Many other interesting images were found in Ireland: its scenery, character &; a few that I did not use are reprinted above.

Although they are generally sympathetic British tourists with Anglo-Irish backgrounds -- Samual Carter Hall was born in Waterford and his wife Anna Maria Fielding Hall was born in Dublin -- Anna Maria was a supporter of the temperance movement, and the Halls were at times vehemently critical of Irish mores and manners. Nevertheless, their multi-volume Ireland: its scenery, character &, is of interest for the many local legends they relate; for the storied details of the landscape of pre-famine Ireland; and especially because they used the work of many Irish artists throughout their books. Among the Irish artists who illustrated Ireland: its scenery, character &, are Cork Artist John Connell; Thomas Crofton Croker, who wrote the lyrics to the Joycean-referenced "Oh Twine Me a Bower"; Henry MacManus, a 19th century Dublin School of Art headmaster; Belfast painter Andrew Nicholl; and Cork artist William Willes who studied and worked in England but returned to Cork to as the first master of the School of Design in Cork.

Note that in the illustrations above, The Roundtower is by British artist G.F. Sargent, and the Powerscourt waterfall is by British landscape painter Thomas Creswick.

Midweek, on a woodland walk, I thought about the continuing work on the score for fiddler's passage and in particular about how more precise notation (the specifications of the sonnet form, polyphonic electronic literature written to a score) introduced fortunate constraints and how the history of music notation is of interest in this respect.

I sat beside a stream, had a small picnic, indulged in locative sketching, and then went home with the memory of intertwined music and words.

September 10, 2012

In Berkeley, on Tuesday Night, September 4, 2012, I attended an extraordinary event: Alan Turing: A Centenary Celebration.

The evening was introduced by Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Director Robert L. Bryant. Oxford mathematician and Gay Liberation activist Andrew Hodges, author of Alan Turing: the enigma, gave a fine talk to a full hall. Setting Turing's creative work in algorithms, code breaking, and artificial intelligence in the context of Turing's life, Hodges brought one of the most important figures in the history of computer science alive, reminding the audience of the difficulties of gay lives in the World War II and post-war era, while at the same time celebrating Turing's career and the remarkable contemporary influence of his work.

Turing is my hero, legendary Stanford computer scientist and author of The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth, told the audience in a panel that followed Hodge's speech. Knuth also reminded the audience that there were not many University computer science departments in Turing's era, and he noted that collaborative efforts by people in the field were important in changing this situation.

All of the Turing Centenary panelists were themselves Computer Science luminaries. The panel was chaired by UC Berkeley computer scientist Richard Karp, who won the Turing award for his work on the theory of algorithms. In addition to Knuth, other panelists were Martin Davis, NYU, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences; Peter Norvig, Google Director of Research; Dana Scott, Carnegie Mellon University; and Luca Trevisan, Stanford University. Many of the panelists have done formative work in algorithms, and Dana Scott worked with Strachey on the semantics of programming languages.

Some events cannot be adequately summarized. But for those of us who create with the machines, algorithms, and languages developed/foreseen by Turing and by the computer scientists who celebrated his work, Tuesday, September 4 in Berkeley was an important and memorable evening.

Questions of scoring electronic literature were on my mind last week as I finished build 3 of the score for fiddlers passage and at the same time began a HTML5/CSS version. As regards, scoring electronic literature, I confess that intitially, I had more questions than I had answers.

The difficulties are not too different from the problems that confront early music scholars; for example, see Davitt Moroney's program notes for The Polychoral Splendors of Renaissance Florence (Cal Performances) in which he describes how he recreated the circa 1545 anonymous Spanish canon Unum Cole Deum, working from unusual notation. ("Spanish number tablature")

In some instances, an Authoring System may be well enough documented so that a scholar of the future could reconstruct works created in that system. BASIC, for instance, is well documented, and in the case of Uncle Roger, I don't think it is necessary to create a score; the four programs that comprise this work are the score. Even without access to my BASIC recreation of the work, a scholar who visits my archives at Duke University should be able to set Uncle Roger running by looking at the original programs and lexias.

Javascript is widely used, and if a script was discovered 100 years later -- Nick Montfort's Taroko Gorge, for instance -- a scholar of the future could probably set it running pretty easily, or convert it to run on a contemporary computer. Although Montfort and Stephanie Strickland's Sea and Spar Between is more extensively commented, as an experiment, I took a look at Nick's elegant code for Taroko Gorge, a generative poem/script -- the reuse of which has become an electronic literature tradition. No additional score would be needed to restore Taroko Gorge, I decided. Additionally, a scholar might soon find that he or she was inspired to recreate another work based on this code. Indeed, I spent several happy hours altering the code a little to create Scholars Contemplate the Irish Beer. (Thanks, Nick!)

But in the case of the polychoral literature which I have been writing and coding, until recently, my documentation was hand-drawn score charts that are quite large and -- due to pen and ink and pencil vagaries -- difficult to reproduce online. Furthermore, there are some complexities in this work that are not common in generative poetry, such as the 3-stave measure; the use of lexias (someone once said that I was a paragraph poet as opposed to the language poetry school) and the varying speeds of lexia duration within the measure. Thus the question had to be asked: what would a scholar find that would enable the reconstruction of these works?

In the long run, I conclude, I need to write a program that encompasses all the aspects of the notation. However, long ago when I worked on library database programming on an IBM 1160, I was trained to begin with systems analysis and then write the program. I still think that this is a good method.

September 16, 2012

As Junction of Several Trails opens, Máire Powers and Liam O'Brien are sitting at an outside table with a view to the woods. On the table, there is a white tablecloth, a basket of freshly baked bread, a plate of country cheese. They have ordered a local microbrew.

The conversation is filmic in that only some details are revealed, yet the work conveys a whole experience; it is musical in that it is scored and framed by continuo text. The From Ireland with Letters time signature is now 40 sec/8 sec, with each measure being 40 seconds and the unit of measurement 8 seconds. This allows for certain parts of the conversation remaining on the screen a little longer than the 32 sec/8sec time signature of fiddler's passage. (Note that I prefer not to go under 8 seconds for the unit of measurement because there can be server glitches with short duration text production.)

The conversation begins with a discussion of family memories, passed from generation to generation and the question: Did Hiram Powers know of the family's Irish slave origins? In the process, details of their own families emerge. They talk about what led each of them to their convergent narratives: Walter Power, Hiram Powers. The conversation then segues into who Walter Power was.

In preparation for this discussion, this week I have begun to review the branches of the Power families in Ireland in the 17th century.

At this transitional time, I took a long anticipated September trip to the Sierras, where I packed my backpack with a picnic and sketchbook and at about 7,000 feet hiked above a blue green alpine lake. I descended to a quiet private place to eat lunch and paint; the sun was shining on the lake; a hawk perched on a tree beside me. For several hours, I sat quietly, looking at the trees and the mountains across the clear water, making a series small paintings and drawings for artists books.

This writer's record of last week closes with a Memorial Concert for baroque soprano Judith Nelson, an event with which -- on the evening of Monday September 10 -- the week began.

It was a fine musicians' celebration for a fellow musician, with soloists and ensembles who performed in Nelson's honor including, among other colleagues and friends, British soprano Emma Kirkby, The American Bach Soloists and friends, under the direction of Jeffrey Thomas; musicians of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra; Anna Carol Dudley, Jennifer Ellis Kampani and Susan Rode Morris, who sang a lovely Monteverdi madrigal; Susan Hedges singing Gershwin's "Summertime"; and an effecting performance of Bach's Cantata "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit", played and sung for the most part by Bay Area musicians, with Jonathan Dimmock as organist.

Judith Nelson's husband, U.C. Berkeley emeritus professor of English, Alan H. Nelson translated "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit" for the program notes, and following the closing chorus, he took the stage to introduce the highlight of the Memorial Concert. And from Christopher Hogwood's iconic production of Handel's Messiah, Judith Nelson's own beautiful voice and strong virtual presence became a central part of the evening via a DVD projection of her Westminster Abbey solo: "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth".

I was not very familiar with Bach's "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit" and during the concert heard it as at times transitionally difficult. But later at home, I was interested to discover -- when studying this work and listening to several performances -- that my experience of the work was not surprising since there are unexpected changes of tempo in this early (1707) Bach cantata. They are illustrated in a detailed chart, available on the website of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem.

Since it was an issue I had been addressing in scoring fiddler's passage, I note the usefulness of this chart in interpreting the score. Indeed, not yet documented questions I have been asking myself this week concerned using several different but parallel ways of scoring for electronic literature.

Bach composed "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit" in a phrase by phrase mix of tempos and keys. The origin of each phrase in this remix is set forth on the Bach Cantatas Website. To my ear, Bach also added contrasting interpretations to the words by backgrounding certain phrases with unexpected instrumental passages.

The lyricist for "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit" is not known, yet in the textual construction of this work, there is something of Bach's music -- a kind of contemporary juxtaposition that requires the reader to adjust his or her expectation of how words/music might conventionally flow.

September 25, 2012

Last week was a week of restoring early work, as I took the time to finish the second edition of A Party at Silver Beach, which I had begun working on prior to its exhibition in my ELO2012 Retrospective.

These days I am less inclined to change the look and feel of earlier work. So I have kept the early 21st century World Wide Web look of A Party in Silver Beach. But much of the text has been rewritten with the idea that since what I am creating overall is the experience of being at a celebration, every narrative element does not need to be completely realized. The complete story is seldom revealed in such situations.

"And somewhere in the distance,
the sound of Papageno's glockenspiel
was emanating from Uncle Roger's music box.

