Stingy Kids

Baseball: Blog All Open Tabs

Lately, my musings on baseball have turned to the connection between religious reliquary and baseball memorabilia. Here are some links that touch on this subject and others that don't: 

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With baseball cards somewhat passe nowadays, these connoisseurs came to the auction to buy genuine, "game-used" equipment and paraphernalia straight from the clubhouse, complete with "letters of authenticity" from experts, family members and previous owners. "The closer you get to the player, the better," explained Leland's chairman, Joshua Evans. "Lots of use is desirable." 

(Dispatches and a Fan Gets a Souvenir) 

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Earliest Baseball Relic Found 

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The catcher hits for .318 and catches every day 

The pitcher puts religion first and rests on holidays 

He goes into cathedrals and lies prostrate on the floor 

He knows the drink affects his speed he’s praying for a doorway 

Back into the life he wants and the confession of the bench 

Life outside the diamond is a wrench 

("Piazza, New York Catcher," Belle and Sebastian)

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NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture

"NINE studies all historical aspects of baseball, centering on the societal and cultural implications of the game wherever in the world it is played. The journal features articles, essays, book reviews, biographies, oral history, and short fiction pieces."

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Dale Thayer Debuts, Becomes a Cult Figure:

"The score presented the opportunity for Thayer to get some work in, and holy heavens did he ever. When the camera flashed to Thayer, the first and only thing anyone noticed was the miraculous mustache, one with roots all the way to Mecca and back. This my friends, should be on scouting reports."

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And this gem by Stephen Jay Gould:

Baseball (as the codified form of a large variety of basically similar stick-and-ball games) has, like the poor, always been with us. Teams, leagues, and various lists of "official" rules had coalesced by the mid-nineteenth century, but Jane Austen refers to something called "base ball" in her 1797 novel Northanger Abbey, and various contests based on hitting a ball with a stick and scoring by running around bases came to America in the early days of European colonization and then grew and diversified as the nation expanded and knit together.

(Baseball's reliquary: the oddly possible hybrid of shrine and university)

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Online discussion spaces about baseball skew heavily male, some of them exclusively so. It is a routine tactic to express one’s hatred of one’s rivals in effeminacy terms, impugning their manhood, implying that they are like those lesser creatures: women. T-shirts abound: A-Rod Sucks Randy’s Johnson, Derek Jeter Drinks Wine Coolers. Success is masculinity; a pitcher’s ability to intimidate correlates positively with the size of his testicles. Sometimes, as a female fan, it is hard to express one’s opinion about a player without being accused of romantic feelings.

It does get tiresome after a while, looking into the mirror of the fandom and not seeing my own reflection. 

(Veejane Acheson, "The Abomination of the Pink Baseball Cap")

Mike Brant

Mike Brant was an Israeli singer who became a pop sensation in France.  He sang in French for the most part but apparently learned the language along the way.  In a French documentary that I came across on YouTube (and can no longer locate), I learned that Brant used to have French songs transliterated into Hebrew to aid his pronunciation.  Here are two screen shots that illustrate how this was done:

This and That, Part 1

One Day Poem Pavilion by Jiyeon Song

As the sun passes over the sky, light filters through strategically placed holes in the "pavilion," casting lines of a poem on the ground.  If you watch the time lapse video, you'll notice that the lines of the poem also move, becoming clearer and then fading.  The poem, which Gizmodo describes as "cheesy," is a Sijo written by the eighteenth-century Korean poet Kim Ch'on-taek.  Song is a student at the Art Center College of Design in California. (via Monster-Munch with thanks to Jennifer13)   

Two Portraits: Bia de' Medici and A Child with a Drawing

The first portrait is by the sixteenth century Italian painter Agnolo Bronzino.  It was commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici after the death of Bia, his illegitimate daughter.  Cosimo I never revealed her mother's name but he was very devoted to his daughter and greatly mourned her when she died of a fever at the age of six.  This is one of my favorite paintings, and I had the chance to see it at the Uffizi several years ago.  The light appears to emanate from her face, a kind of "halo" effect, which is due in part to the fact that Bronzino produced her likeness from her death mask.  This portrait became one Bronzino's most celebrated paintings and inspired Joseph Cornell's "Medici Princess."

