Archive for April 2003

Finally got some photo-album software together, meaning that I can now share photos like never before!

Jen’s Birthday

Chris Goes Away

Rock the House #1, Rowena Parade

Favourites are: the “Douglas G. Eyes Wide-Open/Eyes Wide-Shut Triptych” (1, 2, 3); Chris and Jenni, Brad’s cut, Chris posing; Oliver and Beth, Caz and Kenny, the “Andrew C. Re-hydration Triptych” (1, 2, 3).

If there’s a halo above my head it’s because I’ve just been through seven or so garbage bags of party garbage and extracting the recyclables. (I was wearing gloves but—have you ever unexpectedly found your fingers covered in green dip?) I feel so virtuous.

A memo from Harold Ross (founding editor of The New Yorker) to Katharine S. White, defending his decision that payment for poems should take into account not just a poem’s length, but also its width:

September 9, 1947

Mrs. White:

The new poetry payment scheme is in to stay, or the principle of it is. It’s the only way I, for one, can operate, with any idea of what I’m doing. We pay for everything else by space—or at any rate we measure everything, and space is one factor—and we should unquestionably pay for poetry that way, too.

I think it is a mistake to explain the rates to poets, unless some one of them asks for an explanation, which is unlikely. All through this payment thing one factor sticks out to me: Prose writer, artists, poets, are appalled at the thought of space entering into the appraisal of their, and other people’s work, but space is certainly a factor in the value of a contribution to the New Yorker Publishing Company, Inc. If we measure poems by their length (which we have always done, and which practically everyone else does), it seems to me absurd not to take into consideration also the width.

H.W. Ross

In his essay on James Joyce, “Joyce’s Choices,” David Lodge writes:

There is a story well known to all students of Joyce, that one day in Zurich, when he was writing Ulysses, he met his friend Frank Budgen in the street and told him he had been working all day and had produced two sentences. “You have been seeking the right words?” asked Budgen. “No,” replied Joyce, “I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentences I have.”

(From The Practice of Writing, p. 130.)

I seem to spend an awful lot of time ordering and reordering the words within sentences too; my notebooks are filled with multiple renderings of pretty much the same thing. But this is a feature of English, I suppose. How well do the opening lines of Coleridge’s “Xanadu” translate into other languages, say? In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a stately pleasure-dome decree…

This reminds me of something Brad said recently. We were talking about hip-hop, and he mentioned that he’d been listening to some French hip-hop recently, and that it was pretty good. (He recommends MC Solaar.) He reckons it’s good because French, like English, has both lots of short, sharp, rhyming words and a flexible word order. I’m comfortable with the idea that some languages sound better than others, but for some reason the thought that some art forms aren’t really possible in some languages is little unsettling. Is there such a thing as German hip-hop?

One of my favourite CDs is a CD-R compilation I got for 50p from the Bongo Club in Edinburgh. Australians don’t MC terribly well (it could be just the accent)—but Scots do! The track breaks are pretty strange, but there’s some good Scottish hip-hop about 1:15 into track 3. (The whole album.)