The most important element I added in the second edition of A Party at Silver Beach was the magic realism device of Uncle Roger's music box, which plays at times when lovers reunite. While I was working on this I listened to/watched James Levine's Metropolitan Opera Magic Flute, with Kathleen Battle as Pamina and David Hockney as set and costume designer.

Looking at issues of recreating a work on its original platform -- for the final part of my book chapter on the recreation of the BASIC recreation of Uncle Roger -- I went home from a library trip last week with Nikolaus Harnoncourt's Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech. (Portland, OR, Amadeus Press, 1988, translated by Mary O'Neill from the 1982 original Austrian edition, Musik als Klangrede)

Although admittedly I was tempted to do so by his words -- "In general, the sound of the Baroque orchestra is much softer, but sharper, more aggressive and more colorful than that of the modern orchestra..." (p. 117 )-- I am not making (in the face of Harnoncourt's own disdain for those who think computer circuitry more important than a symphony, p. ii) -- the unthinkable comparison of Uncle Roger with a Baroque Orchestra.

Nevertheless, Harnoncourt, who recently directed The Magic Flute at the 2012 Salzburg Festival, writes with clear, challenging insight and cogent example, and when I was finished his chapter on "The Baroque Orchestra, (pp. 111-117) I had a better understanding of why electronic literature works of the command line era exist in a different place than works of the GUI era and why this is an important consideration. (Forgive me Saints of early music, we who write electronic literature have not the history to understand how to navigate our problems of "translation".)

As regards continuing struggles with notating electronic literature, Harnoncourt's chapter on "Problems of Notation" (pp. 28-38) looks at (among other things) the difficulties of playing/performing pre-1800 scores. Given that I am working on the notation for the conversations in Junction of Several Trials, I was particularly interested in how the 17th century Italian/French composer Jean-Baptiste de Lully tried to notate the speech of French actors and in the process arrived at unusual time signatures "...completely inconceivable in the music notation of that period...".( p.37) The texts, Harnoncourt observes, "...acquire a wonderfully scanning rhythm."

His chapter on "Tempo" (pp. 50-58) is also relevant. "The question of tempo only became problematic with the origin of polyphony," he notes. "Now tempo and sometimes even rhythm had to agree, at least in certain passages. Since this was not possible using the old neumatic system of notation, a completely new notation, designed to indicate tempo and to some extent, rhythm had to be invented." (p.51)

October 3, 2012

For several weeks, I had been circling around Junction of Several Trails, doing some writing, looking at the score, but I was having difficulty getting into that mode where the writing is central to existence, and the work becomes a part of existence. When this mode does not happen, there is usually something wrong, and it has to be dealt with. I had made a good beginning on the conversation between Máire and Liam. But there were some problems.

Firstly, changing the time signature from 32 sec/8 sec to 40 sec/8sec wasn't working very well. I think this is because I had already begun to score with 32sec/8 sec and also because when I tried to work with it, 40 sec./8 sec seemed clunky. I have not yet completely addressed this issue, but one thing to explore is how Jean-Baptiste Lully wrote and notated recitative in the tragédies lyriques.

Secondly, the words I had written in the opening staves of continuo were not working. I had begun with two paintings -- Thomas Cole's "View of Florence, and his "View of the Arno, near Florence", both painted at the time when Hiram Powers arrived in Florence. Liam's art historian descriptions of these paintings are important, but they should come in later. Junction would open more dynamically if the entry of Liam and Máire was framed on each side with words about music. So, I began again.

On Liam's side, in counterpoint to the central discussion of family memories of Walter Power's arrival in America, I alluded to Liam's own family history by bringing him onstage with the Irish American waltzes that were playing when his grandfather met his grandmother at a Boston Dance Hall in the 1950's. (You could meet someone whose family came from County Cork at the time of the potato famine and so did your family, but you never knew this until you were dancing and talking at the Hall.)

"Neither one remembered
which band was playing
or the name of the waltz
that they first danced to,
but they said
over and over again
(as if the memory was a song)
that the sound of the accordion
was the sound of the dance hall,
and there was nothing like
that music on that evening.
'I think it was Tom Senier
playing the accordion';
'no, it was Joe Derraine.'
'It was a local tune,
a waltz with no words'"
'no, there were words,
they were about a woman
whom you met in Tralee
or Aranmore or a place
you had never been
but you were really
in Boston or Cambridge
or Dorchester,
and there was nothing like
that music on that evening."

...yet as in poetry, the allusions contribute to the experience

At intervals last week when I was working on this, I would stop working and explore Davitt Moroney's program for his harpsichord concert at the Cal Performances Fall celebration on September 30.

In the hands of a master, the writing of a music program that leads to many stories is in itself an art form. Of course, when that program is played, it is the music itself that is most important, yet as in poetry, the allusions contribute to the experience. So Davitt Moroney's program:

Henry Purcell, Suite in D major: Prelude, Almand, Hornpipe
Johann Sebastian Bach, Fantasia and Fugue in A minor
Louis Marchand, from Suite in D minor: Prelude, Two Courantes, Chaconne
Johann Sebastian Bach, from The Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus 8
François Couperin, from the Eighteenth Ordre Prelude, Le Tic-Toc-Choc ou Les Maillotins

led me on many trails on which, among other data items, there were:
celebrated harpsichordists including Gustave Leonhardt, Kenneth Gilbert, and Moroney himself;
French harpsichords painted with scenes of meadows, trees, and flowers,
or in elegant black, gold and red;
album covers with clocks, fountains, and men in Puritan attire;
a pièce croissée that will probably find its way onto the menu of Uncle Roger's music box;
and something I should have explored long ago: the scores of the works in Art of the Fugue.

In the process of beginning to look at those scores...

In the process of beginning to look at those scores, I understood better how Bach's themes work with the variations -- which was helpful not only in writing Junction of Several Trails, a work where conversation themes work together with memory variations, but also in looking at my problems with scoring for this work.

Following where Davitt's program led, in my mind, I now saw the four-stave structure of Junction (where the conversation is framed on both sides by the variations) in Bachian terms, as if it were a mirror image of Bach's Contrapunctus 9 from Art of the Fugue.

Soon, I would go to hear Davitt Moroney play at the Cal Performances Fall Free for All, and on that memorable afternoon of French and German harpsichord music, I would also hear the Kronos Quartet perform string quartet new music from Mexico, Syria, and many other places, including work by Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov and by New York composers John Zorn and Bryce Dessner.

Meanwhile, there were many other things I was doing/working on: the Twitter tools page for Authoring Software; trail hikes, each one adding a new sketch to a series 3 1/2 x 2 inch drawings for artists books, plans with JR Carpenter for a collaborative work that will juxtapose mail art with computer communication; my book chapter on the recreation of the BASIC Uncle Roger; a restored web page for my MIT Press book on Women in New Media; and centrally, the continuing writing and scoring of Junction of Several Trails.

...the way Purcell's beautiful Prelude and Almand led into an unexpected Hornpipe

On Sunday, September 30, 2012, at noon, in the Berkeley Music Department courtyard, I listened to the singing of the UC Men's Octet and (under the trees) the singing of Perfect Fifth. It was a fine hour that began with a cappella barbershop and Cal football songs and segued to a cappella Renaissance and early Baroque choral music.

Then, I went to hear the long anticipated program that UC Berkeley Professor of Music and Internationally renowned harpsichordist Davitt Moroney played for this Cal Performances fall celebration,

At one o'clock, in Hertz Hall, as if he were Bach, coming into a room, sitting down and beginning to play -- and there is no one else who can play the way he can, which of course he knows -- Dr. Moroney played every note of his program with perfect touch.

I particularly liked the way Purcell's beautiful Prelude and Almand led into an unexpected Hornpipe; the river flowing majesty of Bach's Fantasia, followed, like an emanating stream tributary, by the perfectly constructed Fugue in A minor; the clouds of cascading notes in Marchand's Chaconne, the clarity of Contrapunctus 8, and the imagined movement of Davitt Moroney's hands in the concluding Couperin.

He received a standing ovation, and there was no question that he deserved it.

Afterwards, I sat for an hour or so in a cafe, where I ate memorable French pastry, drank good coffee and -- writing in my notebook -- explored the plotting of Junction of Several Trails.

Then I joined the crowds of people heading into Zellerbach to hear the Kronos Quartet.

The Kronos Quartet is David Harrington and John Sherba, (violins), Hank Dutt, (viola) and Jeffrey Zeigler. (cello) Playing to a large, enthusiastic crowd they rocked the hall with new music that began with Mexican composer Severiano Briseño's rousing "El Sinaloense" and also included -- in addition to the music mentioned earlier -- Syrian composer Omar Souleyman's "La Sidounak Sayyada" and music by Vietnamese musician Kim Sinh and by Cantor Alter Yechiel Karniol.

...the long anticipated music was unforgettable

While drinking coffee and eating French pastry, I had been thinking that Máire Powers would arrive at the cafe from a Focluth Wood rehearsal. What Focluth Wood was rehearsing before Máire meets Liam would, of course, not be the music that Kronos played on stage on Sunday.

Nevertheless, there is about Focluth Wood's music a certain Irish wildness which echoes the music of folk cultures that Kronos so finely transforms into contemporary new music. Indeed, the idea of such transformation is inherent in the music that Máire plays in Begin with the Arrival and Fiddler's Passage.

There was also -- with the echoes of Irish fiddle music in the fast moving notes and the musician's virtuoso skill -- something of a contingent influence in the work by Couperin with which Davitt Moroney finished his program on Sunday.

And as the program concluded, he delayed the entrance of this final work in such a way that when he began to play, the long anticipated music was unforgettable.

