Monday, December 04, 2006

#2 Notes from The Translator


True, translation is best done in silence. (Even though no one will hear you scream anyway.) But if the text is not too challenging, I like to add a little music. Select the genre according to what you want to convey in terms of flavour. But if nothing else works, try Glenn Gould and Bach.

Saturday, December 02, 2006


THAT’S MY GRANDAD with the cane. It’s a post Great War reunion. My grandfather had served nobly in the Middle East with the 14th Regiment, reputedly tending the wounded under a hail of bullets from the Turks on the heights at Gallipoli.
Australia would like that battle to sum up Australia.
After the war, Dr. Henry Joseph Loughran, returned to his practice in the hilly country idyll of Daylesford, Victoria.
Earlier, when a medical student in Melbourne, Henry J. had dropped his studies to volunteer with the others to fight for Britain in the Boer War. He served two countries bravely, apparently.
He’s small, but he’s got that fancy cane thing going. Dolly magnet.

Monday, November 20, 2006

God what's in there?

Bills, probably. I once discovered an out-of-date bill for clearing snow from the roof of the condominium. We had to pay a fine and it was my fault.
Also all that hard-to-file stuff. A great offer for candied rosehips from Guatemala that might be fun. Only there's no Guatemala binder. Nor one for candied anything.
And there'll be some computer installation discs there, for sure. And maybe a piece of plastic that looks like it has a computer application. To connect the whizoo with the whazoo.
But mainly just surplus information.

As you see, I've cleverly fenced it off. I think it's wise. Who knows? It could spread, seep, seduce. I've got the Maginot Line of tin cups with pens in them. There's a Balinese monkey god on duty -- inherited from my parents. There's a semi-concealed photograph of Dad rowing in the Xavier College eight for the inter-school championships of 1928 or 29 on Melbourne's muddy Yarra River. There's the framed photo of yrs truly on leaving magazine editorship in 1999. And there's the dangling charm of Lukas's booties from when he was just over one year old.
The pile can't escape, can it?

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

tips from THE TRANSLATOR! (#1)


WRITE YOUR TRANSLATION LIKE EXPANDING POETRY -- BY GOING THROUGH AND TRANSLATING ONLY THE WORDS YOU LIKE.
REPEAT UNTIL DONE.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Sunday, October 29, 2006

BIG IN JAPAN NOT

When I first discovered swing


THE 4 MILLS BROTHERS were all born in Piqua, Ohio -- John Jr. in 1910, Herbert in 1912, Harry in 1913, and Donald in 1915. Their father owned a barber shop and founded a barbershop quartet as well: the Four Kings of Harmony. When bass singer John Jr. died suddenly in 1936, father John Sr. took over the part. That’s dad in the picture.
John Sr. retired from the group in 1956 and Herbert, Harry and Donald were a trio from then on.
The Mills Brothers linked barbershop with doo-wop. And they worked in jazz all their lives.
There’s little that matches the Mills Brothers sound for chumminess, rhythm and warmth. Even “Yellow Bird”, essentially a song about loss, is a crooning, swooning ballad to a banana tree.

The great thing about the Mills Brothers was really that were so old and so friendly. When I was a boy, they were three jovial, overweight guys that lived in their tuxes. They were much older than my father, but even callow I could hear that they swung.

In sub-generational incarnation, they still do today.


(Main source: A Cappella – www.singers.com)

Well paid and well laid

THE MILLS BROTHERS were a well-paid act for thirty years or more, spanning several music eras.
At one early Mills Brothers show, Harry Mills forgot his kazoo -- the group's usual accompaniment -- and emulated the instrument by cupping his hand over his mouth. The brothers worked the novelty into their act, with John taking tuba, Donald trombone, and Herbert a second trumpet.
The instrument-scatting novelty appeared to wear off by the late '30s. And despite recordings with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, they weren’t selling much.
That changed in 1943 with the release of "Paper Doll," a sweet, intimate ballad that became one of the biggest hits of the decade -- twelve weeks on the top of the charts, and six million records sold (plus sheet music).
In 1952, "The Glow Worm" became their last number one hit.
A move from Decca to Dot brought a moderate 1958 hit, a cover of the Silhouettes' "Get a Job". It made explicit the considerable influence on doo-wop that the early Mills Brothers records had exterted.
And they always had those big, satisfied smiles. The kind that come from hot love.

