantly fixated on her own serio-frivolous breeziness, but flagrancy is generally a sign of sincerity. There were scenes in Ghost Dog that were so shameless in their pursuit of being “peculiarly silly” that I knew he wasn’t doing it for the glory. McSweeney’s (and some – if not all – of Wholphin) irritates me because it plays the seriousness-of-comedy cards from so close to its chest; it’s so cagey/deadpan about its performance of an attitude that ostensibly is founded on a relaxed opennness to the real mysteries of life. How can I believe in (or be moved by) your simple, childlike wonder at the world when you’re so obviously so hyper-conscious and calculating about self-presentation? Well at least that was my problem with Dave Eggers. Or was before I stopped reading what he wrote.

This is what the term “faux-naif” should refer to. Unfortunately I think it means something closer to “playing dumb.”

During Ghost Dog – and I guess maybe this speaks to some kind of failing on the part of Ghost Dog, but maybe not – I was thinking about how this attitude, like I said, gets credit for being youthful and fresh, a spiritual antidote to our numb assumptions about the world… but maybe it’s as regressive as the stuffed-shirts would say. Childlike wonder and childlike incomprehension are more or less the same thing. I think often about how the things that filled me with strange impressions as a child are now things that make sense to me; a book that has lost its aura of mystery has gained its meaning. That’s not a bad tradeoff. Doesn’t the world offer us enough opportunities for wonder (death, consciousness, and so forth) that we don’t need to be so nostalgic-desperate about the whiff of mystery that clings to things when we don’t yet understand them? If Miranda July and friends are simply saying that we must never forget that we are fallible and that we may understand less than we think, I wholeheartedly endorse that message. But there seems like some kind of sentimentalism about confusion; that it wasn’t the openness and lack of prejudice but the actual bewilderment of childhood that needs to be shown respect. I mean, I certainly enjoy the trip, when that’s what art offers, which is often! – but once we start insinuating that it’s an actual good; in fact, that maybe even the wisdom of not-understanding is a wisdom that goes beyond the wisdom of understanding – then I start to want some reassurance that this is wisdom and not just a form of immaturity.

On to these thoughts the movie juxtaposed Samurai wisdom (I was going to say “Zen,” but I know that would betray a gross ignorance of distinctions between schools of classical Japanese philosophy), which also sanctifies (what’s a word that means “makes seem wise”?) the embrace of mystery as mystery and sadly (but superior-ly) shakes its head at the idea that the world is knowable. But again, isn’t mystery the domain of children? Certainly in many ways, in the cosmic sense, we are indeed all children – but why deny ourselves the rights and responsibilities of adulthood with regard to understanding, say, interpersonal relationships (, Miranda?) or the self (, Jim?) Isn’t there a way to acknowledge our shortcomings and inconsistencies, to be aware of our lack of understanding without aggrandizing mystery as beautiful and complete? Why is it wrong to see mystery as a challenge? This suddenly reminds me of my irritation when I saw Jules et Jim – is life really as poetry? Are you sure? And if the point is not that life is this way, if the poetry is a tool for us to bring back to life from another sort of place, why cast poetry in life’s image at all? I already asked this here once before. Still haven’t finished Mimesis, but I’m working on it.

I don’t know, this isn’t at all my long-term attitude but the devil’s advocate in my brain was gnawing out a tunnel in this direction last night, anyway. It’s actually a little hard for me to write it now, by the light of the next day, because these ideas don’t have as much inherent appeal to me at this point. But look, I got it down anyway.

I sort of want to dismiss all of the above, now, to show where I “really” stand, but I think that argument is an easier one to make – at least it seems that way to me because I’m naturally drawn to it – and anyway, it’s annoying for you to have to read something and then read the opposite of it, and annoying for me to write it.

Yeah, that’s really going to be it for Ghost Dog. Oh, but I will say this: Miller’s Crossing, which also takes gangster genre stuff in a moody philosophical direction, is more genuinely thoughtful and much less childlike. The main thing that Ghost Dog had that Miller’s Crossing didn’t was the element of Samurai codes and, in a related vein, hip-hop. The solemnity in both cases seemed sort of borrowed rather than presented, but that was the point. But maybe that’s also a limitation.

Okay, some more about the actual movie. I liked the music by RZA – or as I like to call him, THE RZA. Of course, this is one of those cases where the choice of composer was more of the point than any particular thing the composer did for the movie itself. Good mood-music instinct on Jarmusch’s part. I was reminded of a similarly apt atmosphere-creating choice of that pre-existing music for Amélie. Then he goes and actually shows Ghost Dog putting on mood music, which I was less into. Mood music can have a profound effect but it isn’t all that profound a concept. In fact it’s kind of embarrassing to show it; it’s a kind of self-manipulation, but the movie didn’t seem to see it that way. I guess meditation is also self-manipulation. Jim Jarmusch (and Ghost Dog) probably see mood-music self-prescription as being more like meditation than willful submission to a romantic illusion. It’s so hard to figure out where to draw these lines!

This movie was one of those custom-designed vehicles for the vibe of a certain actor as perceived by a certain director. The whole movie was kind of like a frame of concentric Forest Whitaker outlines lovingly traced around Forest Whitaker himself, just like Punch-Drunk Love was a weird sort of frame fondly built around a particular impression of Adam Sandler, and of course like all those Bill Murray movies that reveal the parts of themselves that certain people like to project on to Bill Murray.

