Going green in Norway

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La Maison des Animaux

Intelligence has reached us from Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog that the noted writer's son Louis is now resident in Oxford at what appears to be some kind of fraternal organization called Maison des Animaux. We are very fearful of the outcome.

At Oxenforde, litel Lowys semeth to fare ful well. He hath founde newe freendes and ys doynge wel in his classes. He boardeth yn a smal hous yn towne yclept the Maison des Animaux, and telleth me many a storye of mirth of the aventures that he hath wyth hys freend Pluto, the whych ys a grete janglere and a goliardeys.


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Messene

Click me.

I was looking up Messene on the Internet yesterday, an ancient Greek city in the Peloponnese known for its remarkably well-preserved ruins of civic buildings and fortifications dating from the fourth century BCE.

The polis was created by the Theban General Epaminondas to check Spartan hegemony after the Battle at Leuctra in 369, where the Spartans got the living snot beat out of them by the Theban army.

What struck my attention was how greatly the flora backgrounding this watchtower along the city walls resembles that of California. You might think that you had landed in the East Bay Hills in late April or early May.

Photo of Messene from Wiki Commons.

Would you like to be free of those heavy, logy days due to constipation?

Click picture to embiggen

Mutt and Jeff was created by Bud Fisher and first published in November 1907 in the San Francisco Chronicle. Published six days a week, it is generally regarded as the world's first comic strip. It quickly became a nationwide success and remained in syndication until 1982.

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Nancy Ewart's paintings

Visting Open Studios in San Francisco is one of the periodic pleasures of life in San Francisco: you can get to see more contemporary artworks in the course of a weekend in October or May than you can see anywhere else in town, plus which those of us on a fixed weekend can avoid the usual museum entry fees.

After visiting a small coven of artists at 689 Bryant this month, to my great surprise I came home with a painting, actually a collage which you can't see from the photo, entitled Black Sun, White Line:

The artist is Nancy Ewart, who writes an art column for the S.F. Examiner and who also writes her own art blog called ChezNamasteNancy. If you want to know what's going on around town for art shows, museum exhibitions and gallery events, these are the sites to visit.

Nancy is also a very talented painter, and shows regularly at Open Studios. Concerning her erratic career as an artist, (and whose isn't), she writes:

I came here in the 60's to study art (at the SFAI) but I always knew that I couldn't do it full time. I've always painted, done calligraphy, make small books and written. For a while, I even wrote an astrology column and read tarot cards,  but I had to make my living in other ways. For years, I worked for small presses/small newspapers, all the alternate media that SF used to have.

When that dried up, I went to work for UCSF. I got a history degree along the way and did a couple of years work toward an MBA but had to stop, due to the cutbacks in funding for higher education and the demands of my job.I retired a few years ago after 30 years in the salt mines and every day since then has been an exciting adventure. When I retired, I thought I would finish off that long-delayed second (third?) degree but the twists and unexpected turns of this stage of life have meant that I've changed my plans  - often and without regret. I paint more and have started a career in arts journalism, covering all the arts and museums in the Bay Area and sometimes beyond that my energy, interests and time will allow.

Concerning my new acquisition pictured above, she emailed me as follows:

The piece that you have was inspired by the NASA website which I look at every day. I love the images of the cosmos which are both graphically beautiful and scientifically fascinating. It's amazing to think about the wonders of the universe and I can't wrap my mind around the billions of galaxies that are out there. When I make art based on cosmic images, I prefer to use strong graphic shapes and bold colors; otherwise, it can be an amorphous mess. I also like to use layers of mixed media; "Black Sun, White Line" was painted on hand made paper, textured with several types of gel medium including my favorite one which contains pumice stone. Paint and oil pastel rubbed into that surface creates the most amazing textures and while it's not anywhere near the awesome wonder of the universe, it gave me great joy to make.

Nancy's paintings show in my mind perception an almost unique way of thinking about color, as you can judge for yourself  in this picture entitled Number 8:

Nancy is currently working on a series of paintings which she as she says are "based on images of the Elgin Marbles - sculpture from Ancient Greece which is the foundation stone of our culture." You can see them yourself right here.

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"The Shakers!" at Poets Theater

It may be that I have seen too many of the poets theater productions at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, or  maybe it's just that the 19th century is something I'm reasonably informed about, but Friday night's show seemed to me logically altogether consistent and not the slightest bit outré. In any event I never had the sensation that I had no idea what was going on, as occasionally true in productions previous.

Thus it was no surprise at all to witness Cliff Hengst's stellar performance as Apple Betty, the totally disgusting old woman of the forest, mother of the twelve-fingered son Ludwig, who inexplicably speaks German, wears faux Lederhosen, and leches uncontrollably after the sisters in the local Shakers utopian religious community located somewhere close to the wrong side of Amherst, Massachusetts.

