A Living Text

Rachel is getting better and better at Garage Band. Her music sounds just great! Check this one out:

You Watch Me

Rachel has a site up now to podcast her songs. It’s not having a contract and touring, but it’s a baby step. Go and check it out, especially the song called “A Sign.”

In William F. Buckley’s book, Inveighing We Will Go, there is a column from 1971 where Buckley quotes a letter sent to him regarding John Lennon’s Rollling Stone interview of that year. The writer of the letter to Buckley says:

These sheep-witted Beatles, fawned on and reverently looked up to by most of the young across the earth, although their dispositions are as mean as their intelligence and their morals are as base as their lineage, I make so bold as to suggest to you, started it all, and have dealt Western Society such heavy blows that it will be a century in recovering, if, in fact, it ever does.

These men are not innocents - they are sophisticated scoundrels capable of the most swinish behavior and their influence poisoned the headwaters of the Sixties and we now see that trickling stream of history as it gathers and deepens and broadens and rolls its mighty tides of drugs and antinomian attitudes, now already engulfing what remains of civilization in a few walled towns. 

There is an interview with Laura Waters Hinson about the movie As We Forgive; read it here. She says:

Most of the murderers referred to a spiritual darkness descending upon them, and I believe that is what happened. It’s not like Nazi Germany where there were ordinary citizens who simply looked the other way. In Rwanda, it was mass killing by hundreds of thousands of people. Ordinary citizens whose kids played together, who went to the market together, and who lived together participated in this and killed each other. It happened everywhere. I think it had to have been a great spiritual darkness taking over. I remember a magazine cover that quoted a minister at the time of the genocide saying, “There are no devils left in hell, they have all gone to Rwanda.”

You have to see this link on Apple design. The source of their inspiration is obvious. Johnathan Ive is paying homage to Dieter Rams. Whatever he is doing, he needs to keep doing it!

TypeOff.

 Typography

At times I really enjoyed Keillor’s wit and insight, since I am half-Norwegian and from Minnesota. He is good at painting a picture of Lutherans and the un-emotional makeup of the Nordics who settled Minnesota. However, this book as a whole has a lot wanting. The plot meanders and goes nowhere in the end, it seems that the books is just a semi-autobiographical vehicle for Keillor to stick episodes from his life and observations of the world around him. I think it would have worked better as a series of essays or perhaps short stories.

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The characters in the book all describe other people using a ridiculous amount of detail that make them seem totally unrealistic. We are to believe that a small-town, back-woods farmer describes his ancestors using a novelists eye for detail. The descriptions of appearances and clothing are uniformly from Keillor and the characters function as puppets in his world. The voice throughout is his, he has pasted episodes together that allow him to unload his commentary on the world, the episodes themselves don’t mesh well. It seems as if the plots of books he never finished are dropped into this book as episodes from the past, narrated unbelievably by these Minnesotans. His obsession with sex is typically modern and liberal, and lessens the impact of the work.

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It is fun to see how he skewers modern public radio, I don’t know if these are his true thoughts or if he is playing the antagonist. He is quite insightful in his constant observations of a small town Midwestern mentality that is perhaps fading in our day, although I don’t know since I don’t live there anymore. But as a book, I think this effort fails.

I tell you, a Midwesterner pays a high price for good manners. As a child, you’re taught not to interrupt, but interruption is a necessary skill in any negotiation. When someone tries to lead you down the garden path, you have to say Whoa, or else he will steal the shoes off your feet. Midwesterners don’t interrupt, and they are brought up to eschew craven self-interest and to sacrifice for the common good. So they get rooked. Politeness is their undoing. There comes a point in every negotiation when you have to set the pistol on the table and say, “Stop lying to me and tell me what this will really cost.”

Someone wrote about Borges:

Borges also employed two very unusual literary forms: the literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work. Both constitute a form of modern pseudo-epigrapha.

Borges’s best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the Argentine magazine El Hogar. Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations, he also published original works after the style of the likes of Emanuel Swedenborg or The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, originally passing them off as translations of things he had come upon in his reading. Several of these are gathered in the Universal History of Infamy. He continued this pattern of literary forgery at several points in his career, for example sneaking three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero.

At times, confronted with an idea for a work that bordered on the conceptual, Borges chose — instead of following through with the idea in the obvious way, by writing a piece that fulfilled the concept — to write a review of a nonexistent work, writing as though the work had already been created by some other person. The most famous example of this is “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, which imagines a twentieth-century Frenchman who so immerses himself in the world of sixteenth-century Spain that he can sit down and create a large portion of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote verbatim, not by having memorized Cervantes’s work, but as an “original” work of his own mind. Borges’s “review” of the work of the fictional Menard effectively discusses the resonances that Don Quixote has picked up over the centuries since it was written, by way of overtly discussing how much richer Menard’s work is than Cervantes’s (verbatim identical) work.

While Borges was certainly the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, it was not his own invention. It is likely that he first encountered the idea in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist philosophical work and biography of its equally non-existent author. This Craft of Verse (p. 104), records Borges as saying that in 1916 in Geneva he “discovered — and was overwhelmed by — Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart.” In the introduction to his first published volume of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths, Borges remarks, “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.” He then cites both Sartor Resartus and Samuel Butler’s The Fair Haven, remarking, however, that “those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.” [Collected Fictions, p.67]

from my favorite singer: