Plainfeather's Blog

Motorcycle trip to Monterey County

2012-01-12T20:12:00.000-08:00

Scenes from a bike trip to Monterey in 1999. The interiors are from Mission San Antonio de Padua.

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Against the literary persecution of corvids

2012-01-07T12:51:00.000-08:00

Kelly Moore: King Crow

I engaged last week in an email exchange with Lew Ellingham upon the unjust representation of blackbirds in European folk-traditions. Upon his suggestion that discriminatory attitudes of this nature are due to the color and not the intelligence of the birds concerned, I wrote:

Hi Lew,

I can only agree that the demonization of the corvid family in the European tradition is due to the associations made with their (so-to-speak) skin color rather than their species behavior, which in the view of many naturalists, as I understand, is quite exceptional.

The traditional antipathy towards wolves seems more intelligible, since they were certainly a menace in the early middle ages (see for example the ninth-century Annals of Fulda). But if blackbirds are to be judged only by their feather color, then we have obviously and prejudicially fallen victim to yet another silly cultural meme, probably on the same intellectual level that assigns purity to white and evil to black.

How arbitrary these correspondences are is shown by the Japanese, who see white as the color of death—because of its alleged ghastliness, I suppose, since their ghosts are also pale like ours—or by the Chinese, who used to build moon-viewing platforms to observe the full-moon because it facilitates Supreme Good Fortune, instead of inspiring lunacy as here in the West.

A broader issue is what good can be found in the forest to begin with, since of course before Petrarch such environs were known to be full of creatures of menace, living and dead, as well as all kinds of potentially lethal botanica: ("This is the forest's prime evil, the murdering pines and the hemlocks....")

My favorite bad-crow poem nonetheless is the popular Scots ballad:

The twa corbies

As I was walkin' all alane
I heard twa corbies makin' mane
The 'tain unto the tither did say,
where sall we gang to din th' nicht?

It's in ahint yon auld fell dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight
Naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawke and his hound and his lady faire.

His hound is tae the hunting gane
His hawke tae fetch the wild fowle hame
His lady's ta'en anither mate,
So we can mak oor dinner swete.

Ye'll sit on his white hoose-bane*
And I'll pick oot his bonny blue e'en
Wi' mony a lock o' his golden hair
We'll theek oor nest when it grows bare.

There's many a mon for him maks mane
But nane shall ken whaur he has gane.
O'er his white banes when they are bare
The wind shall blaw forever mair.

I know the traditional melody for this, but have never heard anyone sing it successfully—it really works very much better as a poem, and few folk-singers can resist applying an unwanted measure of pathos.

I don't know how many wives kill off their husbands in the Scots ballads repertory, more often than not with poison. Mariticide (the liquidation of one's husband, a looming double-hazard of gay male marriages) must have been something of a problem, and in this case it is clearly what the poem is all about. As Liza Carthy famously observed, "There's nowt so queer as folk."

Kelly Moore: A Boy and His Crow

In fact this poem isn't about the crows at all, which anyway are unpardonably confused with vultures, nastily engaged in ocular extirpation. Bonny blue eyes may have accordingly been seen as a special gourmet delight for them. These are however very polite crows, conducting a thoughtful dialogue and assigning each other places at the dinner table to forestall any arguments.

But I proceed now to the Safeway with my own dining list, where I shall cheerfully hum to myself: Heigh-ho the carrion-crow as I inspect some dead animal tissues in the meat department.

James

The crow pictures are from Kelly Moore's website: a murder of crows.

* skeleton

Sidewalk visions

2012-01-07T10:03:00.000-08:00

Street art, South of Market, ca. 1999

The most offensive tv commercial in 2011

2012-01-06T16:57:00.000-08:00

I saw on Huffpo a discussion recently which attempted to adjudicate the most offensive tv ad in 2011. I declined to participate, thinking that the field would be richly contested and that my own nomination would not be particularly well-informed, since I don't watch that much television to begin with.

On the other hand, I can't help wondering if anything worse could be found than the 30-second piece of arrogant, mendacious misrepresentation that prefaced the PBS Newshour every weekday evening for half of last year. This malignant piece of "underwriting," which is PBS-speak for advertising, was delivered every single night to the point of mental stultification by Chevron, anxious to define its corporate self as engaged to the exclusion of all other activities with the protection and enhancement of the environment, and the creation of employment in the economies of developing countries.

This ridiculous sanctification of Chevron's corporate mission, its suppression of the circumstance that the company exists to sell a variety of oil-products which cannot be considered other than toxic to the environment, combined with the mesmerizing stupidity and endless repetition of such dumb-downing self-presentation, should I think easily elevate Chevron to the field of top contenders for the worst tv commercial of the year.

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Milano

2012-01-05T07:55:00.001-08:00

Milan Cathedral, 1983

Il duomo

Here we go again

2012-01-04T08:20:00.000-08:00

Actually it seemed to me that 2011 was a crap year for the planet,considering how many hundred of thousands of persons died unnecessarily, got permanently maimed in demonstrationsor open warfare in the streets, or who became or remained mired in poverty, and in some places were struck down by famine.

Logically one might hope for a measure of relief in 2012, but ofcourse the farce of another national election, in which everyone gets toexpress his/her own urgent vision of a utopian America that is structurallydoomed to failure, now hangs in January like a black cloud on the horizon.

Results from the Republican freak show in the Iowa statecaucus yesterday demonstrate the level of political intelligence abroad in theland, and shows how much money and effort will be required to overcome it.

Thunder from Beneath

2012-01-04T07:41:00.000-08:00

I cast my New Year's hexagram in the I Ching for 2012 and received #16, Yü, Enthusiasm. The commentary in the edition that I like to use seems remarkablyauspicious:

There is a rhythmic force, a world music, that lives deep inthe Unconscious of each of us. It's a primitive drumbeat, a shaking rattle, atribal chant that invokes the primal self to rise up and join the dance. Thisis the enthusiasm that is generated now. Not rhetorical persuasion, not a playon the emotions, but a charismatic, irresistible Call of the Wild. Confuciussaid that the person who could comprehend this could 'rule the world as thoughit were spinning in his hand.' This is a time for instinct, not intellect—theThunder from Beneath.

In order to receive the bespoken Call of the Wild I shallneed to spend less time at the computer next year, which I happily make my NewYear’s resolution.

Denise

2012-01-03T09:15:00.001-08:00


Denise Kastan, co-founder of Small Press Traffic, in 1976.

Lew Ellingham's new poem: Sha'ar Zahav

2012-01-01T06:46:00.000-08:00

The evening lamp

2012-01-01T06:30:00.000-08:00

Mina Fonda Ochtman (1862-1924): The evening lamp

Ditching Hitch-22

2011-12-31T11:55:00.000-08:00

The media were making such an intolerable rumpus about the death ofChristopher Hitchens during the week before Christmas that I felt constrainedto stop postponing reading his recent autobiography, Hitch-22.

It came rather as a disappointment, not only in terms of hislaborious progress from one failed ideology (Marxism) to another (militantatheism), transacted apparently under the shadow of a raging father-complex, butalso because stylistically the book reads as if written by—well, just another journalist.

Perhaps Hitchens felt required to accept a deadline imposedby his imminent demise, but a successful autobiography requires the space andtime and leisure sufficient for an extended stroll down memory’s lane, not arush to the exits. Among British emigrés I wouldn’t necessarily define the autobiographicalruminations of Keith Richards or Alistair Cooke as literary masterworks, but atleast they got the narrative tempo right.

What did tick me off completely was a statement in which Hitchenscriticizes non-Marxist protesters from the Sixties:

From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex orgender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as arevolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all thatwould be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Thencould follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for theold “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right ofexperience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us tostand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability werequalifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when theLeft lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this wasthe first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.

What manifest horseshit, and how incredibly stupid to define one’s performance as a revolutionaryas dependent upon adherence to the “moral advantage” of Leftist principles, “hard” or otherwise. Askany gay persons victimized by the persecution and psycho-terrorism prevalent in theFifties if they considered the class struggle responsible for their demonizationin society. What Hitchens is really whining about is that identity politics wassuccessful to a degree, while international socialism obviously wasn’t.

Steven Fama's 2011 hit list

2011-12-31T10:56:00.000-08:00

Steven Fama is among the most consistently perceptive poetry critics found in our tiny and rudely elliptical circle of Bay Area bloggers, so be sure to see his list of favorite poetry books from 2011 posted today at the glade of theoric hermetica.
I would certainly find it hard to disagree with any of his selections.

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A new poem by John Norton

2011-12-27T18:01:00.000-08:00

Surprised By Joy

Who might he have looked like

like my neighbor Sam Katz

sweeping the sidewalk

in his lucky Giants cap

the one with the Israeli flag pin

and a miniature mezuzah

like Hakim at the Trieste

making the perfect cappuccino

all day every day

reserving his banter for the women.

He must have been dark-skinned

curly beard

headwrap of some sort

to keep the sand out of his hair

short hirsute circumcised

his family desert people

water is precious

the sustainer of life

a complaining people

eyes down mostly

the Roman yoke one more burden.

Night watch in the hills –

a pack of no-good illiterates

distracted by the chanting and the music

now startled by the whirling lights

pick up and run into the town

not knowing what they might find.

John Norton

St Gotthard Pass

2011-12-17T10:49:00.000-08:00

While doing some research recently for my grad seminar at Berkeley I was looking at a biography of the 10th c. German bishop St Gotthard (Vita S. Godehardi). This put me in mind of crossing the St Gotthard Pass in Switzerland, which is approached by an awfully high bridge. The latest of several versions was built in 1977 and looks like this:

Source: Wikicommons

The modern bridge was built over the gorge in the same spot as its 12th c. counterpart, and I was wondering how on earth medieval travellers managed to span the roaring waters in the gorge below.

The answer is shown by the German painter Carl Blechen, who shows how the bridge of 1833 was simply built on top of its medieval predecessor:

Building the St. Gotthard Teufelsbrücke, Carl Blechen, ca 1833

Then apparently the medieval version was simply removed, and the new one after time became the base for ever higher constructions moving up the sides of the gorge.