PAPER DOLL (written 1915 by Johnny Black)

I'm gonna buy a Paper Doll that I can call my own
A doll that other fellows cannot steal
And then the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes
Will have to flirt with dollies that are real

When I come home at night she will be waiting
She'll be the truest doll in all this world
I'd rather have a Paper Doll to call my own
Than have a fickle-minded real live girl

I guess I had a million dolls or more
I guess I've played the doll game o'er and o'er
I just quarrelled with Sue, that's why I'm blue
She's gone away and left me just like all dolls do

I'll tell you boys, it's tough to be alone
And it's tough to love a doll that's not your own
I'm through with all of them
I'll never ball again
Say boy, whatcha gonna do?

I'm gonna buy a Paper Doll that I can call my own
A doll that other fellows cannot steal
And then the flirty, flirty guys with their flirty, flirty eyes
Will have to flirt with dollies that are real

When I come home at night she will be waiting
She'll be the truest doll in all this world
I'd rather have a Paper Doll to call my own
Than have a fickle-minded real live girl


(Incidentally, “to ball” was argot for ‘to fuck’.)

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

BENGALI POETS IN THE RAIN


You know your life is reasonably OK when you can count Tutu and Dipak among your friends. Screw the rain!

MMMfffm! Mrrrmffmrrmfff! Rrrrr!

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Bop Bop Bip & Bop n' friends


THE INK SPOTS played a large role in pioneering the Black vocal group-harmony genre, helping to pave the way for the doo-wop explosion of the '50s. The quavering high tenor of Bill Kenny presaged hundreds of street-corner leads to come, and the sweet harmonies of Carlie Fuqua, Deek Watson, and bass Hoppy Jones (who died in 1944) backed him flawlessly.
Kenny's impeccable diction and Jones's deep drawl were both prominent on the Ink Spots' first smash on Decca in 1939, the sentimental "If I Didn't Care." From then through 1951, the group was seldom absent from the pop charts, topping the lists with "We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)" (1940), "I'm Making Believe" and "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" (both in 1944), and "The Gypsy" and "To Each His Own" (both in 1946).
(Thanks, Primarily A Capella
www.singers.com)

”To Each His Own” and ”Ebb Tide” are seminal. That sentimental irony, those comic bottom notes, that fearlessly feminine high crooning.
And you KNOW they were getting laid!

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Just A Gigolo


The Cast:
Astrid, April, Geezer-guy, Barbara.
The Scene:
Paparazzi, Vasastan's friendliest Italian place.
The Plot:
Survivors scheme.
The Backstory:
The rise and fall of Tomorrow Magazine.

Friday, October 20, 2006

HANNIBAL LECTOR LOOKALIKE!


SOME PEOPLE WILL DO ANYTHING FOR MONEY. This chump dyed his hair just because they gave him a part in a dumb TV commercial! Hah! Oh wait...that's me.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Swedish autumn gets OK from Israeli


Sunday, 15 October: Tobias Goldman, visiting from Tel Aviv, pronounced Swedish nature "pretty good" from his vantage point in Bellevue Park, Stockholm. Dad agreed.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

You Didn't Hear It Here First



Press Release
12 October 2006
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006
ORHAN PAMUK
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2006 is awarded to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk

”who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”


Orhan Pamuk was born 7 June 1952 in Istanbul into a prosperous, secular middle-class family. His father was an engineer as were his paternal uncle and grandfather. It was this grandfather who founded the family’s fortune. Growing up, Pamuk was set on becoming a painter. He graduated from Robert College then studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University and journalism at Istanbul University. He spent the years 1985-1988 in the United States where he was a visiting researcher at Columbia University in New York and for a short period, attached to the University of Iowa. He lives in Istanbul.

Pamuk has said that growing up, he experienced a shift from a traditional Ottoman family environment to a more Western-oriented lifestyle. He wrote about this in his first published novel, a family chronicle entitled Cevdet Bey ve oğulları (1982), which in the spirit of Proust and Mann follows the development of a family over three generations.