Thanks to an unusually assiduous R&D division, the Shaker community was known for its invention of  useful household utensilia such as chairs and brooms, but in this case it emerged that utopia has its price, and due to significant issues regarding gender relations and a murder, the community eventually goes up in flames.

Nevertheless I rejoiced to learn of Sister Polly's inspired invention of the coat peg, was delighted to see that the original Trader Joe had found his way into the plot with his offerings of comestibles "not from these parts," and raised neither of my eyebrows to observe Walt Whitman, apparently not yet fully recovered from his earlier employment as a male nurse in Washington and now dedicated to purveying Whitman's chocolates, caring for the physical needs of  handsome Amos, a wounded veteran from Tennessee suffering from post-Civil-War syndrome.

The discovery of Emily Dickinson hiding out as a Shaker spiritual pioneer to avoid contact with her slimy 19th-century parents was also not totally unexpected, explaining perhaps her disturbing tendency to compose poems with a sado-masochistic edge to them, as explained by Camille Paglia and others.

Deftly avoiding mention of the more serious problems which pervaded life in the 19th century -- slavery, genocide of the American Indians, cholera, dysentery, Andrew Jackson and bedbugs -- the script nevertheless did much to elucidate daily life in utopian religious colonies, and offer a tentative explanation for their early demise.

My only complaint was with the employment of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" in the musical finale, which is due to my probably exaggerated veneration of the Carter Family's recording of it. I think I should have replaced it with "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Clam," or something.

But I grumble here minimally, it was a fine and funny evening on a rainy weekend in San Francisco, where we  anxiously await news from Philadelphia regarding the success of our baseball warriors.

_______________________

The Shakers!,  a play by Wayne Smith and Kevin Killian, was performed at Small Press Traffic Poets Theater on October 22nd in San Francisco.


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Seikilos epitaph

Nancy Ewart calls our attention at Chez Namastenancy to a marvelous recording of what has been called the "oldest surviving example of a complete musical composition" in the world (see Wiki, "Seikilos epitaph)."

Key of D, 6/8 time, pan-diatonic scale? You've got to be joking, I thought, but the Phrygian mode is clear from the inscription on the tombstone--if you play only the white keys in D you get the Phrygian mode--and the marks above the alphabetical signs for the notes indicate whether the duration of the each syllable is doubled or tripled, producing a clear rhythmic notation.

The song is only partially notated, limited by the size of the tombstone, but the YouTube version with an imagined accompaniment on lyre and flute as linked to on Nancy's website is gorgeous.

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Knock before entering

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Those of us with our heads firmly pointed backwards will find delight in this morning's BBC news report of the discovery in Zurich of a 5000-year-old door made of poplar wood. Damn, that's a long time ago.

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California Nature Writing -- The Asian Connection

What is often overlooked about West Coast and California nature poetry is that so much of it has been inspired by contact with early Chinese poetry, in which the direct perception of nature, unsullied by cultural filtration and embedded instead in traditional yogic meditation practices, seemed perfectly adequate for poetic expression.

Perhaps it seems a bit far-fetched to compare the experience of the American West--bound up as it is with the frontier enterprise, adventurism, economic exploitation, the vanished Amerindian past, environmentalism, eco-Buddhism and recreational backpacking in the Sierras--with traditional Chinese tropes in which Sung-period literati met once a month on a specially constructed viewing platform on the night of the full-moon, or where a poet visits the ruins of a deserted Buddhist temple and, ever mindful of the impermanence of conditioned phenomena, describes its disintegration back into nature.

The Asian perception of nature seems so passive and uneventful, compared with the gung-ho, activist American approach to the Great Outdoors, or the tourist-bus, sightseeing, excursional discovery of “Nature” popular in Europe, where wilderness and frontiers have long vanished from common experience.

But there were indeed huge areas of wilderness to be observed and written about in Tang- and Song-period China, and contemporary Chinese painting and poetry reveal something totally worshipful about the encounter with nature, centuries before European Romantics turned on to it as a literary theme, motivated by the desire to escape from “society,” meaning as I like to think incipient industrial capitalism.

More locally, Kenneth Rexroth was the first poet to recognize the possibility that the Chinese poets and artists were on to something important, and to incorporate that way of thinking about and describing nature in his own writing, for example in the collection entitled The Signature of All Things (1949). The following poem entitled Winter even reveals one of Rexroth’s numerous sources:

This is not the most elegant of Kenneth's nature poems, and the word "hut" seems a bit precious, but it does show clearly how Asian poetry had a deep affect on one San Francisco writer. In a larger context, it also supports my argument that there does exist a direction in modern poetry which I've called California realism.