German Wiki, artist's name not given

I still have no idea why this mountain pass leading from Switzerland to Italy is named after St Gotthard; apparently there was a hospice on top run by some monks who perhaps were devoted to this bishop from far-off Hildesheim in Germany.

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Naked

2011-12-15T12:38:00.000-08:00

Gregory Crewdson: Untitled, 2001.

Gregory Crewdson's photographs are, as someone said, not so much taken as made, and many show people when they are most vulnerable and exposed, when life suddenly stops moving and a subject becomes frozen in self-reflection.

Never more so than in the picture above. After the initial flash of S-E-X quickly subsides, one sees a woman totally lost in thought in front of a reflecting mirror: something demands that a position be taken, a question resolved, while time itself careens to a sudden stop.

Of course we've all been there in one way or another, naked and exposed to the world around us, having no idea what to do next. That's the appeal of the picture: we've all been there and understand the situation exactly, even if we don't know what the woman is thinking.

What she's thinking may have to do with the naked guy on her bed: you can see him if you click on the photo and look at the right-hand panel in the mirror.

Gregory Crewdson's fascinating photographs are everywhere on the Internet; one can start by looking at his Wiki or else do a Google Images search.

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Peter Reading, poet, died 17 November 2011.

2011-12-06T21:29:00.000-08:00


Photo: Bernard Mitchell

Then we waded at low tide to Hilbre Island;
and we marvelled at scores of thousands of waders:
Sanderling, Knot, Oystercatcher, Redshank, Curlew and Dunlin;
and the giant gull of the north, the hyperborean Glaucous,
glided snow-mantled above the remains of the old lifeboat station;
and there suddenly stooped from a cloud the colour of Blanenau Ffestiniog slate
a Peregrine into a blizzard of wheeling Calidris Alba
and the falcon hit and we heard the thud and a handful of silven feathers
whorled in the wind and the great dark raptor rose with the dead meat locked in its talons;
and I said to my friend: 'We will mind this as long as we live.' (He is dead now.)

From Laertidean, by Peter Reading

Poetry's problem

2011-12-04T10:52:00.001-08:00

Click to embiggen.

I suspect that most people who write poetry have somehow to come to terms with the eventuality that probably nobody is going to read it. I've determined there are three reasons, the first and most important being that there is simply too goddam much of it. This may be related to the earth's overpopulation problem, or to the fact that anyone who can construct a written phrase or sentence automatically self-estimates as poetry-capable. (If you want to join the Stanford Marching Band, you might be required to play an instrument first.)

The other reasons are more structural in nature. A poem is a uniquely conceived thought-experiment, which in modern terms requires non-conventional constructions of meaning. Unsurprisingly, this makes the reader's brain hurt.

Finally, poetry requires a relatively unusual aesthetic sensibility that finds gratification in the choice, progress and associations of words and speech, just as an artist is aware of selecting different shades of color. It is not a common apprehension.

Old Ford truck, Walnut Creek, 1973

2011-12-01T12:10:00.001-08:00

This is one of my first attempts at photography, which I thought came out fairly well considering I had no idea what I was doing. It takes awhile to know how a photograph is going to appear in black and white when what you are looking at is in color. I like the way the head-lights appear anthropomorphically as eyeballs attached to the front fenders, just as in cartoon drawings.

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Steven, Noe Valley

2011-11-25T20:34:00.001-08:00


Steven at home in Noe Valley, 1978.

You have been warned

2011-11-22T18:34:00.001-08:00

The 2012 Republican National Convention will be held in Tampa, Florida, starting on August 27, 2012.

(Luna Park, Melbourne, Australia, photographer unknown)

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Good looks

2011-11-17T17:22:00.001-08:00


Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Self-portrait in a straw hat (1782)

When I see this painting I can't help remembering something I read of Thomas Mann, that when he was in a Swiss hospital during a final illness, a pretty nurse came in to look after him, and he remarked later what a joyful thing it is to encounter a good-looking human being.

Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun had similar thoughts and wrote them down. Her memoirs have been translated and can be read online.

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Pieter Warnar's bookstore in Amsterdam

2011-11-16T18:24:00.001-08:00

Johannes Jelgerhuis (1770-1836): De Winkel van Boekhandelaar Pieter Meijer Warnars op de Vijgendam te Amsterdam

Jonathan on the back steps, No. 2

2011-11-14T17:39:00.001-08:00

Jonathan James on the backsteps, San Francisco, 1978

Jonathan on the back steps, No. 1

2011-11-13T17:58:00.001-08:00


Jonathan James on the backsteps, San Francisco, 1978

Jonathan was the victim of some experiments I was doing with fog filters. We first encountered each other in the Safeway at Church and Market in the early 70's. He was wearing bell-bottom blues and his hair was half-way down his back.

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Le Commissionaire

2011-11-12T18:28:00.001-08:00

Autumn's last breath

2011-11-11T19:28:00.001-08:00

Görschstraße in Pankow, Berlin, November 2011. Foto: Alexander Rentsch.

A royal command

2011-10-29T18:27:00.000-07:00

Friedrich von Amerling: Kaiser Franz I.

Halloween is coming

2011-10-22T06:53:00.000-07:00

An art motorcycle created by Bangkok artist Roongrojna Sangwongprisam. Boy, would I love to power this baby down Powell Street to Market and watch the tourists scatter for shelter.

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October in Japan

2011-10-20T19:42:00.000-07:00


Enryaku-ji, Hiei-san

Nobody manages autumn like the Japanese. Trees are selected and placed near temples just so they will contribute a certain splash of color for a few weeks in October. It's like creating a painting. The photos below which I took in 1985 at Ehei-ji in Fukui Prefecture show Japanese maples precisely positioned for their annual autumnal display.

Korea in October

2011-10-15T05:19:00.000-07:00

Every autumn I think of my visit to Korea in October, 1985, where I'd come after a year of teaching in Fukui, Japan. I was studying Buddhist temple architecture at the time, and the temples of Korea are unique and fascinating. I spent a couple weeks backpacking around the countryside, which I found to be geologically like NewYork State or New England, very different from Japan.


The library at Haeinsa contains 81,258 wooden printing blocks from the Tripitaka Koreana. It may be the oldest intact library in the world.

Booklaunch party at the Green Arcade Bookstore celebrating F. S. Rosa's new novel "The Divine Comedy of Carlo Tresca"

2011-10-10T19:47:00.000-07:00

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On September 14th we celebrated Francesca's book launch at the Green Arcade bookstore at Market Street and Gough, The novel is published by Ithuriel's Spear in San Francisco and recounts the adventures of the murdered anarchist Carlo Tresca in a lively afterworld populated by deceased revolutionaries and political troublemakers of several different persuasions.

Francesca signing poet John Norton's copy

Jim Mitchell introducing Francesca

The book shop was filled to the sidewalk

Francesca with Matt Wilson


Jim with poets Will Torphy and Lew Ellingham

I was pleased to open the event with the following introduction:

Welcome everyone to our book launch party for Francesca Rosa’s new novel. I am the publisher of Ithuriel’s Spear; we are an independent, non-profit book publisher specializing in the literary arts, and almost all of our work is written by authors who live here in San Francisco. Since 2005 we have published twenty titles of poetry and prose, and I should mention also that we are associated locally with Intersection for the Arts, from whom we receive fiscal sponsorship as a non-profit organization.

Francesca Rosa’s novel The Divine Comedy of Carlo Tresca represents a rather unique contribution to the production of literature in our San Francisco community, not only because of its extraordinary length, weighing in at almost 600 pages and 1.25 lbs., but also because it is an overtly political work, asserting itself in a literary environment which, unfortunately so for many of us, has become almost completely apolitical in recent years. Reflecting an abandonment of public interest in progressive politics and the current inability of the Left to organize effectively or to coordinate a mass response by citizens disadvantaged presently by widescale unemployment, budget cuts in education and welfare benefits, and the marginalization of Labor in American social life, it comes as quite a shock to realize that the only effective large-scale populist response to the current economic crisis has occurred instead on the side of the right. We seem to have entered an era not of reform politics as one might have expected, but instead we seem to find ourselves sucked ever further into the black hole of the status quo.

Circumstances of course used to be very different in this city. Thirty years ago a conference called Left Write! was held in Noe Valley. In the words of the organizers it was convened to address the issue of how local writers could best join together to conduct a unified political struggle representing the interests of workers, women, ethnic and sexual minorities, and economically disadvantaged persons in general.

The ensuing years have not been kind to the intentions and ideals articulated at the Left Write conference, and so it happens that in the midst of our current situation the arrival of Francesca’s novel arrives as something of a bombshell, or perhaps, better, a landmine with a long-delay fuse. Without indulging in remorse, her book reminds us of past vows and commitments, not only those of our own youth, but those undertaken by a whole company of celebrated figures in the history of protest politics: socialists, anarchists, peaceniks, feminists, civil rights leaders and feminists, ranging in time from the days of Rosa Luxemburg and Mother Jones and Emma Goldman across the last century and on to those concerned with the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These figures collide and richochet off each other in an imagined after life, all encountered and mediated through the eyes of Carlo Tresca, the hero of the novel, who lies dying in the streets of Manhattan in a pool of his own blood, having been murdered in 1943, probably by gangsters.

Tresca next enters a sort of Tibetan Book of the Dead -type bardo or underworld, occupied in this case mainly by professional troublemakers and working class heroes, a realm of Commie zombies and a land of undead Reds, and characters as diverse as Mahatma Gandhi Leo Trotsky and Count Tolstoy who at one point engage in a heated debate on the philosophical merits of direct action. In the words of Hilton Obenzinger, this book is a “rowdy romp in the netherworld of revolutionaries seen through the eyes of recently murdered Carlo Tresca, a wild ride through a century of strikes, massacres, demonstrations, uprisings and wars.”

