January came and went way too fast. Or maybe it’s just cold outside, by Canarian standards anyway, and I didn’t have energy to go out as much as I would “normally” do. This is what I’ve seen:
6 January: Arístides Moreno & la 101 Brass Band @ Alameda de Colón, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
For years I was avoiding venturing out downtown during the Noche de Reyes. This time I just wanted to check out some live music in Triana. To get my curiosity satisfied, I had to negotiate the inebriated crowds, mountains of rubbish (mostly empty beer cans and plastic cups) and, I’m sorry to say, rivers of urine. As the concert of my interest started at 00:30, I didn’t stay for all of it. 101 Brass Band from Tenerife were great; I’d love to see (more of) them again another time. Mr Moreno could — maybe should — have stayed at home.
A guided night tour through Cueva Pintada, with a musical intermission by Rebeca Mora (vocal), Jonay Mesa (seven-string guitar) and Nelson Saavedra (fretless bass). I’d enjoyed it more if (a) the bus to Gáldar was on time and (b) we didn’t have to run to catch the return bus to Las Palmas.
28 January: Pablo Queu @ Teatro Guiniguada, Plaza F. Mesa de León, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
This is the second time I saw this band. On this occasion, the “extended format” included Alberto Díaz (trombone), Emilio Diena (drums), Ruyman Franco (bass guitar), Jonay Mesa (guitar), Claudio Marrero (tenor sax), Ernesto Montenegro (trumpet, flugelhorn) and Pablo Quintana Guillén (guitar), with short but spectacular appearance of Miriam Fleitas (vocal).
This is the first time I went to Casa de Colón to see films of any kind. Tonight’s screening was organised by the museum and Asociación de Cine Vértigo. The first five shorts were the winners of the last year’s film contest Visionaria, conceptos de isla. Cristina Yurena Zerr Sarmiento, the director of Kintsugi (the second prize of the jury), was there to say a few introductory words, along the lines “I don’t want to talk longer than a film and my film is really short”. I loved that. To my own surprise, however, my favourite film of the programme was the longest one, the 24-minute Chão de fábrica (Lunch Break) starring Helena Albergaria, Joana Castro, Carol Duarte and Alice Marcone.
Colón Cinema: Selección de cortos iberoamericanos
Casa de Colón, Calle Colón, 1, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Thursday, 26 January 2023, 19:00
Superhost (Spain, 2022) by Marine Discazeaux and Víctor Ordóñez
Kintsugi (Spain, 2022) by Cristina Yurena Zerr Sarmiento
Una vuelta completa / All the Way Around (Spain, 2022) by Zhana Yhordanova
Eneagrito (Spain, 2022) by Oscar Santamaría
Todo el mundo habla de Javier (Spain, 2022) by Fátima Luzardo
Наш старый дом was recorded by Gradsky and Skomorokhi between 1971 and 1974, released on the EP Александр Градский и ансамбль «Скоморохи» in 1978 and had been a staple of his live shows ever since. It’s another one of his songs based on a poem by Burns although with a few twists.
In Marshak’s classical translation, the song is subtitled “На мотив народной песни «Покупайте веники»” (“To the tune of the folk song Buy broom besoms”); the refrain “Buy broom besoms!” appears as an epigraph. By some reason, Marshak omitted the last stanza, “Be she green or gray”. In his turn, Gradsky dropped the “brooms” whatsoever replacing them with his own refrain: “Наш старый дом, хорошо нам будет в нём” (“Our old house, we’ll be just fine there”). While this latter seemingly has nothing to do with Burns’ (or Marshak’s) poem, at the same time it’s very much in the style of Burns.
Александр Градский: вокал, гитара
Юрий Иванов: бас-гитара
Сергей Зенько: флейта, дудка, саксофон
Юрий Фокин: барабаны
But wait. It looks like Broom Besoms was not even written by Scotland’s favourite son. In vain was I scouring my trusty little book The Poetical Works of Robert Burns (Oxford University Press, 1915) for it. The Complete Works published by Burns Country does not have it either. Why? Ralph McLean commented:
It is unlikely that Burns originally wrote these couplets, instead they are more likely to have been traditional pieces which he collected.
The buying of brooms was a common Scottish metaphor for female sexual adventures.
The alternate verses of this song continue the overt phallic symbolism of the previous version, but this time do so from the perspective of a man who still has the desire but not the ability to function as he once did.
“Overt phallic symbolism”? Well I never. I find both versions of the song (marked at the BBC web site as containing “some scenes of a sexual nature”) rather tame, especially by Burns’ standard — cf. the alternate version of the famous Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.
I don’t know if Gradsky, in the pre-internet era, was familiar with the aforementioned folk tune, which you can hear here interpreted by Annie Grace, Karine Polwart and Corrina Hewat. In any case, he came up with very different music.
Robert Burns Broom Besoms
Роберт Бёрнс, перевод С.Я. Маршака Песня
на мотив народной песни «Покупайте веники»
Chorus:
Buy broom besoms! Wha will buy them now?
Fine heather ringers, Better never grew.
Покупайте веники!
Вот хороший веник.
Веничек из вереска.
Не жалейте денег!
I maun hae a wife,
Whatsoe’er she be;
An she be a woman,
That’s eneugh for me.
Мне нужна жена —
Лучше или хуже,
Лишь была бы женщиной,
Женщиной без мужа.
If that she be bony,
I shall think her right:
If that she be ugly,
Where’s the odds at night?
Толстая, худая —
Это всё равно.
Пусть уродом будет —
По ночам темно.
O, an she be young,
How happy shall I be?
If that she be auld,
The sooner she will die.
Если молодая,
Буду счастлив с нею.
Если же старуха,
Раньше овдовею.
If that she be fruitfu’,
O! what joy is there!
If that she be barren,
Less will be my care.
Пусть детей рожает, —
Было бы охоты.
А бездетной будет —
Меньше мне заботы.
If she like a drappie,
She and I’ll agree;
If she dinna like it,
There’s the mair for me.
Если любит рюмочку,
Пусть не будет пьяница.
А не любит рюмочки —
Больше мне останется!
Be she green or gray;
Be she black or fair;
Let her be a woman,
I shall seek nae mair.
What a book! Apart from anthropology and archaeology (the authors’ respective field expertise), it deals with, or at least touches upon, ecology, economics, ethnology, history, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology — in short, most of the social sciences and beyond. Or, as the authors modestly put it, “everything”. You don’t have to agree with everything they say to admire their work. The point is not agreeing but questioning the accepted, or any other, narrative.
Speaking of which: I really liked the way the (sub)chapters are named, for example,
How the conventional narrative of human history is not only wrong, but quite needlessly dull
In which we ask: would you rather fish, or gather acorns?
In which we go in search of the real origins of bureaucracy, and find them on what appears to be a surprisingly small scale
and so on. An inexhaustible source of quotes about — well, you’ve got it.
On academia and democracy:
Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history: the kind of social structures you would simply expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else.
Obviously, it’s partly just the desire to preserve the credit for having ‘invented’ democracy for something called ‘the West’. Part of the explanation might also lie in the fact that academia itself is organized in an extremely hierarchical fashion, and most scholars therefore have little or no experience of making democratic decisions themselves, and find it hard to imagine anyone else doing so as a result.
On self-awareness:
Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working out habitual forms of behaviour without any sort of conscious reflection. When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic.
On freedom:
The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence — all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a selfconscious aversion to being told what to do.
But of course. Every year, 31 December, we watch this film. And every single year it happens. Here we go again:
Надя. Моё платье... я забыла одеть праздничное платье!
«Ирония судьбы»
Google it. There are hundreds of web pages pointing out that one of the film’s protagonists, Nadia, made an unforgivable — for a teacher of Russian — mistake: she said одеть instead of надеть. Back in 1976! There are thousands, if not millions, of pages explaining the difference between these two verbs.
Женя. А это что значит? Галя. А ничего это не значит.
«Ирония судьбы»
Contrary to what Galya says, it means something. Well, at least two things. On the one hand, an awful lot of people are bent on promulgating, for the benefit of illiterate masses no doubt, some norm. On the other hand, the populace apparently keep ignoring it, thus provoking the ire of language purists. Maybe there is a good reason to ignore it. If you search the web a little bit more, you’ll find that the “rule” has been refuted on numerous occasions [1—3] — just as it was done, you may recall, for fewer vs less. Yet, воз и ныне там.
Ипполит. В следующий Новый Год я обязательно пойду в баню. Женя. Зачем же ждать целый год?
