selfdivider

I just woke up from a dream which I don’t want to talk about in much detail, except that the dream began with me looking at myself as a 3rd person, but by the end - when the dream had become traumatic, sad - I’d become so ensconced in my 1st personhood that it almost felt as though I had no body to refer to, but only a reeling… Geist, or something. The dream was terrible. It probably has to do with the fact that I watched 시간 (Time) before going to bed, a film by Kim Ki-duk, who had directed an excellent film called 빈집, which was released in the States as 3-Iron. This new film was not nearly as good as 3-Iron, despite some scenes of ludic brilliance. There’s an extended sequence involving a paper mask which is as disturbing and unnervingly funny as anything I’ve seen this year. The film, despite its many flaws, is a kind of a 21st century update of the ol’ identity-switcheroo game, and the various attendant metaphysical maladies which usually accompany such a game. A kind of a heavy-handed reworking, so to speak, of Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina Something like that, I guess. Although I’d have to say it’s more like a melodramatic, quasi-philosophical version of John Woo’s Face-off.

2007 has been a good year. I got to know my daughter better as she began to recognize the world and me, first of all. The year has been largely uneventful, which is more than I can ask for from life. I started this blog with no ambition in August, but met so many people, like you, who think and feel about the similar things. Thanks for reading. I’d thought that perhaps, with this pseudonymous identity that the blog affords me, I could write about crazy things, fuck-it-all But that hasn’t been the case, because I see myself better, more clearly here sometimes, than I’d otherwise be capable of seeing: the reverse of my nightmare which I just woke up from. This stanza from Eugenio Montale’s “Encounter” -

Maybe I’ll find a face again:
in the glancing light a movement leads me
to a sad bough craning from a jar
by a tavern door.
I reach for it, and feel
another life becoming mine, encumbered
with a form that was taken from me;
and it’s hair, not leaves, that winds
round my fingers like rings.

Do you do those New Year’s Resolution lists which you abide by until some drunken night(s) in February? I don’t. But I’m thinking that I’ll do a list this year. I’ll be kinder to people around me, for example. Love my darling wife better. Be a better dad. Stop procrastinating. Drink less. Exercise more… I’m tired already.

(Image, from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia)

Woke up at six in the morning and found a personal essay in yesterday’s NY Times called “The Gift” by Sam Lipsyte, about the author’s experience of taking care of his cancer-ridden mother as she was dying (Thanks for the link, Jenny). The essay is a gift for me, as a reader, in a different sense, since it’s so damn good. Moving, unsentimental, funny, and lucidly written. If you know Lipsyte’s fiction, this essay will further enlighten how you read through certain autobiographical streaks in his work, especially in Venus Drive. I interviewed Sam Lipsyte two years ago for The Blue Notebooks, and not knowing about his mother, asked him a pretty specific (and perhaps insensitive) question concerning his relationship to her. I forget what the actual question was. But I do remember that he did not skirt the issue, was frank and honest; it really was the highlight of that evening. I’ll shut up so you can go read “The Gift.” It’s perhaps my favorite Christmas essay, ever.

Once, lying on her bed, talking, talking about nothing in particular, I studied her as hard as I could. Her eyes were closed, and for the first time I could actually sense the end of her, her body. And lying there beside her was so sweet. Why did we wait until the end to let go of everything that ever kept us from just lying there and talking like two people who are going to die and not be able to talk anymore

(Image: by Georges Seurat, of his mother)

Slow blogging through the holidays, sorry. But I hope you’re all having a great time with your family and/or loved ones. Some short notes: Congrats to Ed, a new father. If you need advice on strollers, etc., I’m your man. Also, Erasing has a great post on Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (which he describes as La Jetee + M. C. Escher + Chris Van Allsburg + Codex Seraphinianus).

Because of school, I didn’t get nearly enough time to read/listen/watch much of anything, or at least not as much as I would have liked to. But for what it’s worth, the following items gave me much pleasure in 2007.

MUSIC

Alkan, Concerto for Solo Piano, etc.: Marc-Andre Hamelin (If I ever have to demonstrate to the martians the expressive and technical range of an instrument commonly known as piano, I’d pop in this disc. My second favorite Hamelin CD, only after his Charles Ives Concord Sonata disc.)

Radiohead, In Rainbows (I’ll shut up.)