A word now about Francesca Rosa: she is the author of Post War and Other Stories which was published with Ithuriel's Spear Press in 2006. She serves proudly as a rank and file union member with SEIU local 1021, and as a member delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council. She has lived and worked in San Francisco since the 1970's and is a long time reader of labor and left history. She first came across the name Carlo Tresca while reading Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's autobiography, The Rebel Girl. Soon thereafter she began the present novel, bringing early drafts of the book to Robert Gluck's writing workshop, and then working on it though independent study with Bob while completing an M.A. in English at San Francisco State. She is currently working on a book of short prose pieces and essays and has been drafting notes for a mystery novel set in San Francisco.

I should mention also that Francesca can be found on weekends working a small parcel of land at the community garden located on Dearborn Street near 18th, and I can tell you from personal experience that she grows killer-tomatoes.

F.S. Rosa's novel The Divine Comedy of Carlo Tresca is available at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.

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Now Blue October

2011-10-01T14:55:00.000-07:00

Now blue October, smoky in the sun,
Must end the long, sweet summer of the heart.
The last brief visit of the birds is done;
They sing the autumn songs before they part.
Listen, how lovely--there’s the thrush we heard
When June was small with roses, and the bending
Blossom of branches covered nest and bird,
Singing the summer in, summer unending.
Give me your hand once more before the night;
See how the meadows darken with the frost,
How fades the green that was the summer’s light.
Beauty is altered, never lost,
And love, before the cold November rain,
Will make its summer in the heart again.

-- Robert Nathan (1950)

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Eugene Ruggles

2011-09-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve made the argument elsewhere on this blog (as for example here or more reasonably here) that there exists an alternate poetry style in California and on the West Coast which, embracing realism and narrative simplicity, derives probably from Kenneth Rexroth and from translations of East Asian poems that started to appear here in the 1930’s.

I think that the work of Eugene Ruggles (d. 2004) with its heightened social polemic backgrounded by nature is directly related, and I wanted to include here a couple examples. I didn’t know Gene personally, but recall him as an affable presence in North Beach 30-40 years ago. He always looked sort of outdoorsy and seemed red in the face from alcohol, as I thought.

The Fire at Midnight

— for my son Adam

A mile west the Pacific

pulls at the load of moonlight

lifted overhead.

Inside our potbellied stove

flame is praising a log. At times

like autumn untying a tree.

We live in a small place

miles from anyone in these woods.

You are nine months tonight.

Just half the length of time

when your mother and I held,

for an instant, the force

spinning through us.

That takes our breath away.

And that later

when the walls had returned,

was rubbing your lungs together

like two sticks, until they caught.

Now from the wooden crib

that I built last spring

you are crying and reaching

toward me. And all I know

is the glow from the fire upon you,

that lovely,

you release the light from me.

Outside the great trees

toss and stamp in their stalls

eager with green even at night.

I rise and go toward you

and reaching down, with the wind

bending branches in my back,

lift your beautiful heat upwards.

Walking down an Alley in Detroit

on the Lower East Side

Beneath a lean-to of shadows

four black checker players have drawn

a crowd beside a rusted barrel lifting smoke

around a coffee pot. October

circles easy in the alley, inhales,

is lined with old heavy clothing.

A few blocks down a Chevrolet

factory shifts into its second gear

of human bodies. The bottle of wine

climbing from hand to hand

leaps once more, and refills

as it sinks beneath the ashes.

When an old man reaches out

his dark face packed with scars

and clears the board in one move,

laughter opens against the brick

like a match, like iodine,

burning along the Detroit River.

Both poems are from Roads of Bread: The Collected Poems of Eugene Ruggles. Edited by Delia Moon, Petaluma River Press, 2009.

See also http://www.eugeneruggles.com/about.html and http://eugeneruggles.com/, which has a really good video.

Valentin's concert

2011-08-24T08:12:00.000-07:00


Valentin de Boulogne: The Concert, 1622-25

As a species of Italian baroque genre paintings, Roman tavern scenes are pretty much straightforward—boozers, card-cheats, pickpockets, loose women and the like. Valentin’s shot at Caravaggism however is totally mysterious.

Five musicians are gathered around a half-eaten meat pie which sits upon on a large chunk of funerary sculpture from antiquity. The violist and tenor at the left need a part book for the melody and words of the song. The child, and the guitarist and lutenist don’t need one; most Renaissance instrumentalists could improvise very capably.

In the foreground a young soldier fills another glass while a woman in the background chug-a-lugs a whole bottle. The three musicians on the right look up toward the viewer, as if responding to a photographer who had come in to the room and asked to take their picture.

The picture suggests an allegory of some sort, but what does it really mean? If we knew what song or chanson they were singing, perhaps it would make sense to us. But we don’t, and so we must imagine the music for ourselves.

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London is still swinging

2011-08-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

The streets of East London may have been filled with riot and mayhem last week, but those participating will have performed their brief insurgency before the some of the finest street art in the world.

Spitalfields Life brings us an informative essay on the work of Malarky, who has his own blog elsewhere.

One of Banksy's most photographed creations is found in the same neighborhood, not to mention the elaborate animal portraits of Roa, which cover entire sides of buildings.

thanks flickr users bulent_yusu and londonstreetphoto; disclaimer.

The Terrace in the Snow

2011-08-16T07:32:00.000-07:00

In the golden twilight the rain

Was like silk threads. During the night

It cleared. The wind fell. It grew

Colder. My covers felt damp

And cold. Without my knowing it,

The snow had drifted into

The room like heaps of salt. At

The fifth watch, in the first flush

Of dawn, I close the curtain

Of the study. During the

Rest of the night I listen

To the ice, warping the colored

Tiles of the roof. In the morning

I sweep the Northern terrace

And look out at Saddle Peak.

It is clear of clouds and I

Can see both summits. Above

The village in the morning

Sunlight, crows begin to circle.

The mud of the streets is covered

With white. No cart track has marked it.

Ice has turned the shop roofs to

White jade. Snow has filled the doorways

With rice. The last cicadas

Have long since gone to earth. Now

They will have to dig a thousand

Feet deeper. Some clouds pile up,

The color of dried moss. My

Chest bothers me again.

I feel I have lost the

Ability to write.

The icicles on the caves

Drone in the wind like the swords

Of murderers.

— Su Tung P’o

From One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, by Kenneth Rexroth.

Young readers

2011-08-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

Lewis Hine: Boy studying, ca. 1924

Frans Oerder: Meisje wat lees (Girl reading).

Karl Mueller: Lesende junge Frau an einem Tisch
beim Licht der Petroleumlampe

It's what people do. They read and write. The Internet is just another way to do it.

From back in the days of unprocessed food...

2011-07-31T08:48:00.000-07:00

Luis Meléndez: Still Life with Beef, Bowl of Ham and Vegetables, and Receptacles, c. 1772

Nobody, but absolutely nobody, painted food as brilliantly as Luis Meléndez (Spanish, 1715-1780). His self-portrait from 1746 indicates that he had other things on his mind as well.

Casa di Broccoli

2011-07-28T04:45:00.000-07:00

Broccoli house via Laughing Squid.

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Summer 101

2011-07-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

Henri Matisse: Bonheur

Summer 102

2011-07-23T20:49:00.000-07:00

Ludwig von Hoffman (1861-1945): Adam in paradisical landscape, detail.

In the grand scheme

2011-07-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

Mike Davis, In the Grand Scheme

This painting by San Francisco artist Mike Davis reminds me strongly of the current budget debate in Washington.

More Mike Davis at SF Bay Arts, where the debt ceiling is always unlimited.

The phone bill

2011-07-19T11:08:00.000-07:00

This was always my favorite lolcats picture. I haven't looked at an AT&T phone bill in years -- I'm on an automatic pay plan just so I won't have to -- but the last I attempted it I thought my chances of comprehension would be greater if the bill were indeed written in Anglo-Saxon.

Gerard ter Borch

2011-07-18T10:09:00.000-07:00

Gerard ter Borch (1617-1681), The Reader

Bostonia ante bellum

2011-07-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

Tremont Street, Boston, 1860

Looking south down Tremont Street toward Park Street Church and Boston Common from King's Chapel and School Street.

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McSorley's Backroom

2011-07-15T09:40:00.000-07:00


John Sloan, McSorley's Backroom, 1912

First the budget crisis, now this

2011-07-14T07:50:00.000-07:00

Terrible news, Spitalfields Life reports that the Duke of Uke has lost his lease.

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My Neighborhood — A Postscript

2011-07-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

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Before 1906 a row of sumptuous Victorians lined the three blocks of Eddy Street from Van Ness to Laguna, making this one of the luxury neighborhoods in San Francisco's Western Addition.

Modern apartment buildings gradually replaced them, leaving only three historic buildings standing, each of which is a designated San Francisco Landmark.

Landmark 11: Rothschild House, 964 Eddy Street

Landmark 11: Family Service Agency, 1010 Gough Street at Eddy, designed by Bernard Maybeck, 1928.

Landmark 35: Stadtmuller House, 819 Eddy, built 1880.

Noehill In San Francisco has a useful listing of local landmarks.

My neighborhood — The McKittrick Hotel — 3/3

2011-07-11T07:09:00.000-07:00

The Portman Mansion, 1007 Gough Street

Vertigo, the finest Hollywood movie ever filmed in San Francisco, must have encouraged many people to move here. This wasn’t true in my case, but after I first saw it in Boston in 1958, the portrayal of San Francisco as a misty, color-saturated, Vista-Visioned enchantment lying somewhere far to the west on the Pacific coast haunted me in its mythic unreality as it does even to this day.

Other impressions from the movie remain unforgotten—the genially conceived long stroll across Ernie’s Restaurant in the famous green velvet dress, of course, and the leap into the Bay under the Bridge at Fort Point, the tète-à-tète among redwoods in Muir Woods, the fall from the (non-existent) bell tower at Mission San Juan Bautista in Hollister.

Equally impressive for me and my male friends in those days was Kim Novak’s appearance at the Empire Hotel at 940 Sutter. Her Playtex Maidenform bra seemed to stretch her green knit sweater to the point of structural unsustainability.

