Books and Music – Page 61

April 29, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Hot off the presses

Two bloggers I read have new books out. Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi has published a 24-page chapbook of her chaplain poems, chaplainbook, under the new Laupe House imprint. And Fred First of Fragments from Floyd has published Slow Road Home: A Blue Ridge Book of Days with his Goose Creek Press imprint. Congratulations to both authors! I take inspiration not only from their well-crafted words, but also from their example. Self-published, cooperatively published and print-on-demand books seem like a natural extension of the blogging ethos.

Speaking of natural extensions, I’ve just adapted Smorgasblog to fit my sidebar – scroll down past the Archives. The sidebar template had no problem with the HTML; it was a simple copy-and-paste job, sparing me the trouble of actually learning the language the blog template is written in (PHP), at least for now.

Links added since my last Smorgasblog update include: Numenius of Feathers of Hope on Vandana Shiva; Dick Jones on friendships between bloggers; Rachel Barenblatt on coming to terms with Jewish concepts of “purity” and “impurity”; Jarrett Walker on Jane Jacobs; a Nigerian commenter at the cassandra pages on Wole Soyinka; Patry Francis on equanimity; and Rexroth’s Daughter on being crabby. Check it out!

April 18, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Listening to the thrasher

Dawn. The third-quarter moon is setting through the branches of the flowering cherry by the side of my front porch. I’m up a little later than usual, and the brown thrasher has proceeded me, improvising rhyming couplets since first light.

If you’ve never heard a thrasher in full throat, you may think I’m exaggerating, but it’s true. Researchers have documented the thrasher’s ability to improvise over two thousand unique phrases in one session – and I mean unique to a human ear, not (as with so many songbirds) only discernible through a sonograph. The thrasher is a close relative of the gray catbird and the mockingbird, so if you’ve ever heard either of those birds, you have a pretty good idea of the tone quality and range of sounds available to a thrasher. But as I said, the thrasher tends to sing in rhyming couplets – in other words, to repeat almost every phrase once before going on to the next.

This pattern not only assures identification, but produces a very pleasing effect. The lines are all approximately the same length – very short – but the variation in pitch and melody between couplets, and the bird’s habit of mixing things up with occasional three-line and one-line phrases, sustains my interest as a listener almost indefinitely. Since the thrasher is also a bit of a satirist, it’s fun to listen for echoes of other birds’ songs or calls; this morning, I was surprised by a brief snatch of whip-poor-will.

The Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez once declared that “The lemon tree in my garden is a bigger influence on my work than all the poets together.” I’m tempted to make a similar statement about songbirds such as the wood thrush and brown thrasher. While the former models lyric concision and allegiance to a single, elegiac mood, the latter makes me hunger for virtuoso displays of craft and wit.

Speaking of virtuoso displays of craft and wit, I’ve just finished an excellent book-length poem that I picked up at the used bookstore last week: Song of Lawino, by Okot p’Bitek. I hadn’t heard of the work or the author before, but it looked good, and I’m a bit of a collector when it comes to poetry. I didn’t have anything from Uganda yet, and this looked like a good place to start.

Turns out that Song of Lawino is one of the most famous works of postcolonial East African literature. What really turned me on, though, is that the whole thing – over 200 pages in the author’s English translation – is in one of my favorite poetic forms, dramatic monologue. Lawino is a very tradition-minded woman from the Acholi society, a Luo-speaking, Nilotic people of northern Uganda. Her song – which, according to the Wikipedia, was based solidly on traditional Acholi verse forms – is a satirical lament for her husband’s abandonment of traditional values and customs in favor of what she sees as a shallow aping of European practices. Though translated into free verse, apparently the original does consist of metrical, rhyming couplets. The author was educated in Britain as an ethnographer, and published scholarly works on religion and collections of proverbs as well as the several book-length poems which – if Song of Lawino is any indication – showcase his insider/outsider knowledge of his native culture very well.

The poem veers from sincere-sounding lament to scatology and denunciation, all employing the praise-proverb mode familiar to any fan of traditional African poetry. Like Don Quixote, or Jaroslav Hasek’s Schweik, Lawino herself remains something of a cipher. Is she really as clueless as she maintains, for example, when she declares, “I am ignorant of the Good Word in the Clean Book”? But as with Schweik, the pretence of ignorance provides an excellent cover for the author’s sly critques. I was particularly struck by the sense of how the Protestant and Catholic missionaries’ teachings might have sounded to a traditional Acholi.

We sang the Faith of the Messengers
Like parrots,
I did not understand it at all!
I thought about it
In my own head
But I could get nowhere,
And there was nobody
To turn to.
The Padre and the Nun are the same,
They only quarrel
They are angry with me
As if it was I
Who prevented them marrying.
To them
The good children
Are those
Who ask no questions, who accept everything
Like the tomb
Which does not reject
Even a dead leper!
Who accept everything
Like the rubbish pit,
Like the pit-latrine
Which does not reject
Even dysentery.
[ . . . ]
We recited
The Faith of the Messengers
Like the yellow birds
In the lajanawara grass
The teacher shouted
As if half-mad
And we shouted back:
I accept the Hunchback
The Padre who is very strong
Moulder of Skyland and Earth…

“Hunchback,” incidentally, is how Lawino understands the focus of the missionaries’ petitions because, as a footnote in a section on traditional versus modern medicine informs us, “The name of the Christian God in Lwo is Rubanga. This is also the name of the ghost that causes tuberculosis of the spine.”