The second portrait is by the sixteenth-century Italians painter Giovanni Francesco Caroto.  The child isn't identified but the stick-figure drawing that the child holds proudly feels timeless.  Is the drawing a self-portrait? The child's parent?  Or the child's depiction of Caroto?  The painting is in the permanent collection of the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona. The museum features the painting on its website and gives its title as "Giovane con disegno di pupazzo."  "Disegno di pupazzo" means, I think, "doll design" (in this seventeenth century Italian-English dictionary "púpa" is defined as "a baby or puppet like a girle") but the title may have come later. 

Neck Dimples

"If your listener protrudes the tip of the tongue through closed lips, take heed. Humans are like other primates in which this expression has been studied. It's always a negative. Think misunderstanding. Uncertainty. Disagreement." ("Body language in the office speaks louder than words")

*throws hands in the air*  In this context, that means "this article has problems."  The one problem I'll note is that it rests on the assumptions that body language means the same thing in all work places and that all work places are the same.  In this day and age, I think that the one thing that we can assume is that business interactions are likely to be cross-cultural and multilingual, so the author's generalizations of the scholarship cited are unfortunate. I actually know one of the scholars quoted in the article and I can bet that he or she had no idea it was going to be this silly.  What made reading this worthwhile was a link to The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs & and Body Language Cues.

Demolition

Last week, Geegaw and I attended Anne Carson's reading/performance of "Cassandra Float Can" and "Possessive Used As Drink (Me)" at the 92nd St Y.  Geegaw paid far better attention than I did, so I'll point you to her summary of both performances.

Cassandra Float Can

"a sensation of veils flying up...call this sensation Cassandra"

"not translatable but not meaningless"

This was a hypnotic and distracting performance.  While Anne Carson spoke in soothing tones, several individuals dressed in black walked along the stage and through the aisles carrying large prints of architectural images.  Some of these images were also projected on a large screen.  Carson spoke about the relation between Cassandra and translation.  According to Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of the Trojan King Priam and was cursed with a gift of prophecy that no one would believe.  After the Trojan War, she was taken by Agamemnon and, in one of the most incredible scenes in literature (which I've only read in English), she stands at the threshold of his home, foresees what awaits her inside, and cries out to the spectators "Otototoi popoi da Opollon Opollon."  Carson's entire performance hinges on this one phrase.  The on line Ancient Greek lexicon that I consulted interprets "otototoi" as a cry of dismay, alarm, awe. Its translation varies.  But it's also worth speculating, as Carson and other scholars do, if it is even Greek in origin.  What language is Cassandra speaking at this moment?  Is she simply emitting sounds of dread or speaking in another tongue?  Either way, how does one translate this cry?  Is there even anything to translate? The skepticism of the chorus provokes a fascinating exchange on language and translation:

CASSANDRA: I tell you you'll see Agamemnon dead.
CHORUS MEMBER: Poor girl, calm yourself. Tone down those words.
CASSANDRA: No—no one can heal what my words prophesy.
CHORUS: Not if they're true. But may the gods forbid!
CASSANDRA: While you pray here, others move in to kill.
CHORUS LEADER: What man is going to commit such crimes?
CASSANDRA: What man? You've completely missed the point.
You've failed to understand my prophecies.
CHORUS LEADER: Yes I have—
I don't see who has means to do it.
CASSANDRA: Yet I can speak Greek well enough.
CHORUS LEADER: So does the oracle at Delphi,
but understanding what it says is hard.

(translation by Ian Johnston)

We learn later in the performance that many of these circulating images are part of what remains of Gordon Matta-Clark's "building cuts," large scale art works that often consisted of cutting holes and creating fissures in abandoned buildings or structures slated for demolition.  It seems that inevitable destruction is the connection between Matta-Clark's buildings and Cassandra's threshold.  Cassandra stands before Agamemnon's home and envisions its ruin.  It's completely unavoidable.  Her speeches to the chorus before she enters the house are stunning in their lyrical power but they are useless.  Cassandra could have stepped inside without a word but, instead, she gives prophecy another try, though she's fully aware that she won't be understood.  She's casting a light that no one will see until it's over.  Like the light in those remaining, surviving images of Matta-Clark's "cuts." 