Another great moment occurs when Madeleine enters the McKittrick Hotel to regenerate her delusional possession by Carlotta Valdes. Certainly nowhere in Boston could you encounter an architecture that looked anything like like this.

The "McKittrick Hotel" was in fact the twenty-room Portman mansion dating from the 1880’s at Gough and Eddy Streets. It was torn down in 1959 to make room for an athletic practice field belonging to Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory School.

Jimmy Stewart pulls up in his 1956 DeSoto FireFlite.

St Paulus Church is behind him, and my apartment under the arrow.

And he goes looking for Madeleine.

An opportunity for a quick bath is ignored.

The derelict mansion was pulled down in 1959.

Time is elastic, you have to become old to really understand this. As much time has elapsed between the Hitchock movie and the present as between it and when the mansion at 1007 Gough Street was yet in its prime. Who knows, perhaps Carlotta Valdes really existed. Every city has its own ghosts, and God knows this town is loaded with them.

A few times each week I sit waiting at the bus stop at Gough and Eddy for the 31-Balboa to come lumbering up the hill. Sometimes, when the neighborhood is wrapped in fog, the McKittrick Hotel rises up spectrally across the street in front of me over the schoolyard, and I see Jimmy Stewart following Madeleine up the steps. It occurs to me that I too have trailed after one beautiful woman or another, only to see her disappear before my eyes.

Several photos of the Portman Mansion: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

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My neighborhood — Jefferson Square Park — 2/3

2011-07-10T09:19:00.000-07:00

San Francisco is blessed with a number of fine parks bejewelling the city like so many sparkling florets of emerald green, even though their public reputation diminishes in comparison with the massively gorgeous Golden Gate Park, arguably the best urban park anywhere.

Who among us has not basked under the Spring sun in the green pastures of Dolores Park, enjoyed the folksy sociability of Washington Park in North Beach, or felt awed before the majesty of the Bridge and the Golden Gate while walking along the Bay at Crissy Field. These are pleasures found nowhere else in this country, and they don’t cost you a penny.

My own neighborhood features a recreational area called Jefferson Square Park, only a minute from my door. Regrettably, compared with the other parks available for public enjoyment in this city, this one is a total loser, and it’s a mystery to me why it exists to begin with. Building a park on the side of a steep hill seems counter-intuitive, but with application it can be reasonably accomplished, as exemplified by the not-distant and altogether amenable Lafayette Park .

But Jefferson Square Park fails completely. It is striated with three lateral black asphalt walkways, punctuated by crumbling stone stair cases that elevate one about ten feet. The ground is damp, and due to lack of discipline, the grass has gone clumpy. It is generally cold and windy. Nobody uses the park except dog-owners on the one end of it and societal desperates requiring a place to sleep in the afternoons on the other.

The park does have a few old-growth eucalyptus trees, and the view south from its northern periphery provides a welcome chance to stretch one’s eyes. But it’s clearly not a place where people choose to hang out or recreate themselves, and its single advantage is that the space isn’t covered with residential buildings and parking lots like everywhere else in the vicinity.

And yet for one brief period, probably the only time in the Park’s history, incompetent city planning produced an unexpected advantage when refugees from the Fire erected a tent city here in 1906.

Underneath my bed I keep a small one-person tent and a rolled up sleeping bag and air mattress. I am not expecting my own building to collapse when the Big One comes, but it could burn down. So I have at the ready a stash of canned food, three gallon-bottles of Crystal Mountain water, and a small aluminum briefcase containing my external, back-up hard drive, along with some emergency weed. You will find me among the first to have established residence in Jefferson Square Park.

Photos: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

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My neighborhood — 1/3

2011-07-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

I’ve lived in the 900 block of Eddy Street for some years now, and have really quite enjoyed being here. Despite the fact that it lacks the defining characteristics of a more authentic San Francisco neighborhood—it’s one of those streets you walk down to get somewhere else: two blocks east to Van Ness, two blocks west to the Fillmore, two blocks north to St Mary’s Cathedral—its central location also enables me to walk to the Main Library, BART and Muni Metro in a quarter hour or less.

It’s also situated on the 31-Balboa bus line, one of the more felicitous routes in the city. The vehicles hustle along efficiently and noiselessly every twenty minutes or so along mostly empty streets. In fifteen minutes you can get to Powell and Market going east, and in thirty you’re at Ocean Beach to the west, perfect for a stroll on hot days. And there’s almost always a place to sit.

My apartment is quiet, comfy and suffers only from being overloaded with books and plants, which would however doubtless characterize whatever living space I chose to inhabit. And it has the inestimable advantage of facing south with an unobstructed view to the sun, enhancing and nurturing my window garden, the light crisply sutured or softened at various times of the day through the judicious deployment of wooden Venetian blinds purchased at IKEA.

But if the neighborhood is nondescript today, it was not always so. I live one door down from what was once one of the city’s most remarkable architectural assets. The Saint Paulus German Lutheran Church profiled itself so prominently against the skyline of the city that you could see it from miles away, from Noe Valley, Bernal Hill or Twin Peaks. It seemed visible from almost anywhere, and you could orient yourself spatially by observing it on the horizon. That steeple you're looking at sodomized the sky at a height of about eight stories.

Built in 1893, the church disappeared overnight in a terrible fire in 1995.

The razed property remained deserted for years, surrounded by a tall chicken-wire fence, home on occasion to a small number of the city’s homeless, whose encampments got periodically annihilated by the police. Its dismal appearance even qualified it in my feverish imagination as an official entrance to hell, described elsewhere on this blog.

All this changed last year when the plot suddenly exploded into prominence as a community garden, now verdant with flowers and vegetables, complete with proprietary beehives ensuring rapid fertilization, and described in considerable detail at the sponsoring organization’s website.

What the Free Farm has meant for local residents is inestimable, not exactly in terms of forging us into a viable community, but serving rather as a constant source of intense curiosity. Walking past to and from the bus stop, or marching down the hill to the Safeway, one can’t help pausing for a few minutes to observe what-all is going on in the new community garden.

Thanks flickr user dluck for the fire picture.

disclaimer

The Silver Goblet

2011-07-08T08:21:00.000-07:00


Chardin, The Silver Goblet, 1763.

When black waves covered Middle-Earth

2011-07-08T08:19:00.000-07:00

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Aaron Hostetter’s marvelous translation of Genesis A. continues with the Anglo-Saxon retelling of Noah and the Flood:

Noah, the son of Lamech, was six hundred winters old
when he with his sons went down under the deck,
wise with his children, by the order of God, precious to the multitude.
The Lord sent rain from the heavens and allowed likewise
a welling gush to press upon the roomy world from every spring,
dark water-streams rushed. The seas rose up over the sea-cliffs.
Strong and fierce was he who controlled the waters.
The children of the wicked feud, of middle-earth were covered
and concealed by the black waves, the homelands of men.
The house of earth was harried, the Maker avenged
the willful crimes upon mankind. The strong sea grabbed
onto the fated folk for forty days, and forty nights as well.
The hate was ferocious, slaughter-cruel towards men.
The waves of the Glory-King drove out the spirits
of the dishonored from their flesh-homes.
The Flood covered them all, the high mountains stormy
under the heavens throughout the wide earth and heaved up
onto the seas the Ark from the ground and with it the nobles.
Then the Lord himself signified, our Shaper,
when he had closed up that ship. (1367b-91)

More at the Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry Project.

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Calixtinus has gone missing

2011-07-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

Arose this morning to receive the dreadful intelligence that the 12th-c. manuscript Codex Calixtinus has been stolen from the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. This ms. is valuable for a whole lot of reasons, including the remarkable folios that contain some of the earliest transcriptions of polyphonic music. I wonder what in the world the thieves are expecting to do with it, and I hope that the cathedral staff has had it professionally digitized, in which case it should be made available online so we can all enjoy it.

Beneath the picture of Charlemagne's army, who look suspiciously like Crusaders, we see the great man Hisself and some friends tippy-toeing off to Santiago on a red carpet. The architectural drawing suggests that architects had gotten away from Roman-style red-tile roofing by the 11th century.

Photo WikiCommons Fitxategi:Codex Calixtinus (Liber Sancti Jacobi) F162v siglo XII.

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In a Scottish bookshop

2011-07-05T07:35:00.000-07:00

William Fettes Douglas (1822-1891), The Bibliophilist's Haunt or Creech's Bookshop.

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Independence Day 2011

2011-07-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

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Thanks to an online July 4th promotional event at ancestry.com and the good offices of my distant cousin Howard Mitchell in Illinois, a far more assiduous genealogist than I shall ever be, I received from him this weekend a document concerning my original American ancestor, Rudolph Hines.

The document below shows that Rudolph emigrated from Prussia in 1733 and ultimately wound up on a frontier settlement in the Ohio Territory, where he died in 1823. He had a daughter named Mary Hines, who married John Mitchell, the son of my patrilinear ancestor from Scotland, who appeared on these shores in 1782.

Of enduring importance is the fact that Rudolph Hines, born Rudolf Heintz, fought in the Brandywine-Germantown campaigns of 1777, rendering him not only obnoxious to British forces similarly engaged, but significant also to a number of his own descendants (who by this time number in the hundreds: families were of course huge in those days), and especially to those seeking admission to the exclusive “Sons of the American Revolution” organization. Thus for example an application from a distant relative named Sherman Strong, who applied for entry on July 12, 1880:

Clicking embiggens.

All of this quite delights me. Even though I share I think only 1/128th of Rudolph’s genetic material, I am convinced that this documentary evidence explains why I majored in German at Boston University, and subsequently spent a total of 13 years living in Germany, preferring Berlin above all other places and Prussia’s Glory above other German military marches.

But despite my demonstrable eligibility, I shall not seek acceptance in the Sons of the American Revolution, which I suppose is as close as we get to hereditary aristocracy in this country. Perhaps such attitudes may have induced Rudolph to leave Germany and fight for American independence in the first place. Anyway, the circumstances of my life require that I view myself as the son of a thoroughly different revolution than the one envisioned and eternally memorialized by the Sons or the Daughters of the American Revolution.

