Otherwhere

Plainfeather has gone off on a cultural expedition to the East Coast.
You will have to amuse yourself as best you can until he returns next week.

Oops!

Silentium!

William Hogarth, The Enraged Musician, 1741.

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Poem by William Carlos Williams, 1962.

Abandoned at the Well of Loneliness

You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me....


There was a time when songs were written to tell stories, and the poems written for them were called ballads, and before there were ballads in English, there were Scots ballads, and before that there were Irish ones, composed and sung in Gaelic.

The stories that ballads are often calamitous, recounting episodes of rape, murder, robbery, mayhem, warfare, anarchy, shipwreck, murder, despair, suicide, villainy, and every kind of psychopathic, or simply weird form of behavior imaginable--"There's nowt so queer as folk," as British folk-music genius Eliza McCarthy is fond of saying.

Nobody really knows when Donal Og was written, since it was done long before anybody started to pay attention to such things. It includes one of the oldest tropes in ballad literature, that of the "fallen" young woman abandoned by her lover, who more often than not is of noble station. Folk literature is seldom friendly to the Establishment, and for very credible reasons.

Lady Augusta Gregory's translation is beautifully composed, although Heaven knows how closely it matches the Gaelic original. Lady Gregory was a persistent champion of Irish culture at a time when Ireland was still part of the Empire, and her Wikipedia picture suggests that she was a force to be reckoned with, not only because she looks like a heavier version of Willie Nelson:

When I discovered Lady Gregory's translation of Donal Og (Young Donald), I thought immediately of  a Scots ballad usually called Lord Gregory, (or the Lass of Roch Royal, Child 76), about another flinty-breasted cad who took off like a bandit when the baby was born. The following is probably the oldest version, though most modern folksingers have settled on a different one.

O mirk, mirk is the midnight hour,
And loud the tempests roar,
A waefu' wand'rer seeks thy tow'r,
Lord Greg'ry ope thy door.

An exile frae her father's ha',
An a' for loving thee;
At least some pity on me shaw,
If love it may na be.

Lord Gregory, mind'st thou not the grove,
By bonnie Irvine-side,
Where first I own'd that virgin-love
I lang, lang had denied.

How often didst thou pledge and vow
Thou wouldst for aye be mine?
And my fond heart, itsel' sae true,
It ne'er mistrusted thine.

Hard is thy heart, Lord Gregory,
And flinty is thy breast:
Thou dart of heav'n, that flashest by,
O wilt thou give me rest!

Ye mustering thunders from above,
Your willing victim see!
But spare, and pardon my false love
His wrongs to heav'n and me.


Ha' = hall; dart of heav'n = lightning. Most of the Child versions agree that the unfortunate woman has come to Lord G.'s home and is refused entrance during a storm.

Saturday Gallimaufry

1. Have a look at BoingBoing's presentation this week on Antartica before it all melts away: http://www.boingboing.net/features/antarctica.html. You need to scoll around with your sidebars.

2. Review your knowledge of the Prime Directive at http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Prime_Directive.

3. A post in the Guardian's book blog defines masturbation as the last frontier of literary exploration, although to be honest, a number of San Francisco writers I could mention would seem to have covered the topic rather extensively at least a couple decades ago.

The Bibliodam

More pictures by Jacek Yerka at http://www.yerkaland.com/preview.php

Car parked in front of Berkeley High School

The West Portal Tunnel Calamity

Entrances to Hell in San Francisco #866

As indicated earlier in this series, those unfortunate riders who are condemned to surrender themselves daily to the foul grasp of the San Francisco Muni have ample reason to project it as a particularly truculent manifestation of hellishness. Who amongst us has not experienced the manifold perils and indignities suffered on board the J-Lurch, or died of boredom on the N-Judas as it treacherously and glacially makes its lonesome way to Ocean Beach, or paused to observe one’s fingernails grow while waiting for the 19-Polk-a-long bus line to show up? And which of us can restrain feelings of sincerest sympathy with those compelled to place their physical economies at risk while riding the 22-Feel More?

But the quiet scene pictured above at Market and Collingwood bears silent witness to a far more sinister history. One week in 1971 the police were deluged with reports of missing persons who, expected home for dinner by their spouses, disappeared without notice during the evening rush hour. The police were called in and quickly established that the missing commuters were daily patrons of the same three Muni underground lines: the L-Terrible, the M-Motionsick and the K-Homicide.

It soon became obvious that the passengers had disappeared somewhere inside the West Portal Tunnel. A team of sewer inspectors and experts from the UC Berkeley School of Mining were quickly dispatched to investigate. Alas, despite extensive investigation, no trace of the railway cars with their cargo of vanished riders was discovered. It was suggested later that the their true destiny may have been suppressed by the authorities, since traces of sulfurous fumes hovering over human skeletal remains were detected in the tunnel for months afterwards.

Today we know that the same authorities had indeed conspired to cover up the true fate of the doomed passengers. Moving quickly to shut down the tunnel, a new one was constructed with doubly reinforced fire-proof walls, its length now extended down Market Street to the Ferry Building.

Nothing is left today to remind us of this horrible episode except a peaceful image of grass-covered rails and a barricaded corridor leading into the bowels of Hell beneath our beloved city.


[Thanks Lew Ellingham and F.S. Rosa.] 

Saturday Gallimaufry

1. A discussion of the Limecat meme plus the Legend of Limecat is offered at  http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/limecat.

2. If you were curious how God created air guitarists, Urban Dictionary has some answers.

3. Lost Fort posted some pictures of the wonderful but generally unknown 12th c.Gospels of Heinrich the Lion this week. Note the colorful long stockings worn by some of the men (Coronation, Burial of Jesus).

How the Commander of the Queers Accepted the Surrender of the Heterosexuals

"I believe repealing 'don’t ask, don’t tell' will weaken the warrior culture at a time when we have a fight on our hands. ...To prepare warriors for a life of hardship, the military must remain a kind of adventure, apart from the civilian world and full of strange customs."

—Merrill Anthony "Tony" McPeak,  former Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, in the N Y Times, March 4, 2010.

the smoke lifted above the battlefield
revealing legions of bare buttocks
extending to the horizon

a euphoric sweat of thanksgiving
formed upon the muscled naked bodies
of our rapid deployment forces
 
vast excitement and cool, courageous
lust combined to relax the cruel
enmity of the centuries

hymns of fairy joy burst forth upon
the lips of our warriors, more pleasing
than the apricot skin of boys

at the order of our commander we
condomized our erectile entities
and fell upon the fuckers

who screamed in a frenzy of hot desire
and swiftly surrendered to us as we fired
our sperm into their golden intestines
 

Bertolt Brecht and the Trust Fund Kids

I’ve heard you don’t want to learn anything,
So therefore I assume that you’re all millionaires.
Your future is secure—it stands like a beacon
Before you. Your parents have taken precautions
So that your feet won’t trip on any rocks.
Thus you don’t have to learn anything.
You can stay just the way you are.

But in case of any difficulties—
I've heard somewhere that the times are uncertain—
You have your mentors who will tell you
Exactly what you need to do to stay well.
They’ve studied with people
Who know about the truth,
And how that truth will always be valid,
And who have prescriptions to help you.

Because so many people are working for you,
You won’t need to lift a finger.
Of course, if things were different,
You would have to learn about things.



I’ve heard you don’t want to learn anything was written in 1930, when Bert Brecht was more or less on the top of things. Three-Penny Opera had been a huge success, and Rise and Fall of Mahagonny was about ready to premiere in Berlin. In 1930 Brecht married Helene Weigel, who gave birth to a daughter the same year. He was working on new ideas for a new “epic theater,”and on the script for the movie Kuhle Wampe, released in 1932. And yet Brecht the poet had “heard somewhere that the times are uncertain”—possibly the understatement of the year in view of mass unemployment and the approaching Nazi take-over in 1933.

Brecht’s plays were seldom performed in this country in the 40’s and 50’s, no surprise considering the fear of Communism at the time. In the 60’s and 70’s, the plays started to attract audiences here, until lapsing once more into their present obscurity, along with a concern for social justice and the fading promise of revolution. What I think that theater-goers missed during this brief period of florescence was that Brecht was also a great German lyric poet.

His verse often drips irony, perhaps nowhere more than here. One wonders what inspired the poem. Perhaps he was sitting in an outside Berlin café, watching the jeunesse dorée pass by who were having too good a time to bother with university studies? Maybe not, times were hard in the Weimar Republic, and Bohemian lifestyles were popular also with the less than well-to-do, as portrayed in Isherwood’s I Am a Camera.

But of course the poem really isn’t about rich kids at all. It’s about their parents, whose wealth helps their offspring to remain stupid in a world filled with fake realities. It’s even more about poor students, who must learn to live by their wits if they’re going to survive—Brecht’s dramatic heroes are for the most part uncannily clever social underdogs.

And by requiring readers to define their social identity just by reading the poem, it’s about you too, and the need for poetry and art to foster political action.




Ich habe gehört, ihr wollt nichts lernen

Ich habe gehört, ihr wollt nichts lernen
Daraus entnehme ich: ihr seid Millionäre.
Eure Zukunft ist gesichert—sie liegt
Vor euch im Licht. Eure Eltern
Haben dafür gesorgt, daß eure Füße
An keinen Stein stoßen.
Da mußt du Nichts lernen. So wie du bist
Kannst du bleiben.


Sollte es dann noch Schwierigkeiten geben,
Da doch die Zeiten
Wie ich gehört habe, unsicher sind
Hast du deine Führer, die dir genau sagen
Was du zu machen hast, damit es euch gut geht.
Sie haben nachgelesen bei denen
Welche die Wahrheiten wissen
Die für alle Zeiten Gültigkeit haben
Und die Rezepte, die immer helfen .


Wo so viele für dich sind
Brauchst du keinen Finger zu rühren .
Freilich, wenn es anders wäre
Müßtest du lernen.


_______________________________

"It is easier to steal by setting up a bank than by holding up
a bank clerk."                    — Bertolt Brecht

               Jesse Lefkowitz: My Grandfather's Study

Memories of Janis Joplin

walking in the Park, surrounded

by a small crowd of admiring

longhairs

hung-over one morning

in the Café Garuda on Haight Street,

bitching about something grungy

at the bottom of a mug of spiced tea

in the summer of '68 there was

a Hell's Angels party at the Carousel Ballroom,

with beer barrels, fist fights, and blood,

and above it all sat Janis

with a five-foot hash pipe, while

the band screamed like a saw mill

at two in the morning

the entire S.F. Tac Squad

lined up in front of the building,

standing by as a couple hundred

Angels started their motorcycle engines

creating a thunder reverberating

down Market Street to the

Ferry Building; it was fabulous

at all the rock concerts

she was the the hippie chick incarnate,

a whirl of motion, and suddenly

she became the lovesick Earth Mother

wailing for her demon lover

one night, in those days,

I dreamed that Janis and I

played Telemann sonatas together

on alto recorders

Sweet Home San Francisco

The house is located on Masonic near Geary Boulevard. Be sure to click on the picture.

Priestly Pedophilia

San Francisco writer and poet John Norton came over for a visit the other day, and we found ourselves talking about pedophilia in the Church, which has reached crisis levels in the eyes of the media.

I opined that thirty years ago Communists were considered the worst people in the entire world, and that these have been replaced since 1989 by pedophiles and suicidal jihadists. I also thought that French films in former times tended to laugh or poke fun at pedophile priests, accepting them apparently as an institutional given in the quotidian rhythms of a Catholic education.

Later I thought of a perfect example, found in Louis Malle’s 1971 film, Murmur of the Heart (Le souffle au cœur) a wonderfully funny story about a 14-year-old lad growing up absurd in bourgeois Dijon in the 1950’s.

Perhaps French school kids are simply more savvy than ours, but judging from the movie it didn’t look that they were greatly surprised or affected by the gropings of horny priests, finding the Church totally ridiculous to begin with.
But perhaps they were secretly gathering evidence to launch injury suits against the Church 25 years later. 

Terry Eagleton at UC Berkeley

Terry Eagleton's lecture entitled "The Death of Criticism?" at UC Berkeley yesterday afternoon was great fun but ultimately inconclusive. Hammering a few more nails into the coffin of critical theory, a project we thought had been put to rest in After Theory (2004), Terry widened his perspective into different areas of cultural study, peppering his remarks with a variety of clever and worthwhile insights. These were interspersed with an endless stream of one-liners, which kept everyone laughing pretty much throughout his presentation.

But a focus was lacking, and although we were once more summoned to do battle against the pervasive evils of exchange-value and instrumental reason—which seemed on a pleasant Spring afternoon in Berkeley rather more Blakean than Marxist—we were left as usual without an executable application, like brides once again abandoned at the altar of social justice.

[Photo from Wikipedia, "Terry Eagleton."] 

The Shanghai Show at the Asian Arts Museum

I fought my way bravely through the rains yesterday to enjoy Target Free Sunday at the Asian Arts Museum and see the Shanghai show. The advantage of this was that the place was practically empty, which of course was super.

I’ve already written about my experience of Shanghai. In my imagination it compares with Cairo as one of the two most fascinating cities in the world. But unlike Cairo, Shanghai for me is a historical locality which existed mainly during the Chinese Republic 1912-1949. Like Berlin in the 20's and 30's, Shanghai was a metropolis of the imagination that reached mythological proportions.

The great advantage of the current museum show is that it includes several drawings and paintings from the mercantile concessions and settlements of the 19th century. Buying and selling was handled largely by the compradors—wealthy Chinese middlemen. In this environment China and the West confronted each other culturally for the first time, and the art it produced is often fascinating.

Chinese artists discovered the joys of perspective, painted panoramic views of the big trading houses overlooking the Huangpu River, and made pictures of comely comprador wives, displaying pendulum clocks on their walls and Victorian sewing machines in their spacious living rooms.

After that, the show became progressively sparser. The glass case with the marvelous display of qibao—those slender silk dresses that young women wore—and the sexy poster art from the 30’s were great. A few fine paintings from the early years after the Revolution, but then it was pretty much over. Although you could go upstairs to the auditorium and see a couple classic Shanghai films.

There were surprisingly few photographs in the show, which seemed completely odd to me, since there must exist many thousands. Mao’s brilliant effort in organizing the Shanghai workers starting in the 1920’s was just barely indicated, and life during the Japanese occupation not at all.

In short, the show was little more than a quick stab into the dark heart of Shanghai—great at that level, and special fun on a rainy Sunday afternoon in San Francisco.

[Photo from http://woollymammoths.org/Mark/.] 

Easter Greetings

Drawing of a hare by Beatrix Potter, from BibliOdyssey.

The Panther, by Rainer Maria Rilke (1903)

His eye-sight is so fatigued from walking behind the bars
of his cage that it no longer focuses on anything.

For him it's as if there were a thousand bars,

and in front of the thousand bars no world exists.

The soft pacing of sinuously strong steps

that go round and round in a tiny circle

is like a dance of power around a center,

in which great strength of will remains paralyzed.

Sometimes the curtain over his pupils lifts
without a sound, and an image enters,
penetrates the tense silence of his limbs

and ceases to exist in his heart.

In 1905 Rainer Maria Rilke moved to Meudon, France to take a job as Rodin's secretary. When Rilke told Rodin that he had not been doing much writing lately, Rodin advised him to go to the zoo (Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes) and look at an animal until he could really see it. 