Song of Lawino is not an epic or narrative poem; the arrangement is thematic, though almost every section does contain stories. Lawino’s complaints seem believable in the sense that it is very easy to believe in her as a character – a proud, all-but-discarded first wife of an ambitious man who is embarrassed by her. One does sense that her complaints are frequently hyperbolic, as in her description of the utter foulness of the public restrooms for a modern dance hall, which might make even Rabelais blush.

The stench from the urinal is thick!
It hits your nose
Like a blow,
Like the horn of a bull rhino!
You choke,
Your throat pains sharply
You get out quick
And shout a curse!
You meet a big woman
She staggers toward you
And leans on the wall
And before she unties her dress
She is already pissing;
She forces out the urine
As if she has syphilis.
*
The stench from the latrine
Knocks you down from afar!
It is as if you have entered
Into a lion’s mouth.
The smell of Jeyes
And the smell of dung
Rise to the roof
The entire floor
Is covered with human dung
All the tribes of human dung!
Dry dungs and dysentery
Old dungs and fresh dungs
Young ones that are still steaming,
Short thick dungs
Sitting like hills,
Snake-like dungs
Coiled up like pythons.
Little ones just squatting there,
Big ones lying on their sides
Like tree trunks.
Some dungs are red like ocher
Others are yellow
Like the ripe mango,
Like inside a ripe pawpaw.
Others are black like soil,
Like the soil we use for smearing the floor.
Some dungs are of mixed colors!
Vomit and urine flow by
And on the walls
They clean their anus.
And there are writings
On the walls
With knives.

Another one of my favorite sections contrasts Western and Acholi conceptions of time. Lawino’s husband has bought a clock, which Lawino admits “Is a great source of pride / And beautiful to see,” but the idea of adapting life’s daily rhythms to its metronome strikes her as absurd.

Time has become
My husband’s master
It is my husband’s husband.
My husband rushes from place to place
Like a small boy,
He rushes without dignity.
And when visitors have arrived
My husband’s face darkens,
He never asks you in,
And for greeting
He says
“What can I do for you?”

*

I do not know
How to keep the white man’s time.
My mother taught me
The way of the Acoli
And nobody should
Shout at me
Because I know
The customs of our people!
When the baby cries
Let him suck milk
From the breast.
There is no fixed time
For breast feeding.

Lawino was a success both in Uganda, in the Luo version, and internationally when the English version was published in 1966. According to the Wikipedia, it was even translated a second time into English, as The Defence of Lawino, by the Ugandan writer Taban Lo Liyong. I was delighted by the serendipity that brought it, and p’Bitek, to my attention.

Speaking of serendipity, just as I started Song of Lawino, I chanced on an article in the Christian Science Monitor that made me wonder if Ugandans might not possess a particular genius for inspired misreadings of Western cultural artifacts. As with Song of Lawino, some popular movies might have alternate translations from dueling “veejays.” These improvisational, voice-over translators/commentators are apparently creating a whole new oral art form in Uganda. Some have already become local superstars, and their fame is beginning to spread beyond the country’s borders as they experiment with taped, Swahili versions of their interpretations.

“Veejaying” is now a central form of local entertainment. But the art involves much more than translation. Part sports announcer, part street preacher, part comedian, a veejay must fill in cultural gaps and keep the audience engaged, which – for many veejays – often means taking considerable creative license.

The video jockey is an offshoot of the distinctly home-grown phenomenon of the video hall. Makeshift shacks commonly made of plywood and tin sheeting, they function as the main form of cinema for the Ugandan masses, most of whom cannot afford theater tickets or rentals of pirated DVDs.

Video halls mushroomed around the country in the mid-1980s, when a measure of relative peace and prosperity made copies of foreign movies more accessible. But since most of their patrons did not speak English well, owners brought in translators, who usually sat near the TV set, ideally with a microphone.

Well-known names include VJ Ron, who is known for his intricate translations of detective thrillers, and the Love Doctor, who specializes in romantic dramas and comedies.

Jingo, as his public knows him, is most noted for his cheeky renditions of American action films in Luganda, the local tongue. Hand grenades might become passion fruits in a Jingo translation; characters played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis evoke proverbs about crocodiles and chickens.

One of the most effective things about Song of Lawino is the dramatic situation itself: the narrator begins by describing her husband’s frequent, harsh denunciations of her – “My husband’s tongue is fierce like the arrow of the scorpion” – before launching into her fierce counter-attack. Apparently, Ugandan veejays also fight against strong cross-currents of criticism. Echoing Lawino’s cultural conservatism, “Some church groups and other conservative outfits here complain that the video halls and veejays are polluting the minds of Africans with the sex and violence of American mass culture.” And according to an accompanying article for the “Reporters on the Job” column, the main veejay interviewed for the story expects criticism from Westerners for the liberties he takes with the films.

“In Kampala, everyone knows [VeeJay] Jingo. At first, he didn’t understand why I would be interested to know about the changes to the plot, and the local references that were peppered throughout each movie,” says Rachel [Scheier]. “Eventually, he told me about working in at least half-a-dozen references to a Ugandan opposition leader, who had just lost the presidential election, into a banal thriller about an airline pilot. He was reluctant because he figured I would criticize his changes.”

Later, Rachel went to Jingo’s trading center to see him veejay live. “I took along an interpreter to translate his interpretation back to me in English. It took a while, but I finally got it. Veejaying isn’t really about translation; it’s about making something completely new, something uniquely Ugandan.”