His second novel, Sessiz ev (1983; The House of Silence, 1998), uses five different narrator perspectives to describe a situation in which several family members visit their ageing paternal grandmother at a popular seaside resort with Turkey teetering on the brink of civil war. The period is 1980. The grandchildren’s political discussions and their friendships reflect a social chaos where various extremist organisations vie for power.

Pamuk’s international breakthrough came with his third novel, Beyaz kale (1985; The White Castle, 1992). It is structured as an historical novel set in 17th-century Istanbul, but its content is foremost a story about how our ego builds on stories and fictions of different sorts. Personality is shown to be a variable edifice. The story’s main character, a Venetian sold as a slave to the young scholar Hodja, finds in Hodja his own reflection. As the two men recount their life stories to each other, their identities exchange. It is perhaps, on a symbolic level, the European novel captured then allied with an alien culture.

Pamuk’s writing has become known for its play with identities and doubles. The issue appears in his novel Kara kitap (1990; The Black Book, 1995) in which the protagonist searches the hubbub of Istanbul for his vanished wife and her half-brother, with whom he later exchanges identities. Frequent references to the mystic tradition of the East make it natural to see this in a Sufi perspective. Kara kitap represented a definite break with the governing social realism in Turkish literature. It provoked debate in Turkey not least through its Sufism references. Pamuk based his screenplay for the film Gizli yüz (1992) on the novel.

Yeni hayat (1994; The New Life, 1996) is a novel about a secret book with the capacity to irrevocably change the life of any person who reads it. The search for the book provides the structure of a physical journey but bordered by literary references, thought experiments in the spirit of mysticism, and reminisces of older Turkish popular culture, turning the plot into an allegoric course of events correlated with the Romantic myth of an original, lost wisdom.

According to the author, the major theme of Benim adim Kirmizi (2000; My Name is Red, 2002) is the relationship between East and West, describing the different views on the artist’s relation to his work in both cultures. It is a story about classical miniature painting and simultaneously a murder mystery in a period environment, a bitter-sweet love story, and a subtle dialectic discussion of the individual’s role in art.

Pamuk has published a collection of essays, Öteki renkler: seçme yazÿlar ve bir hikâye (1999), and a city portrait, Ýstanbul: hatýralar ve þehir (2003; Istanbul: Memories and the City, 2006). The latter interweaves recollections of the writer’s upbringing with a portrayal of Istanbul’s literary and cultural history. A key word is hüzün, a multi-faceted concept Pamuk uses to characterise the melancholy he sees as distinctive for Istanbul and its inhabitants.

Pamuk’s latest novel is Kar (2002; Snow, 2005). The story is set in the 1990s near Turkey’s eastern border in the town of Kars, once a border city between the Ottoman and Russian empires. The protagonist, a writer who has been living in exile in Frankfurt, travels to Kars to discover himself and his country. The novel becomes a tale of love and poetic creativity just as it knowledgeably describes the political and religious conflicts that characterise Turkish society of our day.

In his home country, Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator even though he sees himself as principally a fiction writer with no political agenda. He was the first author in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. He took a stand for his Turkish colleague Yasar Kemal when Kemal was put on trial in 1995. Pamuk himself was charged after having mentioned, in a Swiss newspaper, that 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in Turkey. The charge was dropped after widespread international protest.
(TRANSLATION: You-know-who)

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Street Art Joke


Arbetsförmedlingen (Labour Exchange) has changed its name to:
Arbetsförnedringen (Labour humiliation)

Thursday, October 05, 2006


Burnin' rubber on the streets of Kyneton, Victoria. Ca. 1945.

Sunday, October 01, 2006


NOTICE PLEASE ATTENTION became a subject of world attention myself (Skyway, Bangkok)

Friday, September 29, 2006

SMACK! Andrew Brown's take on violence in Sweden



"I have only once smacked one of my children, and sometimes I still feel bad about it. But I don't think what I did was, or should have been, a criminal act.
In Sweden, it has been illegal to smack any child since 1979, as people who wish to extend the prohibition will tell you. For instance, an article in last week's Independent said: "In Sweden, which famously banned smacking in 1979, there are plenty of reports of parents smacking children, none of which ever result in a prosecution ... The incidence of playground bullying and violence, and violence also among the adult population, has plummeted since the directive came in."