The poet chose a panther, so benumbed by its captivity that it no longer recognizes any world beyond the bars of its own cage. It paces about in a cramped space, a symbol of great power brutally restrained and forced into paralysis. Perhaps once in awhile a thought or idea of freedom enters the panther’s consciousness, but it quickly dies, stifled by the immobility and the “silence” of the animal's useless limbs.

Rilke is the most famous German poet during the period of symbolism, an arts movement that started in France around 1860 and continued in Germany  till about 1925. In reaction to realism and naturalism, symbolist poets wrote in a metaphorical and imaginative manner, reaching for dreams, ideals, and often for other-worldliness. The realia of daily life are treated as symbols and ciphers of other modes of being: What you see is not what you get with symbolist poets.

Thus the panther is not simply a zoo animal. It is you and I, pacing about in our cages when circumstances prevent us from achieving our goals, or from realizing whatever we think we were born for. It is us, when we feel stymied, stupefied, alone, imprisoned.

DER PANTHER

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.


Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.


Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf—. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille—
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.


[Photo of Persian leopard from Wikipedia, "Black Panther." ]

Saturday Gallimaufry

1. Dodie Bellamy looks at a work by Jay DeFeo and concludes that pretty is the new ugly.

2. Once the night skies were full of warriors, women and very large animals, as depicted this week at Astropix. Wait till the image loads and then move your cursor on and off it.

3. E-books sales are up 260% this month, says ShelfAwareness.

4. Avoiding a Schrodinger's box of not-funny, Got Medieval has posted the April Feast Calendar (Part 1).

Journal for March

A very quiet month. The rains desisted for a couple weeks right in the middle of it, and an attack of faux printemps sent everyone outdoors for awhile. Bob Glück's 70th birthday party for Bruce was quite fun; I talked with people I seldom get a chance to see. Francesca and I enjoyed Alice in Wonderland at the Castro, but if memory serves, the first Disney version in 2-D was more fun, tho it may have been because I was still in grade school when it was released and thus more impressionable. I particularly disliked the dormouse in the new version, and the fact that Alice had meanwhile turned 19. I wondered if Disney wanted to avoid confronting the issue whether Lewis Carroll was a pedophile. Also, the undernourished March Hare looked uncomfortably deranged

Otherwise I've been blogging along and reading a lot of history books for grad seminar. People ask why the blog is white against black, like it's some kind of gimmick or something. The answer is simply that I run a lot of color pictures--it's one of the great pleasures of blog editing--and I think  they stand out better against a black background, compared with white or neutral colors. I do wish the type font could be slightly larger.

Reading report for March: Smash the Church, Smash the State! ed. T. Mecca; Becoming Roman, by Greg Woolf; How Societies Are Born, by Jan Vansina; Oedipus at Stalingrad, by G von Rezzori; Hegel, A Very Short Introduction, by Peter Singer; The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England, by Ian Mortimer; How to Write the History of the New World, by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra; plus many articles.

Tales of Sagittarius

Marigolds turn to the sun.

Marigold's fair, dogbane is rare,

Moonfern casts away care,

Marigolds turn to the sun.

Green are the fields of Taraval

Where whispering saints did pray;

Now fools grow strong and leap to the songs

Which the excellent pipers play.

Love is a demon at work in my brain,

Junk is a lover at work in my veins;

Good needles wise, brave blood shall rise

From a pentacle spell of pains.

When the Lord of Planets awakens

And laughing strides forth from his cave,

The enemies of magic will falter

And moon children dance on their graves

His eyes will burn like amber,

But peace resides in his hand;

The bearded thorn and all wraiths of morning

Are company to his plan.

A falcon calls in the wilderness,

Its voice is stronger than sound;

A properous wind through the universe

Bends the horn of the Star Ram down.

For the Boy of Love is a huntsman

Who follows a crippled dove;

At the cusp of the moon he establishes soon

A rising season of love.

Through the hallowed starfields of evening

The gentle Archer goes—

Past planets fair and the rising Bear,

The Dog, the Ram, and the Rose.

   

                             

                        —October 1968, for Robert Rivera, on LSD