Saturday, November 22, 2008
What is so called "Homeless?"
This word "homeless" did not come into any sort of common use in the U.S. until the 1980s. In fact it appears to have been a failed attempt in the 1890s promoted then by the Salvation Army, then falling into complete obscurity, the Salvation Army's early attempt to create an untouchable class an unmitigated failure, out of use until the right revived it in the 1980s with its Reagan era culture wars. "Homeless" meant nothing to Americans before the Reagan era. Because what would "homeless" have meant to Americans used to migration, to going to the frontier, to seeking and getting real work? Behind the guise of Reagan's fraudulent image of a cowboy the right succeeded in promoting the word "homeless" to smother the democratic spirit of Americans. Daniel Boone had no home until he built his log cabin. The Okies and Arkies who squatted on land in California in th 30s and eventually made many of their descendants rich from the value of that land were never "homeless". The concept did not exist, the concept today is utterly dysfunctional. The word's use today has only been a failed attempt to create an American class of untouchables.
legal writing in Delaware
Coming up for air in... damn and this line has a too tight and unavoidable rhyme in it.. Okay, here it goes: Coming up for air in Delaware. In the pastoral industrial greens of Delaware ...
I'm trying in the past few days to get legal motion writing done right for a lawyer who has offered to pay me by the hour, providing I have succeeded at this "test" as he has called it.
Here along the marshes of Delaware.
Well, to update, I haven't as it's clear touched my blog in several months. I was evicted in Boulder in September, and came back to Boulder.
I'm going to attempt a legal writing (services) blog.
I'm trying in the past few days to get legal motion writing done right for a lawyer who has offered to pay me by the hour, providing I have succeeded at this "test" as he has called it.
Here along the marshes of Delaware.
Well, to update, I haven't as it's clear touched my blog in several months. I was evicted in Boulder in September, and came back to Boulder.
I'm going to attempt a legal writing (services) blog.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Hypervigilance and the Starbucks age
In the current era the standard for a coffeeshop, and any business, is hypervigilance, for being taken as better run and for its emplooyees as better trained.
The poet, anyone in the arts, must counter the hypervigilance with authenticity.
However, that said, before making Starbucks the sweeping scapegoat for hypervigilance, Starbucks' businesses are not ones that in fact reject customers' authenticity, from my observation. In fact, the Starbucks in the Pearl St. Mall is the most broadly accepting of customers of any coffeeshop in the central and university Boulder area.
Saxy's and the Bookend are quite horrible, and out of on eastern end of town, The Brewing Market and Folsom St. are also quite bad.
The poet, anyone in the arts, must counter the hypervigilance with authenticity.
However, that said, before making Starbucks the sweeping scapegoat for hypervigilance, Starbucks' businesses are not ones that in fact reject customers' authenticity, from my observation. In fact, the Starbucks in the Pearl St. Mall is the most broadly accepting of customers of any coffeeshop in the central and university Boulder area.
Saxy's and the Bookend are quite horrible, and out of on eastern end of town, The Brewing Market and Folsom St. are also quite bad.
At Starbucks, and asking for authenticity??
Lately I've been writing very well at a Starbucks in Boulder on Pearl St. near 13th. The poems just roll out while I"m writing there. One would think it would be against my nature to choose a Starbucks for a routine spot for writing, and that I would be writing well there especially; because sometimes after all I do make stupid choices about places to write. The choics in Boulder are very thin anyway. Well, I've been led to authenticity, which as an area of philosophy, I have simply never explored.
So, as I often do I started by looking at etymology. Authenticity isn't given an etymology in the Online Etymology Dictionary. Authentic is.
Authentic: 1340, "authoritative," from O.Fr. autentique (13c.), from M.L. authenticus, from Gk. authentikos "original, genuine, principal," from authentes "one acting on one's own authority," from autos "self" + hentes "doer, being." Sense of "entitled to acceptance as factual" is first recorded 1369. Authentic implies that the contents of the thing ain question correspond to the facts and are not fictitious; genuine implies that the reputed author is the real one.
So, what has quickly jumped out at me is that the meaning of authentic has shifted in Western culture from the self to the object.
When I first looked up "authentic" I did not even know, for all the philosophy that I have read, that authenticity had such a crucial role, (I think because American writings and translations avoid the subject) especially in existentialism, which I have read very little of since my Twenties, but which I'm returning to now. At the moment I don't even remember exactly how authentic came to mind. I quickly linked it to something an employee of a Starbucks said to me, probably because I had been trying to be informally gregarious, which in many of these places these days brings a reaction like one doing that must be very strange to try to be sociable. The employee said, "It's all about merchandising, Albert." She was putting products in the display under the counter, little juice bottles brightly colored from the colors of the juices, that is, plastic colored liquid. She undoubtedly meant by "it" not the products themselves, handling or selling them, but the behavior that goes with selling them, the behavior today that is an orthodoxy. It's an orthodoxy of inauthenticity to the point where gestures that should engender social bonds are meant simply to be the inauthentic seller. Americans have created an orthodoxy of a sociopathology, because it demands a break of the link between behavior and feeling.