“The ways of your ancestors / Are good,” Lawino tells her husband, presumably echoing p’Bitek’s own views. “They are not thin, not easily breakable.” I can’t help thinking p’Bitek would be pleased by this new evidence that Ugandan wordsmiths will not only resist but actively transform the tidal waves of cultural influences from abroad. I wish them great success in exporting this model. In time, even a hidebound poet in the benighted North may learn how to become a more active and creative listener.

April 4, 2006 by Dave Bonta

What is music, and how do we hear it?

I’ve spent much of the day annotating my Links page (see top bar – and please let me know via email if you feel I’ve slighted your blog in any way). So in lieu of an original post, let me just put up a couple of quotes that between them encapsulate my own thoughts about music.

I first wrote about Stephen Dunn’s book of prose poems, Riffs and Reciprocities, back in December, 2003. Paired with “Noise,” here’s Dunn’s definition of “Music”:

Something overheard from the dissonant street – a screech, a bang – taken in and arranged. A subjective correlative. Sequences, resolutions, deliberate unfulfillments. The sublimity of large and small moments surrendering to the whole. What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C. The twang the nervous system wants when it’s in revolt. The often welcome melodic lie. Ululation and a stomp of heels, scat-sense, voice and ear living together in brilliant sin. The soul’s undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space. When Bun-Ching played last night – a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned.

And here’s a description of the concert hall experience from a contemporary philosopher, Alphonso Lingis, in his book The Imperative (Indiana University Press, 1998).

We enter the concert hall, locate our seat; we look at the musicians picking up their bows and sticks and reverberating the violin strings and the taut skins of the drums. Our eyes move from one instrument to another in the orchestra pit. Then the music begins, and the tones now disengage from the surfaces upon which they were vibrating and weave into the space between us and the instruments. Our hearing begins another movement, from one tone to the next in a lyrical space that dilates and condenses, expands over a vast horizon, approaches from distances nowise limited by this renaissance salon whose ornate mirrors present on each of its walls only the other walls. This space is complete unto itself and the musical forces, more than tones, do not evoke or depict visible and tangible things, but materialize emergences, events, and destinies inexhaustible in themselves. At the end of the concerto, we look about as though awakening from the caverns of a trance and relocate ourselves in the hall with friends and with refreshments outside.

Last year around this time I posted a short story (well, a fictional vignette, at any rate) set in a concert hall, but I can’t find it right now.

You know, all this writing and thinking about music almost makes me wish I had a stereo of my own. It’s too damn quiet around here! If you’ve ever exclaimed, “I can’t hear myself think!” let me tell you: it’s not always a pleasant music that the brain makes. When my mind draws a blank, it’s not because it’s empty, but because it’s full to overflowing with white noise. Better the “melodic lie” or the surprise of dissonance than this unquiet peace, sometimes.

April 3, 2006February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Living in dissonance: a very selective guide to 20th-century classical music

The way classical music fans ignore or shy away from the great works of the 20th century is a source of continual frustration for me. I grew up on this music. Here are some highly personal responses to some of my favorite works. Most of these riffs bear little or no relationship to programmatic content or the composer’s own view of the work. Please note also that this list does not pretend to be either representative or exhaustive, so don’t leave comments chiding me for neglecting this or that “important” work or composer. But please do feel free to tell me about your own favorites!

Krzysztof Penderecki – Dies Irae

The most appalling of centuries loses nothing in this translation into the dead languages that once launched the Punic and Pelopponesian Wars. Between Cassandra and Medusa there might have been a secret sisterhood of horror. Those who would be prey must first turn to stone.

Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki – Symphony #3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs)

A Polish girl imprisoned by the Nazis writes an invocation to the Blessed Virgin on the wall with a slow shard, re-tracing the letters again and again to make them straight and deep.

Leos Janacek – Glagolitic Mass

How could such soaring syllables belong to the language of slaves? How, wondered JanáÄ?ek, might the God of Nature be shrunk into something small enough to inhabit a church or concert hall?

Howard Hanson – Lament for Beowulf

English, not Hebrew, might be the most fitting tongue for those fated to remain strangers in the earth. Its words are cast in base metals, better for the clash than the clasp. Ah, but the hoard is mute, amassed by monstrous prodigies of the old gods and used to stuff the artificially enhanced hill where the king retires for his last, rapacious sleep.

Igor Stravinsky – Symphony of Psalms

The composer who scandalized bourgeois audiences in 1913 with the Rite of Spring in 1930 explored what is most scandalous about the Bible: the way its best verses erase the line between blessing and curse. David dances before the Ark of the Covenant like a prizefighter, taunting his lover: Destroyer, Motherfucker, I’ll finish what Jacob started. Don’t tempt me! It all sounds glorious.

Francis Poulenc – Stabat Mater

How much longer will the Mother stand for this, one wonders? The Mothers of the Disappeared circle the square until the dictator is forced to flee or face the music. This Stabat Mater (and there are, of course, many others) continues long past the final note.

Bela Bartók – Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste

I once heard a gypsy fiddler on the radio playing an ironic tribute to the late communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceaucescu. In the middle of the song, he set his bow aside and used his fingernails to rake the strings for the length of a verse. Bartók would’ve loved that. His Music is much more life-affirming, but as with almost everything he wrote, it insists upon freedom with every jagged and joyous turn of phrase.