Possessive Used As Drink (Me): a lecture in the form of 15 sonnets

"Poet Anne Carson proves that even the lowly subject of pronouns can be delicious." (via Play Gallery)

1. Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony: Part I; Part II; Part III
2. Sonnet Isolate
3. Recipe
4. Sonnet of Addressing Gertrude Stein
5. Sonnet of Addressing God
6. Merce Sonnet
7. Sonnet of Addressing Oscar Wilde
8. Deictic Quiz Sonnet: Parts I through VI
9. Drop't Sonnet
10. Sonnet of the Pronoun Event
11. Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences from the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Émile Benveniste's Problems in General Linguistics (Paris 1966)
12. Reticent Sonnet
13. Sonnet of "We Tried Doing It Without The Cue Sheet But Couldn't Remember What Color Referred To What Movement And What Had Been Done And What Was Left To Do"
14. Sonnet of the English-Made Cabinet with Drawers (in prose)
15. Crowning Sonnet (Fashioned from the Foregoing 14 by Chance Operations)

I've included links to video excerpts of this performance. 

Jeff Buckley on Translating Song Lyrics

This week Jeff Buckley's 1994 cover version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" reached #1 on iTunes.  Jason Castro's recent performance of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" on American Idol most likely sparked this interest in the song--Simon Cowell had nothing but praise for Castro's rendition--but a comprehensive essay by Michael Barthel also made its way to some high traffic websites.  If you are a fan of "Hallelujah" or simply interested in the cultural history of cover songs, I recommend Barthel's essay, which includes an analysis of how the song has been used in TV/film.  I followed the link trail to an My Old Kentucky Blog  post full of great covers of the song, including a version in Hebrew by Noam Peled.  There are many covers of "Hallelujah" in other languages, though I can't assess whether the lyrics are translations or transformations.  The Welsh band Brigyn performs a version ("Haleliwia") that completely alters the lyrics (see the comments on the video I link to for a translation).  On the other hand, Cohen reworked the song a few times, altering words and lines along the way, so the original lyrics themselves weren't static.  Buckley was sceptical of translation, as this excerpt from a November 1994 interview for the the Japanese magazine Rockin' On shows.  The interviewer Steve Harris observes that the Japanese edition of Grace doesn't include Japanese translations of the English lyrics, which apparently is customary for Japanese releases of non-Japanese music.  Buckley replies that he requested that the translations not be included because "they wouldn't be accurate":

S: Oh. In other words, you don't want a literal rendering.

JB: Yeah. It was just a last minute... It just took five minutes to decide. I went "Eh, no, I hate 'em." Like I hate it when... I mean it took fucking... It took many translators to get Rilke down to a real, cool, honest, accurate, poetic translation from German to English. Stephen Mitchell apparently has the latest "Letters To a Young Poet" and "Duino Elegies", they're all Stephen Mitchell. Somehow, he happened upon, in his heart, he's been able to translate. But I would have to work with a special, Japanese friend, who knows me. I just wouldn't want to... It would just be unfair to the Japanese people, because the songs are important to me. I couldn't just knock off a Japanese rendering, and have it be accurate. I'd have to know Japanese. It might take two pages to fill just the one English thing, because Japanese language, I was told is... Well you know. You're in Japan.

S: [laughs] Yeah.

JB: But, no.. I get all those fucking... That Sufi, the Qawalli Sufi poetry that's brought into... English translation is so dry and disgusting. Eccch. I hate English translations of things like Mexican, Spanish, and Urdu from Pakistan, and French, which is so... just the identity itself... just the logic of the language is so filled with innuendo, and puns, and stuff like that. You just can't catch it. You have to experience that language. So I thought it wouldn't be wise. It wasn't a precious thing. I just thought it wouldn't do any good.

S: So you think that just the Japanese listener, left to his own devices will get more from the...

JB: Yeah.

S: The music as a result?

JB: Yeah. And find out about it over years, to find out what it means to them.

JB: I just thought I was just doing the right thing.