Going back to the etymology, when the poet writes with authenticity, the poet returns that authority to authenticity. A poet speaking with authority speaks in opposition to "it's all about merchandising."
So, as I often do I started by looking at etymology. Authenticity isn't given an etymology in the Online Etymology Dictionary. Authentic is.
Authentic: 1340, "authoritative," from O.Fr. autentique (13c.), from M.L. authenticus, from Gk. authentikos "original, genuine, principal," from authentes "one acting on one's own authority," from autos "self" + hentes "doer, being." Sense of "entitled to acceptance as factual" is first recorded 1369. Authentic implies that the contents of the thing ain question correspond to the facts and are not fictitious; genuine implies that the reputed author is the real one.
So, what has quickly jumped out at me is that the meaning of authentic has shifted in Western culture from the self to the object.
When I first looked up "authentic" I did not even know, for all the philosophy that I have read, that authenticity had such a crucial role, (I think because American writings and translations avoid the subject) especially in existentialism, which I have read very little of since my Twenties, but which I'm returning to now. At the moment I don't even remember exactly how authentic came to mind. I quickly linked it to something an employee of a Starbucks said to me, probably because I had been trying to be informally gregarious, which in many of these places these days brings a reaction like one doing that must be very strange to try to be sociable. The employee said, "It's all about merchandising, Albert." She was putting products in the display under the counter, little juice bottles brightly colored from the colors of the juices, that is, plastic colored liquid. She undoubtedly meant by "it" not the products themselves, handling or selling them, but the behavior that goes with selling them, the behavior today that is an orthodoxy. It's an orthodoxy of inauthenticity to the point where gestures that should engender social bonds are meant simply to be the inauthentic seller. Americans have created an orthodoxy of a sociopathology, because it demands a break of the link between behavior and feeling.
Going back to the etymology, when the poet writes with authenticity, the poet returns that authority to authenticity. A poet speaking with authority speaks in opposition to "it's all about merchandising."
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
alexithymia and the tulip and Colorado
Walking on Pearl St. this morning passing the tulips in bloom I noticed that on one tulip someone had put a pair of plastic eyes, the kind that shake. I said to myself, "This is hilarious," I saw that a man on a bench was looking, the smug expression you see a great deal of from people in Boulder. No doubt at all he was thinking: "It's just a tulip," his verbal expression of his alexithymia.
I'm certain that Colorado attracts people who have alexithymia. The state is a place where people who have it can easily lead lives not being asked to connect feeling to symbols. It's a state where physical prowess in one form or another proves everything.
I'm certain that Colorado attracts people who have alexithymia. The state is a place where people who have it can easily lead lives not being asked to connect feeling to symbols. It's a state where physical prowess in one form or another proves everything.
Monday, April 21, 2008
"We're all interconnected," the woman said, crossing ahead of the crowd against the light.
It still can be heard easily in Boulder, even as Boulder shifts into being a more and more mainstream Rocky Mountain town. And in becoming a mainstream Rocky Mountain town of the post 9/11 years, that means the old fashioned "rugged individualism" in an extremely conservative conformist vein.
At Naropa University "the rhizome" of post-modern philosophy is heard through classes and discussions throughout the school's life and throughout the lives of graduates long after they have finished at the school. Interconnectedness with the rhizome is the school's dogma.
The statement, "(I believe) we're all interconnected," is never when stated presented with modification or allowance for doubt or skepticism. It is always an absolute statement, and the rhizome is also presented always as absolute.
These irk me whenever I hear them and my impulse is to want to defend individuality and sometimes I take that step, even while knowing that the person asserting interconnectedness will be absolutely determined to prove correctness.
I had never come to this realization until today that these are antinomies. (I just developed a clear sense for the first time in my life in the past few days of antinomies).
1. Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other and must be.
2. Any point of a rhizome will be unique and separate from all others and must be.
............
1. We are all interconnected.
2. Every individual is unique and separate.
........
It's impossible to defend one part of one of the antinomies against the other part. To try to defend one is futile. The antinomies exist outside of any way of making a point. Each side will argue that its side is the defender of reason and that the other side is virulently in opposition to reason.
At Naropa University "the rhizome" of post-modern philosophy is heard through classes and discussions throughout the school's life and throughout the lives of graduates long after they have finished at the school. Interconnectedness with the rhizome is the school's dogma.
The statement, "(I believe) we're all interconnected," is never when stated presented with modification or allowance for doubt or skepticism. It is always an absolute statement, and the rhizome is also presented always as absolute.
These irk me whenever I hear them and my impulse is to want to defend individuality and sometimes I take that step, even while knowing that the person asserting interconnectedness will be absolutely determined to prove correctness.
I had never come to this realization until today that these are antinomies. (I just developed a clear sense for the first time in my life in the past few days of antinomies).
1. Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other and must be.
2. Any point of a rhizome will be unique and separate from all others and must be.
............
1. We are all interconnected.
2. Every individual is unique and separate.
........
