Italian music in Dakota

Уолт Уитмен

Итальянская музыка в Дакоте.

В вечернем воздухе, обволакивая
Скалы, леса, форт, орудия, шагающих часовых, бесконечные пустоши
Прозрачными потоками, флейтами и корнетами,
Волнующая, задумчивая, бурная
(И все же уместно звучащая даже здесь, получающая новый смысл,
Даже более изысканный, чем раньше, - как будто бы она возникла тут,
А не в богатом городском доме и не в сверкающей опере;
Звуки, отзвуки, блуждающие мотивы словно бы дома тут:
И невинная любовь Сомнамбулы, и боль Тоски,
И твой, Полиевкт, исступленный хор),
Лучащаяся в желтом косом закате, -
Музыка, итальянская музыка в Дакоте.

И Природа, владычица пожухлой реальности,
Выглядывая из своей мрачной лощины,
Признавая родство, пусть и отдаленное
(Так старый корень признаёт своим цветок или фрукт),
Слушает с наслаждением.

Original: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/italian-music-in-dakota/

Animal Review

Blog that totally made my day (almost two days, to be precise; thanks to wonderful poet Alexey Tsvetkov for the link): http://animalreview.wordpress.com. It's actually a collection of very funny and erudite reviews of, as one can guess, different animals, with subsequent rating of said animals. Among the best ones are hilarious garden snail review full of reproaches upon lame Evolution (no, it's not an auto review, again) self-indulgence, an Ode to Dung Beetle and a solid advice for zebras to move to Wisconsin for obvious marketing reasons. Authors (seems there are two of them) are having a book in print soon with some new animals being reviewed; hopefully they'll put new reviews on the website anytime soon too.
Ciao!

Lost in translation

If you have taste for "the best words in the best order", i.e. poetry, here is one of the most beautiful pieces of poetry i've ever read. "Lost in translation" by James Merrill was written in 1970s; it's blank verse with rubayat insertions. The poem is about a boy who spends one summer with his french (not so french as we get to know later) governess waiting for the delivery of a puzzle from NY and then assembling that puzzle with her.
The poem itself is a puzzle; it is wrought with a rare craftsmanship and the details of this puzzle are of rare beauty indeed. The spiritism seance where the medium divines the piece of puzzle which boy has stolen from the set years ago and kept with him his whole life; boy's misinterpretation of mademoiselle's letter concerning his parents future divorce; shadows of Valery and Rilke travelling through the poem. Even the remembering of the details of the poem is a pleasant affair.
Links that are very helpful for getting the nuances: wiki, collection of reviews (very good) and a good translation by Grigoriy Kruzhkov for russian audience (i'm still pretending that someone is actually reading this entry, very funny)
Enjoy!

The unique universe by Lee Smolin

In his very entertaining article , Lee Smolin argues against the "timeless multiverse" concept (i.e. that our universe is merely one of the many probability-driven universes) and explains why Newtonian physical schema fails when applied to the study of the universe as a whole. In Newtonian schema, there is a notion of "configuration space", i.e. of the set of possible states of a given system. To find a law, we set some initial conditions, run some experiments, change the conditions, run the experiments again and thus distil the laws that are independent of these conditions (and in some sense independent of time since time in this scheme is being used only as a "parameter on a trajectory in configuration space"). But in case of the cosmology that tries to find laws for the whole universe, there is no such thing as initial conditions, and there is no possibility to repeat experiment to find out what belongs to "law" and what is conditional. Thus, history of universe as a whole becomes not one of the possible trajectories of configuration space but essentially laws of physics itself.
Funny how it reflects McLuhan's "medium is the message" concept, btw.
Discussion below the article is quite interesting, too.

Alex Chilton

One of the greatest songwriters of rock music died yesterday, thus finalizing the history of "Big Star", a band that, while essentially unnoticed during its existence (kudos to morons from recording/distributing companies) in mid 70s, went on to become a hugely influential act (think R.E.M, Replacements, Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream, The Posies, Ellioth Smith etc. etc.) and the quintessential listening for anyone who has a taste for clever pop music and perfect melodies. Their music is of the kind that is far better to listen to that to talk about, so just do it.