May 12, 2006

Moby-Dick vocabulary, 9

Chapter IX. THE SERMON

gangway
3. Naut. f. Used interjectionally, as a demand to clear the way.
Seems like he’s using it in a slightly different sense, to mean “get out of there” but not “clear the way.”

side, v.
12. To move or turn sideways.
Right?

larboard, n. Naut.
The side of a ship which is to the left hand of a person looking from the stern towards the bows. Opposed to starboard.

midships, n. Naut.
The middle part of a vessel (with regard to either its length or its breadth); spec. the middle part as identified by the point of intersection of a fore-and-aft line and the broadest portion of the vessel.

The ribs and terrors in the whale,
This site helpfully points out that Father Mapple’s hymn (original to Melville) is a parody-variant of this existing hymn by Isaac Watts (which I believe was figured out by going here). The biblical text of Psalm 18, which is clearly discernible in the Melville even if you don’t know the Watts, is here. The book of Jonah is also worth a look in this regard (and for the rest of this chapter). The present piece is sort of a fusion of Psalms 18 and Jonah 2.

clinch, v.
3. trans. Naut. To make fast the end of a rope in a particular way: see CLINCH n. 2.
6. trans. To secure, make fast. Obs. rare.

clinch, n.
2. Naut. ‘A method of fastening large ropes by a half-hitch, with the end stopped back to its own part by seizings’ (Adm. Smyth): that part of a rope which is clinched.

seizing, vbl. n.
2. concr. (Naut.) b. A small cord for ‘seizing’ two ropes together, or a rope to something else.

I think he just means something like “grab hold of this verse; seize it with your attention.”

sea-line
3. A line used at sea; (a) a sounding line.

sound, v.
2. a. Naut. To employ the line and lead, or other appropriate means, in order to ascertain the depth of the sea, a channel, etc., or the nature of the bottom. Also fig.

canticle
1. A song, properly a little song; a hymn. c. transf.

pilot n.
1. A navigator, guide, or driver. b. fig. A leader; a mentor, teacher; a moral or spiritual guide; a clergyman.

Amittai
Jonah’s father, as per the first verse of the book of Jonah. Also mentioned in an epithet for Jonah in Kings 14:25. This site is telling me it means “my truth” in Hebrew. The important thing here, I’d say, is just to be reassured that there’s nothing to know about Amittai .

Joppa
Wikipedia tells me that Joppa is Jaffa. Oh, and so too will Melville in a few sentences. Jonah 1:3.

Tarshish
Wikipedia says that Tarshish might have been Tarsus or Tartessos (Spain), but that more likely in this case it just means “some faraway city.” Of course, Melville’s about to tell us it’s Cadiz. This is part of the school of speculation regarding the Spanish “Tartessos.”

slouched, ppl. a.
1. slouched hat, a slouch hat. Also, one worn in such a manner that the brim hangs over the face.

slouch hat
A hat of soft or unstiffened felt or other material, esp. one having a broad brim which hangs or lops down over the face.

essay, v.
4. To attempt; to try to do, effect, accomplish, or make (anything difficult)

he paid the fare thereof
Still working on Jonah 1:3. King James Version as always.

cupidity
2. spec. Inordinate desire to appropriate wealth or possessions; greed of gain.

at its axis
Can’t picture this. What does this lamp look like?

heel, v. Chiefly Naut.
1. intr. Of a ship: To incline or lean to one side, as when canted by the wind or unevenly loaded.

plunge, v.
7. transf. a. intr. To fling or throw oneself violently forward, esp. with a diving action: said of a horse (opposed to REAR, v.)

steel tags
Well, I certainly get the general metaphorical gist here, but is he saying that the horse is harnessed by some kind of spikes in its flesh? Or just that the body armor is uncomfortable to it? I don’t know what these steel tags are or how exactly they hurt the horse, despite a fair amount of searching on my part.

prodigy
3. b. A wonderful example of (some quality).

careen, v.
4. a. intr. ‘A ship is said to careen when she inclines to one side, or lies over when sailing on a wind’ (Smyth Sailor’s Word-bk.).

boatswain
1. An officer in a ship who has charge of the sails, rigging, etc., and whose duty it is to summon the men to their duties with a whistle.

as I have taken it
i.e. ‘as I understand it from the text’? Or ‘as I said earlier’? Or what?

direful, a.
Fraught with dire effects; dreadful, terrible.

panther, n.
1. c. fig. A fierce, powerful, or elusive person or thing.

masterless, a.
3. Unable to be mastered or controlled; ungovernable. Obs.

seething
means just what you think it means.

shoots-to
I assume he means “to” in the sense of “shut.” No?

ground-swell
A deep swell or heavy rolling of the sea, the result of a distant storm or seismic disturbance.

quick, a.
17. Of feelings: Lively, vivid, keen, strongly felt.

plummet, n.
2. A piece of lead or other metal attached to a line, and used for sounding or measuring the depth of water; a sounding-lead.

as the great Pilot Paul has it
In Corinthians 9:27. There’s a sort of pun on “castaway” going on here, if you couldn’t tell.

truck, n.
2. Naut. a. A circular or square cap of wood fixed on the head of a mast or flag-staff, usually with small holes or sheaves for halliards.

kelson, Naut.
1. a. A line of timber placed inside a ship along the floor-timbers and parallel with the keel, to which it is bolted, so as to fasten the floor-timbers and the keel together; a similar bar or combination of iron plates in iron vessels.

strong arms yet support him
Does he mean treading water? I think he means treading water.

quarter
18. a. Exemption from being immediately put to death, granted to a vanquished opponent by the victor in a battle or fight; clemency or mercy shown in sparing the life of one who surrenders. b. transf. and fig.


i &middot ii &middot 1 &middot 2 &middot 3 &middot 4 &middot 5 &middot 6 &middot 7 &middot 8

May 5, 2006

Litmus?