It's impossible to defend one part of one of the antinomies against the other part. To try to defend one is futile. The antinomies exist outside of any way of making a point. Each side will argue that its side is the defender of reason and that the other side is virulently in opposition to reason.
the American workplace presentation and alexithymia
The pressure weighs down heavily on Americans to be alexithymic. In mainstream
American life this has created a brick wall that Americans keep running up against in their workplaces. The societal norm of alexithymia bogs down the American workplace in endless recyclings of detail and a severe inadequacy in innovation. The American boss pines for creative presentation but is really uncomfortable or completely unsure of what those really might look like, and the worker makes a presentation that's acceptable for being alexithymic, failing to raise the presentation to the symbolic level of poetry and bogging down the workplace in needless alexithymic statements. This is the box Americans have gotten themselves into.
American life this has created a brick wall that Americans keep running up against in their workplaces. The societal norm of alexithymia bogs down the American workplace in endless recyclings of detail and a severe inadequacy in innovation. The American boss pines for creative presentation but is really uncomfortable or completely unsure of what those really might look like, and the worker makes a presentation that's acceptable for being alexithymic, failing to raise the presentation to the symbolic level of poetry and bogging down the workplace in needless alexithymic statements. This is the box Americans have gotten themselves into.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
religion and alexithymia
I've come to this theory of mine on the nature of religion: The real function of religion, as opposed to perceived purposes, is a primitive means for insuring that alexithymia is kept to a low rate of prevalence in a population. The arts replace religion and lead to higher meaning. Contrary to that labor and engineering and gratuitous entertainment and sports force people toward alexithymia, which leads to war or an endemically violent society that collapses.
............
The word "alexithymia" was evidently coined whole.
I think it's time for a back formation, if it hasn't been done yet, of "lexithymos" to be used by the arts (Maybe semioticians or others have already done this.)
I see lexithymos as especially deliberate in the branch of painting that's been going on for a long time that includes text on the canvas. An artist whose work has been in the Art and Soul Gallery in Boulder and has her own gallery in Denver called Abend, Mary Scrimgeour, is about as lexithymotic in her painting as I can think of from any painter. I'm going to say more about her work in the next few days, because there's alot going in her paintings I identify with.
.......
Well done defintion of thymos from answers.com:
Thymos, one element of Plato's tripartite division of the soul — the other two being reason and desire — can be translated as spiritedness. It is the location of such feelings as pride, shame, indignation, and the need for recognition for oneself and for others.
Thymos can overrule both reason and basic animal instincts and propel one into a duel over an insult, or into a burning building to save a child, or into a war for a cause one finds just. According to Hegel, humanity is at its peak when it thymotically risks its life for the sake of a greater good. On the other hand, it is also what drives suicide bombers and other terrorists.
My note: The coiners of alexithymia must have been drawing on the above definition. However, answers.com goes on to cite Francis Fukuyama, who took a narrower a perspective of thymos than the above definition, and in doing so when in a different direction from the coiners of alexithymia with thymos to advance his conservative sociopolitical theory:
"Francis Fukuyama, the author of The End of History and the Last Man, puts it thus: 'Thymos is something like an innate human sense of justice...'
My note: At that point Fukayama is still consistent with thymos in alexithymia, but then:
'...people believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people act as though they are worth less — when they do not recognize their worth at its correct value — they become angry... Thymos as such is the psychological seat of all the noble virtues like selflessness, idealism, morality, self-sacrifice, courage, and honorability."
Fukayama is I believe advocating alexithymic behavior from removing the feeling content of the definition of thymos.
............
The word "alexithymia" was evidently coined whole.
I think it's time for a back formation, if it hasn't been done yet, of "lexithymos" to be used by the arts (Maybe semioticians or others have already done this.)
I see lexithymos as especially deliberate in the branch of painting that's been going on for a long time that includes text on the canvas. An artist whose work has been in the Art and Soul Gallery in Boulder and has her own gallery in Denver called Abend, Mary Scrimgeour, is about as lexithymotic in her painting as I can think of from any painter. I'm going to say more about her work in the next few days, because there's alot going in her paintings I identify with.
.......
Well done defintion of thymos from answers.com:
Thymos, one element of Plato's tripartite division of the soul — the other two being reason and desire — can be translated as spiritedness. It is the location of such feelings as pride, shame, indignation, and the need for recognition for oneself and for others.
Thymos can overrule both reason and basic animal instincts and propel one into a duel over an insult, or into a burning building to save a child, or into a war for a cause one finds just. According to Hegel, humanity is at its peak when it thymotically risks its life for the sake of a greater good. On the other hand, it is also what drives suicide bombers and other terrorists.
My note: The coiners of alexithymia must have been drawing on the above definition. However, answers.com goes on to cite Francis Fukuyama, who took a narrower a perspective of thymos than the above definition, and in doing so when in a different direction from the coiners of alexithymia with thymos to advance his conservative sociopolitical theory:
"Francis Fukuyama, the author of The End of History and the Last Man, puts it thus: 'Thymos is something like an innate human sense of justice...'
My note: At that point Fukayama is still consistent with thymos in alexithymia, but then:
'...people believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people act as though they are worth less — when they do not recognize their worth at its correct value — they become angry... Thymos as such is the psychological seat of all the noble virtues like selflessness, idealism, morality, self-sacrifice, courage, and honorability."
