Deploying Disgust

Yago Feliz makes use of Michael Sowa's disturbing painting entitled Invitation to represent discomfort in Christian-Muslim relations. I'm not sure that this is the first thing that would have occurred to me, but given that we must all sit together at the same table, he does have a good point. Anyway, your chair is waiting, and whatever you do, watch out for that little dog. If you click on the picture, you'll see what I mean.

Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young.
Alone, our memories resist this disintegration as we grow more lonely with the passing years.

                               -- Preston Sturges, The Palm Beach Story, 1942

[Michael Sowa's painting is entitled Untitled. Click upon it to embiggen.]

The Long View

I prefer to avoid re-blogging, but Brad DeLong’s entry for March 26th “The Long View” is surely worth disseminating for further contemplation:


If all goes well in China and India in the next generation—and if nothing goes catastrophically wrong in the rich post-industrial North Atlantic core of the global economy—then the next generation will see a real milestone. For the first time ever more than half of the world will have enough food not to be hungry and worry about famine, enough shelter not to be wet and worried about trenchfoot, enough clothing not to be cold and worried about hypothermia, and enough medical care not to be worried that they and the majority of their children will die of microparisites well short of their biblical three-score-and-ten years. The big problems of the bulk of humanity will then be those of finding enough conceptual puzzles and diversions in their work and play lives so as not to be bored, enough relative status not to be green with envy of their fellows—and, of course, avoiding and quickly disposing of the thugs who used to have spears and will have cruise missiles and H-bombs who have functioned as macroparasites infecting humanity ever since the first farmers realized that now that they had crops, running away into the forest was no longer an option.


Matt Yglesias quotes Brad as well, but many of his commenters, worried about collapsing global ecologies, remain unconvinced. And of course if you're a poet, I'm afraid you're screwed no matter what happens.

German bookfans are still locked in furious debate over a new best-seller by a 17-year-old high school drop-out who was nominated for the Leipzig Book Prize this month. Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill has sold over 100,000 copies, and since this kind of fame is forbidden to ordinary mortals, let alone to crabby middle-aged writers trying against great odds to scarf a living from their work, literary detectives descended upon the book like flies on cow-plop, and they quickly discovered it contained—quelle horreur! —a variety of passages lifted (actually lightly re-written) from online German blogs.

Helene, who considers San Francisco writer Kathy Acker one of her influences, defended her obviously successful methods, asserting that cut-ups, collage, sampling of existing texts are interesting and legitimate artistic and literary techniques. Her publisher agreed and the book was duly entered in the Leipzig competition.

Critics meanwhile cried plagiarism, and a veritable shitstorm of commentary has thundered through the press, at least in Germany and England, with allegations of literary shoplifting flying around like ninja throwing-stars. If I view matters correctly, the debate has proved to be of more interest than the book which started it. (German pet-shop owners have also profited: the sale of axolotls—a Mexican species of chameleon—have reportedly skyrocketed this winter.)

One of Helene Hegemann’s defenders argues that if the repeated processing of standard melodies by jazz musicians were subject to the same scrutiny, there would be no jazz. Most agree that plagiarism is odious, but the problem is that given the incredible rate of information-exchange on the Internet, how could writers possibly hope to avoid plagiarizing someone, let alone being plagiarized themselves?

If you read a half-dozen blogs a day, aren’t some of those thoughts and formulations going to become a part of your own, and how could one formally credit their original appearance to begin with? If you rip off a blogger’s ideas or language, how do you know they weren’t ripped off from someone else? After all, nobody owns language, and if you spread your ideas and self-projected memes among the digitized public, how can you expect to control them?

A larger theoretical issue is that of intertextuality, a term created by Julia Kristeva in 1966 alluding to the ways in which a given text necessarily references others. Enlarged upon by pomo critics in various contexts, the concept is rather spongy, but it does generally argue that texts do not emanate in 19th-century authorial  fashion from the mind of some hyper-talented genius. Instead they emerge from other texts that precede, and mix it up with whatever texts have influenced the perception of the reader. In other words, texts do not exist independently, and authorship is a complicated structure to say the least.

Helene should have credited her Internet sources, at least generally if not specifically, but the suspicion arises that her publisher forbade that for marketing reasons. The ensuing controversy now propels book sales to record levels. Despite the fortune she has accumulated, it appears to many that she has fallen victim to capitalism, rather than to have made any progress in opposing it, if that was her intention.

