SOUNDTRACK: PJ HARVEY-Live at the Warfield Theater, San Francisco, April 14, 2011 (2011).
NPR was given permission to share this PJ Harvey concert. However, they were only allowed to share about half of it. The show is fairly short to begin with (about 75 minutes) but the downloadable portion is barely 40 minutes. It turns out that NPR was given the rights to all of the songs from the new album, Let England Shake.
Now, I have no idea how things like this work, why they are only given access to these songs as opposed to the other ones, or why an artist (or management) would not let her fans hear the ten or so other songs she played that night. Legal restrictions are weird and usually stupid. But as I’ve mentioned before, you shouldn’t complain about free stuff.
So, what we get here is a spliced together concert (it sounds seamless, although they have removed all of the banter (if there was any)). The album is played in its entirety (although we were not given “Written on the Forehead” which happens to be the song they are playing the most on the radio here), but it’s not played in order. It was also interspersed with older songs “The Devil” and “Silence” from White Chalk, “The Sky Lit Up” and Angeline” from Is This Desire, “Pocket Knife” from Uh Huh Her, “Down by the Water” and “C’mon Billy” from To Bring Her My Love, (I’d like to hear how she handles the older songs, now that’s she’s singing primarily in the higher register). And, “Big Exit” from Stories from the City.
It’s pretty clear that Harvey is no longer the young woman who made those first couple albums. And she sounds strong and confident here. It’s a great set; the autoharp never sounded better.
[READ: April 20, 2011] Five Dials Number 5
I have been enjoying all of the Five Dials, but this issue is easily my favorite so far. The “theme” of this issue is translation. Translators are the unheralded workers in literature, and while I have been trying to give them credit in my posts, I don’t always pay them enough attention (except when a translation is awkward or clunky).
But in addition to the theme (and the really cool interviews with some translators, I thought the fiction was outstanding and I loved Alain de Botton’s Advice column. The whole issue was great.
CRAIG TAYLOR-A Letter from the Editor “On Translation and Sebald”
In addition to translations, this issue also focuses on W.G. Sebald. Taylor’s letter speaks of Sebald as something of a ghostly presence around the office. And one of the translators they speak to is Anthea Bell, who translated most of his work. (This issue made me hunt down Austerlitz, which I’m planning to read shortly).
OLIVER BULLOUGH-Currentish Events: “The Dying Breed”
This Current-ish Events section was awesome. It’s about the village of Abkhazia where people are the longest living people of any country in the world. People there routinely live to be well over 100. (More than one in 40 Abkhazians lived beyond ninety, as opposed to only one in a thousand in the Soviet Union as a whole.) The woman he speaks to is 1o5 but she has bright eyes and a vibrant personality. However, something has prevented the next generation from living this long, and Bullough tries to get to the bottom of it. Wonderful reporting.
JOE DUNTHORNE-A Single Book: Austerlitz
This is the first of several paeans to Sebald. Dunthorne describes Austerlitz in such great and glowing terms (and I have to say he sounds ideal for a fan of David Foster Wallace, what with the sentence that lasts nine pages). I am definitely adding Austerlitz to my “to read” pile.
DAVID LAMBERT & ROBRERT McGILL-Writing Tips “The Collected ‘Maxims'”
This is a wonderful collection of pieces of advice that Sebald gave to his students. Lambert & McGill wrote them down from all of the notes they took in one of his classes. They are excellent, insightful and useful not only for writers but for readers. Any person looking to get into fiction writing should read these maxims.
SIMON PROSSER-Compendium: “An A to Z of W.G. Sebald”
This piece is a fascinating collection of facts about Sebald. It really comprises an amazing man’s life.
ROGER DEAKIN-Introuducing W.G. Sebald
This final piece about Sebald goes to another perennial Five Dials favorite, Roger Deakin. This is more biographical information about a fascinating man.
STEPHEN DUNN-“Permissions”
A good poem.
GAIL ARMSTRONG, ANTHEA BELL, PAUL WILSON, HOWARD GOLDBLATT
These four translators discuss the work of translating–the difficulties, frustrations, and ultimate joys of doing this under appreciated work.
Armstrong’s piece is fantastic. It talks about, among other things, people thinking that translating is very easy (and how they don’t want to pay for every “the” that is translated). But she also talks about seeing non-native speakers try to write in English and the soul crushing feeling that their mangled English produces (with examples!).
Bell translates Sebald among others. She talks about her life growing up and how she came to be a translator. (There’s also a little insight into Sebald as well). Fascinating.
Wilson translates Czech into English, and he talks about the whole process of learning Czech and then parsing it in his mind. It’s one of the more technical articles about translation that I’ve read.
Goldblatt is the foremost translator of Chinese into English and he talks about the amazing difficulty of translating a language that is so very different from English (they have no personal pronouns, and do not really distinguish between singular or plural). Towards the end, he explains that he had a (public) discussion with an author that he had recently translated. The author mentioned three things he was dissatisfied about with the translation. Goldblatt defended his choices, and he was fascinated to see that the Chinese speakers in the audience agreed with the author, while the English speakers agreed with him (about the meaning and context of the word choices).
JAMES ATTLEE-Fiction: “Night Song”
This has been my favorite fiction in Five Dials so far. This is about a translator (hmm) and his first encounter with a lesser known Argentinian poet Alberto Fusi. The narrator is giving a speech to a group at the Anglo-Spanish Friendship Society. And his story reflects back on the his several aborted introductions to the work of Fusi. It’s funny and fascinating. Interestingly, the story feels like it was written by Roberto Bolaño (…a Chilean poet who is involved with a seduction in a bar…). And I mean that as a wonderful compliment. It’s an amazing style match for an English author. The way Fusi keeps coming back into the narrator’s life is really cool.
ALAIN DE BOTTON-Help Pages “The Agony Uncle”
Two questions in this issue: how do you find joy in the city if you really love the country and how do you cope with feeling inadequate about yourself after seeing images in glossy magazines. What I love about De Botton is that his answers are believable and clever and quite helpful, even while he’s recommending you to read someone like Baudelaire (to enjoy the concept of being a flâneur in the city) or to look at the paintings of Vermeer (to combat glossy mag photos). De Botton answers questions that I didn’t know I had with answers that inspire
KURT WEILL & LOTTE LENYA-How to Write a Letter
Unlike past issues where letters were excerpted, this is a collection of signatures and pet names that Weill and Lenya called each other. They are charming and weird and quite wonderful.
J.M.G. Le CLÉZIO-The HH Archive: “Looking back to 1964”
This is the first HH Archive which is actually an excerpt from a work of fiction. Clézios’ The Interrogation is excerpted. The scene is of a man who has set about to kill a rat in his house. The details are exquisite (if not a bit gross). But to witness this man’s brief descent into madness is wonderfully well described.
TONY R., Harlow, Aged 41-The Best Bit: Waiting for Godot
The Best Bit is back! This one comes from an actor who wants to put on Waiting for Godot with his local theatre group. The best bit is of course Vladimir’s speech at the end. Tony R tells how the lead’s pregnant wife keeps messing things up by distracting the actor. These “Best Bits” are such interesting peeks into how people enjoy works of art (I do rather hope they are true).
This was a great issue and I’m really looking forward even more to the next one.
flaneur, J.M.G. Le Clezio, Roberto Bolano
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