Fukayama is I believe advocating alexithymic behavior from removing the feeling content of the definition of thymos.
Friday, April 18, 2008
the cobb salad and alexithymia
I guess the cobb salad can be a metaphor for where I've been going the past two weeks.
I had a large cobb salad with beef strips and blue cheese dressing at the bar at Dolan's Restaurant about a week and a half ago or longer. Can't recall at the moment the exact night it was, but the Denver Nuggets basketball team was playing and losing badly. All right, I believe that was a Sunday or even a Saturday night. Saturday seems dubious for the date because there were not a lot of people there at 9 PM, except for a business group of men and woman, in suits and in evening gowns. Dolan's is a short walk east on Arapahoe Avenue from my apartment, and I've only recently started going there.
I had a matter of fact brief conversation about the Nuggets with a man at the bar whom I've seen many times at The Brewing Market Coffeehouse but have never spoken to. He mentioned that he had seen me there many times and asked me what business I was in. I told him I was a poet. He then said at a forum during the annual CU Foreign Affairs
Conference (which is not about foreign affairs in particular but is a major broad spectrum event covering just about anything that has depth, and it is a good thing) that there was a discussion about the film, "That is No Country For Old Men", (if I recall correctly the exact title of the film), by the Coen brothers, and he said the question was asked what the title meant and he asked me if I knew, and I said that I did. I know the title comes from the first line of Yeats' poem, Sailing to Byzantium. I asked him what the film was about. He tried to describe it but didn't get far, except that through the exchange on it between him and I, he came up with it being violent.
Fast forward to this past week. A young woman who works at the Starbucks on Pearl St. who is talkative when I asked her what she had for lunch said she had gone to Safeway and had a big sandwich. She first said, "I ate alot for lunch!!" So after that I thought I would ask her another day if she had ever had a cobb salad, because when spoke of what she ate, she was talking about ordinary food. Coincidentally it's nearly only been while she has been working that I have gotten rice crispy marshmallow squares; I think I have eaten three of those in the past two weeks. So two days ago I asked her if she had ever had a cobb salad. She said, "It's my favorite!!" I said, "I had a great cobb salad at Dolan's Restaurant." It turned out that her family owns Dolan's Restaurant. She said, "That's my last name, Dolan!" She did not however tell me her first name. Last night I went to Dolan's and had two Jamesons'. The first time of the handful of times I have so far gone there that a woman was working the bar. The woman was young and looked quite a bit like the young woman who works at Starbucks, so I asked her if she was related. She said, "You mean Whitney!? That's Mike's niece." She said she was not related. I asked her her name and she said "BJ". I told her my name was Albert. She nearly filled the shot glass the second time, and gave me a flirty smile saying, "Oops." And then when the charge came up she only charged me for one of the two orders. So... Dolan's so far is being very good to me...
Next to find a woman who would like to go there for a drink.
And in the meantime there is a cobb salad poem for one of the five food poems to submit to Peter Selgin's magazine before the deadline of April 30th.
.........
Any noun or any word that's a modifier can by joined by "and" to alexithymia because the response to the word "x" can only be "x is just x", or "x" is a trope meaning "y". So for example, "the blue car and alexithymia", can be responded to with "The blue car is just a blue car", which is a literal response, or "The blue car was a symbol of "y" in the movie 'x".
............
Two Boulder poems I wrote in that time span:
They say in town this place
was a Black Neighborhood
until over forty five years ago, about the time
that I was born,
three years until my parents' White flight,
twelve years until I saw my mother cry
seeing the burned apartment building
and I’m in Boulder bringing
the property value down....
............
On TV, Augusta National opening ceremony, Apr 10:
Chill crisp morning air.
White shirt, white shoes, white hair:
The shot off the tee is Arnold Palmer’s opening swing...
The Augusta Masters tournament is multicultural:
Among the favorites are a Hispanic, a Korean, and Tiger Woods
who is so many things I couldn’t tell apart.
Pearl St, Boulder Colorado:
I’m likely to see Whites only here on a dank April day....
I had a large cobb salad with beef strips and blue cheese dressing at the bar at Dolan's Restaurant about a week and a half ago or longer. Can't recall at the moment the exact night it was, but the Denver Nuggets basketball team was playing and losing badly. All right, I believe that was a Sunday or even a Saturday night. Saturday seems dubious for the date because there were not a lot of people there at 9 PM, except for a business group of men and woman, in suits and in evening gowns. Dolan's is a short walk east on Arapahoe Avenue from my apartment, and I've only recently started going there.
I had a matter of fact brief conversation about the Nuggets with a man at the bar whom I've seen many times at The Brewing Market Coffeehouse but have never spoken to. He mentioned that he had seen me there many times and asked me what business I was in. I told him I was a poet. He then said at a forum during the annual CU Foreign Affairs
Conference (which is not about foreign affairs in particular but is a major broad spectrum event covering just about anything that has depth, and it is a good thing) that there was a discussion about the film, "That is No Country For Old Men", (if I recall correctly the exact title of the film), by the Coen brothers, and he said the question was asked what the title meant and he asked me if I knew, and I said that I did. I know the title comes from the first line of Yeats' poem, Sailing to Byzantium. I asked him what the film was about. He tried to describe it but didn't get far, except that through the exchange on it between him and I, he came up with it being violent.