BTW, for what it's worth, i had a dream a couple of days ago that involved music of "Big Star", and thought of relistening their albums (which i do quite regularly).
Thanks for the music, man!

Mark Linkous commited suicide

His music is (let me use this plain word) very sad. He apparently suffered from a depression and commited suicide. He made 4 albums in a period of 15 years, and all four are very good. Those are simple statements. Fwiw, there are 13 pages of comments about his death at his last.fm page shoutbox and only 6 pages for all the previous years.
Oh yeah, he was better known under the moniker Sparklehorse.
Interesting detail about all this: Rolling Stone states that "In 1996, Linkous actually died for two minutes after ingesting a dangerous mix of Valium and antidepressants while on tour in the U.K." and that in a later interview he said: “I was really scared that when I technically died (...) the part of my brain that allowed me my ability to write songs would be damaged”.
That reminds me of two akin situations that had happened before. First, there was eminent russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev, whose first concern after he had recovered from a serious illness was if he was still able to think clearly, if his brain functions were ok; second, after great writer Jorje Luis Borges (about 70-80 years later than Tyutchev) recovered from a near deadly head injury, his first concern was if he still could read and, then, write. I guess it shows what universal narrowness of specialization means. Pretty soon you'll find yourself wondering if you still can make that inverted d 350 APM bunny hop while lying on a deathbed. Gosh!


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Now playing: Gasoline Horseys - foobar2000
via FoxyTunes

Vladimir Kozlov, "School"

In spite of the fact that Russia (especially its periphery) has been plunged into gopnik subculture for 25 years now (one can argue it's actually 30 or 40), still little has been said and written about it, and phenomenon goes for the most part unnoticed by the beaux-arts. Granted, there are some films and books, but they usually offer either "intelligent" take on the theme, picturing gopniks as your by the book villains, or "quasi-romantic" take, where you have them as russian blood and soil heroes (the latter stance is explored by trash art, for example). So it's always interesting to read a guy who has something to say about everyday life of teenagers (late 80s in our case) without proving any moral point or making himself look good.
"School" was written in early 00s (it's Kozlov's second book, the first one being a collection of stories straightforwardly called "Gopniks"); it portrays works and days of a labour class guy from Mogilev (present-day Belarus), his works consisting of visiting school and local factory for practice, and his days - of roaming about the block, drinking "ink"(cheap fruit wine) with homies and trying to pick up with girls. Stiff educational patterns of the falling apart empire and mass alcoholism, first sex and lame football fandom, "Ласковый Май" ("Tender May") and "Кино" ("Kino") on the cassette tape, school bus excursion to Saint-Petersburg with significant predominance of shopping and drinking over sightseeing, - somewhat predictable but still exciting set of topics.
Some reviewer compared Kozlov's text to "The catcher in the rye". It's incorrect, of course. "School" is far less introspective (actually it's not introspective at all, sometimes it has almost naturalistic feel about it) than Salinger's book, far more verbose and doesn't seek to go beyond the honest and simple description of everyday's life. But it's good at what it is; the style is concise, slang is abundant and well-used, plot is all but absent and no moral lessons are to be drawn.

So i decided i should totally start a blog

Hopefully it'll be a succesfull attempt to
a) start a page where i will actually be writing something with at least some level of regularity;
b) use it as a place to save my random bursts of creativity or just rare occasions when i have some thoughts that i feel like writing down instead of, well, just forgetting them.
After some deliberation it becomes clear that a) and b) are pretty much the same sentence, just differently composed, so i guess i better move on.
For the music stuff i have http://rateyourmusic.com/~fuy, so here i hope to pay more attention to the books i read and to all kinds of nonsense i find fitting to be here.
And just to set a tone, here is a wonderful Wallace Stevens' poem from which i rather straightforward took the blogs' title:

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.