October 21, 2012

A draft of the first four bars of the Sinfonia for Junction of Several Trails has been composed and is available online. So far, the new notation for this work is working well.

Although I have used conversation in three-stave works, (notably Wasting Time, 1991-1992, which I am currently restoring in the original BASIC) such early narrative data structures are digital text in which word compositions are slowly built on the screen. They are conceptual (with something of the Language and Photography school in aesthetic) and are different from how conversation will be portrayed in Part V of the polychoral Irish American epic From Ireland with Letters. Polychoral dialogue was also explored in recent works, such as when the foreground and the background merged, but I am not yet sure of how to compose the dialogue in Junction.

So, following a trail that began with Nikolaus Harnoncourt's Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech, I went home from the library a few weeks ago with Jean-Baptiste de Lully and his Tragédie Lyriques. (Joyce Newman, UMI Research Press, 1979) Of interest was how Lully experimented in the creation of recitative:

p. 101: "In sequences of conversational speeches, there are certain elements which tend to bind the dialogue together. Poetically, rhyming patterns overlap from section to section and speech to speech while musically, cadences are accomplished before the end of one speech so that the second speaker begins to sing without a harmonic change. The speakers follow each other very rapidly and, indeed, in some instances they interrupt each other."

p. 103: Other techniques used by Lully (who often worked with lyricist Philippe Quinault) include variation in the speaking speed of conversationalists, with in some instances one speaker speaking twice as fast as the other.

The exploration of Lully's 17th Century recitative was not necessarily for the purpose of imitating it. However -- in addition to the fact that I had not thought precisely in terms of using speed of speech in this manner -- another purpose of looking at how musicians compose recitative is to understand the variety of approaches.

Interlude: On Saturday night in Berkeley I heard the Holloway Gower Mortensen Trio play "Back to the Future", a program of 17th Century German and Italian Music.

Led by renowned Baroque violinist John Holloway, playing with fellow musicians Lars Ulrik Mortensen (harpsichord) and Jane Gower, (dulcian) it was an evening of seldom heard "Stil Moderno" instrumental music, including two enchanting sonatas by Dario Castello for violin, dulcian and harpsichord; Philipp Friedrich Böddecker's lively dulcian-led "Sonata Sopra La Monica"; and harpsichord toccatas by Johann Jakob Froberger and Michelangelo Rossi.

The highlight of the evening was the Passacaglia from the Mystery Sonatas. The Passacaglia for solo violin was written by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, one of the finest violinists of the 17th century. On Saturday night in Berkeley, this challenging, riveting, wildly beautiful serenade was played in a virtuoso performance by the incomparable John Holloway.

A seminal work for solo violin, in which the bass is played by the violin itself, the Biber Passacaglia exists in the original hand-written manuscript of the Mystery Sonatas (held by the Bavarian State Library in Munich) -- where each of the sonatas is illuminated by an icon image from the Rosary mysteries, and the concluding Passacaglia is illuminated by the image of a guardian angel.

The works on the program -- which also included Philipp Friedrich Buchner, Johann Rosenmüller, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde, Giovanni Battista Fontana, and Marco Uccellini -- were interesting, technically challenging, sonorous, unexpected, and adventurous -- with occasional echoes of festival or street performance (where music moves outside of expected venues: Joshua Bell playing Bach's "Chaconne" incognito at the Matro Station in Washington DC; John Holloway bringing ancient music to life, as if he were a 17th century violinist transported to Berkeley; Lars Ulrik Mortensen finely recreating a Rossi toccata; Jane Gower playing the dulcian sound of hundreds of years ago)

"Back to the Future": And somehow I remembered Leslie Ross' innovative bassoon "other instruments". Indeed, listening to the experimental early music that the Holloway Gower Mortensen Trio played on Saturday night, I was also reminded of the continuing influence of Fluxus artists on contemporary art, music, and literature.

For instance -- from the point of view of the field of electronic literature -- in the Fluxus objects collected by Jean Brown and now housed in the Getty, one could look at:

Vito Acconci's "when it was set down there (and)....;
Eric Andersen's "Become a member of Eric Anderson's random audience I: frequency C";
Joseph Beuys' "Enterprise";
George Maciunas' "Confetti invitations";
Takako Saito's "Sound Chess";
Carolee Schneemann's "ABC: we print anything in the cards";
and one of my own early image catalogs,

to name just a few works in this extraordinary collection. My work, which Jean Brown purchased for her collection in the early 1980's, was created using a box originally intended for microelectronic chips. Into the slots that originally held the chips, I put photographs and text. (and some of the original chips remained in the box.)

Also on Saturday, I returned to the writing of Junction of Several Trails. After 6 hours or so, it was not working exactly the way I wanted. The segment of continuo which concerns Thomas Cole's paintings of Florence -- "View of Florence from San Miniato", Oil on canvas, 1837 -- is effective, but it should probably be a part of the Sinfornia and not (as currently) frame the conversation.

In Begin with the Arrival, (part II of From Ireland with Letters) there are 4 staves but the continuo is intermittent; in Junction, it is continuous. This kind of Four-part polychoral writing is challenging.....

October 12, 2012

Writing and interface design continue on Junction of Several Trails, and it is beginning to take shape. The 4-stave text, with which it opens now, functions in somewhat the same way as a sinfonia that introduces a Bach cantata.

Thus Junction, which is part V of From Ireland with Letters, now begins with a text sinfonia, where the music is in the writing.

Last week, with Irish American waltzes at Boston Dance Halls, I wrote Liam's continuo. Beginning this week, I wrote the first draft of Máire's continuo. It plays in counterpoint on the other side.

She came to the cafe from a rehearsal.
"And when I'm drinking,
I'm always thinking
How to gain my love's company"
I never should have told them
I was meeting Liam O'Brien,
Máire thought to herself.
And it would be Cormac's turn
to call the songs.
"upon his knee a pretty wench
and on the table a jug of punch".
The band played on,
as if they were at road trip festival,
the audience sitting on blankets,
drinking draft beer
as the sun went down.
But no one said a word
about where she was going
after the rehearsal.
"And what's it to any man whether or no,
whether I'm easy or whether I'm true,
as I lifted her petticoat easy and slow".
Leading with the sweetly wailing sound
of his accordion.
Cormac kept calling the songs.
"I'd go home to my parents
confess what I've done"
until Frannie,
who was married to Cormac,
started playing the fiddle
out of turn,
"A gypsy rover came over the hill",
and Máire joined her.
"A gypsy rover came over the hill,
Down through the valley so shady
He whistled and he sang till the green woods
rang And he won the heart of the lady."

So, somewhere between line 6-14 (above) in counterpoint, I, the writer, bring Máire Powers to the Farmhouse Cafe where:

"At the hour when they were meeting
the woods were darkly beautiful.

There were lanterns in the courtyard
of the cafe where they were meeting,
but they were not yet turned on.
"Down through the valley so shady"

Meanwhile, Liam's continuo is playing on the right hand side. Soon, he will also arrive.

October 26, 2012

Supportive collaborative social media environments foster a creative bonding among individuals, and on social media platforms -- particularly for writers and artists working in new fields -- there is an energy that reflects and catalyzes the artmaking process. Beginning in 1986, on Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on The Well, social media conferencing -- and an associated online publication menu that 26 years later is still innovative -- were instrumental in my work in California and in the work of other writers, including Jim Rosenberg in Pennsylvania and Fortner Anderson in Montreal.

These days, we take this for granted, but at that time the network capability to bring artists from all over the World together on the same platform was radical and astounding. Since then, networked discussion, artmaking, and information sharing have been a part of my life -- from the seminal Telluride community Infozone; to creating MUD-based social media narrative at Xerox PARC; to Arts Wire's work bringing diverse cultural communities online; to the USC-based Critical Code Studies Working Group; to the amazing way in which -- using only 140 characters -- information is exchanged between writers of electronic literature and digital humanities scholars on my Twitter stream.

With this in mind, I posted my Authoring Software story on the upcoming Remediating the Social Conference at Edinburgh, (which will include an interactive e-cast) and then on October 25, I went to the Berkeley Center for New Media to hear digital media theorist Wendy Chun talk about the research for her in progress book, "Imagined Networks".

Under the heading of "Mapping the Unmappable", Chun, a Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, spoke of the science of networks explored by a network of scientists -- collectively solving problems that cannot be solved by one individual.

Additionally, focusing in particular on popular network culture, she highlighted issues including:

• online friendship
• the public/private dichotomy of networked information
• and the role of the "theoros" and social media in the validation of lives and events.

At times in her talk, the popular network that Wendy Chun explored was not the network -- where the role of art and culture in the creation of community is a continuing pleasure -- which I see. Nevertheless, (even though sometimes electronic literature is experimental and targeted to an audience of colleagues) for poets who write on the Internet, writing on the Internet is still Homeric in that whenever/whatever we write on the World Wide Web, we are working in the public square.

In Music in Ireland, Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, (NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) the story begins with a welcome invitation. "Listen, Stan and Dora. There will be music, dancing, and singing tonight...Here's how you get there," Following this invitation and directions, the authors, Dorothea E. Hast and Stanley Scott, journey to a pub on the Western Irish coast. Here players of fiddles, flute, tin whistle, bagpipes, concertina, and accordion "begin their set with a gentle, lilting jig, 'The Mist Covered Mountain,' composed by Junior Crehan..."

"Every few minutes, the musicians switch to a new tune, moving seamlessly from one melody to the next." And in the interludes, there is dancing; there is conversation; there is beer. "As can be seen here," Hast and Scott note to conclude their opening "Invitation to a Session," "...the community surrounding the music -- including people, place, and even physical locale -- is a vital component in the overall musical experience."

Indeed, a poet writing an Irish American epic on the World Wide Web might remember that in some social media platforms (The Well, Arts Wire, for instance) the presence of the networked community and interactive audience is/was and continues to be important in the way that audience and community are important in Irish and Irish American culture.

On Wednesday October 24, at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Music, Carla Moore (violin) and Davitt Moroney (harpsichord) played a Noon Concert Series program that featured two Bach sonatas for violin and harpsichord and Muffat's Passacaglia in G minor.

From the opening riffs in the Allegro of the Sonata in G major, (BWV 1019) to the final Allegro of the Sonata in B minor, (BWV 1014) Bach's fascinating Sonatas for violin and harpsichord were beautifully played by violinist and a Concert Master of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Carla Moore, and harpsichordist and musicologist, UC Berkeley Professor Davitt Moroney, whose recent concerts include an acclaimed performance at the Hall of Musical Instruments of the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.

Between BWV 1019 and BWV 1014, as if in friendly challenge to John Holloway's Passacaglia from Biber's Mystery Sonatas, (played on Saturday night in Berkeley) the incomparable Davitt Moroney took Muffat's Passacaglia and with complex variations, an unusual bass, and subtly implied dialogue woven into solo harpsichord polyphony, he creatively transformed it into into a multi-faceted surprisingly contemporary work. He played this Passacaglia with such coherent vision that it was difficult to separate the composition from the performance, and perhaps because of how he suffused this work with a poetic discourse that wordlessly approached narrative, it was an extraordinary harpsichord passage.

It should be noted that John Holloway and Davitt Moroney have together made a classic recording of Biber's Mystery Sonatas. Holloway and Moroney have also recorded the Bach violin and harpsichord Sonatas.

On Wednesday, listening to Carla Moore and Davitt Moroney play these same Sonatas, I was entranced with how Bach carefully crafted each Sonata movement in such a way that it not only stood by itself but also could be combined with other movements to create a whole. And -- particularly because each movement was such a perfect whole unto itself -- how the allegro/adagio movements were contrasted (and how else this might be done) was of interest.

In BWV 1019, it is Allegro, Largo, Allegro, Adagio, Allegro.
In BWV 1014, it is Adagio, Allegro, Andante, Allegro.

At home, I continued to work on Junction of Several Trails, creating the template for the score and then working within it. With this method, I cannot just write the words and then intuitively put together four staves. Instead the preordained time measurement forces a more constraint-based writing. If this seems difficult, (and in fact at this point it is) the hours and hours of playing/rewriting; replaying/rewriting the work until the correlations between each stave are working are greatly reduced. It is much easier to correlate the four staves of the work when working with a scored template.

This, I suppose, (as noted before, Harnoncourt p. 51) is why music was more exactly notated when polyphony was introduced.

November 4, 2012

While in the Edinburgh, Scotland, many of my electronic literature colleagues met at the ELMCIP Conference Remediating the Social -- and on my Twitter stream and the Bambuser e-cast, I followed the panels, the new works, and the new ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature -- at home I worked day and night on the complete score and the writing of the "Sinfonia" that introduces Junction of Several Trails, until finally late on Saturday night, the score and the draft were at the place that they could be made public. There is of course more work to be done to make the score comprehensible, and, as always, much editing to be done on the writing. But it is working!

The continuo in the second half of the Sinfonia is dense, almost Bachian. There once was, it should be noted, an Irish tenor, who sang early music. His name was James Joyce.

The information intensive word structure of From Ireland with Letters also reflects information age text display, and, in places, it proceeds so rapidly, that it must be replayed in order to comprehend the whole. However, it should be remembered that this is the case with certain works of polyphonic music. Indeed, in earlier centuries, increasing complexity was probably initially difficult for audiences accustomed to Gregorian chant. As is the case with the reading of online text by contemporary Internet audiences, an understanding of polyphonic music was gradually acquired.

In celebration of the first online posting of the Sinfonia, I went hiking in the hills. I have been making a series of small (3 1/2" by 2" drawings) of the forests, trees, ferns, and laurel on trails in the East Bay and Marin, and now have about 35 small pen and ink sketches that will be made into a series of landscape artist books. I look forward to working with my hands and to the interface decisions and explorations involved in making artists books. The interplay between this work and the creation of electronic literature has always been a part of my work.

At home, I made a traditional fresh tomato and basil Italian pasta sauce, remembering the Society of Six: how Seldon Gile went hiking and painting in the Oakland hills with his friends and when they returned to his cabin, they talked about their work while Gile made informal dinners. Pasta and red wine.

Contingently, the uses of narrative in contemporary electronic literature and the immense amount of research required to write historical fiction were (last week) subjects of a lively, interesting digital writers' conversation with Canadian British writer Kate Pullinger, who recently spoke at Books in Browsers 2012 in San Francisco.

In the opening Sinfonia to Junction of Several Trails, the continuo ornamentation of a simpler central text subtly conveys a background to the central themes. In the central measures, accompanying Liam's theme, it describes a painting of Florence done by Hudson River painter Thomas Cole in the same year that Hiram Powers and his family moved to Florence:

Thomas Cole,
View of Florence from San Miniato,
oil on canvas, 1837

"And in the evening, in 19th century Florence, artists gathered at the Caffe Doney, where their conversation was not unlike those of artists of any era."

Liam's continuo text also looks at between-the-wars life in 17th century Ireland and how the traditions of Ireland, such as "The Table Laden" were carried on in his potato famine immigrant.

Family memories of slavery, how slave memories were passed from generation to generation, and the question of whether or not Hiram Powers -- a frequent visitor at the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe before he left America -- knew of the slave origins of his family will return in the conversation between Liam O'Brien and Máire Powers that I will write next.

Accompanying Máire's theme in the opening Sinfonia to Junction, is the family tree that begins with Walter Power and Trial Shepherd.

"Like a fiddle tune
that continually returns
to the opening notes,
her family tree
was echoing in her mind."

The way the Irish names are gradually submerged in New England names becomes apparent as this "tune" proceeds:
Lemuel Powers,
Ezekiel Powers, Abijah Powers,
and Elias Powers who married Emeline White, a descendent of Elder John White. (on whose Cambridge cow-yard a Harvard University library is allegedly built)

In Máire's family the Irish names return when her father marries the granddaughter of a Gaelic revival scholar, who took his family into exile to America after the Easter Rising.

Note that in real life, my family in America, started with the exact same family tree that is disclosed in the Sinfonia to Junction of Several Trails, but Walter Power symbolically returned in name with my grandfather Walter Powers -- who set me on the trail that resulted in From Ireland with Letters. The name continued in my family with my father's brother, Walter Powers II and his son Walter Powers.

November 14, 2012

As is my usual practice, I am letting the Junction of Several Trails Sinfonia rest for a week or so before beginning the process of editing the text and finishing the score.

Meanwhile, work on restoring my 1991-1992 narrative data structure, Wasting Time, has resumed. Wasting Time begins as a simple duet and turns into a more complex trio. Although it is not nearly as elegant algorithmically or as densely narrative as the works that preceded it, notably Uncle Roger and its name was Penelope, it is of interest both as a pre-web example of early, easy to navigate, digital narrative poetry written for a literary magazine and in my own work as a short precursor to polychoral literature. I confess that at the time I was interested in how Gilbert & Sullivan put together words in duets and trios.

Although it is tempting to do so, other than editing words in the narrative portions, I'm not making changes in the program. But in 2012, I have rewritten the REM statements in this way:

10 REM WASTING TIME
15 REM copyright 1991 Judy Malloy
16 REM This BASIC program provides an interesting
17 REM look at producing text with three different methods,
18 REM including READ DATA statements, such as those used in lines 4050-4310;
19 REM file reading, such as the opening statement that calls the file "clicks",
20 REM and inclusion of the text within the program itself
21 REM which begins in line 340.
22 REM At the time when it was written, few people would have looked
23 REM at the program, so it also asks the question:
24 REM if the reader does not see it,
26 REM what is the impact on a work of literature
27 REM of such an experimental and at times unorthodox program?
28 REM And does the program itself echo the narrative situation in Wasting Time?

My approach to restoring early work is that as a writer it is ok to edit my words, but my program and the way it worked 20 years ago is historic. So, except for the opening REM statements which do not effect how the program runs, the program is essentially the same as it was in 1991. Also, some of the purely narrative text in the program has been edited, and several screens of the opening of the duet are omitted.

The program and text are working. I may have over-edited the text. While I consider this, I'm working on the documentation. To introduce the documentation, I have lightly edited the artist's note that accompanied the Wasting Time disk when the work was published in a special edition of Perforations in 1992 -- After the Book: Writing Literature/Writing Technology (Perforations 1:3, Summer 1992. After the Book was edited by Richard Gess. It was published in a cardboard box that contained disks of electronic literature including Stuart Moulthrop's Dreamtime and my Wasting Time and copies of papers (they were separate and not bound) by Michael Joyce, Carolyn Guyer, Jane Douglas, Jim Rosenberg and others.

The 2012 text of my 1992 artist's note in Perforations -- Judy Malloy, "Wasting Time: A Narrative Data Structure" -- which now introduces the documentation for the restored work, reads as follows:

"Intelligent, responsive electronic 'bookware' (either packaged like software or running on book-sized machines) is invigorating established literary forms -- blurring the boundaries between literature, visual art, and theater. Words that are stored on bookware can be retrieved in natural, consequential ways -- as memories are retrieved by human minds. In addition, as they 'run' on the fluid, glowing computer screen, animated words can convey the slow unfolding of time and/or multiple points of view.

My 'narrabases' Uncle Roger and its name was Penelope, use the computer's ability to store and manipulate nonsequential narrative information. My 'narrastructure' Wasting Time uses the visual attributes of the computer monitor in combination with the computer's ability to organize information and display it in an animated manner that clarifies that information.

The Setting

Something about the basement I was living in (in Albany, California in the winter of 1990-1991) reminded me of the house where I lived in the Rocky Mountain foothills in the late sixties. Perhaps it was the penetrating cold and the long red underwear I used to combat it. Perhaps it was the twanging of warm water against the metal sides of the shower. Or, it might have been the contrast between the sinister darkness in the corners of the kitchen after the sun went down and the bright sun in the morning on the owner's well-tended garden -- a contrast that echoed the difference between the black woods outside the window at night in that Colorado house and the white snowcapped mountains seen from its kitchen windows on sunny mornings.

Wasting Time, a work of fictional digital poetry, is set in this house, still located I imagine, above Boulder at 7,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains -- about a mile up a dirt road. In January when the story takes place, after a snowstorm, Ellen and Dick, the fictional new owners, have to park their car by the side of the main road (as we did) and to reach the house, walk up a snow covered dirt road in the dark.

The Characters

Ellen and Dick are a married couple on their early thirties. Ellen is an assistant food designer for a company that makes frozen meals for institutions. Dick, a plant physiologist, is a research-oriented university professor. The third character, Dan, was Dick's roommate in his freshman year at college.

The Structure

Wasting Time, a short narrastructure about 3 characters, is told from separate but parallel points of view using 3 columns of text in a series of 25 computer monitor screens. Each screen is built up slowly, and the speed at which the words appear is partially controlled by the reader.

When I began work on Wasting Time, I had just finished producing a collaboratively written narrastructure Thirty Minutes in the Late Afternoon. In this work, written on Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL in 1990, 3 characters were developed simultaneously by 15 writers, using the WELL's topic system. (a pioneering social media system) The group-written thoughts and actions of the 3 characters were then displayed in 3 parallel columns of text. The reader saw their separate thoughts and actions simultaneously in filmic "real time".

Wasting Time also occurs in filmic "real time" that is represented by 3 parallel columns of text. But in the central part of the work, it utilizes a more complex text delivery system.

The Story

When Wasting Time begins running, words that set the scene appear on the screen, accompanied by a light tapping noise; (The steady falling of the snow outside, perhaps, or the typewriter on which I wrote when I lived in Colorado before the days of word processing) In the beginning, Ellen and Dick's separate thoughts appear side by side. After Dan arrives unexpectedly, the screen structure changes. Ellen, Dan, and Dick sit down on the couch in front of the fire. First, their spoken words appear on the screen (in capital letters) at the speed of spoken conversation. Then slowly, the screen is filled with their thoughts (in upper and lower case letters.) The reader controls the "thought flow" by pressing when he or she wants to see more.

Wasting Time examines the exterior and interior ways in which individuals relate to each other. The gradual emergence of text on the fluid computer screen allows the viewer to assimilate complex word patterns."

And, when the story ran on the original platform, the bright, glowing words on a black screen emphasized the contrasts in the story.

November 24, 2012

Thanksgiving was celebrated early this year with a family visit and a trip to Marin to hike along a streamside trail. I stopped to have a small picnic, listen to the sound of the water, and do some drawing in my notebook of calling-card sized pen and ink sketches.

Later at home, I was happily surprised to see that the image I had been searching for to illuminate the score for the Sinfonia to Junction of Several Trails was already in my drawing notebooks. Additionally, as of Thanksgiving day, the entire "lyrics" were added to the score, an opening page was created for the Sinfonia, and I began to write the conversation between Máire and Liam. At present my plan is to continue with the four stave structure, so that the Sinfonia flows into the conversation. However in this part of Junction of Several Trails, the continuo of Irish poetry and song will occur intermittently, while in the central two staves, Máire and Liam will converse.

Also this week I returned to reading Dorothea E. Hast and Stanley Scott, Music in Ireland, Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. (NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) In books about Irish music, themes about the role of music in Irish culture occur and reoccur in the way that themes occur and reoccur in Irish music itself. These themes are expressed in print as differently by different writers as they are in the music by different musicians.

I am enjoying the stories of how Irish music is learned In Music in Ireland, Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. They begin in Chapter 1, "Invitation to a Session", with West Clare fiddle player Junior Crehan, who for decades played the fiddle in Gleeson's Pub on the Western Irish coast. Junior's mother played the concertina, and he also learned from West Clare fiddler, Thady Casey. But his father wished him to be a farmer, so with his pajamas hidden in the barn, he would sneak out to play at night. Returning home early in the morning, he would put the pajamas on and enter the house as if he had been out early feeding the chickens.

One night, (or so goes the story that he told folk musicologist Tom Munnelly) Junior was walking beside an ancient ringfort -- on the kind of moonlight night where the clouds would at times obscure the moon -- when he saw a small ball of light moving back and forth "...and as I was walking didn't I see two goal posts and a little man standing in between the goal posts? and the ball was coming! 'Stop the ball,' says he." So Junior stopped the ball and stayed for a while to watch the game. When he left, the goalkeeper gave him a small piece of metal to put behind the bridge of his fiddle "as a charm to win a wife".

Junior relates that he played so well that "While the music was on the people were in a kind of daze. They never heard anything like it in this world. And a lot of them say they will hardly ever hear anything like it."

And that is how he won the hand in marriage of the woman he loved. (source: Tom Munnelly, "Junior Crehan of Bonavilla," Béaloideas p. 66-161, 1998, quoted by Hast and Scott on pp 12-13)

"Passing on the Tradition", Chapter 3 of Music in Ireland, Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, focuses how the traditions of Irish music are passed from from generation to generation in ways that include the osmosis of the central place of music in Irish life. In the words of East Clare concertina player Mary MacNamara:

"My father would take us, when we got to the stage we could go out and play, he would go to different houses...maybe twice a week and we'd sit down and we'd listen to these musicians. And listen to the stories they had to tell, listen to them playing. We'd have the tea and the corncake and all the rest, and then we'd play a few tunes with them, might dance a set. And that's really how we got our music. It was kind of given to us by the older people more than having actually sat down and consciously learned it..." (p.44)

In the field of the electronic literature, our history is relatively new and yet -- as digital writing, becomes a part of contemporary culture -- more and more it is being celebrated with exhibitions and gatherings and readings. And I am happy to note that this month my classic Eastgate its name was Penelope is running at Nouspace Gallery in the exhibition Digital Stories of the 1990s: A Look at Works from the Storyspace School, with works by Michael Joyce, Judy Malloy, Stuart Moulthrop, Shelley Jackson, Richard Holeton and more displayed on vintage Macs from Dene Grigar's collection.

Nouspace Gallery & Media Lounge is directed by Grigar and John Barber, Faculty in The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver.

Contingently, this week on Authoring Software, I featured 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a wiki-written book by ten authors who participated in the 2010 Computer Code Studies Working Group: Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter.

Written in BASIC for the Commodore 64, the 1980's program of the title -- 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 -- uses characters (205 \ and 206 / ) from the Commodore-specific character set, PETSCII in order to generate an array of maze-like pattern. The ten writers who created this significant book, worked together to explore the program in terms of it techno-cultural history, including the history of the BASIC language, the Commodore 64, and the histories and uses of mazes.

walking beside an ancient ringfort -- on the kind of moonlight night where the clouds would at times obscure the moon

While I was writing this article, I tried running the program on DOSBox. Since PETSCII and ACSII characters sets are different, the output of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 was not unexpectedly quite different.

On a DOS emulator, I produced this surprising result -- in which the maze metamorphosed into a score.

Note that while in PETSCII, 205 and 206 are the \ / characters that create mazes, in ASCII, 205 and 206 are box drawing characters. A DOS maze could probably be created using the ASCII codes for \ /. However, in ASCII, they are not next to each other in numerical order, so the workaround might force a longer program. Note also that to run 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); on DOSBox, I eliminated the .5 that works on the Commodore.

November 30, 2012

My mother, Barbara Lillard Powers, November 30, 1916 - October 10, 2001, Editor of the Winchester Star, Editor of the Somerville Journal, Managing Editor of the Somerville Journal, the Cambridge Chronicle, and the Watertown Press.

Rain and writing and research. The story that Máire Powers tells Liam O'Brien about how her great grandfather escaped after the Easter Rising set me on the trail of American Fenian support for the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The rebellion was supported by Clan na Gael. (at the time of The Rising, the name for the Fenian Brotherhood) From Boston, Máire's great grandfather's brother was among the men who transported guns to the IRB. After The Rising -- when the British arrested over 3,000 Irish men and women and brutally executed the leaders by firing squad -- his ship sailed silently back to America carrying Máire's great grandfather. And in the crates, that had formerly held guns, was a treasure of books from the Gaelic Revival.

A hundred years later, these books would inspire a contemporary lay by a woman, whose first ancestor in America was an Irish slave.

This week's research (for the continuo to the Cantata of Junction of Several Trails) centered on songs from The Easter Rising.

I began with these words from "The Foggy Dew" by Parish Priest Charles O'Neill:

"But the Angelus' bells o'er the Liffey swells
Rang out in the foggy dew."

The entire opening of this song -- finely sung by Sinead O'Connor with the Chieftains -- is:

"As down the glen one Easter morn
To a city fair rode I,
Their armed lines of marching men
In squadrons passed me by.
No pipe did hum, no battle drum
Did sound its loud tattoo
But the Angelus' bells o'er the Liffey swells
Rang out in the foggy dew."

The names of the rebels are in songs such as Peadar Kearney's ballad: "The Row in the Town", sung by The Wolfe Tones:

"God rest gallant Pearse and his comrades who died,
Tom Clarke, MacDonagh, MacDermott, McBride,
And here's to Jim Connolly he gave one hurrah,
And he faced the machine guns for Erin go Bragh."

The names of the rebels are in "The Boys from County Cork", set forth on the website of the Merry Ploughboys, where the entire ballad is available:

"Meet the boys from Kerry, take the boys from Clare
From Dublin Wicklow Donegal and the boys from old Kildare
Some came from a land across the sea, from Boston and New York
But the boys who beat the Black and Tans Were the boys from County Cork

In Ireland's rebel county our heros fought and died
Tom Barry and his gallant crew filled Irish hearts with pride
From Skibereen to Bandon, to Bantry by the sea
Our brave young Michael Collins fought for Ireland's liberty

Well Cork came us McSweeney, A martyr for to die
And Wicklow gave us Dwyer in those days now long gone by
And Dublin gave us Padraic Pearse, McBride and Cathal Brugha.
And America gave us De Valera to lead auld Ireland through."

excerpt from "Boys of the county Cork", Trad. Arr. Merry Ploughboys;
also sung by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem

All of the seven signers of the 1916 Proclamation, whose brutal executions inspired the Irish War for Independence were:

Galway born Éamonn Ceannt, the first signer of the Proclamation of Independence.

Thomas James Clarke, who had spent 15 years of penal servitude for his role in a bombing campaign in London.

Commandant-General of the Dublin forces, Edinburgh-born James Connolly. He was so badly wounded that he could not stand. Connolly was sitting in a chair when he was gunned down by the firing squad.

Seán MacDiarmada: from Leitrim, manager of the newspaper Irish Freedom. He had polio and walked with a cane.

Tipperary-born Thomas MacDonagh was a teacher, scholar, writer, playwright, and commander of the Second Battalion of Volunteers.

Dublin-born Patrick Pearse, Editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, the newspaper of the Gaelic League. He also founded two schools for the Irish language education of Irish children. (with Thomas MacDonagh) Pearse was the author of the Proclamation of Independence and Commander in Chief of the Irish forces.

Dublin-born Joseph Mary Plunkett, editor of the Irish Review, was also involved in the founding of the Irish National Theatre. He was Director of Military Operations.

More information is available in The Executed Leaders of the 1916 Rising (Department of the Taoiseach)

Thinking about the role of the Easter Rising in Ireland's freedom, thinking of the symbolic treasure of books from the Gaelic Revival, I returned to one of my own favorite books: H.V. Morton's In Search of Ireland (London: Methuen, 1949. First edition: 1930) Morton, an English journalist, set off for Ireland only 8 years after the Treaty of 1922. On the deck of a boat on his way to Ireland, he wrote:

"I was going not to the land of clowns and 'bulls', which amused the ruling class of two centuries, but to a small country that has stood to its guns through a consistent War of Independence that dragged its weary, blood-stained way through nine centuries -- the longest struggle in the history of the world. Before me on the sky-line was the Irish Free State."

Returning to Music in Ireland, Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, in the conclusion Hast and Scott look at the influences of contemporary culture on Irish music. They quote Belfast poet Ciaran Carson in this way:

"Each time the song is sung, our notions of it change, and we are changed by it. The words are old. They have been worn into shape by many ears and mouths and have been contemplated often. But every time is new because the time is new, and there is no time like now." (Ciaran Carson, Last Night's Fun, NY: North Point Pres, 1996. p, 116; quoted in Hast and Scott p. 135)

December 2, 2012

It is the beginning of the Christmas season and time to bring in greenery, light the Advent candles, and (not yet done) bake Christmas cookies and Irish bread.

And on December 2, I raised a glass of Powers Irish whiskey for Lord John Power and his wife Lady Giles FitzGerald, who died on December 2, 1649 when Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army attacked and demolished the Power family castles outside of Waterford. Their story has been told before in the pages of my writer's notebooks and is written in Begin with the Arrival, part IV.

December 3, 2012

Rain, writing, research and music. I drove in the pouring rain to Berkeley on Saturday night to hear the University Baroque Ensemble. Later, at home, I looked at this week's writing and was confronted with the impossibility of creating one notebook entry that combined December 2 1649 in Ireland, the 1916 Easter Rising, and Baroque music in Berkeley. There was only one thing to do: back dating. I decided to give the University Baroque Ensemble today's date, December 3, and to give Máire's scholar-rebel great grandfather the date of my mother's birthday, November 30. It seemed appropriate since my Mother was a Boston area Journalist. I note also that 1916, the year that my mother was born, was the year of the Easter Rising, and at the time in America, November 30 was always the day of Thanksgiving.

And so, I begin with Saturday night, December 1 in Berkeley. It was an interesting and unusual program, alternating vocal works with cello consorts, violin consorts, a keyboard duet, and the full ensemble in a series of pavans, galliards, motets, concertos, and airs -- and closing with a Buxtehude Cantata: "Alles, was ihr tut, mit Werden oder mit Werken".

Because this year the University Baroque Ensemble has an unusual number of cellos, (Abraham Aragundi, Nina Pak, Bryanna Reed, Alexandra Roedder plus cello and violine: Joshua Daranciang and Emily Judd) the program included several works for a consort of cellos and violine. French organist Michel Corrette's enchanting "Le Phénix" Concerto in G major" -- with its multi-cello bowing visuals and sonically fascinating score -- was so interesting (how often does one see so many cello's playing in ensemble on the stage?) and so well played that the audience could not resist clapping in between the three movements. (Allego, Adagio, Allegro)

The voices were Alana Mailes, (soprano) Elsa Bishop, (alto) Casey Glick, (tenor) and Hayden Godfrey. (bass) They were joined in the Buxtehude Cantata by the University of California vocal ensemble Perfect Fifth. Of particular note in the program were Mailes and lutist Marco Paliza-Carre, performing French composer Joachim Thibault de Courville's Air "Si je languis"; the full UBE vocal ensemble performing John Farmer's erotically charged "Faire Phyllis I saw sitting all alone"; and Mailes, accompanied by harpsichordist and UBE director Davitt Moroney, in a fine motet by the 18th century French woman composer Anne Madeleine Guédon de Presles.

Opening with a Largo e staccato, in which alternating staccato and melody led to an Allegro and thence to a lively closing Vivace, Telemann's Concerto in G major was played by violinists Hannah Glass, Jennifer Kwon, David Lin, Anita Satish, Conor Stanton, and Edith Yuan. As in "Le Phénix", the ways in which the different sounds were passed between the musicians were both interesting and well played. Contingently, when the keyboard players (Philip Chan, organ and Kay Yoon, harpsichord) performed C.P.E Bach's Duetto II, (Poco Adagio) the sound of the organ and the sound of the harpischord moved effectively back and forth from separate positions on the stage.

In conclusion, joined by Perfect Fifth, (Director: Mark Sumner) the University Baroque Ensemble performed Buxtehude's "Alles, was ihr Tut". Before the performance I had listened to several Buxtehude cantatas and was amazed that these finely composed and affecting works have until recently been so little performed. Buxtehude's artfully structured Cantata -- "Whatever you do" -- began with an instrumental (Adagio, Presto) followed by a chorus. As if framing the opening chorus in gold leaf, the instrumental Adagio, Presto repeated, creating a Sinfonia-surrounded opening that was then followed (in this order) by chorus, tenor, soprano, chorus, chorus.

It was a splendid and beautifully performed finale to an evening of music surprises.

As if I was in New Hampshire driving home on a December night, there was thick fog on the hills on my journey home. I drove slowly, thinking about the music -- and the way that UBE Director Davitt Moroney works with students to bring an always innovative and well performed series of concerts to the University of California at Berkeley.

December 9, 2012

Remembering the many different trails and paths I walked on to create the small drawings that I am using in this year's books, as the Christmas season begins, I am working on making artists books for Christmas presents -- enjoying the cutting and folding of beautiful Arches paper and the way the memories of the trails persist in the drawings. Probably I should photograph these books, but I have never done this with Christmas present artworks. They are, in a sense, removed from the artworld.

This weeks reading is A Traditional Music Journey 1600-2000, from Erris to Mullaghban by Máire Nic Domhnaill Gairbhí. (Máire Mc Donnell Garvey, published by Nure, Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim, Ireland: Drumlin Publications in 2000)

Earlier in this year's writer's notebook, I wrote:

"In books about Irish music, themes about the role of music in Irish culture occur and reoccur in the way that themes occur and reoccur in Irish music itself. These themes are expressed in print as differently by different writers as they are in the music by different musicians.

Yes. And in A Traditional Music Journey, we begin again with a céilidh.

The author, an Irish Fiddler and born in Connacht, now living in Dublin, begins the story in this way: "I grew up in Tobracken, Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon and my love for Irish music goes back to 1932 when Aunt Molly and cousins came home from Providence Rhode Island...That night in the ancestral home is still clear in my memory." (p. 1) After describing preparing the lamps, the "excitement in the kitchen", the rolling in of a barrel of double X porter, the arrival of the musicians, the playing, the dancing," she writes that:

"There was a feeling of joy and safety in Kilmovee that night that made it never ending...We children were allowed to stay up late and had to be coaxed to bed with the bribe of a Clarke's tin whistle under our pillows. We fell asleep to the haunting sounds of traditional music, which has left me with a love of it, something impossible to explain." (p. 2)

Often when one is writing a work of fiction, after a certain amount of time, the characters begin to take on a life of their own. This has begun to happen with From Ireland from Letters, to the point that I feel it is necessary to remind not only the readers but also myself that although the lives of Walter Power and Hiram Powers are real, Máire Powers' great grandfather -- who from Ireland after the Easter Rising, brought to Boston the books she used to create Begin with the Arrival -- is fictional.

