Young Cicero

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Vincenzo Foppo: Young Cicero Reading

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True confessions

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

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.

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More cowbell!

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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.

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Down on the corner

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Philip Evergood: Street Corner, 1936

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Photo: Travis Fullerton, © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

On the road

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Edward Hopper, The Hotel Room

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East Bay Hills

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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

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In praise of this phenomenal world

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?

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.

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How to obtain results from the government

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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.

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Vermeer's laptop

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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.

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A favorite Vermeer

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Jan Vermeer: Lady writing a letter with maid

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May Day

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

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Ars poetica

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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

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