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Forget Dionysus

2011-07-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit, U.C. Press 2010, is a sort of San Francisco field guide for thinking people, the basic message being that life here is AWFULLY DIVERSE. To prove it there is a map of "queer public spaces"—we used to call them gay bars—coexisting, just to be clever, on the same page with a chart of local butterfly habitats. Three pages of euphoric prose by Aaron Shurin follow, coyly celebrating the “soul” that gays continue to bestow upon the city.

Well, whatever. What I thought uncompromisingly stupid was the relegation of resident “whites” solely to Pacific Heights, indicated on the map entitled “Tribes of San Francisco.” But I won’t bother to be bothered by the absence of any mention of hippies, which happens, in the words of a UC alumni magazine reviewer, because the author “eschews the prepackaged narrative of Love and Haight.”

Regardless of its ensuing commodification / reification, the hippie experience affected the lives of tens of thousands, and helped enable all kinds of social change. What followed in the Reagan period was a sort of damnatio memoriae of the hippies. It still continues, and I suspect the present volume is more evidence of the same.

Speaking as an unrepentant hippie, I refuse to be upset. It always occurred to me that the Haight in 1967 resembled not an infinite city, but more accurately an invisible one. It descends from the skies every hundred years or so like Brigadoon, enabling the more percipient members of society to worship Dionysus with all means at our exposal before it goes away again. It’s like the movie “King of Hearts” (1966), when the doors to a French nuthouse are accidentally unlocked during WWI, and the inmates run out to play in the deserted streets of the town and enact their various phantasies.

It’s a question of grace, not merit, and the best way to ensure that Dionysus returns with his cult to our city is to forget about him completely.

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Why Marx was wrong

2011-07-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

Last week I powered up my Kindle and digested Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton, partly because I generally find him entertaining as well as ethically concerned, and also because there still lurks within me a soft spot for Marxism, recalling the period on American college campuses in the Vietnam period when the New Left functioned as an important arena for political discussion about social change.

The book proceeds by countering a series of hypothetical arguments proposed by fictive opponents, the straw man technique, whereby non-existent critics are reduced to silence. This is a literary form often employed in academic articles: “Although scholars have argued that such-and-such is the case, my own brilliant research now proves decisively that it is not,” whereby of course the scholars in question are never cited by name or their arguments critically analyzed.

Now there are many reasonable ways to criticize Marxist thinking — take for example Brad DeLong’s Understanding Marx lecture notes — and one cogent reason why Eagleton’s book is doomed to failure is that it doesn’t consider more than a few carefully hand-chosen, severely overwrought ones. They do not include my own view for example that the Marxian analysis of social class structure is inapplicable to post-industrial capitalism.

There was a time when you could easily identify industrial workers simply from their appearance. When I studied in Germany in the early 1960’s, they wore caps and blue-colored jackets and leather shoes that were always unpolished and they carried with them leather brief-cases containing lunch and a bottle of beer. In England workers used to look like this:

Where did all the workers go? Well, many went into the service sector due to technological advances in industrial production, and, in an astonishing betrayal of class consciousness, many of those left behind decided they were consumers and no longer workers, so in this country they consequently determined during the Reagan era that their economic interests were better served by voting Republican.

The proletariat simply isn’t around any more. The industrial workers of America now live and work in Mexico and China, and if they ever manage to organize, it will be against those governments and not ours.

(There were two quite interesting PBS Newshour reports last night. One showed a government crackdown on workers’ wage protests in one Chinese city, while at the Party Congress in Beijing the bosses delivered the customary annual diatribe against internal corruption. This is a well-established strategy: deflect popular attention from genuine issues through institutional self-criticism, which no one could do anything about even if the will existed.)

Just as capitalism eliminated uppity San Francisco longshoremen through technological advancement—something incidentally Harry Bridges would never have disapproved of—globalization has done away with American workers as a class of potential troublemakers.

Thus the current collapse of the American labor movement, graphically demonstrated by its inability to react decisively to the events this year in Wisconsin, or the impotence of the mine workers to change the dangerous conditions in the Massey mines in West Virginia, either before or after last year’s catastrophe.

Unlike the 1930’s, when similar economic conditions prevailed, the current recession has amazingly inspired no other organized populist response except on behalf of the right. Given the obscene circumstance that capitalist managers who created the mess continue to make out like bandits while millions suffer, this seems quite a surprise.

But it’s hardly a question of Gramscian hegemony, where the lower classes are hypnotized into advocating ruling class interests, not if you view the right in America as a coalition of the rich, their political mouthpieces, a broad base of uneducated dreamers hoping that tax-cuts and a return to the old ways will lead to a lost American utopia, or Christian fundamentalist phantasts wishing for a not-yet-revealed one.

But it is evidence of the disappearance of the workers as a transformative social force, which is why Marx was wrong.

photo "Leaving Manchester, 1938" from The Edwardians.

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I'm deleting you from facebook, cha cha cha

2011-06-27T12:08:00.000-07:00

East Portland Blog directs us to a long overdue rejection of various facebook lunacies from somewhere in Spain.

The vanilla bean pod story

2011-06-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

I went to the Whole Foods at California and Franklin on Saturday in quest of a vanilla bean pod. Not knowing where to begin, I inquired of three store employees where such an item might be located. Three times I had to explain what a vanilla bean pod is, since none of the workers had a clue. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that although everyone is familiar with the flavor, no one seems to be aware of its botanical origin.

I loaded some other stuff and headed for the cashier, a young woman to whom I explained my problem. Success: she knew exactly what I required, disappeared for three or four minutes and eventually returned with a little glass jar containing a single vanilla bean pod doubled over inside it.

At $9.99 it was a total rip-off, and I've meanwhile learned you can buy the bean pods en masse for a couple bucks on eBay, but at least I went home happy.

Why was I looking for a vanilla bean pod? Because I'm making my own ice cream and have been advised that beans taste better than extract (which can be made cheaply by soaking the beans in vodka).

How did I get started making ice cream? I was standing in line recently at the Safeway complaining vigorously to an older African American lady behind me about how packaged ice cream is full of candy for kids and you can't get the real stuff any more, etc, etc. She said, listen, if you want good ice cream, the only solution is to make it yourself.

Something clicked in the back of my head. I bought a Cuisinart ice-cream maker at Amazon.com for $40 and was soon on the path to perfect ice-cream. I will never return to the pathetic commercial junk again. Substituting Splenda for sugar, I have with patience created the perfect vanilla, to go on top of the currently fresh organic California strawberries. Soon I will master the perfect chocolate. In July, when the black cherries are in, I will commence production of my favorite flavor, Cherry Garcia. In the fall I shall move on to beer ice cream (add Guinness Stout in place of milk), and the next holiday season will find me luxuriating in exceptionally high-proof home-made rum raisin. With golden raisins and first-rate booze.

THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem*
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

from Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream, 1922.

* Let appearances become reality

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In Tibet, 1987

2011-06-13T19:27:00.000-07:00

After studying Soto zen for a year at a sub-temple of Ehei-ji and teaching at Fukui University, I left Japan in the fall of 1986. I spent several weeks traveling around China, a major highlight of which was my visit to Zhenru Temple, a Chinese zen monastery where I interviewed the Abbot Yi Chen, later published in various Buddhist journals.

I next left China for Tibet, my best trip ever, outranking a spectacular journey over the Karakorum from Kashgar in China to Gilgit in Pakistan, about which more at another time.

It was a perfect time to visit Tibet. Because China had opened to tourism only in 1979, little had been done to provide an infrastructure for visitors, so that you could mix freely with the Tibetans and stay at the Tibetan-run Snowlands hotel in Lhasa for a dollar a night, join in with the pilgrims circumambulating the Jokhang Temple, drink your chang and eat your momo’s at an outdoor Tibetan food stand, etc.

There was minimal attention paid to visitors by the authorities; and you could travel inside the country virtually wherever you wanted if you could find a way to get there This usually meant bribing a Chinese truckdriver or creating an ad hoc expedition by joining up with other backpackers and hiring a mini-van and driver from the Chinese tourist agency—a preferable practice since it didn’t cost much and it could get really cold in the back of a Chinese army truck.

There were only two obstacles to impede the intrepid Western tourist: nobody spoke English, so the best you could do was vibe with folks, and then you had to deal also with the Tibetan sanitation standards, which were nothing short of catastrophic.

The lack of governmental supervision disappeared a couple years later and the P.R.C. started getting uptight about backpackers, who of course did not drop enough bucks to make their presence profitable, and who handed out deeply-appreciated pictures of the Dalai Lama to the locals and were consequently suspected of inciting same to riot and rebellion.

I feel hugely fortunate to have visited Tibet in this period, and I have never forgotten those distant mountains, plains and rivers in the Buddhist kingdom (theocracy) so close to the sky.


Potala from the Chakpuri

Coracle taxi on the Kyichu

Temple in Lhasa

Chinese restaurant in downtown Lhasa

Norbulingka entrance

The Southern Temple at Sakya

Sakya

Sakya prayer wheels

At Gyantse

Gyantse

Gyantse Kumbum

Mnemosyne

2011-06-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

Horst Janssen: Hölderlin at 17 and 72.

Inspired by the Werner Herzog cave movie described in a recent post, and by my re-reading of Gustaf Sobin's marvelous Luminous Debris and my current study of the 9th-10th Carolingian annales histories, I have been contemplating the role played by imagination in the writing of history. It seems to have peaked at the very outset with Herodotus, the mother of historians, and then run slowly downhill before almost disappearing in the course of the 18th century, only to be revived in recent decades in the wake of postmodernist influences.

Such an inquiry concerns the application of literary values to the historiographic process, but since it gets quite complicated trying to explain what "literature" really means—cf for example Derek Attridge: The Singularity of Literature (2004) —I suggest instead a deficit in creative imagination: why don't we require historians to take courses in writing poetry as an antidote to the hamster-driven, data-parading assaults upon factuality thrust upon us in graduate school? Has the historicism of past generations become so shameful that it precludes any real thinking about historical events?