I swear (beginning to sound like West Clare fiddle player Junior Crehan telling his story of what happened on a moonlight night) that after much thought, (mine/his) I wrote that Máire's great grandfather escaped with his Fenian American brother -- packing crates that had carried guns to the rebels with books from the Gaelic Revival -- that after I wrote this, this fictional part of the story felt real. And, as if he was my very own great grandfather, which as far as know he was not, I could easily imagine the silent midnight unloading of those books on the piers of Boston Harbor.

I am indebted to the Library of the University of California for many of the Gaelic Revival books that I used to create Begin with the Arrival. But somewhere, I can almost feel it, are the books that arrived in Boston Harbor in 1916, the year that my mother was born.

December 16, 2012
ornamented on December 20

Returning from a December walk along a woodland stream in Marin -- in fog and intermittent rain on a trail where the redwoods grow into the sky, and at this time of year, there are waterfalls along the trail -- I continued to follow Irish fiddler Máire Nic Domhnaill Gairbhí's A Traditional Music Journey 1600-2000, from Erris to Mullaghban, enjoying both the way she integrates the history of Irish music with her own experience and the many songs I did not know which she shares with the reader, such as Turlough Carolan's "Kean O'Hara", (p. 65) which begins with these words:

"Were I blessed in sweet Aran or Carlingford shade
Where ships swiftly sailing with claret and mead"

In the tradition of Irish music itself, ornamenting and quoting early classics, such as Charlotte Milligan Fox's Annals of the Irish Harpers, (NY: Dutton, 1912) and Grattan Flood's A History of Irish Music, (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1906) on her journey, Máire Nic Domhnaill Gairbhí intertwines her own life, the lives and work of other contemporary Irish musicians, and the lives of 17th, 18th, and 19th century Irish musicians and poets.

In the conclusion to another book, Dorothea E. Hast and Stanley Scott's Music in Ireland, Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. (NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Irish poet Ciaran Carson is quoted in this way:

"Each time the song is sung, our notions of it change, and we are changed by it. The words are old. They have been worn into shape by many ears and mouths and have been contemplated often. But every time is new because the time is new, and there is no time like now." (Ciaran Carson, Last Night's Fun, NY: North Point Pres, 1996. p, 116; quoted in Hast and Scott p. 135)

During the past week, in the course of making an exhibition copy of From Ireland with Letters, I reviewed the entire work and was pleased with how it flows. The reading of a work of electronic literature is an exploratory, diffuse experience. Nevertheless, the writer of an epic work of electronic literature may desire to create a rigorous underlying structure. From time to time, as new material is added, it is necessary to reevaluate the structure.

"The story was continually changing with the research;
the weeks of research had been difficult.
She wanted to hear some music."

The Prologue, with which I struggled for almost a year, is now very good, and it effectively sets the stage.

"The sound of the fiddle
brought the forests of ancient Ireland
into the imagination of the audience,
for the pub was situated in a part of New Hampshire,
where pine and deciduous forests still crowded onto the hillsides;
the lakes were clear; and they knew by the music what she meant."

The work then flows into Begin with the Arrival, a dark lay of Oliver Cromwell's destruction of Ireland. In Begin with the Arrival, the story is sung in a New Hampshire pub on a stormy night. The musician is Máire Powers, a descendent of Walter Power, one of the young Irish people Cromwell shipped to America as slaves in the years of The Transplantation.

"passage:
a short part of a music composition,
a detail of a work of literature or painting,
a journey"

In contrast, Begin with the Arrival is followed by passage, which transports the reader to Liam O'Brian's University office and to Florence, Italy where Irish American sculptor Hiram Powers lived and worked from 1837 until his death in 1873.

Eventually, when the work is further along, The Prologue, Begin with the Arrival, and passage will comprise Book I, which will be titled Begin with the Arrival. The overall title of the work, From Ireland with Letters, will at that time be transferred to a top page. Book II will have the title of The Mason's Apron. named for legendary Irish fiddler Sean McGuire's playing of "The Mason's Apron Reel" and for a 19th century photograph of Hiram Powers in a sculptor's apron. The title page for Book II, the Mason's Apron has already been made, but From Ireland from Letters will not be restructured until Book II is completed.

Book II will be comprised of three parts:

"while in the splashing notes
of the not yet named jig,
Irish streams and rivers
flowed down to the sea,
like the waters
of the fountains
in Rome
where Donnchad mac Briain
courted a princess so long ago."

1. Bringing the reader to a practice set of Irish fiddle music in the home of Máire Powers, fiddler's passage was completed in the summer of 2012. Beginning with fiddler's passage, the scores that serve as computer code for From Ireland with Letters were not created as unmeasured scores notated with pen and ink on watercolor paper but rather as measured scores, notated online in the writer's authoring system, fiddlers-passage. Thus while Book I is composed in unmeasured notation, Book II is composed in measured notation.

"In times of peace,
life went on in 17th century Ireland.
Before, in between,
after the wars.
Then, it should be remembered,
sometimes there was dancing
in the fields."

2. The "Sinfonia" to part 2, Junction of Several Trails, leads to Máire and Liam's conversation (or a series of conversations) at the Farmhouse Cafe in New Hampshire. The "Sinfonia" is completed and partially scored and I am writing the conversation that follows. This conversation will be less "ornamented" then the "Sinfonia" and will focus the reader on a duet, the words that Máire Powers and Liam O'Brien speak to each other.

3. Book II will conclude with a short work, currently planned as an introductory look at 17th century Puritan life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony at the time when Walter Power arrived. This part will probably be constructed like The Prologue, only somewhat less formal.

Eventually, From Ireland with Letters will include a third book, Book III.

Interested in the music of Connacht, where many members of the Power family were exiled in the 17th century, I read "Dance Tunes of the West of Ireland", Chapter 7 of A Traditional Music Journey 1600-2000. (pp 76-90)

"Dance Tunes of the West of Ireland" begins with the scores of The Connachtmans Rambles and Farewell to Gurteen:

"The Connachtmans Rambles has been played at my home as far back as I can remember. Farewell to Gurteen I picked up from local musicians as Gurteen is only six miles from my home. It was played for all who had to emigrate and bid farewell to that lovely area," Máire Nic Domhnaill Gairbhí writes to explain her choices. (p. 76)

As if in a set of reels and jigs, her stories of historic and contemporary musicians -- for instance, Sligo fiddler Martin Wynne, who moved to America in 1948 and was influential in teaching the Sligo school of fiddle playing in New York -- move rapidly, incorporating dense information and mercurial changes of mood.

And there are many stories that I did not know, for instance, that the first signer of the Easter Rising Proclamation of Independence, Éamonn Ceannt, (executed on May 8, 1916) was an award winning musician and one of the founders of The Pipers Club in Dublin.

The mood changes quickly when a page later we are in the jovial company of famous Sligo fiddler and storyteller, Fred Finn.

December 30, 2012

In the Irish Christmas Eve tradition, "The Laden Table", after dinner, the kitchen table is set with a loaf of bread and a pitcher of milk. Beside the food, a candle is lit in symbolic welcome for the Holy Family and -- as is the custom of Irish hospitality -- for all visitors and travelers. Last week, on Christmas Eve, I baked Irish bread for The Laden Table. For the family party the following morning, I also baked focaccia and Christmas cookies. Early Christmas morning was Christmas music. And the baking of quiche.

This year, New Year's Eve is the continuing writing of Junction of Several Trails, Part V of From Ireland with Letters.

And although I cannot be there, I look forward with pleasure to the inclusion of the wonderful Eastgate iPad edition of its name was Penelope in the exhibition Avenues of Access at MLA2013 in Boston from January 3-5, 2013. Many thanks to Mark Bernstein and Eastgate and to the curators of the exhibition: Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens.

"Of these events, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell me the story again, beginning where you will."

Judy Malloy, its name was Penelope installed at the Richmond Art Center, Richmond California, Oct. 3 - Nov. 19, 1989, curated by Zlata Baum.

Called a classic of the "Golden Age" of hypertext literature by Robert Coover, its name was Penelope is a work of generative hypertext. It consists of six files of lexias that represent six parts of the life of a woman photographer. The reader moves between these files at will, but once within each file, selections from the group of lexias that comprise that file are chosen at random by the computer. And the narrator's memories appear and reappear on the computer screen.

Like a photos in a photo album, each lexia represents an image from the narrator's memory, so that the work is the equivalent of a pack of small paintings or photographs that the computer continuously shuffles. The reader observes memories come and go in a natural, yet nonsequential manner, and -- in the process -- experiences a constantly changing order, like the weaving and reweaving of Penelopeia's web.

Sailing home on the sea of evolving platforms and authoring environments, its name was Penelope exists in a continuing series of "translations" that include

1. my BASIC program, first exhibited in 1989, as shown in the photo above. This version ran on IBM compatible computers, AT or XT, 128k.

2. Eastgate's Storyspace look and feel implementation of its name was Penelope, published in 1993. (available for both Macintosh and IBM compatible computers)

3. and now the 2013 Apple iPad version, also beautifully implemented by Eastgate and exhibited in Boston at MLA2013

And mirroring this series of translations, as well as the Homeric inspiration for its name was Penelope, and the work's generative interface, the words (freely translated) that begin Homer's Odyssey, now also begin the iPad edition of its name was Penelope:

"Of these events, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell me the story again, beginning where you will."