Su Tong Po (aka: Su Dong-po, and Su Shi) has a wiki under his name Su Shi, and there are a few interesting translations at http://www.chinese-poems.com/su.html.

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Disclaimer.

A Sonnet for October

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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 only altered, never lost

And love, before the cold November rain,

Will make its summer in the heart again.

by Robert Nathan (1894-1985).  

Now Blue October was first published in 1950. It seems to me one of the most perfect sonnets ever written.

Tarzan's Tree House

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Proposal for an Annual Fog-Burying Ceremony

Gustaf Sobin writes of the discovery of numerous stone tablets bearing the inscription “Buried lightning” (Fulgur conditum) on the plateaus above rural Provence. They were placed on the location where a lightning bolt had struck: the lightning was then ritually buried along with whatever charred pieces of wood or rooftops or horsecarts were lying around.

Citing Lucian and Plutarch, Sobin says that a wall was erected around the place where the lightning fell, then an animal was sacrificed and a priest would consecrate the enclosed ground. Considered sacred, the lightning bolt was memorialized and ritually "housed" as the signature of Iupiter Fulgator, and any further destructive powers were assumed to be rendered harmless thereby.

I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to conduct an annual fog-burying ceremony here in San Francisco. I suggest we convene at the top of the Buena Vista Park annually in August (a good time of year for it, when folks have given up hope of ever seeing the sun shine again) and conduct a ritual interment, somewhat along the lines of placing a quantity of San Francisco fog in a lead casket along with a tube of suncream oil to counteract its noxious effects, and then burying the casket several feet underground.

After some prayers of deliverance and a short sermon by an especially appointed Fog Bishop, the rites might be concluded with a sacred bonfire, during the course of which the congregation would be urged to get naked and dance around with broomsticks up their asses and indulge in whatever other festive activities might be considered appropriate or not, as the case may be.

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Photo from Gustaf Sobin, Luminous Debris. 
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Home

I think this is one of the hobbit-house Tolkien illustrations by Hildebrandt.

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A new houseplant is welcomed into my apartment on Eddy Street in San Francisco

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Good morning! My name is Mitchell.
I am the Obersturmbandführer
of this household. It is my duty
to provide you with water, light,
nourishment, and appropriate pottage.
It is your duty to grow to a moderate
height and develop an appealing foliage.
You will not deposit dead leaves
or leak water onto the carpet.
You will avoid contact with mealy-worms
or other parasites. Above all, you will
be happy here, and conduct yourself
at all times so as to reflect credit
upon your species. Failure to comply
will result in your immediate dismissal
to the compost heap in the backyard.

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Ivan Sohrakoff’s California photographs

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For those of us too long in the city pent, there is always Ivan Sohrakoff’s photostream of excellent California pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/5tons/tags/california/.

Be sure to click on the Slideshow icon in the upper right.

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The Wall -- A new poem by Lewis Ellingham

Copyright © 2010 by Lewis Ellingham.

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In praise of non-electronic textuality

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California Nature Poetry

Northern California certainly enjoys one of the richest natural environments on the planet—tall mountains, broad rivers, deep valleys, a majestic seacoast, all linked together with Vergilian hill landscapes that are Alpine green in Spring, loaded with wildflowers in June and turned golden yellow in August—and thus it’s really a matter of astonishment that such environmental richness yields so very little effective nature writing.

To me it’s equally surprising that whenever someone publishes an anthology of American nature writing that the work of Kenneth Rexroth is consistently omitted, who in my mind has written some of the finest nature poetry of the last century.

Anthologies of California or West Coast nature writing typically include poems of Gary Snyder, Robinson Jeffers, John Muir, Joaquin Miller, and of a couple more modern poets who have written one or two poems which thematicize principally the nature of me rather than the nature of nature.

In this respect it would certainly be wrong to underestimate the enormous accomplishment of Gary Snyder, who has interwoven so many contemporary insights, from eco-Buddhism to Native American myth to modern environmentalism, into his own personal and actual experience of being outdoors.

But Kenneth Rexroth’s poems approach nature from an entirely different angle, namely one of close observation. Consider for example these lines taken from a longer poem entitled The Signature of All Things (1949).


Deer are stamping in the glades,
Under the full July moon.
There is a smell of dry grass
In the air, and more faintly,
The scent of a far off skunk.
As I stand at the wood's edge,
Watching the darkness, listening
To the stillness, a small owl
Comes to the branch above me,
On wings more still than my breath.
When I turn my light on him,
His eyes glow like drops of iron,
And he perks his head at me,
Like a curious kitten.
The meadow is bright as snow.
My dog prowls the grass, a dark
Blur in the blur of brightness.
I walk to the oak grove where
The Indian village was once.
There, in blotched and cobwebbed light
And dark, dim in the blue haze,
Are twenty Holstein heifers,
Black and white, all lying down,
Quietly together, under
The huge trees rooted in the graves.


