Calvino's Cosmicomics

PREVIOUSLY untranslated (so far as I know) Calvino—Two Cosmicomics: As long as the sun lasts and The meteorites—can be found in the May issue of Harper's.

From As long as the sun lasts:

It was precisely for that reason, to have a bit of a quieter life, that my grandfather came and settled here—Qfwfq said—after the last "Supernova" explosion had flung them once more into space: grandfather, grandmother, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The Sun was just at that stage condensing, a roundish, yellowish shape, along one arm of the Galaxy, and it made a good impression on him, amidst all the other stars that were going around. "Let’s try a yellow one this time," he said to his wife. "If I've understood it right, the yellow ones are those that stay up longest without changing. And maybe in a short time from now a planetary system will form around it too."

And from The meteorites:

At first we were under the illusion that we could keep it clean—old Qfwfq said—since it was really small and you could sweep it and dust it every day. Of course a lot of stuff did come down: in fact, you would have thought that the Earth had no other purpose in its orbiting but to gather up all the dust and rubbish hovering in space. Now it’s different: there's atmosphere; you look at the sky and say, "Oh, how clear it is, how pure!" But you should have seen what landed on us when the planet bumped into one of those meteor storms in the course of its orbit and could not get out. It was a powder as white as mothballs that deposited itself in tiny granules, and sometimes in bigger, crystalline splinters, as though a glass lampshade had crashed down from the sky, and in the middle of it you could also find biggish pebbles, scattered bits from other planetary systems, pear cores, taps, Ionic capitals, back numbers of the Herald Tribune and Paese sera: everyone knows that universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round.

Note that it's Martin McLaughlin (who also did Calvino's Why Read the Classics? and Hermit in Paris) translating these, not William Weaver. Penguin Classics UK is publishing The Complete Cosmicomics next month.

Two New Reviews, More on the Way

JUST a quick post to note that two reviews of mine have recently been published: one of Dave Thompon's I Hate New Music: The classic rock manifesto over at Ink 19 (click here to read it), and the other of Marina Krcmar's Living without the Screen: Causes and consequences of life without television (Kindle edition; some irony in that, no?) in the April 3 issue of the TLS.

I've got a fairly full plate at the moment on account of other books and CDs for review, some of which I'm really looking forward to (such as Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation and a reissue of Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus with Work Time), so the cruellest month might also be one that's light on substantial blog posts. I will, however, try to get some original CD reviews on Magic Bullets, Garth Knox, Susan Werner, and others posted here before the end of the month.

Digg's Devolution

WRITES John Gruber:

Digg sends a tremendous amount of traffic to sites that make it to the top of their front page, but it’s the worst kind of traffic: mindless, borderline illiterates. Good riddance, really.

That last sentence refers to the lovely message that he's coded to greet all Digg users who're viewing Daring Fireball when the new DiggBar is framing the page.

Me, I hate the DiggBar. Hated it from the moment it first appeared at the top of my browser window. I tend to use Digg only as a directional tool that points me to headlines that don't appear in my regular RSS feeds, and so I resent the cocoon that Digg attempts to create by framing external sites. To turn off the DiggBar for yourself, look under Settings > Viewing Preferences on your Digg account.

While I'm on the subject, I suppose it's worth mentioning that the DiggBar isn't the only reason I'm beginning to question the utility of Digg altogether. Gruber's description of the traffic that Digg generates is sadly becoming true in more and more cases; the site's only original content, the user comments, is a torrent of poorly spelled diatribes waxing indignant about the sensationalist headlines to articles (usually submitted by a small cabal of users led by MrBabyMan) their authors haven't bothered to read.

If one of these diatribes should appeal to the mob, woe betide anyone who holds a different view. It doesn't take an awful lot to rile these users who view themselves as advanced, individualistic, twenty-first century, tech-literate types into showing their nasty, juvenile, tribal, primitive sides. So as not to make each visit to Digg cause for outright despair, I often have to avoid reading the comments altogether, and that, I'm afraid, is a sure sign that a site has devolved into a din of arrogance and arbitrary agitation and is no longer worth visiting. Good riddance, really.

Dictionary.com's Free iPhone App

LESS than a week after I coughed up a whopping $4 for the excellent WordBook dictionary and thesaurus app for the iPhone, Dictionary.com has released its own (free!) dictionary app. Download it here.