Fast forward to this past week. A young woman who works at the Starbucks on Pearl St. who is talkative when I asked her what she had for lunch said she had gone to Safeway and had a big sandwich. She first said, "I ate alot for lunch!!" So after that I thought I would ask her another day if she had ever had a cobb salad, because when spoke of what she ate, she was talking about ordinary food. Coincidentally it's nearly only been while she has been working that I have gotten rice crispy marshmallow squares; I think I have eaten three of those in the past two weeks. So two days ago I asked her if she had ever had a cobb salad. She said, "It's my favorite!!" I said, "I had a great cobb salad at Dolan's Restaurant." It turned out that her family owns Dolan's Restaurant. She said, "That's my last name, Dolan!" She did not however tell me her first name. Last night I went to Dolan's and had two Jamesons'. The first time of the handful of times I have so far gone there that a woman was working the bar. The woman was young and looked quite a bit like the young woman who works at Starbucks, so I asked her if she was related. She said, "You mean Whitney!? That's Mike's niece." She said she was not related. I asked her her name and she said "BJ". I told her my name was Albert. She nearly filled the shot glass the second time, and gave me a flirty smile saying, "Oops." And then when the charge came up she only charged me for one of the two orders. So... Dolan's so far is being very good to me...
Next to find a woman who would like to go there for a drink.
And in the meantime there is a cobb salad poem for one of the five food poems to submit to Peter Selgin's magazine before the deadline of April 30th.
.........
Any noun or any word that's a modifier can by joined by "and" to alexithymia because the response to the word "x" can only be "x is just x", or "x" is a trope meaning "y". So for example, "the blue car and alexithymia", can be responded to with "The blue car is just a blue car", which is a literal response, or "The blue car was a symbol of "y" in the movie 'x".
............
Two Boulder poems I wrote in that time span:
They say in town this place
was a Black Neighborhood
until over forty five years ago, about the time
that I was born,
three years until my parents' White flight,
twelve years until I saw my mother cry
seeing the burned apartment building
and I’m in Boulder bringing
the property value down....
............
On TV, Augusta National opening ceremony, Apr 10:
Chill crisp morning air.
White shirt, white shoes, white hair:
The shot off the tee is Arnold Palmer’s opening swing...
The Augusta Masters tournament is multicultural:
Among the favorites are a Hispanic, a Korean, and Tiger Woods
who is so many things I couldn’t tell apart.
Pearl St, Boulder Colorado:
I’m likely to see Whites only here on a dank April day....
Friday, April 4, 2008
What has happened to the original Romantic poets, composers, and painters?
I've been looking into Schubert's romantic song compositions, and the poems they were drawn from. The stories seem impossible to accept now. In that era nature is wholly nature, and love in nature leads to metaphors of death, and things in nature are metaphors of death and love.
Mutation, coined in 1901, and Mutant,coined in 1954, set the modern and psychedelic eras apart from the Romantic. From Dictionary.Com:
–adjective
1. undergoing or resulting from mutation.
–noun
2. a new type of organism produced as the result of mutation.
[Origin: 1900–05; < L mūtant- (s. of mūtāns), prp. of mūtāre to change; see -ant]
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.
American Heritage Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
mu·tant Audio Help (myōōt'nt) Pronunciation Key
n.
An individual, organism, or new genetic character arising or resulting from mutation.
Slang One that is suggestive of a genetic mutant, as in bizarre appearance or inaptitude.
adj.
Resulting from or undergoing mutation: a mutant strain of bacteria.
Slang Suggestive of a genetic mutant.
[Latin mūtāns, mūtant-, present participle of mūtāre, to change; see mutate.]
(Download Now or Buy the Book)
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Online Etymology Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
mutant (n.)
1901, in the biological sense, from L. mutantem (nom. mutans) "changing," prp. of mutare "to change" (see mutable). In the science fiction sense, it is attested from 1954.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
WordNet - Cite This Source - Share This
mutant
adjective
1. tending to undergo or resulting from mutation; "a mutant gene"
noun
1. (biology) an organism that has characteristics resulting from chromosomal alteration
2. an animal that has undergone mutation
WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.
American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
mu·tant (mytnt)
n.
An organism possessing one or more genes that have undergone mutation.
adj.
Resulting from or undergoing mutation.
The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
Main Entry: 2mutant
Function: noun
: a mutant individual
Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.
Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
Main Entry: 1mu·tant
Pronunciation: 'myüt-&nt
Function: adjective
: of, relating to, or produced by mutation
Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.
.....
"Mutation" did not originate from Darwin at all, or even near the time that he worked. It had to wait until the beginning of the 20th Century.
