legato, then rubato

re: Jan Zwicky

Two terms for music and metaphor: legato and rubato

see etymologies, both curious.

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Graves and Valéry: the German economy in two pre-war's

Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That (pre-war economic jingoisms )and Paul Valéry in Regards sur le monde actuel on his visit with Henley, London, 1896, from 48 years later (The Review) : statistical mechanics/thermodynamics metaphor; hierarchy; Prussian ways and mores, economic warfare.

Economic warfare and Gus W. Weiss on the Farewell dossier ( l'affaire Farewell fiction) ; Fidel Castro on economic war (2007) ; the curious fate of Vetrov (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Mitterand in Ottawa)

The later London of Ford Maddox Ford

Heinrich Böll's Irish Journal and the Irish view of Germany and Germans

Ireland software bubble/real estate bubble in Cork ; Nabakov on time and the bubble (the philosophers, Pnin)

economics and real estate waves ; 1979/1980 collapsing sand heaps and catastrophe theory

Durs Grünbein poem : divorce hotel

Le Devoir philo  ·  Nabokov note Card 68

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Derek Walcott Venus

This will be small-minded.

First, an aside.

I could not help but notice a strange parallel between Robert Graves in the trenches (1915?), the bombardments, (Goodbye to All That) and Elizabeth Smart's (1938?) kangaroos in a garden (on the subject of time).

Now, the unwelcome gristle.

Walcott "North and South" (1981) has Venus rising in an opening stanza that also carries both a full moon and a sunset.

Through the weeks, you might speak of Venus rising in the west (when first seen at sunset.)  But the rising Venus of morning is the only rising Venus, whether, as he reminds us, she survives translation or not.

Poetic license ?  Not with the planets.

More a question of knowing eastern and western, whether to your north or to your south.

Geddes has a photon flashing innumerable times among crystals in the snow.  Can he escape knowing that a photon takes millions of years to translate from the solar core to the shell of the sun ?  Was this his parallel? What is the poet to know of the local inferno ? The flipping magnetic poles ?

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Robert Musil - William James

re: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften


Might Robert Musil have had some idea of William James' intense relationship with his sister, Alice James?
Wm James d. 1910 ; marriage 1878

There should be a Musil note on pale-fire-cards.blogspot.com

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Jan Zwicky, Wittgenstein and Form

I was thinking that had PART ONE had the single line page headers and PART TWO had double-line page headers ... too obvious? A one unit and then a two unit length line as page headers? Golden ratio lengths? Imagine the unexplained subtle elegance of the book without the PART pages themselves being required as partitions.

§
What about a poem which opens with a left indent to

I wonder if it is the case that 

    [and then stanza(s),
    finally ending with
    a right indented ]

        I think that it is so.

Imagine starting to see this as a recurring form in poetry magazines, anthologies.

A paradigm case of  the ugly: a single quote from misguided Ernest Gellner Words and Things, 1st Ed. ?

Dal segno al coda would require us to use U+1D10B as the non-printing HTML UNICODE escape sequence &#1D10B;

The printer or the author was selective in the LW segno chosen?

It was not the segno

Repeat:

And then to the coda.

Zwicky, Wittgenstein, music

IN 1992, would it not truly have been "fresh air" if, instead of the praise of Ronald de Sousa, the U of T Press had broken with good form and marketing and placed a dissenting view of the book on the back cover of the paperbound edition of Kan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy? On a tasteless dust jacket for an oh, so expensive hardcover destined for the shelves of libraries and so, discarded?  And then from the stacks to storage?

Consider that not a single page is colour - in a book of so many reproductions.  Not even the addition of colour to the bass clef.  Or the alto clef of the Mozart.

The music extends only across Wittgenstein's taste.  The melody of Ben Jonson's 1616 "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" cannot find a place in the narrow band from Bach to Bruckner's 7.

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner. Where is that Haydn piano sonata? The Weber clarinet?

Among post-Wittgensteinians, a question of good form?  „Listen - can you hear it?“

Hopefully another edition would include links to fine interpretations of each selection included.

But is it assumed the reader can read music?  Yet we could not have the Kant with the original German?  This was Toronto Studies in Philosophy.  They had published Fackenheim.  Who are these readers of Wittgenstein who cannot read him in German?

It is as sad as those books of Haiku in translation with largely blank pages and not so much as a romanji version of the original.  No special typesetting required (beyond a few diacritics.)

What explains the absence of Suzanne Langer?  A failing of her editor?  A misplaced set of note cards?  A mis-labeled box of index cards?  A single set of large file cards used on a plane while travelling back from an APA conference - and then misplaced?

Should this post be re-worked with an eye to form, to ensure balance, to allow thought to etch the mean plate of experience?

Wittgenstein — said to have interrupted a performance of a Schubert quartet ... a question of style.  A shoebox of notes, perhaps not quite in order.

— § —

note: the 2003 Gaspereau Press volume has the author's name in a subtle red on the title page.
v. Rorschach colour shock; red-inked seals, kanji, on Japanese prints, 朱印

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Zwicky, Woolf and metaphor

It is curious to find so much Wittgenstein in Wisdom and Metaphor - but no Woolf.

Whatever you may think of Virginia Woolf choosing to name Miss Briscoe 'Lily', we do have (following the heavy-handed "virginal" for "Miss Brisk")

"as the night wore on, white lights parted the curtains"

which, in the 'white' for the 'dark', we have a metaphor perhaps stronger than the Haas bowl of dead bees.

Consider Lady Ki No Washika, "No".  The Graeme Wilson translation is as follows:

It’s not because I’m now too old,
More wizened than you guess.. 

If I say no, it’s only
Because I fear that yes
Would bring me nothing, in the end,
But a fiercer loneliness.

as a counter-part to the Haas.

Woolf: "a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth"

What was the Woolf's view of that other painting, the one by Courbet?

わしか