My Allen Ginsberg — Part One of Four

Anyone who majored in English in college during the late 1950’s will remember what a bombshell effect the appearance of Howl and On the Road had on American literature. Poetry at the time was pretty much the exclusive property of academics, just as it has again become today, a nerdy enterprise where an M.F.A. in creative writing is a minimum requirement and points are awarded for social irrelevance and twisted vocabulary formations and encryptions.

In those days one studied the early modernists Pound and T.S. Eliot; other prestigious figures like Robert Lowell and Charles Olson taught college courses, while institutionally unaffiliated poets were either gooey (Carl Sandburg) or quirky (Robert Frost). It seemed that the long tradition of confessionalistic prose and poetry that had its origin in the streets— which began with Francois Villon in the 15th century and continued intermittently until the novels of Thomas Wolfe in the late 1930’s—had all but disappeared.

Into this glass menagerie the beatniks appeared, and suddenly everything was different. Real things experienced by real people again became literary subjects: sex, politics, extraordinary states of consciousness, jazz, the language of the streets were all at once ok. It was very much like the explosion of post-modernism that radically opened up new cultural horizons on college campuses in the 1970’s. And, perhaps most endurably, the beat revolution introduced humor into the literary enterprise, which made the lofty formality of the “canon” seem very boring indeed. AG himself proudly maintained he had made it safe for poets to use the word “fuck” in their writing.

I don’t how college students today respond to reading Howl for the first time—whether they find it trite, unamusing, or just silly. I do remember that the poem had an electrifying effect on poetry students of my generation, to the extent that hairs rose on the back of your neck while reading it, assuming some sensitivity for poetry to begin with. Like women’s liberation, gay pride and radical politics—these are things that can’t really be understood outside the context in which they originated, in this case American society in the 1950’s.

In any event, Ginsberg’s masterwork had the effect of 1) creating a counter-cultural environment for young writers to operate in, (due partially to local police efforts to suppress the poem for obscenity); and 2) catapulting the author into a generational icon, the likes of which no American poet has experienced since. It was a role which Allen obviously enjoyed and played to the hilt, unlike his counterpart Jack Kerouac, who was anything but an exhibitionist.

I mention all this to background my own meager encounters with Ginsberg: they occurred while he enjoyed a public notoriety such as could be compared only with that of Bob Dylan in the mid 60’s, or of Andy Warhol somewhat later.


Photo: Allen Ginsberg's Business Card, from FoundSF.

Salzburg Castle, Austria, by Jean LeClerc, 1799.

A big weekend

A really action-packed weekend, during the course of which England and the U.S. were disqualified from further World Cup participation, (as prophesied by myself last Thursday); the Boston Red Sox uncharacteristically showed up in San Francisco and won two out of three off the Giants; the sun smiled brightly upon the thousands attending the Gay Pride Parade and festival at Civic Center; and many hundreds of our good friends in Canada did their duty and were subsequently arrested at the G-20 protests in Toronto.

As to the soccer: if the U.S. had to lose the game, I am glad that Ghana won, since it is now the one remaining African team in competition. It was a fair game, and Ghana won because they played better.

Two hours later the Germans -- my favorite team -- beat the living snot out of England 4-1. A score like that is a real humiliation in World Cup matches, and watching England getting the guacamole beat out of them is a justifiable pleasure, given their habitual arrogance about their abilities, as articulated endlessly in the British press. They will probably fire their Italian coach soon, but whining over the defeat will probably continue all week.

Argentina meanwhile is really on a roll, and the quarter-final against Germany on July 3rd should be fairly hair-raising. All bets are off in a situation like this.

The headprints of Cerberus

Novelist F.S. Rosa, San Francisco Labor Council member and political activist, reports the lamentable discovery of yet another entrance to Hell in our beloved city.

The three large indentations in the middle of this launching pad to Hell at 10th & Market Streets once held the cushions where Cerberus rested his various heads when off-shift. If you look closely, you will see the actual portal to Hell disguised as a porta potty over near the wall.

The site previously featured an ill-ventilated office building which housed several non-profit agencies. The poorly paid workers on at least one occasion stormed onto the 10th St. sidewalk everyday until they were forced to make the usual Deal with the Devil and end their three-week strike.

Cerberus, while vast in size in comparison to most visitors from Hell, is a non-union worker, and as we all know, non-union workers spend a lot of time in the Hell realm. Cerberus banged his head a lot, thus the dents in the pavement. The storage unit and trailer next to the porta potty house the site's non-profit paper work, since funding cuts have precluded the construction of a permanent building.

The five large pegs on the wall above the parking lot site are convenient for hanging the corpses of recalcitrant non-profit employees as a warning and example to all. Ignore the vehicles in the rear, they are the usual harbingers of our fossil-fueled slide into the burning depths of Tartarus. The path of descent is blocked only by a conveniently flimsy chain link fence, easily breached during the appropriate phase of the moon.

Photographer and location unknown.

A good football day

Great football day yesterday, with all of the three teams I follow -- U.S., U.K. and Germany -- now going on to the second round. Each team won by 1-0, meaning of course there was only goal per game. The English goal was cool but pretty basic, while the German forward Ozil lifted a long beautiful shot high above the other players heads which dropped right into the bucket, a real classic.

But neither could compare with Donovan's goal in the last minute of the U.S.-Algeria game during overtime stoppage. A cross shot from Dempsey on the side bounced off the Algerian goalie, who fell to the ground while the ball then rebounded around 20 feet from the net. Donovan, who seemed to be traveling at the speed of light, swooped in for the kill and rocketed the ball into the net so fast you could barely see it.

It was the kind of shot that soccer nuts will sit around for 90 minutes waiting for, mostly in vain, but this time it worked. Soccer in one sense is an extended period of head-banging until the clouds part and the dove descends and by some miracle a path opens and somebody gets a clear shot to the net. 

In Donovan's case it was truly a fairy-tale shot, and the only thing that could surpass it would be a similar performance in the last minute of play during the final game for the World Cup.

But victory comes at a cost, and now my favorite teams will drop out one by one from the competition, and the best I can hope for is that just one of them will make it to the top. And we don't really yet know what Brazil and Argentina have up their tricots.

The master gambist Pancho Pandolfo

Thanks to this week's broadcast of The Early Music Program on BBC3 I became introduced to the recordings of Pancho Pandolfo, who teaches at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel. He is the finest viola da gamba player I have heard, whose virtuosity on the instrument, based largely on improvisation, is nothing short of spectacular. Unlike most virtuosi, his skills contribute to the expressive possibilities of the instrument rather than simply show off the player's skills.

I've always thought that the gamba was a far more subtle, more expressive instrument than the 'cello, whose gooey emotionality and vulgar vibrato I usually find sort of appalling. The more intellectually vigorous gamba can handle both the relatively brainy, contrapuntal repertory of Bach and the English consort composers, but  does equally well with the more melodic and frequently tearful works of Sainte-Colombe or Marin Marais, and can skip along nimbly with Baroque dances as well.

Unfortunately most gamba recordings are produced by Baroque authenticity militants who attempt to recreate what they view as period acoustic ambience by recording in big hard-floored rooms with hard-surfaced walls, the instrument located a good distance from the microphones. Jordi Savall, another celebrated gambist, has been often recorded in this manner.

Not a bit of it with Pandolfo's excellent recordings, where the mikes are set close to the instrument, putting the listener so to speak in the driver's seat. The sound combined with the playing is a revelation and a cause for great rejoicing, as you can hear for yourself here or here.

Eat your heart out, Yo-Yo Ma.

Photo from http://www.paolopandolfo.com/.

These gay shepherds in the background of a Flight to Egypt painting by Perugino are having way too much fun.

Jan van Goyen's skies

Watching the marvelous documentary film Dutch Light,* which explores the distinct atmospheric glow shown in paintings by 17th-century Dutch masters, has given me a new frame of reference for looking at their landscape paintings.