What makes this something of a cause célèbre is that a young author has blundered into the world of professional book publishing with the experience, modus operandi  and predelictions gained from the blogosphere. The result is a confrontation involving opposing ethical standards for writers, and indeed the practical course of their careers.

The simple fact is that people who write on the Internet need to embrace the idea that they will contribute to the information pool in which we are all swimming for the good of the community, while those writers scheming for fame and fortune should get themselves selected by a mainstream publishing house who make bucks off someone’s talent and who, like Disney Corporation or the music industry, have a team of lawyers at their disposal to save every dime that might get lost from copyright infringement.

Meanwhile, as we wait patiently for a mainstream U.S. publisher to cough up a translation of Axolotl Roadkill and market it in our nicht-Deutsch-sprechen (but nonethless recently health-reformed) republic, you can get an impression of our teen-aged punkgirl author from her MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/lovelyskizze,
from which I have borrowed her photos. Personally I wish her every success and thank her for touching off the fascinating debate which revolves around her, but which clearly affects writers everywhere.

Vilhelm Hammershøi - Interior with Young Man Reading - 1898

What to Write about

It has been said, by someone far wiser than myself, that nobody is boring who is willing to tell the truth about himself. To narrow this down further, someone equally wise said that the things that make us ashamed are also the things that make us interesting.

                                                — Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby

Jakob van Hoddis: The End of the World

THE END OF THE WORLD

Hats fly off the pointy heads of citizens,
Shouts and screams shriek in the wind,
Roof-builders fall to the ground and and break in half,
And—so one reads— floodtides are rising along the coast.

The storm is here, wild seas leap ashore,
Crushing thick dikes.
Most everyone has caught cold.
Trains fall from the bridges.


This early poem by Jakob von Hoddis, his most famous, dates from 1911 and is seen by many as a tocsin for the expressionist era in German literature. What is innovative stylistically is the accumulation of separate images which don't seem to follow one another logically, but which taken together form an intelligible whole. The painting by Meidner illustrates the same principle.

Thematically, the poet stands apart from the apocalyptic events he has read perhaps in a newspaper or magazine, and his ironic stance is reinforced by contrasting these calamities with the mundane reactions of the bourgeoisie, whose nerveless reaction to the approaching end of the world is to lose their hats in the wind and catch cold. So you might read the poem as a critique of sensationalist journalism and its effect on a benumbed or stupified public.

It is interesting that because of the mixed metaphors, one hardly notices that the poem is cross-rhymed: abba, abab. The poet plays also with alliteration, as in the phrase dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.

Jakob van Hoddis was the pseudonym of Hans Davidsohn, born of a Jewish family in Berlin in 1887. He died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. Here is the poem in German:

WELTENDE

Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut,
In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei.
Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei
Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.

Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen
An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.
Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen.
Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken.


The painting is by Ludwig Meidner, Apokalyptische Landschaft, 1913.

La Strada Combustabile

Entrance to Hell in San Francisco #789

An empty car garage on Clarion Alley here in the heart of the Mission District, you’re asking? And how much might the monthly rent be to get your brand new Ducati Multistrada 1200cc off the streets at night, you’re wondering?

Think again, my friend. The wiles of the Horned One are infinite in their variety and exigent in their terrible consequences. What might appear conventionally as a possible accommodation for your overpriced imported Italian motorcycle is in fact a cleverly disguised portal to La Strada Combustabile, a six-lane highway to Hell. Marauding gangs of demons burn rubber in and out of here after midnight, so I suggest you get back on your machine and ride it right back to Bernal Heights. 

Dodie Bellamy and the arrival of the "Mission School"

I’ve always thought that an art museum is like a zoo, where artworks instead of animals are held prisoner and displayed for public gawking at some extortionary admission price. Zoo animals behave like they've been lobotomized, but what's missing in the case of artworks is their history—how they tumbled forth from the mind the artist, how they were meant to be one thing and turned out another, and how the artist lived and worked in a community that nourished and sustained him/her. Sanitized of a context and paraded on display in a museum, an artwork loses its subjectivity, referencing an absent agent whose biography and community of friends seem to have gone missing. 

Dodie Bellamy backgrounds the hidden life of museum art beautifully in a recent  SFMoMA blogpiece. Speaking of the “impenetrable cleanliness of the institution,” and the corresponding lack of memory of the “living community that created the objects,” Dodie goes on to lament the impermanence of neighborhood art scenes in general, and her perceived vanishment of an artist community in the Mission in particular.

