"The Stars Have Cast a Net Over You" (S.J. Grady)

"The Stars Have Cast a Net Over You"
S.J. Grady

In this matrix of harmony and dissonance

the rising and falling impulses of time --

our will steers us only within

the confines of momentum and trajectory

we produce experience in the arc of chaos and intention

So quick are we, to claim the creation of our lives

as our own

to take personally the merely incidental

that we deny the universe her authorship --

and ourselves our part in that greater being

The stars have cast a net over you

and in your struggles the whole universe shakes

we feel the tug of distant thrashing

The burning lights blink on and off

but in their twinkling, a shimmering constant

S.J. Grady lives in New Zealand. A collection of his poems, Shabby Epiphanies, was published by Nikau Press (N.Z.) in 2005. This poem originally appeared online at LitKicks, September 17, 2010.

Georgia O'Keeffe, born November 15, 1887

"To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage."

Georgia O'Keeffe 

(1887-1986)

photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 1914

This just in: a nineteenth-century list of the hundred best books

Clement K. Shorter,

pictured in Vanity Fair (1894)

November is the start the inevitable best-of list-making season. With the holiday season immediately ahead, lists of books, films, and other cultural markers of a year's swift passing are a way to gently nudge the recent memory of culture-just-past. At the very least, lists are a reminder of how much annual creative effort goes unheeded, even with the best of intention and a bedside already crammed with books. (As if just reading The New York Times Book Review isn't enough already, filled with reviews of books-I-really-should-get-around-to.)

The idea of list-making of course is not new, but the amount of "great books" and "essential reading" trumpeted at years' approaching end has always been overwhelming. The Times Literary Supplement, in London, upped the ante in October: a best-of list, from 1898, of 100 essential novels from one well-meaning correspondent, certainly one whose bedside stack never contained a celebrity tell-all or pop-star confessional.

A journalist and author of numerous books on the Brontë sisters named Clement K. Shorter tried his hand at compiling the 100 Best Novels for a journal called The Bookman. The ground rules were simple: the list could feature only one novel per novelist, and living authors were excluded. The Times columnist who unearthed the list, Michael Caines, makes some well-founded remarks about the inevitable vagaries of literary taste, and about our contemporary passion for championing younger -- presumably living -- authors. 

Caines also adds some long-view comment about Shorter's choices  ("would you have chosen Silas Marner over Middlemarch?") and titles of special interest. The list is worth a browse if only to see how much there is unread, just to catch up to the 20th century.

Shorter's top 25 best books of all time,1898. The full list is at the Times Literary Supplement. 

1. Don Quixote - 1604 – Miguel de Cervantes

2. The Holy War - 1682 – John Bunyan

3. Gil Blas - 1715 – Alain René le Sage

4. Robinson Crusoe - 1719 – Daniel Defoe

5. Gulliver’s Travels - 1726 – Jonathan Swift

6. Roderick Random - 1748 – Tobias Smollett

7. Clarissa - 1749 – Samuel Richardson

8. Tom Jones - 1749 – Henry Fielding

9. Candide - 1756 – Françoise de Voltaire

10. Rasselas - 1759 – Samuel Johnson

11. The Castle of Otranto - 1764 – Horace Walpole

12. The Vicar of Wakefield - 1766 – Oliver Goldsmith

13. The Old English Baron - 1777 – Clara Reeve

14. Evelina - 1778 – Fanny Burney

15. Vathek - 1787 – William Beckford

16. The Mysteries of Udolpho - 1794 – Ann Radcliffe

17. Caleb Williams - 1794 – William Godwin

18. The Wild Irish Girl - 1806 – Lady Morgan

19. Corinne - 1810 – Madame de Stael

20. The Scottish Chiefs - 1810 – Jane Porter

21. The Absentee - 1812 – Maria Edgeworth

22. Pride and Prejudice - 1813 – Jane Austen

23. Headlong Hall - 1816 – Thomas Love Peacock

24. Frankenstein - 1818 – Mary Shelley

25. Marriage - 1818 – Susan Ferrier

As Caines wryly notes, Shorter then bent his own rules by including 8 additional novels by living authors, “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard,” in Shorter's own words. If you make the rules, you are free to break them just as well, although it is not noted whether Shorter's recommendation of the 1881 novel Mark Rutherford by W. Hale White created any rush to the booksellers. 

