Janelle Monae sampler

We are madly in love with Janelle Monae: her singing, her dancing, her concepts, her band, her live performances, her videos, her "suites", her inspirations, her company The Wondaland Art Society, her sharp look.

Cold War (from ArchAndroid: "an emotion picture for the mind"), an intimate performance.

Tightrope (also great remix with Lupe Fiasco)

Many Moons (a fave in our household)

Do you know these words?

"New York Times mines its data to identify words its readers find abstruse" (via Sanden Totten, producer of MPR's "In the Loop")

Some days it's a struggle

As we pulled into the Lund's parking lot, I saw an older woman inching through the muddly slush with a walker. I said cheerfully, without thinking, "There I go, in a few years!" My daughter was horrified: "Way to see the worst of things," she said. What I didn't say to her was that I had a flash of fear and awareness, of how hard it had been to get around with my broken foot a few years ago, of the limits of the last two years of physical therapy for my shoulders and hip, of recognition of a relative's rheumatoid arthritis, the news that two dear people had recently suffered the same broken bone in a shoulder through falls: my own fear that what is currently a manageable chronic pain syndrome could engulf my life as it has those of others. And of course, one day I will probably be unable to walk without support. It's a question of when, not if. We all decay and die.

I told her that I was grateful for my health, not expecting the worst, but she wasn't buying it. On the one hand, it could be said that I was seeing the worst. On the other, I was also (at least internally) feeling grateful for my health. But I was also repeating a gesture I'd seen my mother make many years ago, when she said cheerfully, "I'll be one of those ladies pushing a shopping cart in the Tenderloin" and we, her daughters, had reacted with the same horror at what seemed like a fatalistic expectation of the worst, but now, I see, was a kind of magical conjuring: "I'll say out loud what is my fear, and thus dissipate its power over me." Because my mother is not one of those homeless women on Ellis street; she has worked hard and taken good care of herself. And I am doing the same. But the power our words have on our children is not only that of our muddled intentions, and I need to remember that.

After thinking about this incident, I recognize that lately I have re-activated my "cynical defense mode." It's a form of shielding myself from all the pain that I'm afraid would overwhelm me if I really held it in consciousness without defenses. On some level, the jokes about shoes flying at Bush make me laugh, but the reality of the torture inflicted on the shoe-thrower horrifies me. The recognition that his rage is felt by millions who contemplate the deaths of all those killed and maimed as "collateral damage" in Iraq is almost too much to bear. And after the long drawn-out struggle to elect a person who symbolizes our desire for change, the pain that I hear from so many who feel betrayed because Obama has invited an activist for bigotry, Rick Warren, to read an invocation at his inauguration is also my pain (but think how many people would scream if he'd invited Rev.Wright!). I can't shut it all out, and sometimes I feel as if I am écorchée vive. But I am most profoundly aware of my gratitude because I am trying to be mindful of my fears, and transform them into compassion. Unfortunately, what I am doing to defend myself is experienced by others as cynicism at best and anger at worst, but certainly as negativity and not compassion. (So I talked to my daughter about this and we hugged each other and reminded each other that we love each other very much).

My hat's off to Phoenix Woman for reminding us all that along with Rick Warren, another person who has been invited to participate in the inauguration is Rev. Joseph Lowery. She linked to this incredibly thoughtful post by a young man named Matt who describes the effect that Rev. Lowery had on him.

"Best" Quixote translation?

My mother is reading Don Quixote in English with one of her reading groups, and asked me what I knew about different translations. I had to reply that I knew nothing, as I had read it in Spanish, and had never had the occasion to think about "the best translation" before. I started poking around (hey, the Wikipedia entry is good!)and after looking at some scholarly and not-so-scholarly discussions of the history and quality of the very many English translations, I decided that the one her group is reading (the Edith Grossman translation with Alan Bloom's introduction) is probably, in fact, the best for their purposes; it is not a scholarly edition with footnotes explaining every proverb and reference and arguing with past translators' versions, but it is a accurate, and most importantly, a lively and FAITHFUL translation that captures the tone and spirit of the work. Here is what Edith Grossman herself says about translating literary texts (she has translated many Latin America authors, including Gabriel García Márquez):

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.

Why a new translation, when several were made right after its publication? Well, because English has changed a lot in 400 years, and Cervantes is, above all, a modern writer, and reading the original is an experience of great pleasure.
Without having looked at any of the texts myself it seems to me as if Grossman has done two important things: rendered the text in English that is colloquial and accessible, and captured the tone and multiples voices of Cervantes' text. Many people also had great praise for the audiobook read by Guidall.
Wikimedia has a lot of images of Don Quixote including the wonderful series of illustratioins by Gustave Doré.

Here's an interview with Edith Grossman
on translating Cervantes.

Wordle makes your text into a word cloud!

Jonathan Fineburg has created a lovely thing called Wordle. It allows you to make word-clouds out of any text and play around with fonts and colors. You can then post your creation to a gallery. The site's gallery makes these images available to anyone. As you can see if you browse the gallery, one need not choose a poem as a text; you can paste in any text, or write one of your own. Repeated words are bigger. Certain very common words (the, etc) are blocked.

I made one of the poem "Wild Things" by Emily Dickenson. You can paste in the code to embed it in your blogpost, like this. Click on this small image, and it will take you to the Wordle Gallery: Check it out!
Or, I can "print" it by saving it as a PDF, then use Grab to select the image in the pf and make a screen capture. This saves it as a TIFF file, but I can resave it as a JPEG then upload it as a picture, as you see below. Fineburg says that these images can be used for anything, fun, printing on T-shirts, making money, whatever.



OK, now I've realized that when I have created my little Worlde image, that I can click "print", then select PDF from the printer menu, and then choose to save the PDF to iPhoto and it will make a picture. No need to go through the screen grab method. (NB: the FAQ gives alternate instructions for PCs)
Wordle handles multiple languages as well. Here's another Worlde I made with César Vallejo's poem "Masa." This time, instead of generating the format by hitting the "randomize button" a bunch of times, I selected "edit,", then chose the font, colors and a few other features. Because I didn't save it to the gallery, it's not there. Why don't you try making one?