«Ирония судьбы»
Indeed. There is no need to wait until next year, that is, till the next time I’m reminded about Nadia’s festive dress. Most likely, me throwing my two-pence worth in will not change much; I’ll do it regardless.
But first, the rule. The verb одеть (imperfective form одевать) means “to dress”, “to clothe” and requires a (most commonly) animate direct object, e.g. «одеть ребёнка» (to dress a child). The verb надеть (imperfective form надевать) means “to put on” and requires an inanimate direct object, more specifically an item of clothing, as in «надеть шляпу» (to put on a hat). The use of одеть in place of надеть is considered incorrect.
Since when? I couldn’t find who first formulated this rather dubious prescriptivist dogma rule. According to the classic Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary [4],
Одева́ть, одеть кого чем; что на кого
— in other words, Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl already in 1865 cited both uses of одеть, i.e. “to clothe” and “to put on”. For the latter one, he gives an example: «Одень тулуп», “put on a sheepskin coat”. Many classic Russian writers — Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Leskov, Rozanov, Teffi, Tolstoy among them — employed одеть in the latter sense [see examples in refs. 1—3]. And the stars did not fall from the sky.
Why it is even a problem? Who on earth, on hearing «я одел шляпу», will ever interpret it as “I dressed a hat” instead of “I put on a hat”? Nobody, that’s who.
Take the oft-quoted mnemonic «одеть Надежду — надеть одежду». What exactly does it illustrate? The law of conservation of the letter «н» in Russian? Why одежда is called одежда if one cannot одеть it? And if Russian speakers commonly say — erroneously or not — «одеть одежду» instead of «надеть одежду», the reverse is not true: you’ll probably never hear anything along the lines of «надеть Надежду». Incidentally, the protagonist’s name, Nadia, is a diminutive of the very Надежда (Nadezhda).
Another argument of the одеть/надеть police appeals to antonyms: the two words cannot mean the same because, they say, the opposite of одеть is раздеть while the opposite of надеть is снять. So what? There’s no law requiring each word to have its own unique antonym. So, снять equally works as an antonym to нахлобучить (шляпу), натянуть (чулки), напялить (пальто), нацепить (пенсне), повесить (пиджак на вешалку), постелить (простыню), as well as to other verbs unrelated to clothing, such as насадить (молоток на рукоятку), посадить (ребёнка на стул), положить (книгу на полку), поставить (кого-либо на учёт), назначить (кого-либо на должность), сдать (квартиру), and so on. I don’t see why one cannot use снять as an antonym to одеть (in the sense of надеть) either.
As a curiosity, the analogue of одеть from the world of footwear is обуть. The verb набуть is not used in modern standard Russian although it does appear in child-speak, probably as a hypercorrection:
Оська сказал:
— Это он про цирк ругался... что там ведмедь с вещами обращается? Да?
— Да.
— А вандалы тоже в цирке?
— Вандалы — это разбойники, — мрачно пояснил я.
— Я так и догадался, — обрадовался Оська, — на них набуты кандалы.
Logically enough (and probably mirroring the trend of одеть taking over надеть), обуть took on the function of “to put on”, as in «обуть сапоги», “to put on boots”. Still, purists insist that the only correct way to say this is «надеть сапоги». Whatever.
I won’t go as far as to say that we don’t need надеть — yet. It well could be that this verb is on its way out of colloquial Russian anyway [3]. One can bemoan or gloat over it, depending, but there’s no much one can do about it.
«А впрочем, пусть он делает, как хочет! Я приеду, и пьеса станет всем ясна».
«Мама, как нам справиться с тотальным просветленьем?» или о глаголах «одеть» и «надеть». Дискотека 80-ых, 22.02.2016.
Даль, В.И. Толковый словарь живаго великорускаго языка. (1-е издание). Часть 2 (И—О), с. 1234. Издание Общества любителей российской словесности, Москва, 1865.
I saw this artist’s drawings for Espanto at Centre Cultural La Nau, Valencia last November and fell in love with her illustrations. So when I saw this book — for which the author won the first ever award El Ojo Crítico in the category “comic” — in the library, I simply had to borrow it.
There are several apparently unrelated “stories”, if one can call them so. The common thread is not as much as presence of something hidden or unknown but rather different sensations, emotions, dreams and experiences related to that unknown. I liked Atávico the best: it reminded me of both Contact and Spirited Away.