Fernando Lopes-Graca – História Trágico-Marítima

This isn’t that sea that Debussy saw, but the other, the still-unexplored ocean. She knows nothing about the romantic storms and shipwrecks that her would-be knights-errant bear like pox-ridden scraps of cloth to foreign shores.

Alban Berg – Violin Concerto

The soul in the guise of a violin always yearns for transcendence, like the girl in the old story made to lie night after night upon the king’s wrinkled and impotent body in a hopeless effort to stave off the chill of death. But what if an orchestra answered your prayers with questions of its own? The ear must get beyond its patriarchal desire to be ravished.

Akira Miyoshi – Cello Concerto

If the wood of a fallen, thousand-year zelkova tree from some Shinto shrine were cut and polished like an agate, the grain could be interpreted as a musical score – or so this work has led me to believe.

Carl Nielsen – Clarinet Concerto

True story: Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto was the wordless and slightly warmed-over theme song for my first major romantic fling. She had played percussion once in a performance with a former lover, who soloed on clarinet. Could we have picked a worse omen, I wonder, than this tribute to bipolarity with its drunken lyricism, its self-mockery, its pungent soups of despair?

Manuel de Falla – Harpsichord Concerto

Another true story: Right about the same time, a composer offered to teach me harpsichord in return for helping his daughter with English. I declined, having already decided to devote myself to Noh. Twenty years later, I remember a couple of chants, but my body has long forgotten how to unfold a landscape in one sweep of the arm. How much luckier in love might I have been had my fingers learned all the intricate steps of modern gypsies on a horizontal staircase?

I-sang Yun – Muak

The other day, I heard an auto mechanic describe what happens with a vacuum leak: It isn’t that the vacuum is leaking out, he said; the air is leaking in! In a similar manner, just a breath of an air from the steppes – less than a whole melody – is enough to turn the pure, unchanging tones of Confucian music into sonic turmoil.

Charles Ives – Three Places in New England

Whenever I hear the phrase, “bedrock American values,” I think of literal granite in New England – what geologists call the Canadian Shield. I first fell in love with it as a child in Maine. Though the tourist comes to New England for a dose of lyrical maples and churches, a resident might come to prefer the stark look of granite and everything it hides.

Virgil Thomson – film score to The Plow that Broke the Plains

What once was carried off by the wind now washes into the Gulf of Mexico. One way or another, we’ll get back to those bedrock values! But just because the plow is smiling doesn’t mean it likes its work. And just because the tunes sound happy doesn’t mean we really know how to have fun.

Roger Sessions – The Black Maskers Suite

Sometimes tenderness is all in one direction, you know? Sometimes a falconer captures a hawk and keeps it for just one season, solicitous for that roll call of distances in its hooded gaze.

Bela Bartók – Miraculous Mandarin Suite

The exotic dancer’s genius is in what she withholds. Imagine falling in love with that still center of a wheel, despair growing like a ship’s captain becalmed in the age of sail.

John Antill – Corroboree Suite

Clowning was once a scared vocation. Any real or mythic figure, any inhabitant of air, land or water could ripple through the clown’s malleable form with the flicker of a shadow from the fire. His laughter was sometimes as frightening as a difficult birth.

Alberto Ginastera – Panambi Suite

A man from the pampas wanders into a forest for the first time, gets enthralled – or maybe spooked. A clearing just wide enough to support a blade of grass looks like a revelation. Beaten by the incessant rain, he dreams of fountains, roofed courtyards, an inner sanctum as resonant as a drum.

Ali Rahbari – Persian Mysticism in G

Once, a holy man loved his donkey almost as much as he loved God. When the donkey died on the road, he raised a grave mound over him, wept, and went on his way. In time, the local residents built a shrine and spread a legend about a dead saint, and pilgrims began to come. Many hearts were blown open by the encounter. This all happened in the key of G.

Alan Hovhaness – Symphony #2, Mysterious Mountain

The exile dreams of a mountain at the center of the world, having heard that, in an expanding universe, the definition of “position” is something like “an apparent center away from which everything flees.” He nurtures his growing solitude, and writes the symphony again – sixty-seven times in all.

Arnold Schoenberg – Moses und Aron

Though a brilliant librettist and composer, Schoenberg was unable to complete his only opera; his version ends with Moses despairing of his own inarticulateness in the face of the inexpressible. According to the Wikipedia, the famed discoverer of the twelve-tone technique “suffered from triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number thirteen).”

[I]t is said that the reason his late opera is called Moses and Aron, rather than Moses and Aaron […] is because the latter spelling has thirteen letters in it. He was born […] on the thirteenth of the month, and thought of this as a portent. He once refused to rent a house because it had the number 13, and feared turning 76, because its digits add up to thirteen. In an interesting story […] he feared Friday, July 13, 1951, as it was the first Friday the 13th of his 76th year. He reportedly stayed in bed that day preparing for what he thought as his death day. After begging her husband to wake up and “quit his nonsense,” his skeptical wife was shocked when her husband simply uttered the word “harmony” and died.

We live in dissonance – remember that.

March 28, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Listening post

Five a.m. A low cloud ceiling and the scent of rain. Moments after I come outside and sit down with my coffee on the dark porch, I hear the scattered, flute-like calls of tundra swans off to the east. A couple minutes later, more swans, a little closer and in the other direction, also headed north. Then a flock passes right over the house. I’m a little surprised they’re still migrating; I’ve been hearing (and sometimes seeing) tundra swans off and on for about a month, now.