Going further, which poets have written about writing history? My favorite is Friedrich Hölderlin, and his poem Mnemosyne which I translate as follows:

Mnemosyne
(Third version)

The fruits are ripe, dipped in fire,
Cooked and sampled on earth. And there’s a law,
That things crawl off in the manner of snakes,
Prophetically, dreaming on the hills of heaven.
And there is much that needs to be retained,
Like a load of wood on the shoulders.
But the pathways are dangerous.
The captured elements and ancient laws of earth
Run astray like horses. There is a constant yearning
For all that is unconfined. But much needs
To be retained. And loyalty is required.
Yet we mustn’t look forwards or backwards.
We should let ourselves be cradled
As if on a boat rocking on a lake.

But what about things that we love?
We see sun shining on the ground, and the dry dust,
And at home the forests deep with shadows,
And smoke flowering from the rooftops,
Peacefully, near the ancient crowning towers.
These signs of daily life are good,
Even when by contrast something divine
Has injured the soul.
For snow sparkles on an alpine meadow,
Half-covered with green, signifying generosity
Of spirit in all situations, like flowers in May —
A wanderer walks up above on a high trail
And speaks irritably to a friend about a cross
He sees in the distance, set for someone
Who died on the path... what does it mean?

My Achilles
Died near a fig tree,
And Ajax lies in the caves of the sea
Near the streams of Skamandros —
Great Ajax died abroad
Following Salamis’ inflexible customs,
A rushing sound at his temples —
But Patroclus died in the King’s armor.
Many others died as well.
But Eleutherai, the city
Of Mnemosyne, once stood upon
Mount Kithaeron. Evening
Loosened her hair, after the god
Had removed his coat.
For the gods are displeased
If a person doesn’t compose
And spare himself.
But one has to do it,
And grief is soon gone.

* * *

The poem demonstrates Hölderlin’s ability to develop his thoughts in a succession of metaphors and images, which is characteristic of his later writing. This technique of metaphorical thinking surfaced decades later in the writing of Rainer Maria Rilke, and more allegorically in the stories of Franz Kafka. It is an agenda imagined by Kant, who famously stated that images without concepts are blind, (a fair description of the current state of affairs in modern poetry).

The question Hölderlin presents is whether it is and how it might be possible to retain historical memory of past events, exemplified by the deaths of the Greek heroes. Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory. She slept with Zeus and gave birth to the nine Muses, whose activities are also by nature historicizing.

Hesiod writes of Mnemosyne:

Them [the Muses] in Pieria did Mnemosyne, who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bear of union with the father, the son of Kronos [Zeus], a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow. For nine nights did wise Zeus lie with her, entering her holy bed remote from the immortals. And when a year was passed and the seasons came round as the months waned, and many days were accomplished, she bare nine daughters, all of one mind, whose hearts are set upon song and their spirit free from care, a little way from the topmost peak of snowy Olympus. [Theogony 53-63, Penguin Classics.]

And again, he [Zeus] loved Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair: and of her the nine gold-crowned Muses were born. [Theogony 915-917.]

Pindar also writes about Mnemosyne:

If success crowns a man’s venture, sweeter then than honey the libations he pours into the Mousai’s [Muses’] stream. But lacking the songs to praise them, the mightiest feats of valour can but find a sorry grave a deep darkness. But for fine deeds a mirror to establish, one way alone we know if Mnamosyna’s [Memory’s] shining diadem will grant recompense for their labours, in the glory of music on the tongues of men. [Pindar, Nemean 7, ant1.]

In the poem’s first strophe, the “fruits” are simply the deeds or events of history. Their memory disappears from us the same way that snakes crawl away into cracks in the floor, or between rocks. We need to remember things, but our memory is often faulty and can lead us astray like horses on crooked paths. Also there exists a tendency and a willingness to let things slide into oblivion. We should stay nested in the present and not run away to the past or the future.

But what about the experiences of daily life, the common things we treasure, even after we make contact with something that signifies and transcends earthly life? It is like a cross planted in an alpine meadow, an act of generosity by whoever placed it, and a reminder, permitting wayfarers to speculate from a distance about what happened there.

The last strophe places us in the mythic environment of Greece. The heroes at Troy died in various ways, and we owe our knowledge of them to the circumstance that Zeus slept with Mnemosyne on Mt. Kithaeron—“loosening her hair” is a sexual metaphor in older literatures.

Thus historical memory itself is ordained by the gods. When friends or heroes die, we need to pull ourselves together and conquer sorrow by creating a record of what happened. This is perhaps the closest we may approach eternity.

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Anal fire

2011-06-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Codex bibl. fol 23: folio 94v

I had been puzzling for some weeks over this picture in the Stuttgart Psalter (Paris, 820-830 CE) which illustrates Psalm 77, Verse 66:

Et percussit inimicos suos in posteriora: obprobrium sempiternum dedit illos. (Vulgata)

And he smote his enemies in the hinder parts: he put them to a perpetual reproach. ((KJV)

Were these butt-rockets dispensed by the Lord for sodomitical transgressions committed by the victims? What other anal improprieties could have incurred the Lord's displeasure?

The answer came to me immediately from the opening pages of Jeffrey Cohen's Medieval Identity Machines, which reference King Alfred the Great's problems with hemorrhoids. These hellish afflictions may have been more common in the Early Middle Ages than we have supposed. Or perhaps the artist, similarly afflicted and lacking Preparation H, postulated an act of divine retribution.

In modern times, piles of course were the subject of a very popular Johnny Cash song entitled "Ring of Fire."

The corpse flower

2011-06-09T07:53:00.000-07:00

Amorphophallus titanum, Indonesia, 2003

In the cave of forgotten dreams

2011-06-08T08:38:00.000-07:00

Chauvet Caves: Four horses with fighting rhinos

Acting on an enthusiastic recommendation from Francesca Rosa I went with Bruce Boone to see the excellent Werner Herzog film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a remarkable excursion through the Chauvet Caves in Southern France, which contain the oldest pictures in human history. The 3-D presentation was flawless and in fact completely necessary to show how the rock art images merged plastically into the shifting planes of the limestone walls of the cave. Herzog also left plenty of time for the viewer to simply gaze at the works themselves without acoustic intervention, returning to the same images from time to time seen from different perspectives.

The film was in every sense of the word an anabasis into the collective unconscious of humankind, down to the ancient-most layer of our own species-memory that we can access. Why did these cave artists portray animals and not trees and flowers, or geographical features like mountains and rivers, or other humans? Were they interested only in imaging the food supply in motion, or did they understand themselves as part of an animal spirit-world, and the creatures as fellow beings in the commonly-shared ancestral environment?

Assuming that the human population in the Upper Paleolithic in Europe was tiny, and the variety and number of animals running around as dense apparently as on the plains of Africa, the engagement with them must have been extremely intense. Perhaps the fact that the animals are almost always pictured in profile from their sides, in the way we would photograph grazing animals today, demonstrates the angle at which they were also able to be hunted—you don’t see their faces shown head-on, which would permit you to make eye-contact and get personal with them.

A brief excursus was made into the well-known, chubby Paleolithic female figures categorized as “Venuses” and given the common interpretation that these symbolize fecundity. I remain skeptical, remembering that Hawaiian and Polynesian royalty were once esteemed according to their body-weight, and that obesity functioned socially as a Schönheitsideal. Perhaps when food is scarce or difficult to obtain, body fat becomes desirable.

More pictures of the Chauvet caves at the Bradford Foundation website.

Chengdu, P.R. China, 1986

2011-06-07T10:34:00.000-07:00

ΝΕΑΝΙΑΣ

2011-06-06T20:23:00.000-07:00

Kanellopoulos Museum, Athens -- Boetian, 5th-6th c.BCE

Ladegast organ in Schwerin

2011-06-04T08:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not a fan of 19th century organs or of those composers who wrote for them, but a huge exception for me is the Ladegast organ (1871) in Schwerin (capital of the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern).

The instrument itself is a masterpiece of romantic neo-Gothic design popular throughout the 19th century in Germany, and looks like it would be equally at home in a Caspar David Friedrich painting or a Hermann Hesse novel. It has a huge sound, and if you have a few moments, have a listen to it right here.

This performance of Liszt's Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H by Hans-Jürgen Kaiser is terrific; he is wisely concerned less about displaying his own virtuosity than managing the darkly brooding energies and the continually modulating harmonies within an abolutely gargantuan acoustic space. Surprisingly, the effect is audible through even the crappiest of computer loudspeakers.

Just imagine being there and hearing it in person, or indeed in any of these ancient and massively buillt North German cathedral churches (Lüneburg, Lübeck, Rostock, Stralsund), all of which are equipped with towering organs.

Schwerin Cathedral in winter, thanks Wiki Commons

Joy of the soprano recorder

2011-06-03T21:57:00.000-07:00

Nathaniel Hone, The piping boy, 1768.

O father, my father

2011-06-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

This tombstone from a colonial cemetery in Boston has interested me more than all others. The barely legible inscription reads:

W.P.

O MY FATHER, MY FATHER,

THE CHARIOTS OF ISRAEL,

THE HORSEMEN THEREOF.

1658

I think it unlikely I shall discover the identity of W.P., but since Boston was founded in 1630, he must have been in the first or second generation of English settlers in Massachusetts. (It's difficult for many folks to understand there were things that went on in America between 1492 and 1776, but poking around Boston gives you a certain cognitive edge.)

The inscription puzzled me for years -- obviously a verse from the Old Testament, but from where, and what was the context? Not until Google was invented in the late 90's was I able to find the correct citation in 2 Kings 13:14:

Now Elisha was fallen sick of his sickness whereof he died. And Joash the king of Israel came down unto him and wept over his face, and said, O my father, my father, the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof (KJV).

