Tuesday, November 26, 2013

A FATEFUL MISDIAGNOSIS


Currado Malaspina's unlikely interest in Hebraic orthography is quite accidental. It began at Paris Sportif the posh central Paris health club where my friend Malaspina gallops on the elliptical with chubby government ministers and not a few former 'vedettes de cinema francais.'  

While rifling through a pile of damp and salty smelling gym shorts in the lobby's perdus et trouvés (much to the consternation of the Police Nationale, the French have an unusual custom of placing a ragged lost and found box in conspicuous corners of a public buildings as if the nation were one big kindergarten classroom) he found what he thought was an innocent shopping list. 


In fact, thinking at first that it was Arabic, he showed the paper to the weight coach Yazid, a Berber from Mauretania by way of Madrid whose knowledge of Semitic languages was less than perfect. 

"C'est amharique," he helpfully said, inflecting his voice with the swarthy authority of the whole of Africa. And with that he roughly translated the text as "two baguettes, 100 grams of sliced ham, four bottles of Côtes de Gascogne ...." etc. etc.

It wasn't till much later that Currado learned that his crumpled sheet of paper was a lovely little lycée exercise of rhyming Hebrew couplets describing the traditional fast day of Tu Bishvat. 

By then Yazid's deception was of little import. Currado was irrevocably smitten by the naked graphic power of the flexed square lettering.

And this was the genesis of Palimpseste, Currado's great, enigmatic ouevre which has managed to simultaneously enrage la communauté Israelite and excite la communauté des collectionneurs.


Tant pis.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

LA FONTAINE/NOW AND THEN


Just like here in the U.S. there is a lively debate taking place in France on the cultural and behavioral effects of social media. Neuroscientists, intellectuals, politicians, educators and artists have all weighed in on the subject. Concerns about the re-wiring of our nervous systems, the perceived diminution of our attention span, the impact on language and our relationship to imagery are all vital elements of this dynamic debate .

My dear colleague Currado Malaspina has some significant thoughts on the matter and has tested his theories at a recent symposium here in Los Angeles. The Conference on Unified Neurologic Technologies, an annual gathering of researchers, medical ethicists and moral philosophers invited Currado to deliver a paper on the evolution of poetic diction, specifically in regard to the expansion of our collective vocabularies.

He raised several important aesthetic issues such as whether words like tweet, ping, hashtag or byte could ever be rendered beautiful while under the jurisdiction of poetic intent. He spoke about the possibility of odd verb forms like to google, to IM and to Skype being used by poets without irony. He questioned the future of the pathetic fallacy when its objects become things like computers and phones. The viability of metaphor is in a state of uncertainty and Currado hoped to address the issue free from ideology or cultural critique. 

As a thought experiment Currado challenged the audience to compose sonnets whose descriptive tropes were limited to the world of IT.

One researcher from Tuscon came up with this clever couptlet:

"Your grace, your charm, your every facet
My life, my love, my visual asset."

Lyrics of love seemed to dominate. An engineer from the the Environmental Protection Agency began his poem with this wonderfully disorienting play on words:

"We're linked in love while inked undone
Linkedin a knot of Drang and Strum.
Linked to a page as grand as Cyrus,
Sublime and free of any virus." 

 It's hard to exaggerate the varied 
nature of the submissions. 

An anonymous bard delivered this gem:

"My love exceeds the bandwidth of a NASA- based mainframe
A passion that is Kindled by the sound of your screen name." 

It was interesting how meter and rhyme were adhered to by the majority of the participants and how skilled they were in its application (no pun intended).  

Even Currado tried his hand at it and had his colleagues scampering through Google Translate in order to parse through his cryptic imagery.





"Ton souris doit être mes couilles 
Ça-va ça-vient

l'ordinateur se plaint
ta chatte ronronne
Facebook, quel con." 



The debate rages on.