It’s noisy this morning. But the highway sounds are coming up the hollow rather than over the ridge from the west, and mingle with the sounds of freight trains going through the gap. Odd that these two, major sources of anthropogenic noise here should strike my ear so differently – I love the rumble and whistles of trains almost as much as I hate the soulless whine of traffic. At any rate, I’m sure it’s partly this sonic blur of mechanical noise that makes the swans’ music seem so scattered: only the loudest notes are making it through.

About a hundred and fifty feet away along the woods’ edge, something is moving about in the dry leaves and ripping at the bark of logs or trees. It sounds too loud to be a porcupine. Maybe a bear? They could be out of hibernation by now.

From up behind the house, a dry, feline cough. We do get bobcats coming through now and then, and there are occasional sightings of cougars in Pennsylvania, but I’m betting that this is Felis domesticus – specifically, the black and white female who we think just gave birth to a litter of kittens in the basement of the barn, her major annual contribution to the local food chain. She’s probably working over the fresh chicken bones in the stone-lined compost pile we call Fort Garbage.

Light slowly seeps through the cloud cover. Whatever has been making so much noise at the edge of the woods is coming out onto the driveway. To my disappointment, its silhouette is much too small for a bear; it’s round and waddley – a porcupine. It crosses the big grate at the bend of the driveway, then goes down into the stream and comes up on the lawn near the dog statue. It noses around in the yard for the next ten to fifteen minutes.

But now something else is coming from the direction where I’d heard all the bear-like noises earlier. Another basketball-sized shadow waddles across the springhouse lawn, crosses the driveway, and heads straight under the front porch and on into its burrow under the dining room. Well, that explains it: two porcupines!

I’ve been listening for the peent of woodcocks – we’ve had two of them calling almost every night since the second week of March – but the highway noise drowns them out. At about 5:35, though, I hear the telltale whistle of wings, followed by the loud chirps emitted by a woodcock at the apex of its aerial display. And no sooner does the first one finish then the second one launches into flight.

About five minutes later, the dawn chorus begins: first the song sparrow, as if testing the waters, followed quickly by Carolina wren, phoebe, field sparrow and cardinal. A robin starts up its motor: puttputt, putt, putt. The cat pads down the driveway, rounds the bend at the big grate, and continues off down the hollow. The porcupine in the front yard stops doing whatever it had been doing, turns around and waddles down the road after the cat. What could they be up to? Should I be worried?

Just as I’m about to go inside, at 5:46, I hear the deer beginning to stir up in the woods. They’ve presumably spent much of the night bedded down in the laurel. It’s light enough now that I can just make out the shape of the lead animal as she crosses a clearing, and the next in line a few seconds later. I stand and stretch, and two white flags appear dimly among the trees. A hoof stamps once, twice, three times. As I turn toward the door, there’s a commotion of hooves on dry leaves, as if a large deck of cards were being shuffled.

I am reading Gregory of Nyssa: But how can that which is invisible reveal itself in the night?

March 20, 2006 by Dave Bonta

The song sparrow’s song

As I headed out on a walk this morning, I snapped a picture of this male song sparrow (Melospiza melodia) in full throat. Song sparrows hold forth virtually year-round, but in my family, for some reason, we tend to typecast them as prophets of eternal spring. For example, in her book Appalachian Spring (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), my mother noted under March 13:

Song sparrows are almost always with us, but March brings them in to pack their breeding territory as tightly and as early as possible. Despite the weather, which today was hazy and cold, they all proclaimed, “Hip-hip-hurrah, boys! Spring is here!”

Mom claims she got this mnemonic from an old National Geographic record. I’m here to tell you it’s not widely attested in the popular literature. But someone named Tomm Lorenzin has compiled a helpful BirdSong Mnemonics page that includes our family’s favored onomatopoeia (albeit with an extra hip) alongside two others: Maids-maids-maids-put-on-your-tea-kettle-ettle-ettle (the mnemonic Thoreau preferred), and Madge, Madge, Madge pick beetles off, the water’s hot.

As Dave Berry would say, I swear I’m not making this up.

I try to avoid reading music criticism as a general rule. The following passage from the Birds of North America Song Sparrow monograph (No. 704, Peter Arcese et. al., Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Academy of Natural Sciences, 2002) wouldn’t seem out of place in the liner notes for some old Eliott Carter record:

Song a varied series of 2-6 phrases; 3 or 4 phrases common. Introductory phrases usually with 1-20 pure notes or complexes, but [Citations omitted.]

One nifty thing about song sparrows is that, unlike with many songbirds, the human ear can easily distinguish between the songs of individual birds. Considering the abundant variations within a single bird’s repertoire, and the variations between the many regional dialects, there’s no wonder birders can’t agree on a single onomatopoeic interpretation. But the “spring is here” business may not be pure fancy. I think Frank Chapman (Bird-Life: A Guide to the Study of Our Common Birds, D. Appleton and Company, 1910) captured the essence of it in his description of what was then known as Melospiza fasciata:

His modest chant always suggests good cheer and contentment, but heard in silent February it seems the divinest bird to which mortal ever listened. The magic of his voice bridges the cold months of early spring; as we listen to him the brown fields seem green, flowers bloom, and the bare branches become clad with softly rustling leaves.

So hip-hip-hurrah, boys and girls – and Happy Equinox!