What was this all about? Several Bible commentaries I looked at are hardly in agreement, but the idea seems to be that when Joash the king of Israel learned that the prophet Elisha was dying, he appeared and had some kind of future vision, or perhaps past memory, of Israel's military victories.

A bit later the chronicle continues:

20 Elisha died, and they buried him. Now the bands of the Moabites would invade the land in the spring of the year. 21 As they were burying a man, behold, they saw a marauding band; and they cast the man into the grave of Elisha. And when the man touched the bones of Elisha he revived and stood up on his feet (New American Standard Bible).

OK so now maybe we have a Jewish, pre-Christian resurrection parable on our hands? Is this why these words, more than 2000 years old, are inscribed on a colonial gravestone in Boston? Or is it rather that W.P. enjoyed a successful career as a belligerent or a military hero of some sort?

What an appropriate mystery for 17th century Boston, cloaked in patriarchal imagery and advertising itself as the city set upon the hill* to be approved by all, like Gilgamesh looking out from the walls of Ur.

The motto on the seal of the City of Boston is from 1 Kings 8:57 and is no less patriarchal: Sicut patribus sit Deus nobis -- "The LORD our God be with us, as he was with our fathers."

* John Winthrop, 1630, "...for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us." See also my paper Political Themes in the Reformation of John Calvin.

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Other times, other lives

2011-06-02T08:11:00.000-07:00

King's Chapel Burying Ground, Boston

Capt. Thomas Lake aged 61 yeeres an eminently faithfull servant of God & one of a publick spirit was perfidiously slain by Indians at Kennibeck August 14 1676 & here interred the 13 of March following.

Young Cicero

2011-05-30T08:38:00.000-07:00

Vincenzo Foppo: Young Cicero Reading

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True confessions

2011-05-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I ate a whole
bowl full of fresh strawberries
with whipped cream and Splenda.

Recently I bought some
plastic boxes at Walmart
to store things
underneath my bed, but
now they are covered
with dust and hairballs and
I'm afraid to open them.

My apartment is crowded with
books I don't have the strength
of mind to throw away.
I seem to have permanently
postponed cleaning out
the refrigerator.

Two weeks ago I woke up
with a hard-on. I am incapable
of getting up without coffee.
I didn't take time to donate
money to the tsunami
victims in Japan.

In February I fell down
and sprained my knee
in the S.F. State parking
facility. I was wearing my
sunglasses indoors, which
was incredibly stupid.

The skin on my legs
is flaky sometimes, and there
is a fungus growing in one of
my toenails. Dogs have growled
when I walked past.

I should have
been nicer to my Mom
before she died. I didn't
feel badly when Dylan
went electric.

I think Paul Krugman is
right about practically everything,
but I am only faking because
my understanding of Keynes
is not really adequate.

I have repeatedly profaned
the Sabbath. I don't regret
being a hippie in the 60's.
Sometimes I only pretend
to listen to people.

I like Lady Gaga.

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The history of the unknown

2011-05-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

I’m impressed with the idea that as historians we write the history of the unknown rather than of what is known. It seems that facts are helpful in creating parameters for our chosen playing field, but in themselves are boring, even almost contemptible. It’s as if the 19th c. Rankean ideal of “what actually happened” has been replaced with the more compelling depiction of what could have.

The pronouncement that Columbus *discovered* America in 1492—a curious formulation since it was already the world for the millions who lived there, so you might well ask who really discovered whom—is intrinsically inconsequential, since it might have been in 1493 and by Columbus' brother-in-law, and what difference would that have made? More interesting is what isn’t knowable about it, for example which Carribean island did he land upon, the subject of an overly long PBS documentary film a year or two ago.

Writing the history of the unknown proceeds mostly by analogy. In a given social process, we don’t know how A turned into B, but we do have an idea how C turned into D, so we apply that to the former situation. This makes us feel that the know-ability of our undertaking has increased and the aporias correspondingly diminished.

Tenth-century Europe is notoriously difficult for medievalists, who avoid it like the plague, due to a profound lack of documentary evidence. The common practice is to dismiss it as a century of transition. We have the growth of towns and an economy utilizing silver coinage by the year 1000, which wasn’t the case in 900, so it’s like Jack’s beanstalk that grew up overnight when nobody was watching, and we move on quickly to the century following where sources abound.

I’ve been reading Gerd Althoff’s Die Ottonen, a really useful book about the Saxon kings of Germany in the tenth century, but which laments the lack of documentary evidence so often that the reader almost feels guilty for having picked up the book to begin with. One should stop kvetching, accept that the fact that we *know* as much we are intended to, and get on with writing the history of the unknown.

More cowbell!

2011-05-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

Gallensis Cod. sang. 21

Thanks to the good offices of Prof Maureen Miller in the UC Berkeley History Dept, who was kind enough to accept me to her graduate seminar "The Long Tenth Century" for next semester, I shuffled around in some obscure corners of e-codices last weekend and came up with this marvelous picture taken from a St Gall psalter dating from around 900.

You'll have to click on it to see it in detail, but there are some real surprises here. Just for starters, the guy at the upper left who looks like Richard Wagner is playing a rebec which has f-holes carved into it, and he does so with a long bow while holding it under the chin like a modern fiddler.

That may not appear especially earthshaking, but consider how often you've heard a rebec player in a medieval consort using a short bow and holding the instrument in her lap for reasons of alleged authenticity.

King David's instrument on the other hand seems altogether phantastical, except that I do remember seeing something similar elsewhere. Could that be a Swiss cowbell attached to it? In words familiar to a certain generation of Saturday Night Live viewers: MORE COWBELL!

What's clear however is that instrument builders at the beginning of the tenth century are experimenting with hour-glass-shaped instruments fitted to the player's knee, which will eventually morph into guitars.

The king's exotic headgear signifies perhaps that he is Jewish. The artist may be getting his Jews mixed up with his Byzantines, but that almost-conical hat looks somewhat like those worn by the ashkenazim (Rhineland Jews) in the 12th-13th c. (as amply depicted in Schreckenberg: The Jews in Christian Art.)

However, Erich Toch says in New Cambridge Medieval History there is no record of Jewish settlements in Francia before the mid-tenth c., so how in the world would this 9th c.German artist know about such things? (Rabbi Benjamin of Tuleda’s later census shows that there were precious few communities around the Mediterranean littoral, where Jew mainly co-existed harmoniously with Muslims as trading partners.)

Fancy headdress for prelates and monarchs in the medieval tradition are of course still worn, nowhere with more aplomb than by HH the Dalai Lama.

Down on the corner

2011-05-25T06:11:00.000-07:00

Philip Evergood: Street Corner, 1936

On the road

2011-05-22T12:38:00.000-07:00

Edward Hopper, The Hotel Room

East Bay Hills

2011-05-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

.
I've been house-sitting for a friend in El Sobrante who lives close to the east ridge of Tilden Park. The weather has been excellent for hiking the East Bay hills this Spring, although the wildflowers seemed less profuse than usual, I suppose because there was so little rainfall in April. Here are a couple pictures along the trail.

Tamalpais from Wildcat Canyon ridge trail

Old Briones Road

Black Oak Trail, Kennedy Grove

Ancient plants

In praise of this phenomenal world

2011-05-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

Michael Kenna - Hangshan Mountains Study 1 - Anhui, China

The mountains and rivers of the immediate present
are manifestations of the paths of the ancient Buddhas.
(Dogen Zenji)

disclaimer

Was King David a guitar god?

2011-05-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve been much occupied lately with a marvelous ninth-century manuscript called the Stuttgart Psalter, which originated in the scriptorium of the abbey of St Germain des Prés around 820-830, the same time as its more famous counterpart, the Utrecht Psalter. It’s called the Sturttgart Psalter because that’s where it wound up, and the entire ms. has been beautifully digitized by the Württemberg Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart.

Württemberg Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Cod. bibl. fol. 23: folio 163v

The psalter shows King David playing not the typically-seen lyre—an Anglo-Saxon lyre in the English-Irish psalters and a Greco-Roman one in others—but rather he is shown playing a chordophone instrument referred to as a cithara in the Latin psalm text, from which the word guitar (gitarra in Spanish) is ultimately derived.

This instrument appears a half-dozen times in the Psalter, shown perhaps most clearly at folio 055r where it is played with a plectrum, and it appears also theorbo-sized folio 108r, suggesting that it may have been used at service because it is played in front of an altar with the gospels open on it.

In the picture we see King David and his Germanically-costumed hot combo, which includes a woman playing Moroccan clackers in the upper right, a naked dancing boy, and some guys trying to figure out how to make the bellows work the pipe-organ in the lower right, plus a cat upper left blowing a horn that looks suspiciously like a cornetto, since it's bent in shape.

I think it would be fun to reconstruct these instruments and play them together, noting that the basic requirements for a modern R&B group are satisfied: percussion, keyboard, sax, plus of course lead guitar and vocals. (Only a bass is missing, for which we have to wait till the invention of Renaissance consort instruments.) It is nonetheless clear that there may have been more going on in Paris in the 820's than we suspected!

Considering that the invention of the guitar evidently goes back to the late Bronze age as explained here, it is conceivable that King David— if he existed to begin with—might have played one in the 10th c. BCE.

The hour-glass shaped instrument is fretted, which suggests that the Hittites may have used musical scales.

How to obtain results from the government

2011-05-16T08:21:00.000-07:00

From the description in the Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Division I, Political and Personal Satires, dated 1740:

"An engraving, showing an entrance gateway, the road of which is stopped by a Colossus (Sir Robert Walpole) standing with his back to the spectator, bending down, and exposing his naked posteriors. Between his legs is seen a long arcade leading to St (James's) Place, The Treasury, The Exchequer, The Admiralty.

Between the legs of the giant a courtier is driving a hoop, inscribed, "Wealth Pride Vanity Folly Luxury Want Dependance Servility Venality Corruption Prostitution". In his hand he carries a 'Petition for', i.e. for anything. Such, it is intimated, is the courtier's object, and the course he pursues to obtain it. Another courtier has raised himself on a post in order that he may salute Sir Robert's posteriors."

The inscription underneath the engraving reads:

"And Henry the KING made unto himself a great IDOL, the likeness of which was not in Heaven above, nor in the Earth beneath; and he reared up his Head unto ye Clouds, & extended his Arm over all ye Land; His Legs also were as ye Posts of a Gate, or as an Arch stretched forth over ye Doors of all ye Publick Offices in ye Land, & whosoever went out, or whosoever came in, passed beneath, & with Idolatrous Reverence lift up their Eyes, & kissed ye Cheeks of ye Postern."

thanks Michael Gilleland.

Vermeer's laptop

2011-05-15T17:46:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Janson: Girl Writing an Email, 2008

Jonathan Janson runs an excellent website dedicated to the work of Jan Vermeer, and his own Vermeer-derived paintings can be seen at jonathanjanson.com.

A favorite Vermeer

2011-05-04T10:36:00.000-07:00

Jan Vermeer: Lady writing a letter with maid

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May Day

2011-05-02T05:53:00.000-07:00

.
Hooray, hooray,
The First of May.
Outdoor sex
Begins today.

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Ars poetica

2011-05-01T18:35:00.000-07:00

.
Two great poetry readings occurred in April where the crush of business prevented my immediate commentation. On the 29th flarf meisters Kasey Mohammad and Rodney Koeneke plus Lindsey Boldt held forth at Calif Arts & Crafts in Oakland. K.C. and Rodney Koeneke are two very bright guys, and I can't think of either without remembering Roland Barthes' assertion that a text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism makes the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.

There's a good Wiki entitled "flarf" which mentions both poets. I blogged an unserious flarf experiment of my own here.

On April 27th Rich Tagett read from his new collection of poems entitled Demodulating Angel, published by Ithuriel's Spear. The launch was held at Modern Times bookstore on Valencia, possibly the last such event before the closing of the store and its removal elsewhere. For us this was indeed the end of an era, as I think we've now done a half-dozen book openings at Modern Times.

Rich's delivery was superb as always, and I had the great pleasure of introducing him. We've known each other since 1969 when we were both, along with Paul Mariah, starting up as small press publishers. I was also delighted to discover no less than six Ithurielite authors attending the reading.

Rich Tagett

Moi with Rich

Rich with Lew Ellingham

Hotel noir

2011-04-30T19:47:00.000-07:00

.
Readers will be happy to learn that I have selected the firm of Zaha Hadid Architects to design my forthcoming chain of hotels.

Gandalf the Grey reads the midterm papers

2011-04-26T09:14:00.000-07:00

Ian McKellan, Lord of the Rings

Bostonia and Jeffrey J. Cohen

2011-04-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

I was pleased with the exchange of comments I had with Jeffrey Cohen on In the Middle this weekend, in which we briefly marinated in nostalgia about the defection of Brigham's ice cream from Harvard Square. I don't know why I wax Proustian about Boston at this time of year, but after all April is the cruelest month, comme on dit, I suppose because of the start of a new Red Sox season.
Prof Cohen (George Washington University) is in my view the most innovative medievalist of the past decade.

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Redwoods Portal

2011-04-25T08:39:00.000-07:00

I took this photo in or near the Prairie Creek redwoods in 2008. The tops of the trees were lost in the morning fog.

The Swinburne Stomp

2011-04-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

THE FUGS SWINBURNE STOMP LYRICS

Before the beginning of years

There came to the making of man

Time, with a gift of tears;

Grief, with a glass that ran;

Pleasure, with pain for leaven;

Summer, with flowers that fell;

Remembrance fallen from heaven,

And madness risen from hell;

Strength without hands to smite;

Love that endures for a breath:

Night the shadow of light,

And life, the shadow of death.

And the high gods took in hand

Fire, and the falling of tears,

And a measure of sliding sand

From under the feet of the years;

And froth and drift of the sea;

And dust of the labouring earth;

And bodies of things to be

In the houses of death and of birth;

And wrought with weeping and laughter,

And fashioned with loathing and love,

With life before and after

And death beneath and above,

For a day and a night and a morrow,

That his strength might endure for a span

With travail and heavy sorrow,

The holy spirit of man.

From the winds of the north and the south

They gathered as unto strife;

They breathed upon his mouth,

They filled his body with life;

Eyesight and speech they wrought

For the veils of the soul therein,

A time for labour and thought,

A time to serve and to sin;

They gave him light in his ways,

And love, and a space for delight,

And beauty and length of days,

And night, and sleep in the night.

His speech is a burning fire;

With his lips he travaileth;

In his heart is a blind desire,

In his eyes foreknowledge of death;

He weaves, and is clothed with derision;

Sows, and he shall not reap;

His life is a watch or a vision

Between a sleep and a sleep.

(Before the Beginning of Years, by A. C. Swinburne)

thanks patrick and john mellor

Shrooms

2011-04-20T07:38:00.000-07:00

Great photo collection at http://pflanzenliebe.de/Uebersicht_Pilze.html.

The woman with the gauze-headdress

2011-04-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

Rogier van der Weyden: Woman with Gauze Head-dress, c.1445.

From an era when it was considered too sexy for women to display their hair in public. I wonder how long it took to put this thing on. There are two hat pins visible in the painting.

Chlorophytum comosum

2011-04-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Spider plants at kitchen window.

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

2011-04-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

Here we have moi about 1974, standing in front of my apartment at 226 Rose Street, located just a minute's walk from San Franciso Zen Center. I lived here nine years, being involved with music, meditation and periodic employment at the SF welfare department. Today I miss having long hair, but I must admit that the moustache and sideburns, a concession to a fashion of the times, now seem a bit silly. The hand-painted sign above the front door was the logo of the small press I operated in those years.

Bedmates

2011-04-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

Baptized in the waters of flumpff

2011-04-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

.

FOURTEEN WAYS TO DESCRIBE THE RAIN

-- after Hans Eissler

dripping
hydrological
spam

inadvertently
randomized
leaves
mashed
into
a gory
pulp
on the
sidewalk

in the
clouds
of failure
we are
purified

then
Alice
dusted
the gunpowder
off her
petticoats

these
little fingers
are speaking
my
language

they
are
gay
hooligans

je te
dirai
vous

o
the
wild
wind

God bless
our dead
Marines

crinkled
teardrops
serenade
my wild
& foolish
heart

do thou
nothing
till angels
lie with
earthworms

the harps
of ancient
temples
are heard
by psychotic
einzelkinder

or: kill
your
television

covering
the screams
of dying
electrons

desert
rains
fall upon
the blue
anthers
of the
polemonium

if I could
be rain
I'd wash
down
to the
Bay of
San Francisco

but still
I surf
upon the
twattish
waves
of ungovernable
indifference

last year
Maurice
moved to
San Luis Obispo
and opened
a thriving
dental
practice

weather
report:
ein gottverdammtes
saumäßiges
dreckwetter
ist das!

but
that
night
at tahoe...

silver
dollars,
bullets,
rockets

sugarbaby
i baptize
thee with
the waters
of flumpff!

this
world
is lousy
with
strange
ideas

for example
current
symphonies
of abusive
meterology

now
feed me
with
your kisses

and the black
planets
of your
eyes

naked,
stoned
& soaked

take my
breath away,
no better
not

defibrillate!

bring me
bags of
sunshine,
heliocentricity,
bring me
no more
pain

few can
recall
what they
dream
at night

eelish
delvings
(Sylvia
Plath)

do not seek
to ignite
the deeply
concealed
munitions
of my
love

pretty swell
explode

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The Lord of Evil returns

2011-04-05T10:42:00.000-07:00

I'm not so much on silent movies - a lack of patience on my part, I suppose - but I'm fascinated with the original Fantomas films, some of which are now available in high quality restoration on YouTube, as for example:

Inspector Juve's pursuit of Fantomas is of course doomed to failure. You know that he'll never succeed when in the opening sequence F. puts on his executioner's hood, which he'll use to good effect when he submerges himself in a huge vat of vin rouge after chucking a 20-ft python into the Inspector's sleeping chamber.

But the chase itself, which proceeds quite leisurely and with great attention to detail, takes you through the streets of Paris and places you into some fascinating Belle Epoque venues and contemporary interiors.

What better way to prepare for the several centenary events commemorating the first appearance of the Lord of Evil presented this week in San Francisco by City Lights Bookstore.

I downloaded the ebook for the Juve vs. Fantomas novel off Amazon.com for only ninety-nine cents.

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A home on the playa

2011-03-27T09:57:00.000-07:00

thanks waldemar horwat: burning man 2004

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Dennis Martin's remarkable silverpoint drawing

2011-03-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

Dennis Martin: Deanna XXVI

Confessionalism a stupid plan?

2011-03-23T10:05:00.000-07:00

Any encounter with Walt Whitman immediately raises concerns about the viability or legitimacy of confessional literature, which in America finds continuance in the work of Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, certain New Narrative writers here in San Francisco, and others who resist a purely imagined, fictitious literature. The common danger for poets is that the approach leads either to a private space that no one else is simply able to enter, or that the craft of writing poetry becomes in principle an act of self-catharsis, a therapeutic exorcism, a colonic irrigation of one's own subjectivity.

Michel Houllebecq takes a nicely reasoned, dialectical approach to the same problem as it affects novelists:

I don't have a particular affinity with confessional literature; my problem is that I like almost all forms of literature. I have happily wallowed in the writings of Montaigne and Rousseau, but I still feel a delicious visceral shock when reading Pascal's verdict on Montaigne, the extraordinary insolence of a whip full in the face: "The stupid plan he has to depict himself." I have also taken inordinate delight in the absolute antithesis of confessional literature that is fantasy and science fiction.
And above all I have loved, and finally made my own, the middle way, which is that of the classic novelists. Who borrow from their own lives, or the lives of others, it doesn't matter, or who invent, it's all the same, in order to create their characters. The novelists, those consummate omnivores.

(Bernard Henri Lévy, Michel Houellebecq, Miriam Frendo, and Frank Wynne. Public enemies: dueling writers take on each other and the world. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011, p 28.)