"Label 228": unsticking the art and putting it between the pages

It was only a matter of time before Andre the Giant really did have a posse.

The black-and-white image of wrestler Andre the Giant on stickers affixed to stop-signs and telephone poles was an "experiment in phenomenology" begun in 1988 by design student Shepard Fairey, who in 2008 designed the now-famous Obama "Hope" image. Twenty years later, Fairey's original experiment has become an art form that appears virtually everywhere an artist can stick a label.

Artists that once sought gallery wall space find new media for expression, and new places to display their work; today, pop culture is the medium itself, and artists find tools in the everyday material of the marketplace. Spray can, markers, pen and ink -- these seem new and logical tools as art swings wildly from gallery to print to digital, pixel to page, and back again.

Others bypass this process all together and simply go from pole to post, creating stickable art that affixes to any surface. Label 228 (Soft Skull Press) began as camden noir's call for artists to submit their art on USPS Priority Mail stickers -- those ubiquitous rectangles with their inviting white space. Six months later, 500 items had arrived from around the world.

From the Soft Skull website: "These labels are free, portable, and quick and easy to exhibit, offering artists the chance to spend more time creating their work than if they were to paint and write directly on walls, vehicles, and public objects.”

One man's stickable art, of course, is another's graffiti; it's a toss-up if these labels by Mecro, Zoso, Kegr, Robots Will Kill! and others are permanent treasures. The disposable nature of a label suggests they're not meant to be -- the viewer's appreciation here depends on the images' inclusion in book format, away from the ephemeral encounter at street level. If the irony of this is lost on the artist, to the viewer looking through Label 228 its an irony that assumes its own art form.

Translating the sutras: a warning for the 33rd century

No-sword is the personal website of Matt Treyvaud, a writer, translator, and linguist who lives in a seaside town near Kamakura, Japan. He has posted about the process by which Buddhist sutras were first translated into Chinese in the tenth century, and under the heading "Teamwork" outlines the nine-step process.

How difficult could it be, one might ask. Well, consider the hurdles of meaning, understanding, and the relative flexibility of each language itself. Today, of course, the Google Translator slice-and-dice method suffices for most of us on our electronic devices with the click of an "enter" button. A warning: the mind-blowing, word soup of Google Translator is something no one who loves reading and language should look into too closely, and use with an extreme caution.

Google Translator's resulting vertigo-inducing cliffs of non-meaning are steep. Put Whitman's I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass into the Google masher, select Arabic, for example, and you get

أنا loafe ودعوة نفسي

والحقيقة أنني أميل loafe في سهولة مراقبة بلدي الرمح من العشب في الصيف.

Put that translliteration back into the wringer, ask for English, and the result is:

I call myself and loafe

In fact, I tend to easily monitor loafe in my spear of grass in the summer.

You can alternately select an even more tortured word taffy as the Translator asks in a motherly fashion, Did you mean أنا love ودعوة نفسي والحقيقة أنني أميل loaf في سهولة مراقبة بلدي الرمح من العشب في الصيف ?:

I love and call myself and I lean loaf at my ease of control of the spear of grass in the summer.

To get the meaning of the sutras right, tenth-century Chinese had a committee of translators to buff the texts to a high gloss -- working in tandem to get the Buddha's thoughts more exactly correct. Treyvaud reveals in his post the division of labor nearly replicates the Google Translator somersault: as he writes in his post, it had been previously thought that the assembled were "an array of faceless, more-or-less bilingual monks working alone or at best in parallel. It turns out that the process was much more involved. In Kanbun to Higashi Ajia 漢文と東アジア (Kanbun and East Asia), Kin Bunkyō 金文京 gives an account of the 982 C.E. translation of the Heart Sutra into Chinese by a team centered on an Indian monk named Devaṣanti 天息災":

A large number of monks and officials (官吏) gathered ... and performed the translation via the following division of labor:

1. 訳主 ("Lead Translator"): Read the Sanskrit original aloud. Devasanti performed this task.

2. 証義 ("Meaning Certifier"): Sat to the left of the Lead Translator and discussed the meaning of the Sanskrit original.

3. 証文 ("Text Certifier"): Sat to the right of the Lead Translator and confirmed that the text had been read aloud without error.