Take for example Jan van Gruyen's Landscape with Two Oaks, painted in 1641:

The realism of most Dutch paintings usually doesn't afford much opportunity for thematic interpretation, but this one presents quite a mystery. What have the three men been doing, are they travelers, or have they been out gathering edibles in their sacks? Have two of them paused to rest, or has one perhaps hurt his foot, while the third marches down the hill, in a hurry to get back to town before the gathering storm breaks? Do the two oaks, towering ominously over the two men in the foreground, have a symbolic meaning?

One doesn't often need to ask questions like this about Dutch paintings of the period; "What's going on here?" is not a common issue. One thing however is totally obvious: the lowering sky dominates the painting and threatens all that lies below it: the earth, the three men, the town in the distance, even the monumental presence of the broken, towering oak trees.

A less direful, but nonetheless commanding sky, radiant with "Dutch light," is shown in van Groyen's View of Dordrecht, 1644, one his favorite landscape subjects:

Known as the oldest city in (the county of) Holland, different waterways meet to flow into the North Sea at Dordrecht, where clouds continually sweep in from the west. Here the working men do the things they do in places where the land becomes water and joins with the overwhelming sky. The cathedral church is an anchor point between both; it remains in place there to this day, as does the Dutch light.



*The documentary film Dutch Light (2003) is available at Netflix.

Plotinus bites the dust

Reacting to the West Portal Tunnel Calamity, one of our Entrances to Hell in San Francisco posts, Lew Ellingham sent in the following comment recently:

Plotinus, my familiar, drew my attention to the stench. It seemed more than the usual petroleum-tinged motes of Upper Market Street as we walked westward from the Harvey Milk station at 17th St., Castro and Market, with its new little park at the door of the Glass Coffin Bar. Plotinus is small, so we tarried, and I am old, so we tarried more, but eventually the slanting hole of the Collingword entrance to the Twin Peaks Tunnel hove to view. This once was also the Eureka Street Station, long ago abandoned, though the platforms remain in the tunnel itself. Perhaps the closing of this entrance introduced the karma that has blighted the setting for decades; one wonders. Train drivers who race their speeding trains in the wee hours, thinking to save time or rush home from a final shift: a few have derailed. Other trains have killed workers on the tracks, derailed for no apparent reason, passengers have disappeared -- whither? The stench grew stronger; sorry vines and old weeds festooned along the collapsing walls of the tunnel entrance, the old metal gate weary from whatever, once a bright gray and now the color of a mothballed warship, pealing.
I bent to pick Plotinus up, to carry; he was struggling, slowing down. Only the size of a small dog, I often have to do this, though in some situations he is way ahead of me, jumping and turning quickly, racing about within his small compass. But as I touched him, he flew from my hand, which in any case had not closed over him, and hurtled toward the old metal gate of the Collingwood entrance. A huge sound accompanied. Deafening. A movement of air, a sucking. And indeed, the detritus of the street drew and massed with Plotinus as all flew toward the rattling doors, the whole portal trembling, as if a jet plane were about the emerge or collide. My bladder yielded to the horror. These distractions dulled my understanding of the event as a whole, the images more like sequenced still photography than motion pictures, but I did see Plotinus together with a large tree branch hit the grating above the metal doors and bounce heavenward in a large arc toward Collingwood Street. On the street’s surface both landed, but the entrance itself was but a swirl of tumbling, flying junk and noise, dimming only as the orifice itself began to disappear behind the impacting debris.
I had fallen, unaware of it until I tried to rush to Plotinus and found myself crawling. So horrible! Was he dead? His huge starring eyes were open, but then he seldom blinks them; he rested on one side. In a moment I had grabbed him, tucked him beneath my open jacket, hidden him from the maelstrom. Can I hide myself? So awful, so awful. I couldn’t see clearly. Tears, yes, but the atmosphere was cluttered, the light rapidly failing. Was time passing quickly, like the strong wind? I could hardly clear my nose from phlegm, and was gasping. Was this over? Was it just the beginning?