This aching after forgotten scenes and lost communities unfortunately does not abate with age. Writing recently about Bob Kaufman took me right back to Grant Ave in 1959, the year of my initial discovery of San Francisco. Where hundreds once gathered, nothing remains to remind but a few faded pages of print and a photo or two.

The Summer of Love 1967 on Haight Street proved life-changing. It was followed by the Castro era, which in many ways produced some extremely imaginative social and street-artsy behaviors--it wasn't just politics. There were mini-scenes elsewhere: on 24th Street in the 70’s, in the Lower Haight in the 80’s, on Valencia Street from the 90’s and after, intermittently also on Telegraph Avenue going back to the political 60’s and Café Med days, where poetry arguments often raged among total strangers.

It is a trick of the mind that if you are involved with a scene, it seems considerably more stable than it actually is. I can remember some hippie friends in 1967 talking about buying property in the Haight-Ashbury, thinking that the life of the community would endure for decades, so forceful the outbreak of a major cultural revolution seemed at the time.

The years of yuppification have all but put an end to low-rent neighborhoods and cheap places to eat, the essential requirement for artist scenes and popular culture movements in America since jazz music was born a century ago. As poets retreat from the streets to the "impenetrable cleanliness" of college classrooms, digitization fills local cafes with laptop zombies and young nerdlings chatting online to remote locations. People are now everywhere but here. Or as Gertrude Stein might put it, there’s no here here. It seems to have disappeared in a cloud of electrons. Certainly there’s hardly anyone left to chat with about obscure pieces of blues music over a cup of coffee or herbal tea.

Dodie remarks upon a cat with bladder problems at the Adobe Bookstore. I knew that cat, but I was more impressed by two others resident at the Aardvark on Church Street. The first was a somnolent tabby which sat meditatively on a stack of books on the counter and looked benevolently upon the proceedings but without a whole lot of inner involvement. And there was a black cat, which mostly didn’t like anyone, and would rise occasionally to stalk patrons around the store, rejecting strokes from all but a very few. 

Saturday Gallimaufry

1. If you have a favorite spot anywhere along the coast of California, you will find a photo of it at http://www.californiacoastline.org/.

2. Thanks to the Lost Fort, you are only one click away from examining Britain's smallest house.

3. Piers Perrot Gaveston has photos to show you where Edward III spent much of his downtime. The three gold lions against a red background remind us that Himself was yet a Plantagenet.

Maui

A friend from schooldays returned recently with his wife from a couple weeks in Maui, which started off a series of reflections upon my own visit there in 1971.

Compared with today the island was still relatively undeveloped for tourism. Surfers from L.A. converged upon Lahaina annually, and returned with stories of an undeveloped beach area near Makena, a huge tract of land owned by the Matson Navigation Corporation. 

Word got around, and soon there were a couple hundred California hippies camped on Black Sands Beach. We lived naked and slept under the stars, boiled our brown rice and green tea over campfires on the beach, enjoyed the fruit which fell down from the trees, and took turns fetching fresh water from a well on the Makena Road. We scorned alcohol as stupid-making, took psychedelics instead, snorkeled, meditated, exchanged life-stories with complete strangers at the evening campfire.

It proved one of the most educational experiences of my life, worth at least two years of grad school, with no tuition costs. I learned that white people turn brown as a berry when left out in the sun all day. I learned that sexual attraction is not such a big issue when nobody has any clothes on. I learned that people will almost automatically form tribes and live communally by instinct, if left to their own devices. And I learned that inwardly it feels completely right to go to bed an hour after the sun goes down and rise with the sun in the morning, and that you learn to avoid buried kiawe thorns subconsciously when you run around barefoot at the edge of the beach. 

My two months on Maui were probably the best of my life, amplified in my imagination no doubt by the infallible judgment of the righteously ripped. It was a holy space, and I decided to protect it by never going back. I wrote this journal-poem when I returned to San Francisco:

Maui 

Vagrant heaps of clouds stood piled

at the rim of the volcano. Like a tribe

of natives we lived naked on the island.

I hunted cowrie shells in pulsing tidal

pools and watched whales playing

in the channel. I got sick with dysentery

and lay two days half-dead in a kiawe grove.

Once a large black bomb washed up

onto our beach. A Navy helicopter landed

on our beach one morning, scooped away

the bomb, and flew off with it into the sky.

One afternoon I watched a mongoose

steal a loaf of bread from my camp. 

On the road to Ulupalakua I dropped acid

and tasted my own seed. Evenings we sat

at the ocean's edge, chanting OM

to the setting sun. We slept under

myriad shining stars of the universe.

Once I awoke before dawn and saw

a comet, a pale blaze in the eastern

sky, vast as a galaxy.

 

Happy 70th Birthday Bruce Boone

nothing matters but the quality
of the affection—in the end—
that has carved the trace in the mind,
dove sta memoria....*

                            —Ezra Pound


Happy Birthday from Jim.


* Where memory remains....

Yesterday was Pi Day (3/14)

See, I have a rhyme assisting
my feeble brain, its task resisting.

3.14159265349 

Bob Kaufman - Part Two

It is hard to imagine two more different personalities: Jack Spicer, the intellectual, linguist, and self-outed yet skeptical gay person; and Bob Kaufman, the archetypal street-poet, jazz-fan, jailbird, surrealist/dadaist poet who jumped onto the tops of parked automobiles in North Beach with a wine-bottle in hand to shout his poems to the world whenever the furor poeticus came upon him.

One thing that united both writers was the common vision entertained of the poet as a crucified innocent, a visionary tormented by a hostile world bent on silencing him/her. In this state of social abandonment, both saw the poet as a victim, flawed and broken, wounded and alone, for and to whom they occasionally delivered exhortations of self-encouragment. This mission-statement became a topos among North Beach poets of the 60's, a practice inspired no doubt by Allen Ginsberg.

Jack Spicer, for example, famously calls upon the poet to transcend the societal disaster by recalling the visionary wellspring—Poet, be like God. But Kaufman, in the poem below, uncharacteristically pleads moderation.

Perhaps you could see forget to not as an admonishment to curb ecstatic flights of the muse in favor of the concentration upon Mahayana emptiness—Kaufman described himself a Buddhist in later years, whatever that term might have meant to him. But however we understand this poem, it is one of his best, and among the finest ever written in San Francisco, this city of poets and arena of contending visions.

forget to not

Remember, poet, while gallivanting across the sky,
Skylarking, shouting, calling names … Walk softly.

Your footprint on rain clouds is visible to naked eyes,
Lamps barnacled to your feet refract the mirrored air.

Exotic scents of your hidden vision fly in the face of time.

Remember not to forget the dying colors of yesterday
As you inhale tomorrow's hot dream, blown from frozen lips.

Remember, you naked agent of every nothing.


_______________________________

Bob Kaufman did not live to see his poems appear in a collected edition, and his biography remains to be written. The photo and poem are taken from Beatitude Poetry Broadside. David Henderson's intro to a selection of Kaufman's poems entitled Cranial Guitar is extremely useful, as is A. D. Winans Remembers Bob Kaufman found online.

Saturday Gallimaufry

1) The best thing I read online this week: Dodie Bellamy’s beautifully written elegy to lost San Francisco neighborhoods, triggered by the contemplation of some artworks that arose within them, now housed in local museums. Go now and read this brilliant piece of writing.

2) Although modern media have seized upon the Tudor period as the prime arena of interest for English history buffs, there are those happy few amongst us who believe that 14th-century England is, at the very least, equally fascinating. You've got your succession of three Edwards, the first being a power-mad Nazi, the second probably gay and according to one report executed per anal implementation of a red-hot poker, followed by Edward III, a military nut who master-minded the Hundred Years' War.

Then you've got your famine of 1315-17, the Black Death around 1358, your Geoffrey Chaucer, your fabulous Peasants’ Revolts of the 1380's, and, to top this astonishing century off, the deposition of Richard II, also possibly a gay person, in 1399. Really, just how exciting can medieval history possibly get?

Thus I was pleased to discover and join a King Edward II group on facebook this week, which referred me to an informative website where that unfortunate monarch still reigns, more specifically at http://edwardthesecond.com/.

[The modest bungalow in Wales where Edward II was born is named Caernarvon Castle. Photo by Daniel Mersey from the Castles of Wales website. Clicking embiggens].

Tick Tock

Le tic-tac des horloges, on dirait des souris qui grignotent le temps.

--Alphonse Allais

The tick tock of the clock, like mice nibbling away at time.