4. 書字の梵学僧 ("Scribe Learned in Sanskrit"): Recorded in Chinese characters the Sanskrit that was read aloud. [...] For example, the Sanskrit word hṛdaya was written 紇哩第野, and sūtra was written 素怛羅. [...]

5. 筆受 ("Receiver via Brush"): Translated the Sanskrit written in Chinese characters into Chinese. For example, 紇哩第野 would become 心, and 素怛羅 would become 経, combining to form 心経, "Heart Sutra."

"Bhagavatī Heart of Perfect Wisdom" by Zhao Meng Fu,

main part 1254–1322 A.D.

6. 綴文 ("Text Composer"): Rearranged the individually translated words into the correct Chinese word order; which is to say, into kanbun.

7. 参訳 ("Translation Barger-into"): Checked the translated text against the original Sanskrit, and corrected any errors.

8. 刊定 ("Trimmer/Finalizer"): Edited cumbersome or long-winded expressions down to size. Sanskrit texts had a tendency to be detailed and lengthy, but in Chinese texts brevity was prized.

9. 潤文官 ("Text-Juicing Official"): Determined whether the translation was appropriate as Chinese text, and added rhetorical flourish as necessary. For example, the "度一切苦厄" ("he crossed beyond all suffering and difficulty") of "照見五蘊皆空 度一切苦厄" ("he illuminated the five skandhas and saw that they were all empty, and he crossed beyond all suffering and difficulty") was not in the original; it was added at this stage. The previous eight steps were performed by monks, but this step was performed by a lay official.

Consider the Engliish-language simplicity of the title Heart Sutra, which is itself an approximation of the original Sanskrit (Roman alphabet: Bhagavatīprajñāpāramitāhṛdaya) into Tibetan (Roman: bcom ldan 'das ma shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa'i snying po), through the Chinese (Roman: Bhagavatī Heart of Perfect Wisdom).

Tibetan editions add bhagavatī, meaning "Victorious One" or "Conqueror", an epithet of Prajnaparamita as goddess. And, compounding the matter even further, despite the common name Heart Sūtra, the word sūtra is not present in known Sanskrit manuscripts.

Treyvard does point out in closing that "the above has no small element of ritual to it over and above what is necessary to get a translation done." Still, the process raises the fascinating specter of all the English language "text-juicing" that lays ahead when everything is pushed through the latest version of ancient and revered Google Translator results -- some time in the 33rd century.

Kurt Vonnegut, born November 11, 1922: "the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound."

Kurt Vonnegut on Mark Twain, 2007: " ... He himself was the most enchanting American at the heart of each of his tales. We can forgive this easily, for he managed to imply that the reader was enough like him to be his brother. He did this most strikingly in the personae of the riverboat pilot and Huckleberry Finn. He did this so well that the newest arrival to these shores, very likely a Vietnamese refugee, can, by reading him begin to imagine that he has some of idiosyncratically American charm of Mark Twain." Earlier in his remarks, Vonnegut explained Twain's "necessary miracle":

... This is the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound. A storyteller, like any other sort of enthusiastic liar, is on an unpredictable adventure. His initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself.

The wildest adventure with storytelling, with Missouri calculation, of which I know is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It was written in this sacredly absurd monument -- as were Tom Sawyer, A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, from which I have quoted, and the world masterpiece,Huckleberry Finn. Twain's most productive years were spent here--from the time he was 39 until he was my age, which, is 56. He was my age when he left here to live in Europe and Redding and New York, his greatest work behind him.

That is haw far down the river of life he was when he left here. He could not afford to live here anymore. He was very bad at business.

About A Connecticut Yankee: its premise, its first lie, seemed to promise a lark. What could more comical than sending back into the Dark Ages one late nineteenth-century optimist and technocrat? Such a premise was surely the key to a treasure chest of screamingly funny jokes and situations. Mark Twain would have been wise to say to himself as he picked that glittering key, "Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here."

I will refresh your memories as where he wound up, with or without his hat. The Yankee and his little band of electricians and mechanics and what-have-yous are being attacked by thousands of English warriors armed with swords and spears and axes. The Yankee has fortified his position with a series of electric fences and a moat. He also has several precursors to modern machine guns, which are Gatling guns.

Comically enough, thousands of early attackers have already been electrocuted. Ten thousand of the greatest knights in England have been held in reserve. Now they come. I quote, and I invite you to chuckle along with me as I read:

"The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand. They halted,they stood their ground a moment against that withering deluge of fire, and then they broke, faced about, and swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment; the three-fourths it and plunged over-to death by drowning.

"Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us."

End quote.

What a funny ending.

Mark Twain died in 1910, at the age of 75 and four years before the start of World War I. I have heard it said that he predicted that war and all the wars after that in A Connecticut Yankee. It was not Twain who did that. It was his premise.

How appalled this entertainer must have been to have his innocent joking about technology and superstition lead him inexorably to such a ghastly end. Suddenly and horrifyingly, what had seemed so clear throughout the book was not clear at all -- who was good, who was bad, who was wise, who was foolish. I ask you: "Who was most crazed by superstition and bloodlust, the men with the swords or the men with the Gatling guns?"

And I suggest to you that the fatal premise of A Connecticut Yankee remains a chief premise of Western civilization, and increasingly of world civilization, to wit: the sanest, most likable persons, employing superior technology, will enforce sanity throughout the world.

Shall I read the ending of A Connecticut Yankee to you yet again?

No need. ...

What do writers listen to when they write?

What do writers listen to when they write? In these media-saturated days that doesn't seem like such a far-fetched question for an interview any longer, but it remains unasked most of the time. Even more rare is the chance for an author to write about the music that inspired an idea or enhanced the form of a story.

Perhaps it seems more appropriate to ask a writer simply if he turns the music off or on when he sits down to write. To many, music is only a distraction. But it turns out that many contemporary authors find music forms a soundtrack to their writing. And for some authors, music can help find a way into a story.

The Largehearted boy site has a regular feature, Book Notes, which asks writers to comment on music they listened to while they worked on their books. Thaisa Frank writes about her first novel Heidegger's Glasses, a story of World War II, that the music of Beethoven was her first choice while conceiving the story. But there were other inspirations as well: California rain on skylights, and an iPod shuffle that included Cat Power, Bob Marley, and The Cranberries.

Frank decided early in framing her characters that the camp Commandant would be listening to Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the "Pastoral." But she changed her mind: "after listening to the Pastoral, I decided the dissonance was heavy-handed and remembered Mozart's Piano Concerto in C, which my boyfriend gave me in college. It joined my iPod shuffle. The Commandant played it, too."

...Since I studied piano perhaps it's not surprising that I chose the Concerto or made the one of the characters a pianist, although at the time I didn't give it much thought. Nor did I give it much thought at first when she played Scarlatti sonatas. Then I listened to Scarlatti and remembered how much I loved playing his sonatas and the sense of a clean, well-ordered world. I found as many Scarlatti piano sonatas as I could and they also joined the iPod shuffle.

At some point -- perhaps toward the middle of the novel -- I began to watch documentaries about WWII, documentaries in which Germany's national anthem at the time was played again and again. I heard this anthem in a curious way -- distancing myself, trying not to hear it. Perhaps I listened the way people who were threatened by, or unsympathetic to the Nazi Party listened.

In one documentary, however, I found a song that became emblematic -- a song I then listened to again and again. This was from Lotte Leyna's German recording of The Three Penny Opera. It is called "Solomon" in English, "Saloman" in German. I first heard it on a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl. While Riefenstahl insisted that she didn't know about the concentration camps it was played over and over, like a dirge. The song sounded less ironic in German than it does in English. It sounded mournful. The rhythm is insistent and relentless. It washes over Riefenstahl's denials like waves.

Thaisa Frank

I also listened to Cat Power, blues piano by Jimmy Yancey, and The Cranberries. Each piece of music felt close to the novel or the act of writing it. The Cranberries and Cat Power are close to the feelings of love and betrayal that persisted in Germany during WWII. And Jimmy Yancey's piano seemed closest to the way I seemed to disappear when the writing went well. His blues are deceptively simple--as though the piano is a guitar and he is picking out tunes. I always see him at an old upright late at night in a smoky Chicago bar. There's a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and he's playing as if no one is listening. ...

The music of the blues and the reality of German concentration camps in World War II make an unlikely pairing, but that was Frank's way of "disappearing" into the story and letting the story tell itself. Most writers, if pressed, would have a difficult time explaining where their inspiration comes from. It seems that an author's music playlist is one small facet that can make the mystery of creativity a little clearer, even as the connection between source and inspiration remains as inexplicable as ever.