Saturday Gallimaufry -- Medieval edition

1. A medieval castle is under construction in Arkansas, of all places.

2. But it will probably not have as fine a tower as Westgate in Canterbury, now to be saved from closure.

3. It’s been confirmed that the remains found in a lead casket in Magdeburg Cathedral last year does indeed contain what’s left of Queen Editha, an Anglo-Saxon princess who became the first wife of Otto the Great. Her body was reinterred in 1510 into a lead coffin, and her skeleton was wrapped in silk cloth dating from the 10th century.

Otto and Editha in happier days, a sculpture in Magdeburg Cathedral from the 13th century. Sic transit gloria mundi.

One good road to follow

Fitz Roy in Patagonia, in the Andes mountains between Chile and Argentina.
cc photo from Flickr user digimei.

Dirce

The Christian Dirce, by Henryk Siemiradzki (1843-1902). In Euripides' play Antiope, Dirce is killed by being tied to the horns of a bull. Note the fasces-bearing lictors standing nearby, and a slave holding Nero's guitar in case the emperor is moved to burst forth into song.

Coincidentia oppositorum

With Capitalism, man exploits man. With Socialism, it is exactly opposite.

                                 -- Robert Anton Wilson

Gut gespielt!

Good to see Germany in such great shape today, even as they steam-rolled over Australia on their path to the Cup. Their attack formations were exciting to watch, and of course they controlled the ball totally during the second half, depriving us of the opportunity of evaluating the performance of the new German goalie, who really had little to do except file his nails.

Australia's midfield defense was as good as non-existent. It's not the one-sided kind of game one likes to observe, but it showed us soccer fiends what the Germans can do this year, and what future series competitors are going to have to deal with.

Thank God they found some good tv commentators (British, of course) after the terrible American ones yesterday, and how nice to see Klinsi (Germany's star player from the 1990's, Jürgen Klinsmann) offering some insightful comments that were clearly over the heads of the sports journalists.

Zhenru Monastery -- Part one

In February 1987 I was backpacking around China for the first time and found my way to Zhenru Si (Jenru Temple) in Jiangxi Province. I learned about this place from an article by Stephen Batchelor which appeared in the Middle Way magazine in 1985, a publication of the Buddhist Society in Britain. Stephen had heard that this temple existed, and that the monks were doing zen meditation on a daily basis, but he had not yet himself visited it.

I decided to do so, and arrived in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangzi. In those days there was barely a tourist infrastructure in place in China, which had only opened to foreign visitors in 1979. As in Russia, tourists had to first report to the local Intourist office to show their papers and get assigned a hotel room. At that time I hadn’t learned any Chinese yet, and almost no one in China spoke English—unbelievable, only 20 years ago—so I hired the services of a translator and a driver, and a government cadre had to come along too to make sure I was up to nothing subversive.

We drove for two hours out into the countryside and up into the mountains and eventually arrived at our destination. Aside from the fact that no one in the West at the time really understood to what extent Buddhist practice still existed in China, there were two important reasons to visit this remote place. First, it was unknown if there were Chinese monks still doing chan (zen), since it was commonly supposed that the practice had disappeared from Buddhist temples during the period of syncretism and the disappearance of the Five Houses (chan sects) in the 14th century. The second reason was to see if the existing zen meditation practice bore any resemblance to the school of Soto Zen introduced by Dogen Zenji to Japan after he learned studied it at Cao-Dong sect’s Tiantong temple near Ningbo in the early 1200’s.

If this subject is of interest to you, please read my interview with Abbot Chen in the white box below. Be sure to click on the following pictures for a closer view.

Zhenru from a distance on a bleak February day. The temple was savaged during the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt mainly with money from Taiwan. Nevertheless, according to Abbot Chen, zen meditation has continued here without interruption for over 1000 years.

Zhenru is surrounded with rice fields. The imperial government never allowed monks to do perform ritual alms-gathering as is still done today in Southeast Asia.

Venerable T Guang, Guest Manager (l.), and Venerable Yi Chen (r.), Abbot of Zhenru monastery. Below a statue of Manjusri, the Perfect Wisdom Boddhisattva, found typically in his glass box at the entrance to a chan  meditation hall.