Stockhausen, Stimmung: Paul Hillier and Theater of Voices (see here.)

Herbie Hancock, River, The Joni Letters (I enjoyed this disc so much better than the other Joni Mitchell tribute album which was more hyped. Wayne Shorter hasn’t sounded this good in years, either. Tina Turner in “Edith and the Kingpin” is wicked, and Hancock’s solo in the same song is too good. My favorite of the album Luciana Souza’s cover of “Amelia.”)

No Age, Weirdo Rippers (Wesssssssiiiiiiiide!)

LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver (my daughter’s favorite album of 2007.)

Carla Bruni, No Promises. (Sexy, sexy…)

Motian/Frisell/Lovano, Time and Time Again. (I am kicking myself for having missed their concert last month.)

Burial, Untrue (The music I listened to the most while writing this year, alongside Tallis Scholars’ Requiem CD.)

Sally Shapiro, Disco Romance (Makes me feel old and young at the same fucking time.)

Beethoven, Sonatas Op. 101 & Op. 106: Mitsuko Uchida (The Hammerklavier that pounds the head and stirs the soul.)

Brahms, String Sextets: Nash Ensemble.

Schumann & Schubert, Cello Works: Antonio Meneses (Great Arpeggione sonata, but even better Schumann. Lyrical, searching and intimate. One of those records that gets better with each listen, starts living inside you. I know I will listen to it over & over again, for years, i.e. Radu Lupu’s late Brahms.)

Glenn Gould, The Complete Original Jacket Collection (80 CDs. Immaculate packaging, with each CD encased in its own sleeve, which is a reproduction of the original LP cover. This is for the completist in you, if you’re a Gould fan. I am in love.)

BOOKS

Fred Wander, The Seventh Well (A remarkable novel by a holocaust survivor, tautly written and elegantly translated by Michael Hofmann, whose recent literary criticism, by the way, makes me believe he is very very angry at life. But as for Wander, see my post here.)

Felisberto Hernandez, Lands of Memory (This book is actually a reissue that will come out Spring ‘08, but you can find used copies online, I think. Writing that is at once enigmatic and utterly natural. No wonder why writers like Calvino, Cortazar and Garcia Marquez worshipped the man.)

C. P. Cavafy, The Canon (Yes!)

Gerhard Richter, The Atlas (An update of the artist’s “idea book.” You know how Wittgenstein, in his Preface to Philosophical Investigations, called his propositions “a picture of a landscape… a thought criss-cross… an album” The Atlas is exactly that.)

Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives (But look out for Nazi Literature in the Americas, due out soon. Crazy little book. It’s a personal preference, I guess, but I much prefer Bolano in shorter works. But I’ll save the ultimate judgment until the release of 2666.)

Shaun Tan, The Arrival (See here.)

David Malouf, The Complete Stories (I just can’t believe I haven’t read his writing until this year.)

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise (Well worth the wait.)

David Peace, Tokyo Ground Zero (Thanks, Terry, for the recommendation.)

Hooray. Now that the semester is finally over, I can drink in the morning hours. As true as that may be, I won’t (at least for today). Instead, I’d like to recommend a book: Soseki Natsume’s Spring Miscellany and London Essays, which is Soseki’s recollection of his stay in London, where he studied with W. J. Craig, a noted Shakespeare scholar who was the editor of the Arden Shakespeare. Soseki Natsume is best known in this country by his novel I Am a Cat of which narrator is - drum roll, please - a cat (see my post here). He had stayed in England between 1900 and 1902, and was not very happy during the course of his stay. The short pieces which are collected in Spring Miscellany were originally serialized in 1909 in the Asahi Newspaper. They are called shohin (little items), the Japanese counterpart of the European feuilletons. Particularly delightful is Soseki’s meditation on Thomas Carlyle written after his visit to the Carlyle Museum on Cheyne Row, Carlyle’s home in London. “It was here,” Soseki writes, “that Carlyle lived in austerity, like Cromwell, like the Emperor Frederick, in this house resembling a factory chimney, without even receiving the annual income offered him by Disraeli for the publication of his writings in which both Cromwell and the Emperor Frederick were celebrated.” Soseki wanders through Carlyle’s house, lightly pensive, comparing Carlyle to Schopenhauer, digressing as he walks. Not many writers can balance irony and sincerity as deftly as Soseki can, and his light-footed poise is evident even in these slight shohin pieces. (If you are in NYC, you can pick up a remainder copy of Spring Miscellany for two bucks at the Labyrinth Bookstore on 112th & Broadway.)