I just saw, um, something. An artistic work. This work trafficked pretty much entirely in cliched, secondhand material. It was, to put it simply, junky and undistinguished. I’m not trying to write a review here; this is just what you need to know before I can say what I want to say. (For what it’s worth, I consider the comments above to be fairly objective facts about the thing – they don’t really touch on my opinion.)

Anyway, this particular work, for all its shortcomings, did not particularly annoy or displease me. In fact I generally considered it successful, and in articulating the reason why, I feel like I hit upon a possible litmus test for all art. The piece pleased me because I believe that it would have pleased its own creators. That is to say, it was made of stuff that I would consider “corny,” but made by people who (it seemed to me) sincerely loved that corn. Had the creators wandered in like I had, I believe they would have found their work absolutely delightful. And I don’t think this is true of all works – in fact, I don’t think it’s true of a great many works. And I think the distinction gets at something crucial. I think one subconsciously tries to have the experience that the creators would have had.

So much television seems bad not precisely because it is stupid, but rather because it is stupid but not infused with any sincere love of stupidity. TV shows almost always give me the impression of having been put together by people who, if they were in the audience, would be annoyed or disinterested. This thing I saw tonight, though objectively annoying and forgettable, would, I believe, have pleased its creators, and this makes me sympathetic – to the artists and to their work. Enthusiasm is sympathetic. The opposite is not. Is cynicism the opposite? Maybe, in this situation anyway.

I worry sometimes that if I encountered my own music (or my own writing) I wouldn’t like it. But, and I am trying to be fair with myself, I don’t think that’s what would happen. I think that if I encountered something by me, I would feel threatened by it because I would identify with it, and would try to find flaws with it – and would easily find some – but I think that the sincerity of it would come through and I would ultimately be heartened by the fact that someone else out there had a similar sensibility to me. Namely, me.

I still think sometimes about the question I posed at the end of my posting about Everything Is Illuminated in re: what is it about bad art/writing/whatever that makes us feel “manipulated” rather than “moved” or “entertained.” Maybe this is a partial answer. I didn’t get the impression that Jonathan Safran Foer would have been particularly moved by his own book. I think he just would have felt like someone was stealing his material.

I definitely don’t think George Lucas would like the new Star Wars movies if he hadn’t made them.

I’m tired so this is over.

May 3, 2006

A Bit on Notation

To play a piece well, I should imagine that I made it up, guided by my ear and sense of drama, became accustomed to playing it, and eventually decided to notate it, only then discovering what it looked like on the page. When I encounter a score I tend to think of it in whatever terms the score implies, visually, but that’s a mistake. It allows me quick access to the piece because patterns are already arrayed visually and can be comprehended almost instantly, but ultimately those aren’t the sorts of patterns that make a musical performance come alive.

Charles Ives said that he wasn’t exactly sure how to notate his music and that he thought maybe someone else could do it better; his scores were the best approximation he could manage. What he meant by “better” was “in a way where the patterns revealed notationally correspond more closely to the patterns that govern the music itself.” His music is certainly difficult to make sense of, but – and I’m thinking of the Concord Sonata, here – I’ve found that the greater difficulty is in finding the sense behind a notation that tends to obscure that sense, even while it forms a record of it.

I’m trying to articulate a principle here that is very basic to the way I think about musical scores. There’s the kind of sense a piece of music can make to the ear, and then there’s the kind of sense that music can make on the page. I tend to think of most classical music as inaccessible to me if I don’t have the benefit of a score. I can also usually make sense of a piece – if it’s traditional enough – after some 15 hearings, but I’d say that over the course of those 15 hearings I’m constructing some sort of mental map that serves the same function as a score. Without a map, I’m lost.

I think there is a philosophy-of-music mistake that gets made a lot. I’m not sure whose mistake it is – historian, composer, listener, or just me – but I do think it has a lot to do with why almost nobody wants to listen to the classical music I burn to CD for them. The mistake is thinking that to make interesting music one should make things interesting in the “map” sense. I’m not specifically talking about notation here – the map can also be the mental map that one builds over 15 listenings. Better, I should say: the mistake is, in one way or another, not taking account of the discrepancy between an aural experience of music and a “mapped” experience.

Metaphor: If you are in a hedge maze shaped like a toucan, you are not having a ‘tropical’ experience. That would require small toucans stationed inside the hedge maze.

Remember when I said I wasn’t going to waste time explicating everything so that I could touch on all my points?

A good deal – a great deal – of classical music only makes sense to me on the “yes, but look what the maze is shaped like” level. A hedge maze shaped like something might well be an unsatisfying maze to solve – too few choices, or too many long dead ends – and listening to classical music I often feel like I compensate for the lameness of any given turn in the maze by reminding myself of the lovely overall pattern of which it forms a part. The problem is that, frequently, that pattern is itself not visible from the vantage point of one in the maze. Or, to extricate myself from this metaphor: the musical structure that not only underlies and orders a piece but also thereby serves as justification (or consolation) for any indifferent or obscure details is not always accessible to a listener without recourse to some kind of extra-musical aid. And maybe it’s appropriate to think of “knowing it from having heard it 15 times already” as extra-musical – it’s cumulative knowledge, but experientially cumulative, not musically cumulative. It’s possible that what I just wrote is nonsense, but for the time being, in the context of this thought, it convinces me.