The Reader

Bob Kaufman - Part One

One of the more unfortunate aspects of Spicer Mania during the past ten years has been the long shadow it has cast upon the careers of certain other San Francisco poets who have not enjoyed the same kind of stellar biographical and editorial treatment. I think particularly of Bob Kaufman, who was born the same year as Spicer, and who like him hung out on Grant Avenue, read poems at the Coffee Gallery, and worshipped Bacchus immoderately in North Beach in the late 50's and early 60's.

More than Spicer, Kaufman was really up against it, suffering mental distress that probably not many of us would be able to endure—poverty, drugs, jail-time, involuntary electroshock therapy, more or less the whole panoply of mid-century American punitive psychoterror. It may be that the extremely uneven quality of Bob Kaufman's work reflects his struggles, and yet he managed to bring off a few really masterful poems, such as:


WALKING PARKER HOME


Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind
Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/
Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings
People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s
Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times
Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization
Bronze fingers —brain extensions seeking trapped sounds
Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight
Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts
New York altar city/ black tears/ secret disciples
Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates
Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes
Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions
Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground.
Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding
Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/ beauty speared into greedy ears
Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions.
Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/
Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/
Death and indestructible existence


In that Jazz corner of life
Wrapped in a mist of sound
His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn
Wailing in his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams
Inviting the nerveless to feel once more
That fierce dying of humans consumed
In raging fires of Love.


One has to know first of all that Bob’s son Parker is named after Charlie Parker, and that the title suggests that father and son are walking home together, so one might guess that the musician’s “legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn,” is being transmitted here from father to son.

What jazz actually meant to this generation of North Beach poets has been told many times, not the least in Jack Kerouac's "spontaneous bop prosody," but in this poem a line is drawn from the sax players Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young to Bird Parker’s “boppy new sound,” all arisen from the pain of “ghetto thoughts” and “black tears.” This “Jazz corner of life” is nightmarish: it is filled with dayrooms of junk, melting walls, circling vultures, money cancer and flights of terror.

But as for John Coltrane, it is also a place of redemption, a place where the dying of humans is consumed in raging fires of Love, where a Jazz-tinted dawn might arise even in the hearts of the nerveless.

Bob Kaufman reads at The Coffee Gallery in 1959. Note photographer Imogen Cunningham seated on the right. Photo by C.R. Snyder, many thanks to FoundSF. Click to embiggen.


[Walking Parker Home is included in Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, New Directions, © 1965 by Bob Kaufman. The poem appears also in The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, 2006.]

Saturday Gallimaufry

1.  A great resource for San Francisco history with hundreds of photos can be pleasurably rummaged through at FoundSF. Above photograph shows cable car tracks on Market Street running toward the corner of Castro in 1888.

2.  And here at FORA.tv is Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, a  fascinating ninety-minute video presentation formed from home-made movies of old San Francisco.

Nürnberg 1493

Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum.
The Laurentius and Sebaldus churches are still there today.
Clicking embiggens.

Smash the Church, Smash the State!

Despite the rumpy pumpy title, this collection of Gay Lib reminiscences published in 2009 by City Lights is well-ordered and useful. The period covered is generally the early 70’s, and it is interesting to see how contributors experienced those festive and confusing times quite differently from one another.

Initially Gay Lib arose in less than a half-dozen places in the U.S., and communication was virtually nil. There was no national organization, and due to the nationwide media boycott—homosexuality was still outlawed in most places and considered a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973—it was very difficult if you were in San Francisco to know what folks in Iowa City or Boston  or NYC were up to. It was truly an underground operation, and it’s been interesting for me to read some of these stories 35-40 years later.

The lead article by Susan Stryker emphasizes that rebellious activities were underway long before Stonewall and its subsequent “mythologizing” effects, by way of example here in San Francisco already in 1966 with the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots. Susan is concerned mainly with the transgender community, but as one who has been fulminating for many years against the “Stonewall narrative"—according to which the gay revolution originated in NYC in 1969—I am proud to report that the flames of rebellion were burning brightly in San Francisco by at least 1967, as far as us longhaired gay males were concerned, who hung out at the Capri on Grant Avenue.

One contributor thinks that Gay Lib had no need to go public before 1969, but the fact of the matter was that it was really quite dangerous to advertise one’s gayness in public before then, and it was only under the umbrella of the massive anti-War protests in 1968 that Gay Lib was finally able to hit the streets without undue fear of violence or arrest. Outside of the hippie reservation in the Haight-Ashbury, just going around the City with longhair aroused insult, and it was perilous enough to ride the 14-Mission late at night if your hair was long, gay or straight.