 

Article continues here.

Zhenru Monastery -- Part two

The meditation hall is also the dormitory, as traditionally so in Japan.

The monks sit on the benches facing outward during meditation, and sleep on the platforms up above them.

This is the altar in the center of the meditation hall, which reminds me of the news stands on the U-Bahn platforms in Berlin. The figure inside is that of Buddha's uncle, who according to the legend taught Buddha how to meditate. Note the thermos bottles to the left, and smoke marks above the niche. It seems indicative of the earthy quality of Chinese zen, compared with its highly-polished presentation in Japan.

This is the Chinese version of the kyosaku, or wake-up stick. There are two versions: one for an offense against the chan sect, the other (with different Chinese characters) for an offense against the rules of the monastery.

The traditional fish drum and meal bell, brought also to temples in Japan.

Chinese Buddhist temples commonly have a Paradise Wall in a narrow hallway behind the meditation hall, an opportunity for local people to splurge on folk art. In addition to all the Arhats and Lohans and Boddhisattvas, Guanyin is seen pouring out libations of mercy through a plastic garden hose.

Article continues here.

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Zhenru Monastery -- Part three

My interview with Abbot Yi Chen of Zhenru monastery was much briefer than I hoped, mainly because the government cadre who had been appointed to watch over us insisted that it not last longer than an hour. Another problem arose that such commonly understood Buddhist terms as Heart Sutra or Prajnaparamita in English aren't the same in Chinese, so unless the translator is knowledgeable, it takes a bit of jockeying around to discover what is meant.
Despite its brevity my article was published in several places in the U.S. and Europe, including San Francisco Zen Center's Windbell magazine. It showed perhaps for the first time that chan monasteries exist in modern China. I interviewed three more temple abbots in the early 1990's, but none of these conversations had the same effect.

Open publication - Free publishing - More china

Congratulations

to our brave U.S. soccer team, and especially to our fabulous goalie Tim Howard. It's true we may have tied the wicked English only because they were having a bad football day, but hey, you guys did great and who says that luck isn't a legitimate part of sports competition. Now on to Germany vs. Australia (today at 11am on Channel 7) -- Schieb mir den Fußball, Ottfried.

Of course we were delighted also to learn that Joe Biden attended the game yesterday with "several family members" (Reuters). Nice to hear that politics has been so good to you, Joe, although I frankly doubt that you had any more fun than I did in front of my 24" Viewsonic. I wish you could have found time to answer my open letter from last weekend, though, which I now fear has fallen upon deaf ears.

Saturday Gallimaufry

1. Please have a look at San Francisco gardening writer Richard Schwarzenberger's marvelous blog called In Faro's Garden at http://berrypicking.wordpress.com/.

2. Bay Area photographer Robert Fischer has posted a gallery of his scurrilous work at http://www.robertfischerphoto.com/.

3. Steven Fama's glade of theoric ornithic hermetica has given the once over to Rachel Loden’s “The Hollywood Years,” a slanguage poem from her collection Dick of the Dead, at http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/.

4. If you're old enough to remember how cool the covers of Fortune magazine used to be, you can glut yourself with them at http://www.gono.com/adart/fortune/fortune_magazine_covers.htm.

5. I am still waiting to see if my favorite science project at Lawrence Labs in Livermore will achieve ignition this summer as scheduled. If you have time, watch the trailer here: https://lasers.llnl.gov/.

6. Dodie Bellamy's latest and final contribution to SFMOMA's blog series which she calls One Final Long Tracking Shot is a beautifully written remembrance of arty things past. Let's hope she keeps her own blog well-fertilized from now on at http://dodie-bellamy.blogspot.com/ -- it's really fabulous to read Dodie regularly on the Internet.

7. Aaron Hostatter is making swift progress at The Anglo-Saxon Narrative Project with his translation of Elene, a hagiographic epic written probably by Cynewulf in the 9th c. The story is a dramatic retelling of the legend of St. Helena, the British mother of Emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, who is reputed to have found the True Cross.

8. If you have time this weekend, check out the wonderfully atmospheric Polaroids taken by Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovski (thanks Boingboing.net), for example:

From the galleries of Jacek Yerka.

The Reader

The Reader is a 2008 film based on the 1995 German novel by Bernhard Schlink. Kate Winslet, here being read to in the bathtub, is secretly illiterate, and has this amazing look of stressed concern about it throughout the movie.

Today's searching question

I was totally amazed at BBC News this morning, whose question for the day is:

My God, can it really be true that the British nation sits around their breakfast tables talking about such things? I suppose it may help them take their minds off their impending World Cup football defeat this Saturday.

Gertrude Stein for Governor

Thanks to Ron Silliman for posting this great picture of Gertrude Stein:

One can only hope that the new Republican nominee for Governor will dress as stylishly, once she buys her way into office and sets about trying to convert California into a profit-making corporation.

Blindspots

Helen Thomas' forced "early" retirement at the age of 90 because of some absurd remarks recently urging Israel to vacate Palestine seem symbolic of the inability of most Americans to think clearly about Mideast policy.
My friend Alex Martin suggested recently that in his experience many Chinese acquaintances, generally liberal and politically progressive in most areas of concern, will automatically become irrational when Tibetan policy is discussed, as when the Dalai Lama is dismissed in anger as an insurgency leader. The fact that the DL has never advocated Tibetan independence is simply not perceived: he is simply a diabolical agent threatening Chinese sovereignty, and that is all there is to say about it.
Such blooming nonsense is typical of the way many American politicians view Palestine -- it represents a perceptual blind-spot in the minds of many, and events that are more properly viewed as morally scandalous are not even registered.

Sunbeams

Demonstrating that light can be enlightening, this painting by Vilhelm Hammershøi from 1900 entitled "Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams " will embiggen if you click upon it.

An open letter to Joe Biden

Hey Joe,
I was watching your astonishing performance on Charlie Rose last Tuesday evening, in which you stridently defended current Israeli defense policy after Monday’s raid which killed nine people on a Turkish ship bringing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. Your take on the situation is that Israel and Hamas are at war, and that therefore “It's legitimate for Israel to say, ‘I don't know what's on that ship. These guys are dropping 3,000 rockets on my people.’”

Despite a wave of global outrage about the commando assault, you apparently feel that there’s no harm done because Israel “had a right to know” what was aboard the vessel, even though it found itself in international waters.

But you say we must also not forget about the poor Palestinians, or as many as are left alive after the Israeli bombardments of a year and a half ago. “The one thing we have to do is not forget the plight of these Palestinians there ... they're in bad shape,” you say, shedding crocodile tears from those big blue eyes. “So we have to put as much pressure and as much cajoling on Israel as we can to allow them to get building materials in,” you generously suggest, since Israel has forbidden the import into Gaza not only of cilantro and musical instruments, but also of wood and cement for the same security reasons you find so reasonable.

Joe, I voted for you a couple years ago, partially because you’d reportedly gained much experience on the Senate foreign relations committee, even though that experience did not prevent you from voting for the Iraq War Resolution in 2002. At least you seemed more knowledgeable than Sarah Palin, your Republican counterpart. But lately I’ve begun to think that you and I may be residing on different planets.

Joe, the war on Gaza ended on January 18, 2009. In a three-week period between 1,166 and 1,417 Palestinians—less than 375 of them combatants-- and 13 Israelis were killed. In September 2009, a UN special mission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone produced a report accusing Israeli Defense Forces of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. The UN Human Rights Council endorsed the report, criticizing Israel but not Hamas.*

Israel rejected the report earlier this year, not before inaugurating a policy of collective retribution upon the 1.5 million people living in Gaza, in hopes apparently that they will somehow rise up and oust Hamas from power. For this reason all exports from Gaza are banned, almost all factories remain closed, and almost the entire population is left dependent on food aid. The blockade is supposed to prevent arms smuggling, but the goal is rather to force an impoverished and victimized population into overthrowing Hamas.