January 7, 2013

"Above my booklet, the lined one
The thrilling birds sing to me.

In the 9th century, an Irish scribe wrote those words in the margins of the St Gall Priscian manuscript. [1]

As 2012 ended, I took a walk in the Berkeley hills, sat down beside the trail, and stopped to begin a new series of drawings.

Then, playing Internet continuo, at home, I virtually accompanied my colleagues in the electronic literature exhibition and the digital humanities sessions at MLA2013 -- writing coverage for Authoring Software and keeping pace/improvising with the Twitter stream from the Convention, while beginning on New Year's Eve, I code-scored the first five measures of the Cantata to Junction of Several Trails.

Measures 4 and 5 of Junction of Several Trails

Contingently, wondering what were the titles of the forty books that Máire's Gaelic League scholar great grandfather brought to America in April 1916 when he escaped on a returning Fenian ship, I began a list of those books.

Some that I have already read are:

W. H. Grattan Flood, A History of Irish Music, Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1906.

John Healy, The life and writings of St. Patrick, Dublin: Gill & Son, 1905.

Charlotte Milligan Fox, Annals of the Irish Harpers, NY: Dutton, 1912

Rev. Denis Murphy, S.J., Cromwell in Ireland, a History of Cromwell's Irish Campaign. Dublin: Gill & Son, New Edition, 1897.

John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, London: Longman, 1865.

George Sigerson, Bards of the Gael and Gall, New York: Scribner's, 1907.

Specimens of the Early Native Poetry of Ireland with an introduction and running commentary by Henry R. Montgomery. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, and Co., Second Edition, 1892.

Some that I have only begun or that I seek are:

Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland From Earliest Times to the Present Day, 1899

P. W. Joyce, The Wonders of Ireland, 1911.

Standish O'Grady, Early Bardic Literature, Lemma Publishing Corporation, 1879

Standish O'Grady, The History of Ireland, London: Sampson, Low, Searle, Marston, & Rivington, 1878-80.

George Petrie, The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland, Dublin: M.H.Gill, 1855

Together, there are 11 titles, only a beginning. But the making of this list and the reading of the books is a an epic e-poet's grand diversion. (And I will complete and verify the citations soon)

The words that are used as continuo in the beginning of the Junction of Several Trails Cantata and that now appear in the first five measures of the score are from the Trad Irish song "The Next Market Day" [2]:

"She sat down beside him, the grass was so green
The day was the fairest that ever was seen."

____________
1. Kathleen Hoagland, 1000 Years of Irish Poetry, Old Greenwich, CT: Devon-Adair, 1981. p. 25
2. Jerry Silverman, Mel Bay Presents Songs of Ireland, (Pacific, MO: Mel Bay Publications, 1991. p. 6

January 15, 2013
and a short entry of pleasant intervals written on January 21, 2013

Many hours of work and finally the opening measures of the Junction of Several Trails Cantata are attached to the Sinfonia. And so, Junction of Several Trails is almost ready to be placed on the main menu for From Ireland with Letters. The process of moving between the score and writing was intense but satisfactory. The annotated score now needs to be translated into the online score and attached in some way to the score for the opening Sinfonia. And of course the Cantata is not yet finished.

At times of intense writing and score-coding, the time spent on writing in this notebook is diminished. But last week, there was time to relive the closing measures of the Cantata -- sitting on the floor of the Cal library and one by one looking at the many books in shelf after shelf of volumes on the Gaelic Revival and the Easter Rising.

It was something I had to do, as if in libraries around the world, the story is still being told.

Because of its extensive coverage of the Gaelic League, I went home with Timothy G. McMahon, Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008

And last week was also a fine week of family birthday parties.

January 21, 2013

This week was a fine walk in Marin, sunlight in the dark forest, a wide stream, a waterfall beside the trail, a small picnic, and another good beginning to my 2013 artist book drawing series. This week was also writing, score-coding, documenting the sources of lyrics I used in Junction of Several Trails, and a lively and interesting discussion with sound and interactive performance artist Michelle Lewis-King about her project on how women approach coding.

January 23, 2013

In preparation for the next part of Junction of Several Trails -- which will begin with the story of how Máire Powers knew of the family history of slavery and then segue into a discussion of The Greek Slave -- I am rereading "The Greek Slave" in the core reference Richard Wunder, Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor. 1805-1873, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991, (pp. 207-274) and at the same time in other sources, I am returning to 1847, the year the Hiram Powers crated The Greek Slave in Florence and shipped her to America.

Frederick Douglass' influential Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave was first published in 1845, a few years before The Greek Slave arrived in America in 1847. Other early slave narratives written by African Americans included Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man, 1836; A Narrative of Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery, 1837; and Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, 1847. All of these books were widely read at the time, and all are now available on the website Documenting the American South (DocSouth), sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It was in the climate of these and many other widely read slave narratives that in 1847 Hiram Powers shipped The Greek Slave to America. The sculpture arrived on the docks of New York in August 1847. During the initial 447 days it was on view it was seen by more than 100,000 people. (Wunder (p. 242)

Among the first places where The Greek Slave was exhibited in America in the years before the Civil War were (in this order) New York City, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, Louisville, and New Orleans. The statue then returned North, where among other places it was shown in Albany, NY, Providence, RI, Burlington, VT, Rochester, NY, and St Louis. (Note that the story is slightly more complex because Powers made several versions of the sculpture, and several versions were exhibited in America in the late 1840's and early 1850's. The histories and current locations of the different versions will be detailed soon in this notebook.)

On January 16, 1851, the Abolitionist newspaper The National Era wrote the following words in a review of The Greek Slave:

"I was fashioned by a hand whose every motion was the offspring of love for man in all his relations, with a sublime conception of the beautiful and the true, and it is therefore that he has sent me around the world to preach by this loveliness and nakedness, and by this cruel chain, joy to the forsaken, comfort to the destitute, and liberty to the captive. I was carved from Parian, rather than from Ebony, that I might more effectually appeal to perverted justice and partial sympathy; but I am the representation of the captive and the forsaken everywhere, and whatever sympathy I may secure for my enslaved sisters in Turkey, are due to my sisters of another hue in the land throughout which I am making my pilgrimage. Whatever claim of justice I may secure for me, and those like me, are due to those equally oppressed in your very midst. Think you that it was cruel to rob me of liberty, purity, and happiness? Though my skin were black as night, my soul would have the same aspirations, and need the same sympathies, my intellect would have the same laws and need the same development. Cease your sympathy for a slave in Constantinople, and go show kindness and justice to those over whom you have power."

"Powers's Greek Slave in St. Louis", (The National Era, January 16, 1851

In From Ireland with letters, I have returned again and again to Powers' dream of the woman in white whom he could not reach across the river, metaphorically interpreting this dream -- which he cited as an inspiration for The Greek Slave -- as a vision of the wrenching of enslaved captives from their families, in Powers' case, the young people stolen from Irish families and sent into slavery at the time of the Transplantation.

The scene in Ireland in the 1650's is described in To Hell or Barbados, (Dingle, Co. Kerry, Ireland: Brandon Books, 2000) by the journalist and antislavery advocate Sean O'Callaghan, who died on the eve of the book's publication. In his words:

"The work of rounding up people for transportation was carried out very thoroughly by government agents throughout the country. These 'man-catchers', as they were called, were mounted and armed, with long whips to herd the unfortunate people into the holding-pens outside the cities and towns ....Here they were branded with the initials of the ship that would take them to Barbados or Virginia. They were attached together with ropes around their necks and the long march to the seaports in the south of Ireland began." (p. 78)

In his statement for the American exhibitions, Hiram Powers, the artist, whose Irish forefather had come to America in 1654 in the hold of the slave ship The Goodfellow, described his sculpture The Greek Slave in this way:

"..Her father and mother, and perhaps all her kindred, have been destroyed by her foes, and she alone preserved as a treasure too valuable to be thrown away. She is now among barbarian strangers, under the pressure of a full recollection of the calamitous events which have brought her to her present state..."

January 28, 2013

There are details about the Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave that now need to be explored. Indeed, it is almost Liam's turn to talk. His narrative cannot be written without disclosing more about the The Greek Slave -- and two other sculptures by Hiram Powers: America and Benjamin Franklin.

At the time when he meets Máire Powers at the Farmhouse Cafe, Liam O'Brien has been working on deep background for Hiram Powers' studio in 19th century Florence, Italy. Using 16th Century Florentine arts writer Francesco Bocchi as a guide, he has explored the treasures of the City. (recorded in passage) Reviewing his own research on the Hudson River School, he has looked at paintings such as the View of Florence from San Miniato al Monte that Thomas Cole painted in 1837, the year that Hiram Powers and his family arrived in Florence. And, as related in the Prologue, he has explored the work of the 19th century Italian artists at the time of the Risorgimento.

It is to this last trail that I now return, setting the stage for the beginning of The Greek Slave in Hiram's studio in 1841.

A writer may sometimes spend several months on reading for what might seem to the causal observer to be only a few lines of poetry, yet writers sometimes need to do this background reading. It is one way to put oneself in the space of characters and their environment. In the creation of an epic work like From Ireland with Letters, a writer also needs to review his or her own writing of the story so far.

And so, I am using this notebook to explore a few trails in my own writing, beginning with keyed excerpts from the Prologue:

"Her feet were bare,
and she wore a Garibaldi medal."

"As if he was at the junction of several trails that would eventually converge, the many research trails Liam had started at once did not particularly concern him. He looked out the window, thinking that when he had finished reading he would go for a hike.

On his desk, Albert Boime's book on Italian artists and the Risorgimento was open to Pietro Magni's evocative sculpture of a girl reading. In the year of the Reunific