Tucked near the end of the book is Soseki’s letter to his wife, Kyo, on March 8, 1901. In the letter, Soseki is unnerved because he has been expecting a letter from her, especially as he knows that his wife must have delivered their baby. He asks Kyo if the baby is a boy or a girl (Tsune, his daughter, was born on January 26, 1901.) “SS Rio de Janeiro,” writes Soseki, “which set sail from Yokohama on February 2nd, has been wrecked off San Francisco, and I am very worried as to whether there was mail for me on that very boat.”

Inexplicably, when I read this letter about the wreck of SS Rio de Janeiro, I became intrigued. Probably for no other profound reason (which is often the case with me) than a coincidental tangent: in my previous post, I’d quoted a stanza from Brodsky’s “Rio Samba.” Apparently, on February 22, 1901, SS Rio couldn’t navigate through the dense coastal fog of San Francisco, and as the steamer neared the Golden Gate Bridge, she hit the jagged rocks near Fort Point and sank. It seems that even though the visibility was zero, the captain disregarded others’ warnings and decided to approach the harbor. 129 people died, and about 80 survived. The ship was filled with immigrants. “Chinamen,” said an eyewitness in the NY Times article, “were even more panic-stricken than the white women… [rushing] about the deck howling frantically.”

The same article mentions a certain Third Officer Holland, who, along with a man named J. K. Carpenter, was in a rescue boat. But the hull of the SS Rio crashed into the boat, splitting it in two. The report states that J. K. Carpenter had swum away and eventually rescued, but “the fate of Holland is not known, but he is supposed to have perished.” It seems that indeed Holland had been supposed as one of the deceased, until he surfaced, two days later, unharmed. Nobody knows how he had come to be numbered among the dead; he was pulled down by the suction, but took hold of a life preserver and swam to the surface, where he was rescued by an Italian fisherman. (I keep thinking about Dashiell Hammett’s Flitcraft in The Maltese Falcon.)

About nine months after the wreck, a diver named Sorenson found the sunken ship about a half mile from Fort Point. On board, it was reported, were $65,000 in general cargo and $400,000 in raw silk (I am going to resist making a Sebald parallel here, with the silk in RoS and Austerlitz - maybe another post.) Sorenson, according to the article, was entitled to 70% of everything recovered from the wreck. I wonder how much of that booty he actually ended up keeping, how much of that was recovered. There was even speculation that vast quantities of gold and silver were on board - $3 million worth - the rumors of which were never substantiated. Anyway, in 1990, the wreck of SS Rio was declared a possession of the State of California and became listed in the National Register as nationally significant.

I suppose Kyo’s letter to her husband was in fact among the mail which sank with SS Rio. If so, it’s most likely that the letter has since been long dissolved in the water, forever irretrievable. But maybe - who knows - the letter is preserved still, kept inside some black chest impermeable to water and time, sealed and locked away for all eternity. Who the hell can ever know of such things By the way, in the same letter to Kyo expressing his anxiety about his mail vanishing with the wreck of SS Rio, Soseki writes with pure delight and amazement of his experience attending a Christmas pantomime staged in a theatre on Drury Lane. He tells his wife of the wondrous stage effects, especially during a scene in which fifty girls dance in a submarine palace, their hair and costumes lit up, sparkling with thousand little red bulbs. “Just think!” Soseki writes to his beloved wife -

You have only just been looking at a palace beneath the ocean, and already it is covered over by the wonderful flower garden which succeeds it, and after this it is the sun shining on the sea, while finally we find blue-tinged mountains appearing and then turning into a snow-clad landscape.

(Bottom Image by Anthony Goicolea)

On Books (Passing of Time):

“What would you think, fair reader, of a problem such as this - to write a book which should be sense for your own generation, nonsense for the next, should revive into sense for the next after that, but again became nonsense for the fourth; and so on by alternate successions, sinking into night or blazing into day, like the Sicilian river Arethusa, and the English river Mole - or like the undulating motions of a flattened stone which children cause to skim the breast of a river, now diving below the water, now grazing its surface, sinking heavily into darkness, rising buoyantly into light, through a long vista of alternations”

- Thomas De Quincey, from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

…

On Flying (Getting Lost):

“Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.
Grow a mustache and change your bio.
Here the rich get richer, the poor get poorer,
here each old man is a Sturmbahnführer.”