The strategy is not only morally scandalous, but categorically stupid to begin with. Hamas is the only administrative organization that exists in Gaza – are you going to shoot the person who is keeping you from starving?

Joe, let me ask you bluntly, who exactly are you working for? Which persons, what shadowy forces have gathered and conspired to transform you into a moral coward of this magnitude? Are you speaking for the Administration when you defend the blockade of Gaza, or are you are simply having fun playing the loose cannon on Public Television?

Hilary came out on Thursday with the usual crap about how the government needs a full and complete investigation of Monday’s events before issuing a position statement – why wasn’t that good enough for you too? After all, in another week or two public attention will have moved elsewhere, and those of us not condemned to spend our lives in Gaza will move on to other concerns.

Joe, I suspect that you and I are not likely to achieve agreement on Middle East policy, so let me instead suggest an alternate proposal which articulates more general and non-partisan principles. Let us agree therefore that:

1. US policy will not support the boarding of ships in international waters without immediately obvious and reasonable grounds.
2. The US will now commit its energies to begin the economic reconstruction of Gaza, regardless of whatever power relations are currently in place there or elsewhere.
3. The US will no longer provide military and financial support to countries that damage the lives and welfare of non-combatant civilian populations anywhere in the world, either in time of peace or war.

Come on, Joe, give us a little help here. After eight years of institutionalized moral stupefaction under Bush Two, you were elected to try and improve things. What you were saying to Charlie Rose the other night is against morality, against history, and against common sense. Let’s go back to the drawing board and come up with something better, ok?



* See Wikipedia, “Gaza War.”

Spill, Baby, Spill

However agreeable it is to watch the CEO of British Petroleum squirming to regain respectability in the face of a shabby, irresponsible, preposterous, fraudulent, hopelessly botched and totally self-induced technological mega-fuckup, the suspicion remains that corporate America sees nothing more than gallons of money escaping uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico.

While the rest of us watch dying pelicans strangulating in the reeds and listen to sanctimonious tv reporters bleating their endless concern, no doubt Big Oil is preparing whatever Plan B's will need to be put into place to stem the flow of fugitive wealth and find some new holes to insert its relentless boring devices into, like disturbed hornets working secretly in the shadows.

Thus although Nature temporarily has the upper hand, it is clearly just a question of time till all is well and we are once again firmly on the path to "getting the economy going again," since, as Chevron soothingly assures us, "Every Day, We Invest In The Energy To Move Us All Ahead."

Those of us who prefer not to be moved ahead by Chevron might recall how capitalism, for all its vulgar materialism, in actuality despises matter, and therefore Nature as well, rejecting both in favor of satisfying its insane quest for wealth, a purely mental entity.

Terry Eagleton puts it perfectly: "It is a culture shot through with fantasy, idealist to its core, powered by a disembodied will which dreams of pounding Nature to pieces. It makes an idol out of matter, but cannot stomach the resistance it offers to its grandiose schemes" (After Theory,  p 45).

No cilantro, please, we're Jewish

Matt Yglesias presents today a useful chart filched from The Economist showing a number of items presently forbidden from import into Gaza, which includes cilantro, fishing rods and music instruments.
It is truly difficult to imagine how Israel's security interests, rapturously defended by Joe Biden on Charlie Rose last Tuesday night, would be gravely afflicted by such innocent items, unless of course it is hoped that their absence might prove sufficient to incite a popular rebellion to overthrow Hamas -- that's assuming of naturally that Gaza musicians haven't meanwhile been ordering up bassoons stuffed with plastic explosives.
Truly this is state policy reduced to the level of farce.

A Deep-damasked Tiger Moth

I was looking at yesterday's post about John Keats' casement and I realized I didn't know what a Tiger Moth looks like, so I went searching on the Internet. The species has international variants, but I think this is the British model:

A Casement High

A casement high and triple-arched there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings:
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings.

John Keats, Eve of St. Agnes

Adobe, by Will Sparks

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand.

                   -- Edna St.Vincent Millay          

Good reading will help you advance, but watch out for that darned chlorine gas.