A mutation is an intrinsic change in a species. The mutations, for example, in fruit flies are changes in color, position of organs, such as an extra pair of wings, and other features. But what does the word mutant, not coined until 50 years after the word mutation, do? What does it signify? What is it used for? In evolution science new species are recognized. And in biology outside of evolution research new species are small organisms, such as new bacteria, are recognized all the time. To my knowledge science never recognizes the word mutant, and I would make no argument at this point that it should recognize the word as scientific, and I believe this is because the word mutant holds an idea that the intrinsic quality of a species persists even with the changes from mutation which biology recognizes as defining a new species. So, a mutant rose, for example, would be a rose mutated to the point that science would recognize as no longer a rose, but a new kind of flowering plant. But the word mutant retains the intrinsic quality of the rose. And from this has arisen the puzzled fear people have of an intrinsic quality in a living thing that morphologically has lost its physically identity that satisfies what people want to see in the thing. Evolution, in fact, might, over a long period of time, make a certain plant or animal, for example, much much larger than it is now, or much much smaller, from what we know of species that have retained most features but have gotten smaller or larger in the evolutionary record from the past.
The word mutant has not gotten respect in the arts. It's probably very hard to find any poems that have gotten respect in the literary world today that have used the word. And even though the poetry world for the most part today abhors acknowledging scientific influences, except for a subcategory of poetry that thematically covers math and science, poetry appears to take many cues from science on words to not respect. And yet the word mutant arose at the same time as the word psychedelic, and has been a defining word in the cultural era that has prevailed for the past fifty years. The word psychedelic, however, was coined by philosopher scienists, and the word mutant does not appear to have gotten any creedence in philosophy any more than in science. The word mutant has thrived entirely in arts related to cinema, including in fiction writing that is directly connected to cinema.
There is morphological change in Classical Greco-Roman mythology in which human, animal, and divinity transpose and change while retaining intrinsic qualities that identify who and what they are. These were part of worship and devotion and explained natural effects and cyclical changes in the environment that were awed. Some cycles represent a frightening long term natural effect that overwhelmed a people such as drought or flood. Our word mutant has so far not represented something that would be worshipped. But it also seems to me inevitable. I have not heard yet of a cult that worships any pop culture mutant character, but mutant is also likely to become a way a group creates its own original idol. The question I have is whether the word mutant can lead to important tropes in poetry. And I think that is the case and I think that what blocks this from happening is a lingering very strong influence from the Romantic era on Western poetry on what makes an important trope, but it might also be possible that Western poetry simply does not see depth in a trope until it is something that has been worshipped.
Mutation, coined in 1901, and Mutant,coined in 1954, set the modern and psychedelic eras apart from the Romantic. From Dictionary.Com:
–adjective
1. undergoing or resulting from mutation.
–noun
2. a new type of organism produced as the result of mutation.
[Origin: 1900–05; < L mūtant- (s. of mūtāns), prp. of mūtāre to change; see -ant]
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.
American Heritage Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
mu·tant Audio Help (myōōt'nt) Pronunciation Key
n.
An individual, organism, or new genetic character arising or resulting from mutation.
Slang One that is suggestive of a genetic mutant, as in bizarre appearance or inaptitude.
adj.
Resulting from or undergoing mutation: a mutant strain of bacteria.
Slang Suggestive of a genetic mutant.
[Latin mūtāns, mūtant-, present participle of mūtāre, to change; see mutate.]
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The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Online Etymology Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
mutant (n.)
1901, in the biological sense, from L. mutantem (nom. mutans) "changing," prp. of mutare "to change" (see mutable). In the science fiction sense, it is attested from 1954.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
WordNet - Cite This Source - Share This
mutant
adjective
1. tending to undergo or resulting from mutation; "a mutant gene"
noun
1. (biology) an organism that has characteristics resulting from chromosomal alteration
2. an animal that has undergone mutation
WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.
American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
mu·tant (mytnt)
n.
An organism possessing one or more genes that have undergone mutation.
adj.
Resulting from or undergoing mutation.
The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
Main Entry: 2mutant
Function: noun
: a mutant individual
Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.
Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
Main Entry: 1mu·tant
Pronunciation: 'myüt-&nt
Function: adjective
: of, relating to, or produced by mutation
Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.
.....
"Mutation" did not originate from Darwin at all, or even near the time that he worked. It had to wait until the beginning of the 20th Century.
A mutation is an intrinsic change in a species. The mutations, for example, in fruit flies are changes in color, position of organs, such as an extra pair of wings, and other features. But what does the word mutant, not coined until 50 years after the word mutation, do? What does it signify? What is it used for? In evolution science new species are recognized. And in biology outside of evolution research new species are small organisms, such as new bacteria, are recognized all the time. To my knowledge science never recognizes the word mutant, and I would make no argument at this point that it should recognize the word as scientific, and I believe this is because the word mutant holds an idea that the intrinsic quality of a species persists even with the changes from mutation which biology recognizes as defining a new species. So, a mutant rose, for example, would be a rose mutated to the point that science would recognize as no longer a rose, but a new kind of flowering plant. But the word mutant retains the intrinsic quality of the rose. And from this has arisen the puzzled fear people have of an intrinsic quality in a living thing that morphologically has lost its physically identity that satisfies what people want to see in the thing. Evolution, in fact, might, over a long period of time, make a certain plant or animal, for example, much much larger than it is now, or much much smaller, from what we know of species that have retained most features but have gotten smaller or larger in the evolutionary record from the past.
The word mutant has not gotten respect in the arts. It's probably very hard to find any poems that have gotten respect in the literary world today that have used the word. And even though the poetry world for the most part today abhors acknowledging scientific influences, except for a subcategory of poetry that thematically covers math and science, poetry appears to take many cues from science on words to not respect. And yet the word mutant arose at the same time as the word psychedelic, and has been a defining word in the cultural era that has prevailed for the past fifty years. The word psychedelic, however, was coined by philosopher scienists, and the word mutant does not appear to have gotten any creedence in philosophy any more than in science. The word mutant has thrived entirely in arts related to cinema, including in fiction writing that is directly connected to cinema.
There is morphological change in Classical Greco-Roman mythology in which human, animal, and divinity transpose and change while retaining intrinsic qualities that identify who and what they are. These were part of worship and devotion and explained natural effects and cyclical changes in the environment that were awed. Some cycles represent a frightening long term natural effect that overwhelmed a people such as drought or flood. Our word mutant has so far not represented something that would be worshipped. But it also seems to me inevitable. I have not heard yet of a cult that worships any pop culture mutant character, but mutant is also likely to become a way a group creates its own original idol. The question I have is whether the word mutant can lead to important tropes in poetry. And I think that is the case and I think that what blocks this from happening is a lingering very strong influence from the Romantic era on Western poetry on what makes an important trope, but it might also be possible that Western poetry simply does not see depth in a trope until it is something that has been worshipped.
Monday, March 31, 2008
rhythm and narration
Dorrit Cohn in Transparent Minds speaks of "the rhythm of inner debate" in his chapter on narrated monologue.
So I decided to tinker with his example from Jane Austen's Emma. Austen in her novels used short passages of a few paragraphs in length of straight narrated monologue.
The beginning of his example:
"How could she have been do deceived! He protested that he had never thought seriously of Harriet-- never!"
He includes then a paragraph of seven lines. I've started on this project by trying to turn that first short paragraph into a poem. In the second paragraph the narrated monologue really does get nasty. "... it was jumble without taste or truth. Who could have seen through such thick headed nonsense?"
I came up with these poems. I'm trying to combine the rhythm of inner debate with poetic line and music rhythm:
How she could be so crudely
Deceived! A man who protested
He had not ever thought of her ringlets;
Harriet— too lovely cur! So...
How she could be so crudely
Deceived! A man who protested
He had not ever thought of her,
that Harriet—too lovely cur! So...
How she could be so crudely
Deceived! A man who protested
He had never ever thought of
Harriet—that lovely slut! So...
How she could be so crudely
Deceived by a man who protested
He had never thought so of
Harriet—that lovely cur. So....
How she could be so crudely
Deceived by a man who protested
He had never thought much for
Harriet—ringletted cur. So...
How she found she could be so
Crudely deceived! A man who said
He would never sing lied for that
Josephine—ringletted whore. So...
.........
I'm looking at Dorrit Cohn's book for strategies to put into poetry for narrative.
So I decided to tinker with his example from Jane Austen's Emma. Austen in her novels used short passages of a few paragraphs in length of straight narrated monologue.
The beginning of his example:
"How could she have been do deceived! He protested that he had never thought seriously of Harriet-- never!"
He includes then a paragraph of seven lines. I've started on this project by trying to turn that first short paragraph into a poem. In the second paragraph the narrated monologue really does get nasty. "... it was jumble without taste or truth. Who could have seen through such thick headed nonsense?"
I came up with these poems. I'm trying to combine the rhythm of inner debate with poetic line and music rhythm:
How she could be so crudely
Deceived! A man who protested
He had not ever thought of her ringlets;
Harriet— too lovely cur! So...
How she could be so crudely
Deceived! A man who protested
He had not ever thought of her,
that Harriet—too lovely cur! So...
How she could be so crudely
Deceived! A man who protested
He had never ever thought of
Harriet—that lovely slut! So...
How she could be so crudely
Deceived by a man who protested
He had never thought so of
Harriet—that lovely cur. So....
How she could be so crudely
Deceived by a man who protested
He had never thought much for
Harriet—ringletted cur. So...
How she found she could be so
Crudely deceived! A man who said
He would never sing lied for that
Josephine—ringletted whore. So...
.........
I'm looking at Dorrit Cohn's book for strategies to put into poetry for narrative.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Dealing With Jealousy
The person who has the gift for an art faces jealousy, often extreme, as a matter of course, and in American life probably as much as any who face jealousy because of other qualities because culturally the U.S. doesn't want to honor its people in the arts.
Most Americans in the arts who gain a high status these days tend to remove themselves from public social life. These are not the days when Andy Warhol was a highly visible party bon vivant, and Tom Wolfe was an icon in his flashy suits.