WordBook claims 220k definitions; the Dictionary.com app claims 275k. Both feature a companion thesaurus, word(s) of the day, etymologies, and audio pronunciations. The WordBook app also has some bonus features like wildcard search and online integration with Wikipedia, but these aren't particularly essential.

The financial hit is much more tolerable this time around, but this reminds me of the time I, in a fit of reference mania, bought the entire OED on CD for hundreds of dollars. I was using Windows 98 at the time, and the CD was rendered obsolete three years later with the arrival of Windows XP. The publisher couldn't have cared less and made this quite clear. No upgrade discount, no cross-platform discount (for my eventual migration to a Mac), no sympathy. Even if I'd wanted to, I wouldn't have been able to use my OED CD-ROM to look up the definition of sucker.

Faber's 52 Poems for 80 Years

IF THE Web seems to be little more than a blind and frivolous celebration of ephemera, take comfort in Faber's new 52 Poems widget honoring the publisher's 80th year.

Available ready-made for iGoogle, MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Friendster, Wordpress, or customizable for virtually any other site, it displays one poem per week chosen from eight decades' worth of Faber archives. This week it's Larkin's "The Trees," well timed with the season: "The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said".

Get the widget from the 52 Poems website.

Jai Agnish • Awake When You Dream

Jai Agnish
Awake When You Dream
self-released (free download)

Among the small circle of listeners familiar with his work, Jai Agnish is perhaps best known for his electro-pop albums Automata (2000) and Mechanical Sunshine (2006). Awake When You Dream, his third full-length, is an attempt "to see what he could pull off without the machines," leaving Agnish with just barebones instrumentation: a Gibson acoustic, a Roland synth, and the occasional backing vocal by Peg Carlin.

But the music doesn't suffer from this back-to-basics approach; in fact, Awake When You Dream is quite an appealing, tuneful little disc, with just enough diversity—"New Parade" and its pattern of march and glide, "Walls" and its urgent succession of descents—to keep what are quite homogenous songs from getting stale over a 42-minute running time. The album's stumbling point is instead its reliance on repetition, which, coupled with Agnish's odd and not particularly flexible vocal delivery, makes these thin songs seem less substantial.

Repetition can be used to grand effect, and many a singer (Morrissey and Isaac Brock come immediately to mind) has built a career on it, but Agnish's lyrical repetition often feels gratuitous or lazy, as in "Paradise":

Trying to find my way to paradise
To paradise
Trying to find my way to paradise
To paradise

Can't quite figure out this roadmap
And there's too many signs
Too many signs
Can I hitch a ride there with you?
Can I hitch a ride there with you?

Trying so hard
Does it matter at all?
Matter at all?
Trying so hard
Does it matter at all?
Matter at all?

Tie up to the truck
Maybe you can tow me there
You can tow me there

This transcription, abbreviated slightly for the sake of space, doesn't quite capture how often certain stanzas are revisited several times within this sequence, and that the whole sequence is then repeated a second and third time. Had there been something profound or poetic in all these lines it might have been an easy thing to overlook, but "Paradise" is just one of the many songs on Awake When You Dream that takes a long time to say nothing in particular in a very solemn way. "Walls" is guilty of it too:

Concrete walls above my head
Didn't mean it in the end
Didn't mean it at all

Walls above my head (x3)
And in the end (x3)
I guess it's best for the rest of us (x2)

How high is this anyhow? (x2)

Tracks like "Lightning Bugs," "Shopping Malls," "An American," and "Farview" are of a slightly different, vignette-as-narrative variety, and while they do offer something meatier than tepid philosophizing, Agnish sings them in a bemused, distanced way that renders their content flat. Although this doesn't scuttle the songs entirely, it's still tempting to imagine how, say, Sufjan Stevens (who's worked with Agnish from time to time) or Damien Jurado might handle this very same material and imbue it with the bit of heart and conviction that it's wanting.

Awake When You Dream still has quite a bit going for it—not least that it's decent music that Agnish has made available at no cost to you—and some, though not all, of its shortcomings tend to recede after repeated listens. It's not an album for the ages, but it ought to leave you with a couple of melodies that will be hard to shake for the next few weeks.

Listen and download: Bandcamp, Last.fm, Virb