Unfortunately the present book hardly attends to the writers, poets, newspaper and small press publishers, and gay-friendly bookshop owners, whose work provided a theoretical platform for the nascent movement. A second volume dedicated exclusively to their efforts would certainly be appreciated.


[Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation, ed. Tommi Avicolli Mecca. City Lights, 2009] 

Meetings with Royalty

The UC Berkeley Alumni Magazine, which you might think would be in a state of apoplectic rage about the current disembowelment of higher public education in California, this month offered a humor issue instead, which included a couple pages of Mark Twain’s stories about his encounters with British royalty.

This put me in mind of my own experiences along these lines. I came into the presence of the Queen two times, both inadvertently. In June 1961 I was exploring London for the first time on my own. Arriving one morning at St Paul’s, in those days a grotesque heap of coal-smoke-blackened stone, I saw Herself coming down the long rows of steps, more or less unaccompanied, where she’d evidently attended a military commemorative service of some sort. That kind of church event happened a lot in London in those days, usually on weekday mornings, and often with some degree of royalty in attendance.

She was quite a beautiful young woman, and she was wrapped up in tons of white satin, a blue sash with a big ceremonial brooch, studded no doubt with diamonds, as was no doubt the smallish tiara on top of her head. She managed to keep smiling while carefully negotiating her way down all the steps.

Her Majesty next entered my life sometime in the 1980’s in Berlin, where I was teaching at the Volkshochschule, and where she was attending her ceremonial birthday ceremonies put on by the British garrison. In those days there was a men’s room at the corner of Joachimsthaler Strasse and Kurfürstendamm. It was below street level, and one afternoon as I came up the stairs after draining the lizard, there was the Queen of England, riding past me in a cavalcade, not 15 feet away from me on the sidewalk, and OMG she looked right at me and waved from behind the window of her limo! Of course I waved right back at her, and since the entire event had taken me completely by surprise, I immediately regretted not having washed my fingers after peeing.

I heard the Duke of Edinburgh give a lecture to a bunch of us foreign students at the University of  Edinburgh in 1965. I don’t remember it, except that he was really funny. And then around 1980 I saw Margaret Thatcher close-up, leaving Westminster Abbey with Ian Smith, the last minister president of  Rhodesia. I had come to search for Chaucer’s grave in the Poets’ Corner. Thatcher had this flaming orange hair which would have rendered her visible from across the Thames. Ian Smith was about to replaced by Robert Mugabe, although no one knew it yet.

Ecco la primavera!

Incontrovertible proof of Spring's arrival is shown in my fabulous photo of California Trillium (trillium ovatum)taken in February along the trail leading down into Muir Woods from the north. The flower grows beneath redwood trees in February and turns purple after awhile.

February Journal

February came and went without much innovative participation on my part, due mainly to the circumstance that the Spring semester is now proceeding apace, and my graduate seminar in historiography is marching double-time along with it. Insane demands are made upon my time; unfroward restrictions are placed upon my choice of reading matter; inadmissible restrictions have been imposed on my failed social life.

Shall we of servitude complain? We certainly shall, but perhaps more appropriately later on when my seminar paper becomes due. Otherwise I have accomplished nothing this month, unless you count the four terraria I constructed out of some goldfish bowls obtained from the Goodwill, a bag of peat moss, and a bunch of mosses and lichens purchased from a lady in Georgia who sells recherché botanica of this sort on eBay.

I have also had a good time writing Plainfeather’s Blog, which to my total astonishment received over 1100 hits this month, up 100 per cent over January. At this point I know I am supposed to bleat out THANK YOU! the way they do on National Public Television, but I fear my sudden popularity may be a statistical anomaly, since at this time of year there’s little else to do in San Francisco except read people’s blogs.

Books read this month included: C. Brown: Postmodernism for Historians; J E Philips, ed.: Writing African History; D Lowenthal: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History; E Fuchs et al eds.: Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective; J Lopez, ed.: After Postmodernism; B Dahlen: Out of Third: M Chernoff and P Hoover: Selected Poems of F Holderlin; L Hickman: Tiresias.

Oh and merci beaucoup to NBC for bringing the Winter Olympics on tv this month in defiance of the ESBN hegemony.