March 14, 2006August 1, 2015 by Abdul-Walid

The Mayor of Niafunke

Gwari women in the Sahel (photo by Abdul-Walid)
“What is wrong, my love? It is you I love.
Do not be angry, do not cry.
Do not be sad because of love.”
– Ali Farka Toure, “Diaraby”

I was in Ghent last week when I heard that Ali Farka Toure had died. I was calm and sad. I went into the living room and told my hosts that a great man had left life behind. Though they were fans of world music, they had not heard of him. But perhaps they saw in my eyes something of his spirit, because when I came down to breakfast the next morning, no one was in the room but Ali Farka Toure was singing. My hosts had gone out and bought Talking Timbuktu that very morning. It was a rainy day in Flanders, but in Northern Mali, and all across the Sahel as far as Abuja, a great dust storm was whipping around the funeral cortege of the late mayor as it moved towards Niafunke.

I first started listening to Ali twelve years ago, when Talking Timbuktu was released. Two years earlier, a friend of mine had driven me to a record shop and, in great excitement, had bought me a new disc. That CD was called Meeting by the River, and it featured Ry Cooder on a modified slide guitar and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt on a modified vina. As I listened to those musical dialogues, I was awed by the depth of the relationship between the two master musicians. So, looking for lightning to strike twice, I bought Ry Cooder’s next album when it came out.

It was an amazing audio document. There was no surprise at all when it went on to win a Grammy that year. And it caught the crest of something called “world music,” introducing many people to the musical riches of far-off places like Mali. For me, it was the sound of the spirit: Talking Timbuktu made me homesick for Africa, though the music it contained had nothing directly to do with the part of Africa I came from. In fact, a Nigerian friend used to tease me – “You’re listening to that Hausa music again!” What he meant was that the music evoked the agrarian, Sahelian world that both Northern Nigeria and Northern Mali had in common, the world of syncretic Islam and the cultures of the Mande, the Fulani, the Peul, the Hausa. It had, in other words, nothing at all to do with me, a Southerner, a Christian, a Yoruba.

And yet, playing “Soukoraï¿½? (track two) over and over again, I found in it something that had everything to do with me. I didn’t know what the words meant – still don’t – but I knew there was something in the music that was deeply relational. I was hooked. A sizable proportion of my income began to go toward music from all over the world. Much of that music was from Africa, especially Mali: Oumou Sangare, Habib Koite, Afel Bocoum, Kandia Kouyate, Salif Keita, Toumani Diabate and, of course, the great Djemilady Tounkara. It was the league of heroes. A private passion was born.

When, a few years later, the opening bars of “Diarabyï¿½? (track ten) became a signature riff on the public radio show The World, I was pleased and irritated at the same time. This was my album being broadcast to millions daily, without due attribution or respect, used as the theme for a geography quiz – and not a particularly difficult one, either. How dare they cannibalize a masterpiece for such a humdrum purpose? I had all the intolerance of a fresh convert, but in truth I secretly grew to love this modest representation of my world in the wider world. Ali’s music was everywhere. Maybe even in the White House, it had climbed in through the windows and shot the President precisely where he most needed it.

I was living in London at the end of the last century and that was when Ali Farka Toure released Niafunke, named after his home village. I bought it right away, along with Afel Bocoum’s Alkibar, which had been recorded at the same time, in the same village, by the same crew. Both were gorgeously produced, released on the Nick Gold and Jerry Boys label World Circuit.

I loved Niafunke, but wondered – could anything really compare with Talking Timbuktu? Was there any sound on God’s earth that could measure up to the final bars of “Gomni,” when Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure restate the song’s theme in an almost unparalleled harmonic union of guitar lines that makes the hairs stand up every single time? Could the pained longing expressed in “Ai Duï¿½? have an equal on any other album?

I had my answer soon enough, when Ali Farka Toure came to play at the Barbican. Ticket prices were steep, by my impoverished student standards: â‚¤20 per person, and it was double for me because I had invited a friend along. But what a night! Before the concert, Habib Koite had been playing in the lobby, which was apt preparation. The hall was packed. Ali Farka Toure, dark and authoritative, cracked jokes from the stage and put us at our ease before the concert started. And then, the wall of sound: Hamma Sankare was a monster on the calabash, that humblest of percussion instruments; Afel Bocoum, appearing with his mentor of thirty years, was in fine voice; and the master himself, from whose guitar glistening chords unfurled on song after beautiful song. Occasionally, he would take the stage alone with his njarka and do what can only be described as calling out to the spirits. And they came, filled the Barbican to the rafters. The Londoners were awed, shaken. This was “early music” in the best sense of the word, sounds that took us back to something we might once have known.

Soon after, I finally penetrated the mystery of Niafunke. It had become clear to me that the somewhat glossy perfection of Talking Timbuktu had been jettisoned here in favor of a rawer energy. The grooves were similar, but the guitar crackled with electricity. The ambience of the recording was noticeably warmer: it was recorded in an abandoned schoolroom in Mali, not a high-tech Los Angeles studio. In fact, if there’s any flaw with Talking Timbuktu, it’s this relative lack of ambience. But to speak of Talking Timbuktu and Niafunke in this way – not to mention The Source and In the Heart of the Moon – seems almost sinful. These albums all deserve six stars out of five. Soul runs through them all. I just don’t get those “world music” snobs who dismiss albums like Talking Timbuktu because a white guy plays on it, or because it’s not tinny and scratchy like the recordings from the seventies for Radio Mali. Who cares who plays on it? As Duke Ellington said, “If it sounds good, it is good.”

In those days, I played Niafunke everyday, along with my other favorite at the time, the album of kora duets by Ballake Sissoko and Toumani Diabate called New Ancient Strings. Once, I was sitting in the university library listening to Niafunke through my oversized headphones, when a young European woman I had been trying to attract came over and sat with me. What a wonderful opportunity, I thought.

I placed the headphones over her ears and cued up track four, “Saukare.ï¿½? Ali Farka Toure learned this song in 1946, at a wedding, and it has a deep, alien sound, nothing like one might hear growing up in, say, Trondheim. In retrospect, this was most certainly not the song to draw a first-time listener to the man’s music: it’s just Ali singing, accompanied by the njarka, a single drum, and a chorus of two other voices as unsweetened as his. In any case, I explained to this Norwegian with her bright blue eyes that the song was about an ardent groom, that he was promising to bring his bride the finest bull in the herd as proof of his love. I suppose I thought this was just the thing to make her fall madly in love with me, but it didn’t seem to have the intended effect. She listened to the song politely, completely mystified. After that, we would exchange awkward hellos whenever we encountered each other in the hallways of the school.

Since then I’ve learned to temper my enthusiasm, at least in public. In private, different rules apply: “Roucky” from the 1993 release The Source still makes me feel like I’m in the best church possible; “Sambou Ya Ya” from the new release In the Heart of the Moon still speaks deathlessness into my skeptical spirit; “Gomni” – the version on Talking Timbuktu – still makes me cry. They are the work of a man who, in his generosity, in his fierce superstitions, was utterly unlike me. And yet, if I am not in such music, I am nowhere at all.

The day Ali Farka Toure died, and a day before I found out about it, I happened to hear his music. It was a Belgian television show about AIDS in Kenya, following the story of a woman who, after living in the Netherlands for a long time, went back home to help educate her fellow Kenyans about the disease. “Why Ali Farka Toure?” I asked my wife, greatly annoyed. “It makes no sense, using West African music to illuminate an East African film! They’re always trying to pull this crap, thinking no one would notice.” My wife, a genius at handling my overreactions, said nothing.

I kept watching the film, which used fragments of different songs from Niafunke: here a bus journey in the dusk, there a scene from a mountain looking out over the slums outside Nairobi. Eventually, I had to admit that it was a perfect fit. The music went along with the images, because both were about what all good art is about: being there, being present to what is, serving mystery and the visible. I like to think that the sound of “ASCO” entered my ears that evening at the very moment that Ali Farka Toure’s spirit was leaving his body, a thousand miles away.

The great Sahelian dust storm has settled for now. Ali Farka Toure, monsieur le maire de Niafunke, is gone. But his way of being in the world will continue to speak life to many, and this surely is one way of not dying.

—

ALI FARKA TOURE: a recommended playlist
(all available on iTunes)

1. Roucky (The Source)
2. Gomni (Talking Timbuktu)
3. ASCO (Niafunke)
4. Saukare (Niafunke)
5. Sambou Ya Ya (In the Heart of the Moon)
6. Cinquante Six (The Source)
7. Soukora (Talking Timbuktu)
8. Diaraby (Talking Timbuktu)
9. Howadolo (In the Heart of the Moon)

Also, don’t miss the tribute by Lucy Duran and Andy Kershaw on BBC Radio 3.

Used by permission. All rights reserved by the author.
See also The grass snake.

—Abdul-Walid of Acerbia

January 28, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Why I love the Old Testament

These generalizations about the Tanakh – its proper name – don’t quite hold for the latest books, Ezekiel and especially Daniel, which betray a great deal of Iranian influence and thus should really be classed more with the intertestamental apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. NOTE: This is a draft post, subject to further refinement. These reasons are basically all right off the top of my head – the kind of things I would tell you if we were sitting down to coffee, and you happened to ask me how the heck a professed anarchist like me can love the Bible.

1. It does not depict a creation ex nihilo, but opens (pace the usual translations), “When God was beginning to create the heavens and the earth…” God creates as a sculpter does, day by day uncovering an emergent order from the primordial wilderness (see 15, below).

2. It contains no theology (aside from God’s teasing statement to Moses in Exodus 3:14, the sense of which is “I will be whoever the hell I want!”).

3. It is not entirely monotheistic, alluding in a few places to other gods (e.g. Psalm 82); depicting Yahweh as having divine offspring and/or representatives (“angels”); and suggesting a multiple nature for divinity itself with Yahweh’s frequent alternate name Elohim, which is a plural form. (Adonai is also a plural form, but this “is usually construed as a respectful, and not a syntactic plural,” whereas “it is argued that the word elohim had an origin in a plural grammatical form.” See the Wikipedia article Names of God in Judaism for further discussion of the way different names reflect different aspects or personalities of divinity.)

4. Its Yahweh is not incorporeal, all-good, or all-wise, and in some stories resembles an amoral trickster deity similar to the Norse Loki, the Yoruba Eshu or the Maidu Coyote. Yahweh kicks ass.

5. It is free of the poisonous influence of radical dualism (good and evil – or matter and spirit – as wholly separate, mutually exclusive categories). The problem of evil is raised but not “solved.”

6. The destiny of the individual soul after death is alluded to, but nowhere treated as a matter of consequence.

7. The language is direct, rhythmic and repetitious in the manner of the best oral epic. The graceful language and vivid imagery recall poetry more than prose.

8. It is full of analogic thinking and creative leaps, such as “Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward” or “As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of fools.”

9. So-called “Biblical parallelism” extends from the level of the verse to the overall organization (alternate tellings of the same story, even alternate histories – e.g. Judges-Kings vs. Chronicles), teaching a tolerance for alternative interpretations.