- Joseph Brodsky, the 1st stanza from “Rio Samba”

(Bottom images by: Shaun Tan from The Arrival & Chris Ware from Jimmy Corrigan)

Browsing through the “Notable Children’s Books of 2007″ on the NY Times site, I was floored by this image taken from a book called The Arrival by Shaun Tan. Perhaps I’m late in discovering his work; the reviewer called the book more of a graphic novel than a children’s picture book. Curious, I went to the book store to see for myself. Found it in the graphic novel section, completely dissed: a single slim copy buried between gargantuan Marvel and DC compendiums on the top shelf. Took the book and read it in about twenty minutes, mesmerized. Probably the best twenty minutes of my past week. I was too cheap to buy it at full price, so it’s on my Amazon wish list. But all told, it’s one of my favorite books this year.

The Arrival is completely wordless. It tells the story of a nameless immigrant, who looks Asian one moment, European the next. He leaves his family back in the old country to settle in the new country. One might presume the new country is America, as the port that the immigrant comes through is vaguely reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century Ellis Island. But if the new country is America, it is in its opaque, allegorical disguise (let’s call it Amerika.) As a matter of fact, aside from the people themselves, who are rendered in precise physical and emotional realism by Tan, everything else is allegorical, as if taken from a dream or a myth. Even the hieroglyphic script - which is beautiful but illegible, printed everywhere - is invented by Tan, forever indecipherable.

The strongest part of the book, for me, was the first half of it. Estranged from his old country and way of life, the immigrant struggles to find work, and pines for his wife and daughter in the new land. It’s possible that I found a more personal kind of emotional resonance here, as my father came to the states a year before us; reading The Arrival, I could easily imagine my father’s hardship and loneliness. But in the images above, see how subtly the images in the montage panes on the left transmogrify into their alien counterparts on the right. Throughout the book, the narrative moves through arresting and elliptical sequences of images; many of you will be reminded of Chris Ware’s poetic way of distilling ephemeral moments into images, memorializing the present fleeting into the past in the process.

There are many moments in The Arrival that will convince you that what Tan has accomplished is just great art. It’s a free and inventive work, immaculately designed and composed. Strange creatures and enigmatic symbology, along with Tan’s consummate but peculiar logic in arranging the book’s images into a compelling narrative called into my mind both Hieronymus Bosch and Kafka. The surreal design of the new country and its architecture, though, made me think of Brodsky and Utkin the most.

Brodsky and Utkin are Russian architects who were called “paper architects” during the Soviet years because they were avant-garde architects whose style remained radical, even after the Socialist Realist style was denounced as “over-decorated” by Khruschev in the ’50s and abandoned. Brodsky and Utkin, though, continued to produce a series of whimsical architectural etchings. They were influenced by the cosmopolitan architecture of the past (i.e. Byzantine, Egyptian) as well as the post-modern concept of the city. As a result, their work seems both utopian and dystopic at once. (I don’t think they work together any more as artists; each of them is a practicing architect.) Anyway, their etchings are usually accompanied by equally whimsical texts written by the artists. (My favorite is “Villa Claustrophobia,” clearly influenced by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which I have no reason to insert into this post; please check their small but fascinating body of work in a book published by Princeton Architectural Press.) The work above is called “The Crystal Palace,” and its accompanying texts - a haiku by Basho and the artists’ description - could very well describe the strange land which the immigrant in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival must adopt and call home:

Seaweed swarms with
Transparent [minnows] Catch them -
They shall thaw without a trace.

Basho

Crystal Palace is a beautiful but unrealizable
dream[,] a Mirage which calls you always[,] seen
a the edge of [the] visible. But as each dream [is seen] in
close examination[,] it will prove the other thing
than it seemed [from] afar. [It stands on the edge of the city.] A person who wants to
visit it will make a long way through the town
borderland, blocks of slums and dumps but co
ming at last to the Palace find neither roof nor
walls - only the huge glass plates, stuck into the
huge box of sand. A Mirage remains simply
a Mirage, though it can be touched. Passing
from one glass chink to another, a visitor will
walk [through] the Palace… and find himself at
the border of a small square, where the Landscape
commences… Did he learn the very essence of the Crys-
tal Palace[ W]ill he have a desire to visit it once more
Nobody knows…

So I wanted to follow up on yesterday’s post on Adorno, Schubert and Sebald, especially about the operetta (Das Dreimäderlhaus) that Adorno alludes to in comparing the wanderer in the Winterreise with the fictional doppelgänger of Schubert Like any self-respecting scholar would have done, I googled “Adorno” and “Dreimäderlhaus.” It turns out that Alex Ross had briefly mentioned Adorno’s hatred for the operetta in his profile of Adorno he’d written for The New Yorker back in 2003. From the article, I learned something even creepier: Hitler had also condemned Das Dreimäderlhaus in a speech he gave in 1929, basically for the same reason as Adorno, that Schubert’s sacred melodies were defiled.

Ross’s article is a good one, especially in its clear-eyed assessment of Adorno’s influence on German music. There’s a bit about Stockhausen. A mention about Eminem and a composition by Helmut Oehring called “Do You Want A Blowjob” But all that aside, what makes the article special for me is a sequence of three sentences (after which all of Alex’s writing must be seen as an inevitable denouement) which has the epigrammatic zing of, let’s say, a mordant Fénéon dispatch -

Tragically, Adorno was himself a victim of the shock tactics of pop culture. In April, 1969, a group of female activists interrupted his lecture, “An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking,” by flashing their breasts in his face and taunting him with flowers. He died a few months later, on August 6, 1969.

(Speaking of Fénéon, I just learned through The Dizzies that Luc Sante has a new blog. Go check it out.)

Adorno writes about Schubert’s song cycles this way -

They link up with poems in which again and again the image of death present themselves to the man who wanders among them as diminutively as Schubert in the Dreimäderlhaus. A stream, a mill and a dark desolate wintry landscape stretching away in the twilight of mock suns, timeless, as in a dream - these are hallmarks of the setting of Schubert’s songs, with dried flowers for their monumental ornament… The eccentric structure of this landscape, where each point is equidistant from the center, is revealed to the wanderer who traverses it without making any headway, every development is its own perfect antithesis, the first step is as close to death as the last.

In 1972, well before he started writing outside of the academia, W. G. Sebald wrote a great essay called “The Death Motif in Kafka’s The Castle.” In the essay, Sebald mentions the particular Adorno quote cited above to link Schubert’s winter wanderer to Kafka’s K, to emphasize the point that the image of journey or an aleatory hike is the symbol of death in both Schubert and Kafka’s works. It should also seem obvious that Sebald’s own prose works operate on this principle as well. Writing about K’s yearning for death as a desire for salvation, Sebald writes that in death, K can avoid the terrifying alternative - to be a “stranger and pilgrim” on earth, unable to die like Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus, or the “Wandering Jew.”

Kafka’s presence is pervasive in Sebald’s Vertigo. Not only is one of the four sections from the book dedicated to Kafka (”Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva”), Kafka appears throughout the novel as an apparition, or in the forms of doppelgängers (think of the twin boys Sebald meets on the bus, who look just like Kafka). Kafka’s story of Hunter Gracchus plays a prominent role in Sebald’s narrative as well; Sebald carefully retells the story of Hunter Gracchus, especially focusing on the two men carrying the bier upon which Gracchus lies. This image of Kafka’s Gracchus finds its double image, when Sebald, in Pizzeria Verona, sees two men carrying a bier and upon it, a dead body. More tellingly, in the section “Il ritorno in patria,” perhaps the most autobiographical piece in all of Sebald’s writing, the Sebald-narrator remembers his childhood years in W (Wertach) and Engelwirt. He remembers a beautiful girl named Romana, a twenty three year-old woman whom Sebald seems to have idolized as a child. The Sebald-narrator remembers spying on Romana having sex with “Schlag the hunter” in a woodshed. Schlag is a huntsman who regularly disappears in the Black Forest for weeks before surfacing in the town again. Later, the Sebald-narrator says that whenever he saw the ice stores open up for summer in his town, he’d imagine that he and Romana would be locked in the ice store by accident, and holding each other tight, they would freeze to death (a variation on Stendhal’s “crystallization” metaphor, which appears in the first section of Vertigo: “Beyle, or Love Is a Madness Most Discreet.”) Anyway, Schlag the hunter is later found on the other side of the border, in Austria, having died from falling off from a cliff into the ravines. The Gracchus image is vivified again and Schlag becomes Gracchus’ doppelgänger, as Sebald writes that above the sledge which bore Schlag’s body was a wine-colored horse blanket (above Gracchus’ bier is a floral-patterned cover.) Shortly after seeing Schlag’s dead body, the Sebald-narrator falls gravely ill, the first of many instances of vertigo which would recur throughout the rest of his life, as we learn from Sebald’s subsequent books.

The question is: why was Sebald so obsessed and unnerved by these doppelgänger moments which serve as structural buttresses of his prose works Too many answers, too little time, I suppose. But at least for now, we can turn back to the Adorno quote on Schubert at the head of this post, the one that Sebald used to compare Kafka to Schubert. If you read closely, Adorno compares Schubert’s diminutive wanderer from Winterreise, who sees the image of death everywhere in his journey, to the “Schubert in the Dreimäderlhaus.” This is a mysterious and beguiling comparison: the Dreimäderlhaus was not Schubert’s own composition, but a cheesy and sentimental operetta which adapted Schubert’s music to fictionally imagine Schubert’s romantic life. Adorno loathed the Dreimäderlhaus, yet still used the operetta to compare the Winterreise wanderer to the fictional doppelgänger of Schubert.

This irony would not have been lost on Sebald when he used the specific quote for his essay on Kafka. As much as he maintained that fiction, in essence, is merely a string of lies, Sebald was also riveted and disturbed by the level and content of truth that fiction brought forth. (It is no coincidence that the word “Schwindel,” the German term for “vertigo” and the word Sebald uses as his novel’s title, also means “fraud” or “deceit.”) Any doppelgänger effect is also, strictly speaking, only an illusion. Yet such illusions, for Sebald and those who read him, open up other insights, different roads meandering into difficult, uncanny truths.

In the section relating to Kafka in Vertigo, Sebald notes that according to his diary, Kafka had gone to a cinema one day in 1913, and muses if Kafka hadn’t watched Student of Prague, a Faustian tale in which a hero named Balduin sells his soul to a stranger named Scapinelli to woo a girl. “[Kafka],” Sebald writes, “would have recognized a kind of doppelgänger [in Balduin]… just as Balduin recognizes his other self” -

In one of the very first scenes, Balduin, the finest swordsman in all Prague, confronts his own image in the mirror, and presently, to his horror, that unreal figure steps out of the frame, and henceforth follows him as the ghostly shadow of his own restlessness.

The ghostly shadow of fiction, in other words, always accompanies us in real life through our winterreise, as our own, unshakable doppelgänger.

(The first image - “Winterreise” by Caspar David Friedrich)

No, I am not drawing parallels between Stalin and Stockhausen. Just saying that I was thinking about both yesterday. I went to the bookstore to see if I might finally buy Montefiore’s Young Stalin, the book that was high on my “to read” list. I’m sure the book has its merits, but I’m sorry to say that I could not stomach its first page. This is how the book’s Prologue begins -

At 10:30 a.m. on the sultry morning of Wednesday, 26 June 1907, in the seething central square of Tiflis, a dashing mustachioed cavalry captain in boots and jodhpurs…

You gotta be kidding me with those adjectives. We get “sultry” and “seething” in a quick succession, and the sentence is not even halfway done. I’m not so hot about “dashing mustachioed” either. And the writing in the first few pages is nauseatingly over-spiced with unfortunate adjectives and adverbs, shouting: INTRIGUE IS HERE! Very disappointed because I’m sure the narrative is as good as many of the reviewers have mentioned. Call me a fascist, but I don’t think I could get involved in the story past all that purple, purple, purple.

Later in the day, my friend M called me to see what I was up to, if I wanted to catch the Mayweather-Hatton fight tonight. Then he told me if I knew that Stockhausen died. I was caught off guard, not because I was stunned by his death, but rather because for some reason, I’d thought he died a long time ago. God, I thought to myself, he lived a full life.

So right now, I’m listening to the new recording of Stimmung, by Paul Hillier and Theater of Voices. Stockhausen composed the work after wandering through the ruins of Mexico, contemplating about the way that the Aztecs recited the magic names of gods through stimmung. The composition consists of 51 models organized around four eroto-spritual poems and the magic names of ancient gods (i.e. Aztec, ancient Greek). Six singers on six microphones (which are tuned to an inaudible harmonic of B-flat) progress through the models by singing in overtones. As you can see from the image, Stimmung is not a traditionally “written” work. The singers have a great amount of freedom, even in choosing the order in which the models and names should be sung; the order can be decided upon beforehand or improvised during the performance. I guess Cortazar’s Hopscotch may be a literary analogue, except that Stimmung allows for an even greater aleatory freedom and spontaneity. (For a fantastic explanation of Stimmung, go here.)

I’ve never been to a performance of Stimmung, but would love to, as it is very much a work which almost requires a live audience to convey its constantly morphing spiritual atmospheres. But Hillier’s luminous new recording is as close as you can get to a live experience, I guess. Stockhausen was once asked how he had arrived at the novel compositional technique of Stimmung, and his response is as beautiful and magical as anything you might ever read about creating a work of art -

After a few days, my work was only possible during the night. The children needed silence also during the day. So I began humming, did not sing loudly anymore, began to listen to my vibrating skull… Nothing oriental, nothing philosophical: just the two babies, a small house, silence, loneliness, night, snow, ice: pure miracle.

(The greatest Stockhausen photo, ever: by Betty Freeman)

I was going to write about Schubert’s D. 960 Sonata, but due to a shitload of work I need to address, I’ll have to push that off until later. Instead I’ll tell you a funny story. My daughter has been talking coherently and it’s freaky and wonderful at the same time. When she says these new phrases which I’m sure she hasn’t picked up from us or elsewhere, I think to myself that maybe Chomsky’s right about the innate, almost-perfect faculty of language. (Pinkerites, turn away from this post.) Anyway, until last week, my daughter would refuse to address me and my wife by our usual monikers of “daddy” and “mommy.” She’d say “daddy-bear” and “mommy-bear,” and in fact, she’d throw a tantrum if we addressed her with any other name than “baby-bear.” So I remarked to my wife that it’s like that weird story in which a family of bears takes over a human household or something. She looked at me incredulously and said, “you don’t know the story, do you” Embarrassed and angry, I admitted that I didn’t know, and she told me that the story I was referring to is probably “Goldilocks and Three Bears,” in which a girl named Goldilocks happens upon a forest house and briefly enjoys the beds and porridge of three bears, until the bears come home and threaten to eat her or something. Weird.

Because I came to the U.S. after my childhood, I missed out on a lot of standard, western literature for children. For example, I learned some Mother Goose rhymes only recently, reading to my daughter. As a child, I read some Andersen and Grimm Bros. tales, to be sure, but I read mostly Korean tales, myths, and biographies. When I came to the States, I remember learning English by reading about a dog named Ribsy (Beverly Cleary, I think) and this mouse on a motorbike with a ping-pong helmet. Then, influenced by my sixth grade English teacher, I started to read Wallace Stevens’ poems with a great deal of obsessiveness. His poems, for the first time, made me aware of the capacity and beauty of the English language.

At the Sebald event last week, I ran into a woman named Anna, who is a German translator. I’d forgotten where I’d met her, and she reminded me that we’d met through her friend, Barbara Epler, Sebald’s American editor at New Directions, after The Blue Notebooks Sebald Symposium last year. I see her, without fail, at every Sebald event I go to in the city. Anyway, we were talking about German literature and she asked me why I was so particularly interested in German writers. I thought about why, and in the process, it became clear to me: the passion stemmed from my childhood in Korea. For some reason, my cousins who were high school students - whom I idolized as a kid - read a lot of Goethe and Schiller, plus other German Romantics. So the book which I pined to read and understand, which I’d thought contained nothing less than the meaning of life, was not a Shakespeare or a Tolstoy, but The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Another example. My uncle on my mom’s side was a high school teacher in the rural Chunra Province, but he looked more like a farmer than a teacher, with his leathery, copper brown skin and white undershirts. I remember he raised a lot of free-roaming chickens in his front yard. But in his private study, which was only a dark, tiny room with a low sit-down table, he had shelves of books with names that seemed almost mythical to me. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, et al. (even though the book that immediately grabbed my attention on his shelf was Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian.) I would leaf through the pages and read the words, but the words would not make sense in my head, made me dizzy. I understood that my uncle had a flourishing, secret inner life. I also understood that his books were written in a beautiful code that I might one day hope to unlock myself.

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