[from Mojo Pin]

Senior Thesis

Scott Elmegreen, a soon-to-be graduate of Princeton University, wrote two senior theses this year (I barely cranked out one!).  "Wrote" isn't exactly the right word.  One could also say that he "composed" his senior thesis.  But that's not quite right either.  Emlegreen, a music major with a certificate in creative writing, wrote and composed his senior theses, both of which explore the relation between music and the written word.  For his music thesis, Elmegreen wrote a story titled "Flowers Pick Themselves," which tells the tale of Spencer and Adie, two teenagers in love in a world that treats love like a disease.  It's sixteen pages long and includes a music file at the end of each page.  The audio track begins playing the moment the page loads and, with few exceptions, timed well with the pace of my reading (or, arguably, the music set my pace).  As I read and listened to this story, I was thinking about tone, which in literature usually refers to the "mood" that a text conveys.  But it makes sense to return aurality and music to literature.  I imagine that before writing, the modulations of a storyteller's voice, his or her pitch, volume, cadence and pace, set the "tones" of a work.  At a poetry reading, I'm always struck by the voice of a poet and how his or her reading of a work adds something that wasn't visible to me on the written page.  A shift in mood, sometimes.  But live readings also risk presenting a work in a way that destroys it for me.  I remember in high school reading Dorothy Parker's poem "Penelope" and falling in love with its melancholy, lonely mood/tone.  So I was horrified when my English teacher read the poem out loud as a sarcastic, humorous piece.  It was like the poem had split in two.  To this day, I hear echoes of her voice when I read the poem. 

For his second project, Elmegreen wrote a novel titled Reveille, which also features Spencer and Adie.  In this work, the thoughts of some of the protagonists sometimes appear as musical notes.  In the novel, music is visible, textual.  For someone like me, who has a very poor musical background, the musical notes wouldn't "say" anything to me, at least not initially.  That is, I wouldn't be able to read them and I certainly wouldn't be able to translate them into sounds.  This makes me think of a wonderful scene in Milos Forman's Amadeus in which Salieri glances at the unfinished score for the Requiem Mass and hears the music in his head.  When I see a note, I just see it, a dot anchored to space by a vertical line.  But at any rate, the presence or intrusion of a musical score in a novel would create a pause, a moment in which I have a choice as a reader to skip ahead or to try to dig in and try to imagine what is being conveyed by those lines and dots.  In "Flowers Pick Themselves" there is a clearer distinction between music and written language, quite simply because you can hear the music as you are reading.  But here the challenge for me was to listen to the music not as an accompaniment but as this other layer of language that was also very much a part of the text.  At the top of each page there is an image of a rose that fades as you read.  This flower seems to suggest that the visibility of text, on which our reading relies, is  itself tenuous, vulnerable, temporary  Imagine if your favorite story suddenly vanished one day.  Would you be able to recite it by heart?  Or does its existence rely entirely on being a word on a page?

I'm excited to see what Elmegreen does in the future with these and other works.  Another Princeton student, Josh Williams, also wrote a senior thesis that has been getting some buzz. Both Elmegreen and Williams were advised by Joyce Carol Oates, who worked with Jonathan Safran Foer on his creative writing thesis, which became the novel Everything is Illuminated. 

The Mechanics of Wonder

I saw an experiment many years ago on television where they had a little man-made robot arm, like those things on the fairgrounds, where the hand reaches in to a bunch of candies, picks them up, and then moves it over, and always manages to drop it before it gets to you. You know those things. And then it drops it, and then it reaches over again, picks up another one, and this was a machine that was on an assembly line that was doing this. And they said, "This is really clever, because we've managed to simulate the human hand, and it can pick it up and take it over there and drop it." But one thing that struck me was, when all the candies had gone, the hand didn't know...The hand kept going, picking up some air, and dropping it. And came back for some more air. Now we would know that. This dumb hand didn't. And more than that, my fingers, the sensors on the ends of my fingers, the thousands of little sensors, would be able to differentiate between a leaf and a tabletop, or a shirt, or a t-shirt and a pullover. That's how sophisticated we are. And we take it for granted! We go, "Yeah, well, it's the end of my fingers!" So you see what I'm saying. I have a sense of wonder...I have that sense of wonder about, "Wow, man, how could I dream a melody?...It's magical."