This was written by a very good columnist. Yet it made no sense at all: my own, half-Swedish son was born in 1979, and no Swede I know would claim that their country was a more violent society then than it is today.

So I wrote a snarky email asking the writer where she had got her facts from. She referred me to a report by someone called Professor Joan Durrant, which had been cited in the Scottish parliament in debates on smacking.

Durrant also wrote a pamphlet for Save the Children, which was widely circulated. The Save the Children pamphlet does not seem to be online, though the Scottish parliament website has an account describing Durrant's research, an attack by one of her critics and her response.

This leads to a predictable tangle of assertions about misleading use of the figures, from which she emerges claiming that reported statistics of violence tell us nothing about the real rate of crime. The website says: "She states that reporting rates are useless as a measure of actual assault rates because of their extreme sensitivity to changing definitions and public awareness of violence."

It seems to me odd for a social scientist to take this position of extreme agnosticism unless the figures suggest something she would rather they did not.

Sure enough, the Swedish government's official English-language summary states that "the number of reported assault offences against both children and adults has increased since 1975 and today lies at a level that is more than three times that of the 1975 figure. The largest increase occurred during the first years of the 1990s, when assault offences increased by 34% in five years."

When I looked at the more detailed Swedish tables, it turned out that since smacking was banned, reported assaults on children under the age of six have quadrupled; those on children under the age of 14 have gone up even more.

It is an important point that these figures do not show smacking at all: they cover assaults that were illegal even when smacking was allowed. Almost all the attacks on children under six took place indoors, and the perpetrators were known to them; older children were most likely to be attacked outdoors and by strangers. That looks like bullying to me.

Of course, this does not prove, or even suggest, that the rise in violence is because of the law against smacking. But what the government's figures do unambiguously show is something obvious to anyone who reads the Swedish papers for a week: that the ban on smacking has not made the country less violent. Why should anyone believe otherwise?

The answer surely lies in the mythic status of Sweden in the Anglo-Saxon world. If you are a rightwinger, you used to know that Swedes are constantly killing themselves in despair at social democracy, and now you also believe that they are terrorised by Muslim immigrants. If you are a leftwinger, you know that they are enormously, happy, peaceful, prosperous and enlightened.

The columnist concerned assured me no child had been killed by its parents in Sweden for 15 years. Yet this summer, the tabloids were full of the harrowing torture and eventual murder of a disabled 10-year-old boy by his mother and father. In fact, child abuse to the point of murder is very rare but not unknown. There is also in Swedish law a special crime of infanticide, which is punished less severely than murder. Five cases of that were recorded in 2005 and six the year before.

But the myths enjoyed by both left and right are far too useful to spoil with facts, even though a great deal of English-language information, including the crime statistics, is published on the web.

The only germane statistic missing is any indication of how much Swedes actually do smack their children. On the Scottish parliament site is a survey suggesting that the incidence might have gone up a little since the mid-70s. But that does not prove anyone's point, so it is most unlikely to be believed."

(From A WORM'S EYE VIEW, the weekly GuardianUnlimited column by Andrew Brown. Used with permission. AB is the author of The Darwin Wars: The Scientific War for the Soul of Man and In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite. He also maintains a weblog, the Helmintholog.)

Monday, September 25, 2006

LUKAS AND ANNA


This is my new girlfriend Anna. She is an anaesthetics nurse from Malmö. Wonder what was in that foaming green drink she gave me.....zzzzzzz

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Abraham (reading a newspaper article out loud):
“It says here that women use about 30,000 words a day, while men only use 15,000 words.”

Sadie:
“That’s because a woman has to say everything twice.”

Abraham:
“What?”

Sunday, September 10, 2006

He's back and he's confused!

ONLY BEER with good friends -- white wine with the ladies -- will help! (Cocktails if you're my fancy son.)