10. For every passage that seems hateful and exclusive, there’s a passage that’s accepting and inclusive.

11. Hints of an earlier matriarchal order abound, and despite the overwhelming patriarchal emphasis, there are more strong female characters than in any comparable work from antiquity. In Proverbs, Wisdom is allegorized as a woman. By way of comparison, Zhuangzi, my other favorite anthology of sacred literature, contains virtually no references to women.

12. The Saul-David cycle has a depth of psychological realism worthy of the greatest novels. In general, Biblical characters are three-dimensional, flawed beings.

13. No one has ever written a book on The Plants of the Prajnaparamita Sutra.

14. Human beings are consistently depicted as a very small and weak part of an overwhelmingly large universe, and become guilty of the worst kind of impiety if they start to believe otherwise.

15. Desert or wilderness (tohu) is portrayed as part of a separate order that in some sense (as the tohu-wa-bohu of Genesis 1:2) predates and gives rise to Creation; thus, it is a place of testing and renewal (for Jacob/Israel, David, Elijah, etc.) and an image almost of Emptiness in the Buddhist sense.

16. Even as captured and subverted by end-time and Messianic theologies (including Christianity), its literary richness and depth of ambiguity has provided a much-needed moderating influence on radical movements, from the hey-day of gnosticism, through the Scholastics and Kabbalists, down to the Inquisition (which is, in one form or another, on-going).

17. It spawned two translations (the King James Version and, I gather, Martin Luther’s) which rank among the most beloved and influential works of literature in their respective languages – mainly by virtue of cleaving as much as possible to the literal meaning, even at the price of excessive strangeness.

18. The opening chapter of Genesis justifiably served as Exhibit A for the pagan author Longinus’ work On the Sublime. In the Bible, things don’t have to be ideal or perfect in a Platonic sense to inspire awe or reverence.

19. The Bible’s emphasis on mitzvot (“commandments,” duties) basically reinvented religion in the West, turning it away from a primary emphasis on the worship of power and toward an emphasis on the cultivation of individual morality and social justice.

20. The Bible makes room for scathing critiques of kingship and priesthood, and its nebiim (“prophets”) constitute one of the earliest and most important literary and historical models for conscientious objection to institutional power in the West.

21. Because awe is the beginning of wisdom, as the Bible repeatedly suggests, and because spirit and breath are intimately connected, as the Hebrew word ruah (and possibly the very name Yahweh) implies.

December 14, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

A chef’s guide to choosing poetry

Poetry is a natural accompaniment to food. Poem chemistry helps to soothe the psyche, appetize and refresh the palate, and assist with digestion.

Some combinations of poetry and food are more successful than others. However, attempts to set down a complex list of “rules” for matching food to poetry are ill-advised; the myriad variables of preparations, spices, sauces, side dishes, etc., along with individual palate and preference, make rules impossible. That being said, I’ll step into the quagmire and share some generalities that guide me well…

If the food flavors are complex, keep the poetry simple. If the poetry is complex, straightforward and simple food preparation will allow the poems to show off.

Matching the general flavor profile of the poetry with that of the food usually works. Keep the categories simple:

FOOD FLAVORS and corresponding POETRY FLAVORSSalty or sour (savory) – Light, crisp, imagistic

Bitter – Difficult, avant-garde, acerbic

Rich – Word-rich, metaphorically dense, allusive

Sweet – Musical, direct, ecstatic

When flavor elements mix in the food, try the same combination in poetry. Tomato sauces, for example, usually combine both sweet and sour flavors, so try poems that have both aural and syntactic complexities. This is not an exclusive or hard-and-fast system by any means; there are other combinations that may work just fine and serendipitous surprises are always palate-thrilling, but this chart can be a good starting point.

Occasionally a particular flavor element in a book of poems may be echoed by one in the food, but these pinpoint matches have an element of risk. A hint of cinnamon, for instance, can work wonders with some, but not all, Ondaatje. Poems by Charles Simic tend to go very well with sausages. But best try any new combinations on yourself before serving them to guests or large gatherings.

SPARKLING POEMS are very all-purpose. Wit is a great refresher and palate cleanser. These kinds of poems are especially good with savory foods. Want a treat? Try May Swenson with pizza!

CRISP, IMAGISTIC POEMS are a good all-purpose category. Allusive poems with little or no enjambment will harmonize with a wide variety of dishes.

RICH, FORMAL OR NEO-FORMALIST POEMS are good matches for foods that have cream or butter-based sauces. Some enjambment here is usually all right.

HAIKU work with delicate foods, such as trout.

ECSTATIC OR SURREALIST POEMS are the best choice for spicy (hot) cuisine, such as some South Asian or Mexican dishes. Be careful trying to match orgasmic poems with orgasmic desserts – one will probably climax before the other, leading to a combination of satiety and dissatisfaction more reminiscent of The Wasteland.

LIGHT POEMS are another good all-purpose category. They are fine with roasts and stews, fowl, and light meats. Many will even work with meaty fish, like salmon, swordfish, or halibut.

BEAT POEMS are reserved for steaks, chops, charred dishes, and scrapple. They also handle acidic foods, like tomato sauce, and take the edge away from bitter greens.

Feel free to experiment. Learn what works for your palate. The important operative wisdom is to eat and read what you like.

For more specific recommendations of poetry, barely in time for ~~holiday~~ Christmas shopping, see here.

December 5, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta