Gift wrap. Barcelona, winter 2018

Gift wrap. Barcelona, winter 2018

Holiday lighting as the city gears up

its increased energy from within.

Drop down menus of string lighting,

remembered versions from other years,

invented colors spraying

like ice dust off the rink.

The main thing’s always been

to nudge the real smile—proffer

the friendly hand.

A few last gifts need to be picked up,

no denial of what’s ranged for celebration.

Lights sparking the push, warm houses

receiving the late guest. A sign

of welcome, a sign of worth.

Tempus fugit

Tempus fugit

Now a person could unsubscribe to some of these listservs…. But no, that’s daft, we need those.

Correspondents then. I mean some of these people haven’t written to me for ages now. Some of them don’t even answer emails anymore. At the same time… If I write to them, shake them up, they do answer. Well, most of them anyway.

Hmm… Maybe get a bot to take care of some of this.

Reading Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway also, should be included in the talk I’m working on. People who have read the novel will no doubt remember the basic duality the author sets up between Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. One protagonist privileged, a person of means; the other, an ex-soldier who survives World War I, is unemployed. Poet and society matron. Male and female. Simplifying in this way may give us leads into understanding the ideas running through the book. A close reading reveals pretty quickly how carefully it is planned and written. Two other binary opposites, sane/insane, are of use here, especially as Woolf herself made use of them as she planned to write the book.

In Virginia Woolf ‘The Hours’: The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway. (Pace U P, 1996), Helen M. Wussow tells us that in planning notes dated October 16, 1922 Woolf wrote: 'Suppose it to be connected in this way: Sanity & insanity. Mrs D. seeing the truth. S.S. seeing the insane truth' (Wussow, 412). Shakespeare and others had of course dealt with similar ideas. In any event, during the noonday visit Septimus Smith makes to one of his doctors, Dr Bradshaw, Septimus is depicted as thinking himself privy to what he assumes is the fact that, in literature (and perhaps in culture generally) '[t]he secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair’ (75).*

The novel thus navigates around truth versus insane truth… Doubt—the region of beauty, as Woolf terms it in the essay ‘Reading’—is created about the acuteness of Septimus Smith’s psychological trauma. Obviously the insanity of war is part of her societal indictment. One of the things I personally find fascinating is the use Virginia Woolf makes of suggestion through a series of key words or ideas as she sets up the viewpoints of her characters in her ‘novel of consciousness’. Finally, reading these texts today in some of the terms she establishes provides a lot of information on metafictional strategies and the craft of creating ‘a good story’…

 *Mrs Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2000.

Reading notes

Re-reading Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf in preparation for a get together with friends to talk about Woolf’s work—and Lee’s, for all that, for the bio, Virginia Woolf, A Life, is an incredible achievement. Lee is tremendously thorough and she writes so well. But aside from that it is a true work of love, not only of the life of its subject but of the collective life of “dear Reader”. Philo-sophy in its widest sense.

Here, for example, is an aspect of Woolf through Lee,

Painting overlaps with remembering in To the Lighthouse, and Virginia Woolf—like Lily Briscoe redoing her painting in the Ramsays’ house and garden—spent a lifetime making her own ‘views’ of St Ives [Wales] [….] When [Woolf] comes to [inventing] Mrs Ramsay […] she has given herself plenty of practice:

For the great plateful of blue water was before her, the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.

When Virginia Woolf describes Talland House [in St Ives] in her memoirs she does it like a picture: she says it looked ‘like a child’s drawing of a house, remarkable only for its flat roof, and the crisscrossed railing that ran round the roof, again, like something that a child draws’.

Lee’s comments, I should add, come from the second chapter of her book, titled ‘Houses.’ The main theme at that point is to look into ways in which Woolf remembered her rich and very active childhood and ways in which she wrote about those experiences. An interesting reading, I think, for those in search of green sand dunes and platefuls of blue water.

in progress...

A parsnip, a sweet potato, on the kitchen table.

New double glazed windows in the living room make for quieter space.

Perhaps more slowly one signs from echoing voices,

musical shards, a sense of darkness, or of light.

The streets and their stable of cars brim with piles of yellowing leaves.

Unless the street cleaners have been by.

Autumn's end

Autumn’s end

Sharp gain in the dry

elm leaves. We look up, listening—

cicadasong.

sky,

sky,

green

sea—

rope trailing

waves,

Agamemnon

Agamemnon

Somehow he wishes he’d stayed

whether the warring stopped

or burnt on—burnt in,

vengeance on vengeance.

Always much to tell. Sacrifice,

roll of minds run now by machines.

And these halls? Larger before.

Concentrating hard

sometimes brings back

their ring of happiness.

Drawing Hierarchically

In 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, Matthew Frederick’s 19^th “thing learned” is “Drawing hierarchically.” This section of the book talks about planning a drawing well, starting out by stating: “When drawing in any medium, never work at a ‘100% level of detail’ from one end of the sheet toward the other, blank end of the sheet.”

I put this down here not only because it is very good advice in terms of planning many things but in anticipation of some landscape drawing I hope to get done this weekend. And it is good to review thinking of a drawing or painting support as being a blank sheet in two dimensions onto which the illusion of three dimensions will be set up.

An illustration on the facing page of Frederick’s comment shows something like this in the form of a reclining human figure depicted on a grid of lines, all in black and white.

And the text continues, “Instead, start with the most general elements of the composition and work gradually toward the more specific aspects of it. Begin by laying out the entire sheet. Use guide lines, geometric alignments, visual gut-checks, and other methods to cross-check the proportions, relationships, and placements of the elements you are drawing.”

I imagine that people are pretty well into this way of looking by this time, but I find it useful to go over that last part again before reading/writing/drawing on. Because in those words just quoted is the concept of flow, rhythm, the movement of making something that also includes an awareness of containment (“cross-checking”).

Frederick’s conclusion to what has gone before:

“When you achieve some success at this schematic level, move to the next level of detail. If you find yourself focusing on details in a specific area of the drawing, indulge briefly, then move to other areas of the drawing. Evaluate your success continually, making local adjustments in the context of the entire sheet.”*

*All citations are from the book named above, by Matthew Frederick, published 2007 by MIT Press, Cambridge MA & London UK

Four pictures

Greenbank: They've cleared some of the brush

Greenbank: They’ve cleared some of the brush

The crowns of the trees fill the train window,

trees with the heavy and rounded rain clouds.

With but I mean not removable from

birch, ilex, hornbeam, lime and oak.

Then a swell of willow, crack willow or white willow,

a river bordered by crack willow.

Greenbank: They’ve cleared some of the brush

from the railway berm.

Fresh clean cut of the sapling stumps.

As the train lurches forward—stubble fields,

hedges, an uncut field of wheat.

A white farm building stands out against the green.

Summer evening landscape, Lleida-Camp de Tarragona, July 22, 2018

Summer evening landscape, Lleida-Camp de Tarragona

as the train speeds up,

grass and hay fields, some

in dun stubble, some green as Ireland;

old blacktop roads,

knolls in the distance like

barrows          wild cane,

reeds, umbrella pines,

canals, and well tended

kitchen gardens or orchards;

eroded railway ditch walls and

stacks of lumber beside

a solar panel company

cumulus cloud shapes—champagne

corks or chariot dragons—

then the pine covered hills

with their cultivated plots

in a dip of plain—olive trees, maize,

fruit trees, wheat

summer heats up the shallows

summer heats up the shallows

still dew in the grass

catalpa leaf in sunwash

summer heats up the shallows

warms the deep water as we cross

toes feeling carefully

for each cool stone

Post data

The drawing, I'd intended to add, is in charcoal and Conté. I wanted to concentrate on the contour before moving into the facial features, clothing folds, etc. Anyway, it's a step toward what I'm after in this type of work....

Drawing in progress

Two nudes

1. 

tensió torsió força salt endavant mar ones de muscle parar el moviment fora de balanç sense gravetat fixa fitxa sobre la plata(forma) fora del control interior dintre de la veu

Translation:

tension torsion spring forward sea waves of muscle stop the movement off balance archive on the pllat(form) out of control internal inside the voice

 

2. 

joia crit energia amb contraforça gravetat dividit entre els espais energètics pivot fulla sobre el vert números de la corda línia

Translation:

joy cry energy with counterforce gravity divided among the energy spaces pivot leaf across the green numbers of the cord line

composition

 composition

contour drawing before winter’s early

dusk

mostly old news          modernism’s collage

post now in the pretext hogging

ink

why nib curve cradling          the shout

one more line possibly a caesura

here it is

Dalloway Day

In keeping with today’s first ever Dalloway Day, honouring Virginia Woolf and her work, I offer a short text below. This is adapted from a section of my article “On Not Knowing Text”: Towards Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,” originally published in Left Out: Texts and Ur-Texts (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2009). Extensive thanks to the IDEA Editorial Board and the Reading Committee for all their help. They are named here https://idea-udl.org/recent-books-by-idea-members-ouvrages-recentes-didea/ and also here https://jsbak.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/lo-front_matter.pdf

Happy Dalloway Day!

Mrs Dalloway has often been considered to be a parody of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Both books have lead protagonists that, like Odysseus, travel in single-day time frames.* As Ralph Freedman noted, Mrs Dalloway is “an ‘anti-novel’ in the true sense of the term because its portrayal of the act of knowledge subverts the conventionally accepted qualities of the novel which are focused on the intercourse between men [sic] and worlds.”**

We find, for example, Einstein and Mendelian theory named early in the novel (page 24)*** in conjunction with an airplane being watched by a crowd of people—“a symbol” the novel tells us “of man’s (sic) soul.”

Woolf’s use of allusions and quotations in Mrs Dalloway (Modernism loved intertextuality) is already well developed in her short story collection Monday or Tuesday (1919). And she refers to the development of her experimental techniques in a 1920 diary entry: “Conceive,” the Diary invites its implied readers, “Mark on the Wall, K[ew] G[ardens] and Unwritten Novel (sic) taking hands and dancing in unity.” And later in the same entry Woolf notes: “I must still grope and experiment but this afternoon I had a gleam of light” (Diary II, 14).

Woolf is apparently referring here to the use of parody or intertextuality, clearly seeking some novelistic gain in depth or texture. In “Kew Gardens” for example we find an emphasis on the microcosm/macrocosm duality as fragments from the conversations of different characters are presented while the external narrative voice of the story ekphrastically registers changes in the intensity of the natural daylight, sometimes through the imagined perception of a snail.

Woolf’s modern attitudes toward science and nature were influenced not only by people like Roger Fry and Bertrand Russell but also by such publications as The Athenaeum and The Times Literary Supplement, as Michael Whitworth has noted.**** The other two stories mentioned above similarly play with perception/cognition. And while it is true that none of the devices used in these avant-textes is new, Woolf’s handling of them demonstrates an extremely high technical ability.

As this ability grew, similar invocations of scientific understandings of luminance and color perception like that found in “Kew Gardens” would continue to be used. Both Mrs Dalloway and pre-textual “Kew Gardens” mark major literary turning points.

*See Molly Hoff, “The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs Dalloway,” Twentieth Century Literature 45:2, Summer 1999.

**Freedman, R. The Lyrical Novel… Princeton UP, 1971.

***Woolf, V. Mrs Dalloway. London, Penguin, 1969.

****Whitworth, M.H.  In The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2000, 146-63.

In advance of Dalloway Day

Paula Maggio and many other readers of Virginia Woolf's vast palimpsest have been talking about the coming premiere of Dalloway Day, an international celebration of the British author's work which will be held annually.

One of Paula's recent posts may be found here

https://bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com//06/16/woolf-walking-writing-in-london-in-advance-of-dallowayday/

Given what the works of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group stand for, I just wanted to voice my approval of the creation of the Day and commend the ongoing work byWoolfians to promote Bloomsbury's contribution to Modernist arts and sciences.

Wednesday, 20 June 2018 marks the first occasion, and I'll post again then. Meanwhile ... Advance Happy Dalloway Day to all!

Só qui só (2)

Further experimentation with Joan Timoneda's poem ..... The major differences in version 2 (below) are the use of contracted "I'm" in stanzas one and three; omitted "I" before "see myself"; and the last line reversal. I have ideas for a third version which would make more radical changes. Not sure yet whether to do it ...

Só qui só

Só qui só, que no só io,

Puix mudat d’amor me só.

Io crec cert que res no sia,

o, si só, só fantasia,

o algun home que somia

que ve alcançar algun do,

puix mudat d’amor me só.

Só del tot transfigurat;

só aquell que era llibertat,

i ara d’amors cativat

me veig molt fora raó,

puix mudat d’amor me só.

Sí só, puix que en lo món vixc

i a mi mateix avorrixc,

i segons que discernixc

veig la qui em dóna passió

puix d’amor mudat me só.

                                                                                          Joan Timoneda, 1556

My translation (version 1):

I am who I am

I am who I am, I am not I,

for by love changed am I.

I well believe that nothing is,

and, if I am, I’m fantasy,

or some man who dreams

he may attain some gift,

for by love I’m changed.

I am fully transfigured;

I am who was freedom,

and now by loves made captive

I see myself gone mad,

for by love am I changed.

Yet I am, for in the world I do live

And do weary even myself,

and by my discerning

do see her who fires my passion

for by love changed am I.

My translation (version 2):

I am who I am

I’m who I am, I am not I,

for by love changed am I.

I well believe that nothing is,

and, if I am, I’m fantasy,

or some man who dreams

he may attain some gift,

for by love I’m changed.

I’m fully transfigured;

I’m who was freedom,

and now by loves made captive

see myself gone mad,

for by love am I changed.

Yet I am, for in the world I do live

And do weary even myself,

and by my discerning

do see her who fires my passion

for I’m changed by love.

Só qui só

In partial celebration of Barcelona's Poetry Week, which starts today, I'm posting the following in-process translation of Joan Timoneda's "Só qui só." The original text, many will already know, is also sung by Raimon and of course available on YouTube among other places. Information on the poetry week is abundant online. Wikipedia has information about Timoneda (~1518.83) but as far as I can see only in Catalan and Spanish. The poem:

Só qui só

Só qui só, que no só io,

Puix mudat d’amor me só.

Io crec cert que res no sia,

o, si só, só fantasia,

o algun home que somia

que ve alcançar algun do,

puix mudat d’amor me só.

Só del tot transfigurat;

só aquell que era llibertat,

i ara d’amors cativat

me veig molt fora raó,

puix mudat d’amor me só.

Sí só, puix que en lo món vixc

i a mi mateix avorrixc,

i segons que discernixc

veig la qui em dóna passió

puix d’amor mudat me só.

                                                                                          Joan Timoneda, 1556

My translation (version 1):

I am who I am

I am who I am, I am not I,

for by love changed am I.

I well believe that nothing is,

and, if I am, I’m fantasy,

or some man who dreams

he may attain some gift,

for by love I’m changed.

I am fully transfigured;

I am who was freedom,

and now by loves made captive

I see myself gone mad,

for by love am I changed.

Yet I am, for in the world I do live

And do weary even myself,

and by my discerning

do see her who fires my passion

for by love changed am I.

Note on "Conferential"

As a note to what I wrote yesterday, let me add that Sebeok’s article is still available online. It should come up easily by searching on “Semiotics and the biological sciences initial conditions Thomas A Sebeok” without the quotation marks. If not, I note the link below. Sebeok’s mention of Lotman goes:

The Russian master, Yuri Lotman, has […] taken the boldly original step of doing away with the concept of a “bridge” altogether, replacing it by the semiotically sensitie manoeuvre of transcoding. A main principle of his research method was the elimination of the opposition between the exact sciences and the humanities by treating the fabrics of these complementary domains as if they were readily transmutable from one semiotic system to another (Lotman 1990:271).

Lotman 1990 etc. is the 1990 publication Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Study of Culture.

One of the links to the Sebeok article:

 http://livingbooksaboutlife.org/pdfs/sebeok.pdf

Conferential

In her essay on Walter Sickert, Virginia Woolf tells readers that writing and painting have much to tell each other. Many people of course are already aware of this fact, but the authority of a writer like Woolf brings the truth home in new ways. But my aim in mentioning this is to call attention to the shared edification one gets from a different kind of reading, which is the conversational exchanges of scientific conferences—scientific in the wide sense, a sense Nietzsche at least would have promoted. Lotman too, and this updates, regards the humanities and the exact sciences on equal footing. The master, Thomas Sebeok calls him in an article I unfortunately seem to have mis placed. In any event talking at conferences both formally and informally spurs freedom of speech. Tout simplement. They stay in touch and in many ways promote a more global social sense. Which takes us back to that writing/painting mot.........

Virginia Woolf's Reading Notebooks

It will no doubt be recalled that this year marks another e-first (if I may so….) in that Google Doodles honored Virginia Woolf’s achievements on the occasion of her 136^th birthday. So in the context of new publishing technologies that achievement gets bigger.

And this new event is now followed by free online access to Brenda Silver’s great contribution to Woolf scholarship, Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton UP, 1983). As Paula Maggio notes on Blogging Woolf, this new availability is “in multiple digital formats.”

Well worth a look for interested readers……. The link:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/publishing/books/silver-virginia-1983/

Industrial machinery

Views from photographs taken in Cardona--the Salt Mountain. Thinking of the robotic aspects of industry......

Of time and the river...

Lleida, 1 April 2018-- Seeking color

Buntings (2)

Later, thinking along the same lines as my text of 25 March, it occurred to me that effectively the graying brought about by the camera’s flash is like a broken color effect between two complementary colors. Then a comment by Helen Frankenthaler about her paintings came to mind, “I carry my landscape around with me.” Or words to that effect. I’m not sure I’ve put down her exact words. In any case, here are a few of my own chasings.