The kind of sense that I find in a score is generally inaccessible to me by ear, and complementarily (as I was saying at the beginning of this), the kind of sense I find with my ears is generally not what pops out of a score.

This goes into deeper waters – the larger issue is that of what Nicholas Cook called “the two sides of the musical fabric” in that book I read last year – and is something I wanted to write about in my very-long-delayed entry about John Williams, the point of which was going to (and may still someday) be that my ears have a very particular and nuanced understanding of certain snatches of movie music, and yet when faced with the long-inaccessible scores to same, my eyes instantly found and perceived the inanity that I had always felt obliged to claim that I heard but really never had. That is to say that the ear-regulated marketplace of movie music has sifted to the top the styles that work for the ear, regardless of what they might seem to mean when parsed by the eye (or, if you prefer, the mind). More on that, as I say, later, hopefully.

I’ve been playing the piano for a certain piece of musical theater for several months now, and almost none of what I play has ever been notated. It’s always been quite rudimentary stuff but has evolved, ever so slightly, under my hands as I play it over and over. Recently I thought that it would probably be a good idea to fix in notation just what it was that I had been playing, and I created scores for a couple of the songs, doing my best, like Ives, to capture the things that I had worked out in a realm far from notational thought. Ives had trouble notating because he was writing weird, tumultous stuff, whereas I was doing absurdly straightforward, simple, traditional things. And yet I felt befuddled by the inherent inadequacies of the notation – most of what I’d wanted to record, it turned out, were subtleties of inflection that had no real place in notation; if I shoehorned them onto the page with a bunch of finicky indications, the impression would still be wrong – as though these crucial subtleties were themselves finicky. They aren’t! Anyway, I did what I could and made something that looked normal and reasonable, and now I play with it in front of me. What’s odd is that now that I have the notation, I often find myself lapsing into parsing what I see as I would parse any other score, and I end up playing something that seems foreign and lifeless, even though all I’m trying to do is recreate my own performance! Just like when I transcribed a “script” from a videotape of a candid conversation and unsuccessfully tried to perform my own lines. I was – as with Moby-Dick – unconvincing.

The problem is the same: the sense that we make in life – in music – is not the same sense that we make in symbols. But as creators, as artificers, people tend to work with the symbols first – like some great artistic algebra, founded on the principle that the semantic quantities, the associated meanings, will survive whatever operations you put their signifiers through and will show up, analogously reconfigured, at the other side, when you reap the meaning of your symphony or novel or whatever.

Maybe my ear-thought is just limited and I need to strengthen it. Some questions to me are still unresolved: are the exquisitely elaborate orderings of Bach meant to be on the hidden or visible side of the fabric? What about sonata form? I have learned to enjoy Beethoven only by drawing a miniature map in my mind as I go – and this technique works very well, and the rewards are well worth the effort, and with enough practice the effort becomes almost imperceptible – but am I compensating for a shortcoming? Is it my personal shortcoming (related, perhaps, to my weak navigational sense)? Or has modern-day culture undertrained everyone’s ears? Or was Beethoven always and necessarily operating slightly at odds with the ways of the ear? That would be fine with me, if that were true. But only because the trade-offs seem so obviously worthwhile in his case.

The mistake mentioned above comes in pieces that, for example, seem on the page to consist of all sorts of change-of-tempo, change-of-meter, rhythmically elaborate etc. effects, but in practice simply come off in ametrical time and are thus – you’ll excuse me Mr. Carter – boring. You can quote me on this: ametrical time is inherently unmusical. That’s not to say that it’s undramatic – obviously, all sorts of dramas take place in ametrical time – and musical elements can be formed into drama.* But music that is in fact constructed in metrical time but neglects to mark it is, generally, a lost music. I am dismissing large swaths of 20th century music here but someone has to. Such music might make extra-musical sense on the page or in the memory – or even, eventually, in the ear, following the tracks laid by the memory or the score – but can never make sense (musical sense) in the ear alone. Of course, there’s still that question of the trade-off. Maybe some months spent with the score to Night Fantasies will reveal to me the greatness I’ve heard so much about. And maybe that greatness would be so great as to be some-months worthy. Maybe.

The more interesting and important direction to work, I think now, is the other way – from the notation back to what the ear can know and the heart, ahem, can understand. This is the essential problem for actors, which is I guess why I find acting so fascinating. Most acting deals with symbolic sense so shallow as not to pose any problems. It’s when you have denser stuff like Shakespeare – or, say, Melville – that inadequate “de-notation” really shows. And most Shakespearean acting that I’ve heard has been, I’d say, insufficient. Same with most classical performance.

Once I was invited to listen to a friend’s informal pseudo-concert on the violin, which she played for friends as preparation for a competition. Afterward, I picked up one of the scores to look at it, and saw with some surprise what a rhythm she had been playing “actually was,” in notational/conceptual terms – a driving rhythm in 3 – whereas I had heard it as a strange, choppy passion governed by abrupt, complex rubati. I thought about it and realized she had just been very slightly prolonging each accented note as a way of super-emphasizing it. I guess she (and, it would seem, many other classical performers) thought this would heighten the sense of propulsive energy. In fact, it had completely bucked me from the horse, and had rendered the music as some kind of horrible sideways duck instead of as a bounding rabbit. Lot of animals in there. She asked if anyone had any suggestions, and, feeling strongly enough about this point to risk being rude, I answered by saying that maybe she should keep a very strict time when that rhythm was first introduced so that the listener would be able to process it. She and apparently everyone else there were bewildered by this comment – they weren’t even consciously aware of the deviation from the rhythm. The more I tried to explain how hard it had been for me to hear the correct metrical scheme, the more shocked they seemed. They all, of course, already knew the piece. It was, I guess, a famous piece. I might know a bunch of classical music but as far as “literacy” goes, I’m pretty ill-equipped.

But my embarrassment – which was, I daresay, extremely mild – is not the point; the point is that music is a tough sell. On the page (or in the memory), something might seem so sturdily sensible that it can bear the strain of exaggeration, but in the world of the ear, things are much more fragile.

I’ll allow myself to finally stop writing now that I’ve gotten a little sleepy and thought of this silly-putty-ish metaphor: music in the world of the symbol, on the notated page or in the schematic diagram in the mind, is thickened and flexible, like rubber, and can be played back at any speed, exaggerated and stretched, thrown around the room and stomped on, still maintaining its essential shape. Furthermore, its essential shape is all that it maintains – the specifics of any given performance are all enveloped in its smooth surface. However, music heard is like a brittle, prickly skeletal structure. The “essential” shape can’t necessarily be distinguished from the rough edges, and the whole thing is susceptible to being crushed by even the slightest irregular pressure.

So – I think maybe no more reading from Moby-Dick until I can at least do the musical equivalent.

* I’m imagining an unmetered piece with various self-contained gestures hanging in space… such a piece could form a dramatic whole, and by virtue of being made of music and forming some sort of whole, we would want to say that it forms a musical whole. But this is “music” defined by its technical rudiments, not by its characteristic nature, and it seems important, to me, to make this distinction. Such a piece is, to my mind, characteristic not of music but of something else, that other thing, that 20th-century thing. If there is an essential character to “music,” to “drama,” to “poetry,” such that we can say that a painting is “musical” or “poetic,” I think there is a parallel essential character of “ametric 20th-centuryality” – the quality of being attuned to that which is neither human nor natural. Well, that’s a rough shot at it, anyway.

May 2, 2006

Russian Thing

I was about to say that this was an homage to The Mighty Handful, but that would suggest that I know what this is, and I don’t. In re: Russia, The middle section is direct, the rest is maybe more oblique.

It came pretty easily and, I will say, is more or less just what I intended it to be – which is not generally true of stuff I write – so I’m satisfied with it in that respect. Of course, not understanding my own intentions is another kind of problem, but one thing at a time, I suppose.

Raw score
Raw audio

May 2, 2006

Moby-Dick vocabulary, 8

Chapter VIII. THE PULPIT

engraft, ingraft, v.
2. fig. a. To implant (virtues, dispositions, sentiments) in the mind; to incorporate (a thing) into a previously existing system or unity, (an alien) into a race or community; and the like.
engrafted, ppl. a.
In the senses of the vb. lit. and fig.

tarpaulin, n.
1. a. A covering or sheet of canvas coated or impregnated with tar so as to make it waterproof, used to spread over anything to protect it from wet. Also, without a or pl., canvas so tarred; sometimes applied to other kinds of waterproof cloth. b. A sailor’s hat made of tarpaulin.

While I’m here I want to also mention this:
2. a. transf. A nickname for a mariner or sailor, esp. a common sailor. Now rare or arch.

because earlier in this project, I stupidly “pshaw”ed at the idea that tar meaning “sailor” might be derived from “tarpaulin.” This turns out to have been stupid for two reasons. First: sailors were, in fact, called “tarpaulins,” which I didn’t know and which makes the derivation seem perfectly likely. Second: “tarpaulin” is itself so named because it is made with tar – making the competing derivations for tar=sailor substantially identical – which of course makes perfect sense, but all these years of encountering tar-less tarpaulin referred to as “tarp” had deafened me to that obvious fact. OED, in fact, gives this as the etymology:

Generally thought to be f. TAR n. + PALL n. + -ING (as in netting, grating, and cf. AWNING)
The blackness of tarred canvas may have suggested its likeness to a funeral pall; though, in the absence of any instance of tar-pall, this origin must remain conjectural.

Fascinating. Let’s move on.

man-rope
Naut. One of the ropes on each side of a gangway or ladder, used in ascending and descending a ship’s side, etc.

maintop, n.
Naut. 1. The top of a mainmast; a platform just above the head of the lower mainmast.

Quebec
The city is elaborately fortified.

notoriety, n.
1. The state or condition of being notorious; the fact of being famous or well known, esp. for some reprehensible action, quality, etc.
I include this because I was under the mistaken impression that any non-negative use of “notoriety” was in error. This is not the case. Both the etymology and the quotations in the OED tell me that the word “notorious” originally did not have a negative connotation and simply meant “widely known.” The negative falls under esp. nowadays but there’s still certainly room for Father Mapple in there.

Ehrenbreitstein
A fortress in Germany on a hill overlooking the Rhine. Not sure if the “perennial well of water” image is meant to tie in to Ehrenbreitstein, or even to real fortresses in general. Though it would seem reasonable that a well would be an important, or at least desirable, feature of fortresses.

cenotaph, n.
a. An empty tomb; a sepulchral monument erected in honour of a deceased person whose body is elsewhere.

lee coast
Well, I now know lee to mean “sheltered from the wind,” or in particular, “the sheltered side of something,” but it’s not entirely clear to me what it means when applied to a whole coast – a coast in a painting, no less. Is it just that an informed viewer tell which way the wind is blowing in the painting? I see in google that “lee coast” is a phrase that infrequently but occasionally appears in nautical talk, often in a generic sense not relating to any specific weather circumstances. Can’t find a definition. Help.

scud, n.
2. d. Ocean foam or spray driven by the wind; also transf. of ice or snow.

silver plate inserted into Victory’s plank where Nelson fell
Pictures here. The current plate is apparently brass. Either the plate’s been replaced or Melville got the material wrong – both seem likely enough.

helm, n.
1. The handle or tiller, in large ships the wheel, by which the rudder is managed; sometimes extended so as to include the whole steering gear.

bluff, a.
1. Presenting a broad flattened front; esp. a. Of a ship: Opposed to sharp or projecting, having little ‘rake’ or inclination, nearly vertical in the bows.

fiddle-headed, a.
a. Naut. Having a fiddle-head.
fiddle-head
1. Naut. The ornamental carving at the bows of a vessel, the termination of which is a scroll turning aft or inward like the head of a violin.

beak, n.
7. The pointed and ornamented projection at the prow of ancient vessels, esp. of war galleys, where it was used in piercing and disabling the enemy’s vessels; now = BEAK-HEAD.

a voyage complete
This is a famous enough quote and makes fine sense already, but just reassure me: by “and not a voyage complete” he is saying that… a) the ship of the world has not a single completed voyage to its record; it is untested and this is its first trip; b) the current voyage is just begun rather than nearing completion; c) the current voyage will not return to its point of origin; d) something else. It’s a), right?


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April 16, 2006

Moby-Dick vocabulary, 7

Chapter VII. THE CHAPEL

Me reading (4:45).
UPDATE 5/06 – Links to reading intentionally broken.

bearskin
3. A shaggy kind of woollen cloth used for overcoats.

mason, v.
2. trans. To build (something) in or into a wall. Obs.
I have not previously but am now going to start informing you whenever the present sentence from Moby-Dick is one of the several quotations cited by the OED. It is now.

Isle of Desolation
Well, “Isle of Desolation” is an old name for the largest of the Kerguelen Islands, in the south Indian ocean. But that’s obviously not what Melville means because he adds “off Patagonia.” A-ha! Google was thoroughly unhelpful with this, but I eventually dug it up: Isla Desolación (seen at center here) is on the coast of Chile and marks the western entrance to the Strait of Magellan. Almost never called by its English name these days, apparently.

bow
1. a. ‘The fore-end of a ship or boat; being the rounding part of a vessel forward, beginning on both sides where the planks arch inwards, and terminating where they close, at the rabbet of the stem or prow, being larboard or starboard from that division’. Smyth Sailor’s Word-bk. Also in pl. ‘bows’, i.e. the ‘shoulders’ of a boat.
I put this here for the plural.

cave of Elephanta
An elaborate temple complex to Śiva/Shiva on an island near Mumbai/Bombay, carved out of solid rock and full of sculpture. Melville’s point? My guess is that he’s saying that the blessings of the Christian god are as inaccessible to these lost souls and their widows as the blessings of the Hindu god would be irrelevant (and is thereby putting in another little dig at the absurdity of Christianity when viewed on a global scale). But he might also be saying something about how remote and irrelevant a place the cave of Elephanta is, and that all places are the same to these dead because their bodies are nowhere. Or something. I’d appreciate any thoughts or input.

Goodwin Sands
In Kent, England, a stretch along the English Channel noted for being the location of hundreds of shipwrecks.

In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included
I give up. In what census? He seems to be saying that they are included. If this is a riddle, I can’t solve it, and if it’s just simple, I can’t see it straight. Please explain this to me.
Having read the whole passage several times I’m now willing to venture that he might simply mean “In what sense, exactly, do we believe the dead are still alive? Because clearly we do believe something of the sort – listen to the following contradictions…” Which mostly makes sense, but it’s still a bit odd. Maybe I’m just letting the syntax worry me. Anyway, weigh in, readers.

so significant and infidel a word
Am I right in thinking he just means “dead”? It’s not that likely to be “prefix”ed to someone’s name, and he hasn’t actually used the word in its adjectival form yet, so I’m a bit confused.

forfeiture
3. concr. That which is forfeited; a pecuniary penalty, a fine. ? Obs.

death-forfeitures upon immortals
This puzzled me but now I’m pretty sure I get it – he’s saying “the church tells us that the soul is immortal and death is an illusion, but when it comes to the practical matter of getting life insurance to pay up, that seems to go out the window.” I.e. all of us are the supposed “immortals.” I think that’s right, especially given the rest of the passage. But tell me if you understand this differently.

stave, v.
2. trans. To break a hole in (a boat); to break to pieces; also, to break (a hole in a boat). to stave in, to crush inwards, make a hole in.
Somehow I missed this one when it first appeared back in the Excerpts.

brevet, n.
2. An official document granting certain privileges from a sovereign or government; spec. in the Army, a document conferring nominal rank on an officer, but giving no right to extra pay.
b. transf. and fig.

lee, n.
The sediment deposited in the containing vessel from wine and some other liquids.
2. pl. b. fig. Basest part, ‘dregs’, ‘refuse’.
This sentence is quoted in OED.

A general question to the audience, at this point, regarding my comprehension. I’m afraid I may have lost the gist of the argument. Our narrator first seems to comment wonderingly/skeptically on the oddity of believing that we are in some respect immortal and that Adam is still lying in some horrible paralysis, or on being scared of the dead, etc. – and says that religious faith feeds off of these “dead doubts” “like a jackal,” which sounds pretty disgusted to me. And yet then he’s saying, as though it’s his peculiarity, that he believes that the body is nothing compared to the soul, and that the soul is immortal. So his beef with the church is not about the immortal soul, as I had thought – he likes the idea of an immortal soul. Rather, he’s accusing mankind of thinking of death in terms that are too earthbound. And yet, then, why shouldn’t we wonder at knocking in a tomb, etc? I guess this is sort of a transcendentalist’s distinction: there is a soul and a spiritual “beyond” but they are natural phenomena, not establishments created by a man-like God or mediated by a man-made church. Fear of ghosts and promises of heaven are an oyster’s view of the afterlife, which is actually something far purer. Is that what he’s saying?

I imagine his thoughts on this subject will be restated as the book progresses (or will be made more clearly and intentionally complex – for now I just feel personally uncertain).


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April 12, 2006

Moby-Dick vocabulary, 6

Chapter VI. THE STREET

Me reading (4:41).

I tried to improve the comprehensibility of the reading this time by doing it slower and less pseudo-naturalistically, but on listening afterward I found that to be somehow gratingly inappropriate. The text, to me, has the quality of being a long, smirky ramble. With that slow, spacious, over-attentive approach, the flow and attitude of it seemed completely distorted. So then I did the version above, faster and more forcefully. This is still no good but it’s not as bad, either. I’m still not sure what the best solution is.

Part of the problem may simply be that I don’t have a good voice for this book. I have a prissy stuffed-nose-y back-of-the-throat sound a lot of the time, whereas this needs the opposite, a wide-open low voice with some grit in it. But a young one. William Hootkins (the guy who says “top men” to Indiana Jones), reading on the recent Naxos recording, is suitably cranky and confident, but has a nerdish pitch to his voice that seems wrong – I want someone a little more rough. Though I imagine I could get used to it. Hm – I see here that Hootkins died last fall, just after the recording came out. I don’t think I knew that until now.

UPDATE 5/06 – Links to reading intentionally broken. For all that.

nondescript, n.
1. Chiefly Biol. A species, genus, etc., that has not been previously described or identified. Also in extended use. Now rare in technical use.
2. b. A person or thing that is not easily described, or is of no particular class or kind.

Chestnut street
I don’t know – does he mean in Philadelphia or Boston? Or does he quite possibly mean in Salem, MA? The Norton edition of Moby-Dick apparently indicates that this is Philadelphia.

Regent Street
This is definitely London.

Lascar
1. (Freq. with capital initial.) An East Indian sailor.

Apollo Green
Generally called Apollo Bunder: a wharf in Bombay (now Mumbai).

Water Street
In New York, I assume. Oop, Norton says Liverpool.

Wapping
Area near the ports in London.

Feegeeans
= Fijians, of course, from Fiji. We’ve already seen this one.

Tongatabooans
= Tongatapuans, from Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga.

Erromanggoans
= Erromangoans, from Erromango, a large island in Vanuatu. We’ve also seen this one before.

Pannangians
… I’m guessing this is people from Penang (occasionally “Panang”) in Malaysia, which would make some sense because of its colonial history. But I’m not completely sure – I can’t find any source confirming my speculative link to Melville’s alternate spelling.

Brighggians
I HAVE NO IDEA! I’ve pulled out every stop on the internet for this one and nothing. This is my first outright failure in this project and it NEEDS TO BE RESOLVED! Please, please help!

swallow-tailed
6. Of a coat: Having a pair of pointed or tapering skirts.

sou’-wester = south-wester, n.
2. a. A large oilskin or waterproof hat or cap worn by seamen to protect the head and neck during rough or wet weather.

bombazine = bombasine
2. A twilled or corded dress-material, composed of silk and worsted; sometimes also of cotton and worsted, or of worsted alone. In black the material is much used in mourning.
“Worsted,” by the way, which I never quite know how to imagine, is basically just wool yarn.

dog-days, n. pl.
1. The days about the time of the heliacal rising of the Dog-star; noted from ancient times as the hottest and most unwholesome period of the year. [… In current almanacs they are said to begin July 3 and end Aug. 11 (i.e. to be the 40 days preceding the cosmical rising of Sirius).]

buckskin
2. a. Leather made from the skin of a buck; also from sheepskin prepared in a particular way.
5. A kind of strong twill cloth.

bespeak, v.
5. To speak for; to arrange for, engage beforehand; to ‘order’ (goods).

bell-button
OED classes this under “bell” 11. General relations, c. similative and parasynthetic, where it appears along with “bell-lamp,” “bell-mouth,” “bell-shape,” and others – by all of which I take it to mean a button with a bell-like shape. But since pretty much all Google hits for “bell-button” refer to buttons that ring bells, I’m having a hard time placing this more precisely.

trouser-strap
A strap passing beneath the instep and attached at each end to the bottom of the trouser-leg.
i.e. a strap around the bottom of the shoe.

howling, ppl. a.
2. Characterized by, or filled with, howling, as of wild beasts or of the wind; dreary.

Canaan
I of course know the phrase “land flowing with milk and honey,” but the allusions here to oil and to streets running with milk or paved with eggs make me wonder whether I’m missing other allusions, or a greater depth to this one. Anybody? Also, why corn and wine? Is he saying that either of these is a local product? Are they now? Maybe the point is just that wealth buys these things? Or that in America (unlike Canaan) these are the things connote health and wealth? On rereading it seems in fact like he might be saying that Canaan is a land of those other things while New Bedford is only a land of oil. I really don’t know how to read this passage. Please advise.

scoria
1. The slag or dross remaining after the smelting out of a metal from its ore. Also transf.