(Pitchfork, Interview: Sir Paul McCartney)

Bell, Stradivari and Bach in 2007

Music critic Rythmik generously offered to share his reading of the Joshua Bell experiment as a guest post, a first for Stingy Kids. The italicized quotes are from the Washington Post article "Pearls for Breakfast." If you haven't read this article yet, I suggest you take a look at it before reading Rythmik's critique.

Ok, well first of all. Joshua Bell is indeed an excellent violinist. As absurd as his little experiment was, we can’t deny him the recognition he’s earned. Serious music reaches a musical level in which an average listener’s mere opinions of like and dislike are no longer relevant. For instance, it’s not hard for anyone to love the sound of a Stradivarius, but if someone were to say that they don’t like it, well then simply put….they just don’t understand. True in this day and age it is now important for those involved in serious music to accept the theory that a casual listener doesn’t have to be musically knowledgeable in order to appreciate. However, as soon as the listener begins stating what is “good” or “bad”, we see that a musical understanding was needed from the start. And that is really the heart of the whole issue at hand.

So the Washington Post attempted to essentially make fools of the general public, mind you the music listening public, modern day American culture, and in the end Joshua Bell concert ticket holders. I think that all they succeeded in doing was waking up the classical/serious music world to their own ignorance rather than waking us up to ours. In “an unblinking assessment of public taste…would beauty transcend?” I ask, should it?

When Gabo Met Shakira

A recent Washington Post article on the Colombian pop star (and SK favorite) Shakira ("Sense and Sensuality"), predictably quoted from Gabriel García Márquez's 1999 profile of the artist.  I'm ashamed to say, however, that until a couple of days ago I myself had not read it.  A quick online search brought up the original Spanish version, published in the Colombian paper Cambio in June 1999.  I read it ravenously, mentally translating into English, as I tend to do when I really like what I'm reading and already anticipate sharing it with non-Hispanophones.  But then it hit me: Certainly, an article this well known already exists in English translation?  Indeed it does--sort of.

On June 8, 2002 the Guardian, a UK newspaper, published an article in English titled "The poet and the princess."  The subhead reads: "They are the greatest Colombians: Shakira, pop phenomenon, and Gabriel García Márquez, novelist.  Naturally, they had to meet--and he, the magical realist, was astonished by her fantastical work-rate."  Ignoring the ridiculous pun on "fantastical" and the over-used modifier "magical realist," what struck me about this subhead is that it suggests a contemporaneous "encounter" between "the poet and the princess," meaning one that occurred at around the date of publication.  Naturally, I assumed that what the Guardian editors meant was that "they had to meet" again, in addition to their 1999 meeting.  I started reading the English article and instantly recognized it as a translation of the 1999 interview, though no mention of a translator is made. 

This didn't make any sense to me.  This famous interview took place in 1999, so how can the article pretend to situate it in 2002?  The Spanish original makes several references to topical events--a benefit in Colombia for the victims of the 1999 Armenia earthquake, preparation for Shakira's first English-language album (the one that became Laundry Service), her current single-status, and others--so there's no way, I'm thinking, that any of this could pass as 2002.  But the editors of the Guardian had anticipated this chronological shift and their solution was, in my view, highly problematic, if not unethical. 

Basics Made New

My brother sent me the following quote ("I put the part I thought could apply to literature/translation in bold"):

Mozart belongs, like Bach, to the rare species of the conservative revolutionaries, or the revolutionary conservatives. We have seen that in the days when oblique parallels between music history and the history of the pictoral arts were favored, Mozart was compared with Raphael. But this is one of the most oblique of all parallels. For what Michelangelo said of Raphael is true: one sees in this young man what study can accomplish. Raphael's is an ideal, calligraphic, soaring perfection in which the soul is not involved. Mozart, too, was a great learner but his soul was never uninvolved. He took over a complete language, and used it in new combinations, giving it's words new meanings, to say things that were at once old and new, unknown and thrice known. Thus a great poet uses but the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, and without devising a single new word gives voice to thoughts undreamed-of.--Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, His Work, 1945, Oxford University Press

This is a great passage! In writing, common words become uncommon in their relation to other words. But also, when it comes to writing, so much is in the arrangement of words on a page (or screen), the space between the letters, the font and kerning, the width of the margins. These relations shift meaning, redistribute weight.