I suppose for many this will not even qualify as poetry, given the absence of any kind of conventional literary usage and devices—imagery, metaphor, symbol, language games, a message, etc. It’s really a kind of reporting, using short declarative sentences to describe how something actually is, twenty Holsteins lying in an oak grove formerly an Indian graveyard (you used to be able to encounter such scenes in rural California), deer at the edge of the meadow, the faint smell of a dead skunk.

Perhaps what is even more striking about these poems that the author is simply the sort of person who is undergoing such unique experiences outdoors to begin with.

There’s nothing made up in these lines, it’s all a question of what you see is what you get, and that is surely the power of the moment, or of the here-and-now. For when you think about it, what more is there really that needs to be said?


When I dragged the rotten log
From the bottom of the pool,
It seemed heavy as stone.
I let it lie in the sun
For a month; and then chopped it
Into sections, and split them
For kindling, and spread them out
To dry some more. Late that night,
After reading for hours,
While moths rattled at the lamp––
The saints and the philosophers
On the destiny of man––
I went out on my cabin porch,
And looked up through the black forest
At the swaying islands of stars.
Suddenly I saw at my feet,
Spread on the floor of night, ingots
Of quivering phosphorescence,
And all about were scattered chips
Of pale cold light that was alive.


from The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.
New York, NY: New Directions, 1966.


See also California Realism.
And my Disclaimer.

He has nothing to say

Dear Sir
  I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of & why I am shut up I dont know I have nothing to say so I conclude
Yours respectfully
JOHN CLARE


John Clare was committed to the Northamptonshire County General Lunatic Asylum in 1841 and remained there until his death in 1864.

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Lincoln Highway in Philadelphia, 1920

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A Letter to Wells Fargo Bank

A bill from the organ repairperson

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Gentileschi - St Cecilia and an Angel - 1617

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Gillian Welch at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

I sallied forth Saturday afternoon to Golden Gate Park--and by some mystical circumstance actually got a seat on the 31-Balboa. (That abattoir of public transportation systems, the S.F. Muni, has still not figured out that they need to supplement regular service to accommodate the 20K+ fans going to and from Hardly Strictly--God help those condemned to travel on the 5-Fulton).

Since Hardly Strictly has been almost always favored by beautiful October weather, I wondered how it would be in the cold fogs that prevailed this weekend, but the whole thing was lovely, due in part to the absence of the Blue Angel jets that regularly dive-bomb the event each year. Warren Hellman must have bought them off somehow.

I wanted to see Gillian Welch, one of the few performers I'll return every single time to hear. They were moved to the main stage this year, which pretty well destroyed any sense of intimacy given that the audience numbered in the thousands.

They got started with Long Black Veil and a wonderful Blue Sky Boys sunny-side-of-life song (not the Carter Family version), accompanied by good ol' Dave Grisman on mandolin. The set ended with Time's Revelator, and in between were many of their best, including Dave Rawling's I Hear Them All, which brought many folks to their feet.

Then off to the Rooster Stage to see if Robert Earl Keen had come up with some new stuff. His beard was new, as was the absence of the fiddle-player, but he can still progress from trad-sounding country to the maddest psycho-billy you ever heard as quick as you can say Nogales, Texas.

Home again on the 31-Balboa, packed like chickens in force-breeding cages.

Great afternoon anyway, and thanks again Warren Hellman.

Origins of blogging

Tenth Inning

The latest installment of Ken Burns' baseball series showed on PBS this week, and although there weren't really any surprises, I thought the film did a reasonably creditable job of explaining the two big crises of the last 15 years: first the players' strike of 1994-95, and then the ongoing steroids scandal.

The discrepancy between the ideals of athletic competition and the demands of  predatory capitalism seem impossible to reconcile. If you see professional baseball as a billion-dollar entertainment industry, it is hardly surprising that the players will confront management over salary and hiring rights, or juice themselves up to gain another year or two's worth of income for their families before being tossed onto the data-driven scrapheap of  baseball history.

The film's philosophic conclusion is also probably accurate: such adversities, like the numerous and truly horrible scandals that afflicted professional baseball in earlier decades, will blow over with time, at least till some new scam comes along. The bottom line is that people simply want their baseball, and as for the rest it's pecunia radix malorum est.

Naturally I enjoyed the recap of the fabulous 2004 victories of the Boston Red Sox—whose confused destiny I have been following intermittently since 1948—first against the goddam Yankees, and then against the hapless St. Louis Cardinals in the Series.

I could have wished for a similar review of the Bosox destruction of Denver in 2007, which was also pretty exciting, and the like of which I fear we Boston fans may never live long enough to see again.

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Thomas Cole: The Hunter's Return

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