Herr Alexander
Performing name of Alexander Heimbürger (1819-1909), German magician who performed in New York in the 1840s.

dower = dowry

portion, v.
2. To give a portion or dowry to; to dower, endow.

tapering upright cones
Here’s a picture of a horse-chestnut blossom, and the whole tree.

superinduce, v.
4. In physical sense: To bring, draw, deposit, etc. over or upon a thing as a covering or addition.

carnation, n.
1. a. The colour of human ‘flesh’ or skin; flesh-colour (obs.); b. a light rosy pink, but sometimes used for a deeper crimson colour as in the carnation flower.

sunlight in the seventh heavens
I’m trying to figure out here, as before, what Melville’s source for the whole “seventh heaven” concept was – the idea is common to mysticism of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as appearing, depending on how you’re counting, in Dante. I can’t find “perennial sunlight” specifically named as a feature of the seventh heaven of any of these models, but it makes sense that there would be a lot of light up there, doesn’t it.


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April 10, 2006

Falling Asleep

Twice in the past week I’ve experienced the same sense of having a basic insight while in the process of falling asleep. Of course, thoughts that form while the brain is in that transitional state are difficult to communicate under the harsh glare of our ridiculously high waking-life standards for “making sense” and “meaning anything.” But the particular sleepy thought that I had twice this week is actually about thought, and about sleepy thought in particular – and I’ve been able to remember it, unlike most of the brilliant thoughts I have in the middle of the night and then lose forever. So here it is, dressed up as though it’s a poetic thought rather than a sleepy one.

When we’re falling asleep, our thoughts do not necessarily become more muddled or less intelligent, they merely break down into their constituent parts; these molecules of thought become less sticky and float by one another detachedly, combining, if at all, into only the simplest structures. This is a limitation on the sophistication of thought, but it also offers a certain clarity. One thinks of things only insofar as they can be perceived as conceptual atoms, like the indivisible objects on flash cards: rope, apple, ladder, house. The image I had was of a configuration of overlapping straight lines that approximated a curve. In waking thought we think in terms of the illusory curve, but in that crippled state of half-sleep, the mind can see only the straight lines. The curve is metaphor and implication; the curve is the world of half-truth that we live in, and falling asleep I felt wonderfully free of it.

You might well point out that my mind was using a visual metaphor in the course of praising itself for having freed itself of metaphor. Actually, it’s unlikely that you’ll point that out because I doubt that anyone has any idea what I’m talking about here. But no matter; I just wanted to record this while I was still able to recall any of it.

There were much larger implications to the thought, at the time, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to recover them very well. I think – can surmise – that the rest had to do with seeing life for what it is, without trepidation… facing human mortality and insignificance with clarity, freed of the imaginary, implied curves that seem to make them unbearable by day.

My waking-self commentary on all this is that I recognize it as being typically googly falling-asleep thought and, nonetheless, also not untrue. I am moved and grateful to think that there is any moment in my life, waking or otherwise, where I am capable of feeling that I have thought my way into a geometric clarity that dispels the fear of death. You’d be hard pressed to prove that I was “wrong,” after all, so why not?

Also, in a more earthbound connection, I stand by the general observation about the detached/crystallized nature of thought while falling asleep. I have noticed on many occasions that I perceive and parse music with greater clarity and fluency when I am falling asleep, and Beth recently reported the same experience. It’s as though my mind, having given up the task of investigating implications, is freed to devote itself entirely to manipulating the surface of what it hears; I feel particularly ready to grab on to, say, a melody, and recognize and enjoy it as itself. My intuition tells me that this has something to do how my brain is allocating the resources of its linguistic component. I vaguely remember reading some science article long ago about how the sophistication of human visual processing somehow evolved from a part of the brain that originally served a language-related function. Maybe I have that completely backward or maybe I invented it. Anyway, the idea that our visual thought is somehow quasi-linguistic has an intuitive appeal to me, and this feels like a related phenomenon – like the language unit has been given free rein with all the thoughts; or maybe the opposite, that the language unit has shut down and the thoughts are let loose to be themselves. Though, regarding the experience with music, it definitely feels like my brain is reading the music like language and deriving the same sort of immediacy of meaning from it.

Anyway, I thought it would be a nice gift to my falling-asleep brain, who is in some ways a slightly different person from me, to post his thoughts on the internet and thus give him a sort of foothold in the real world. Although he would probably take issue with the patronizing implication that his world isn’t the real world.

But for better or for worse, I get all the mail. This argument seems pretty solid to me. I’ll check in with him and let you know if he has a rebuttal.

Have I just typed something absolutely incoherent? I have the strange snaky sense that I have finally gone and blown my nose all over the internet. But I guess that’s the sort of looseness I’ve been working toward all along here. I feel remarkably disengaged from any kind of shame about this, which is exciting in its way. The question is: in the absence of shame, what will motivate quality-control? I think that I (and others) tend to feel rather invested in vigilant shame as a crucial element of personal upkeep. In my case I’ve finally come around to accepting that it’s more of a hindrance than an asset, but if I’m to become shameless, is there no way to avoid becoming shameless? One wants to establish a mechanism for self-improvement independent of shame. Harder than it sounds. Maybe some shame is a necessity. But, if I’ve really managed to erase it, it’s entirely unobvious where to redraw that line.

The title of this entry, if you hadn’t noticed, has a double meaning. Possibly a triple meaning.