But jealousy toward people in the arts runs far deeper than a matter of being directed at someone having gained status through a visible work. It is directed at the motivation that makes the artist, regardless of whether the person has any fame or none at all; all the choices the person in the arts has to make to become one, to learn from the masters of the arts, and set aside the necessary time to work solely on the art form, and simply the knowledge of the art form, as if the knowledge is a forbidden fruit which the artist must have sought by some nefarious means. But again, it's still more than that religious root of seeing the art knowledge as a forebidden fruit. It's a jealousy at the truculent determination which a person in the arts must have in a contemporary society which demands a person show little determination at anything.
An American in the arts naturally acquires a physiognomy and behavior which appear to be anathema to everything that is expected of a person in American life. Arts knowledge is anathema to retail work, regardless if the person in the arts does everything necessary to appear to be willing to do retail work, from practicing a smile and cheerful attitude to perfectly dressing the part all the time. Physiognomy and behavior are shaped by how one thinks and concentrates, by how much and by the object of concentration. If one spends three hours a day in art museums studying by observation fine art to gain something for one's art work, that will have an impact on physiognomy that would be directly consequential to serving in retail. One would not learn anything by smiling at paintings or text.
I sometimes invite jealousy by taking books into a bar, as I did last night. I was in the Boulderado Hotel bar, because I had thought it would be a good escape from it being a hotel, and therefore that it would have hotel guests at the bar. But Boulderites took seats next to me. I had a reasonably pleasant conversation with two guys about a neighborhood in Boulder, where there had been quonset huts at one time, and about the area of the country where I grew up. But then a woman came to join, who turned out to be a woman who was native to Boulder, and she took one look at me and the first words out of her mouth were, loudly, a ghastly thing which I'm not even going to quote here I stayed cool and gave a polite reply, and then a little bit of normal exchange again with the man sitting next to me, and then the woman said something loud again, and I said, about her friend, "He's got great dimples." And she tried to turn that into sounding as if I was making an insult, and said, "You have dimples too!" with severe hostility in her voice, and I said, "Yes I do, and that's because I'm a kid inside too." Then she toned down her voice a bit and said, "This guy is..." and trailed off without finishing, and then didn't look at me again.
I have never dealt with jealousy well in my life. I know that the most successful people in the arts are able to assume aloofness and keep a distance from such situations rather than allow themselves to be engaged by a person with such an attitude. And the most important thing is that a person in the arts be able to push it aside, clear the mind of the distraction from the hostility from a jealous person, and get on with the work. If the jealous attack becomes a distraction for the artist, the jealous person has won. And from the cultural conditions of the US these days, the jealous are highly successful at getting things the way they want.
For the poet the distraction that undermines the poet's work is one which would undermine the feeling the poet must put into language. In a society which has an elevated life of the arts the artist often faces the jealousy of peers but that is very different from what happens in the US today, because peers in the arts have to protect their own feeling in their work, so do not go so far as to undermine it in their society. In the US to think like a poet is taboo, that is to be full of the kinds of emotions of reverie and reflection that make poetry happen is anathema to what Americans want in their world. For example, if a poet is reflecting on what it must have felt to be a flower child in the 60s. I am not writing any such lines, but it looks to me like a good example. The poet then must go over the lines of reflection and reverie that would make the poem, say, if there were a line in the poem such as, "The days we carried flowers, the sweetness and the innocence..." The poet then has to go over the line in thought over and over again, gaining feelings that will be part of the living spirit of the poem.
Most Americans in the arts who gain a high status these days tend to remove themselves from public social life. These are not the days when Andy Warhol was a highly visible party bon vivant, and Tom Wolfe was an icon in his flashy suits.
But jealousy toward people in the arts runs far deeper than a matter of being directed at someone having gained status through a visible work. It is directed at the motivation that makes the artist, regardless of whether the person has any fame or none at all; all the choices the person in the arts has to make to become one, to learn from the masters of the arts, and set aside the necessary time to work solely on the art form, and simply the knowledge of the art form, as if the knowledge is a forbidden fruit which the artist must have sought by some nefarious means. But again, it's still more than that religious root of seeing the art knowledge as a forebidden fruit. It's a jealousy at the truculent determination which a person in the arts must have in a contemporary society which demands a person show little determination at anything.
An American in the arts naturally acquires a physiognomy and behavior which appear to be anathema to everything that is expected of a person in American life. Arts knowledge is anathema to retail work, regardless if the person in the arts does everything necessary to appear to be willing to do retail work, from practicing a smile and cheerful attitude to perfectly dressing the part all the time. Physiognomy and behavior are shaped by how one thinks and concentrates, by how much and by the object of concentration. If one spends three hours a day in art museums studying by observation fine art to gain something for one's art work, that will have an impact on physiognomy that would be directly consequential to serving in retail. One would not learn anything by smiling at paintings or text.
I sometimes invite jealousy by taking books into a bar, as I did last night. I was in the Boulderado Hotel bar, because I had thought it would be a good escape from it being a hotel, and therefore that it would have hotel guests at the bar. But Boulderites took seats next to me. I had a reasonably pleasant conversation with two guys about a neighborhood in Boulder, where there had been quonset huts at one time, and about the area of the country where I grew up. But then a woman came to join, who turned out to be a woman who was native to Boulder, and she took one look at me and the first words out of her mouth were, loudly, a ghastly thing which I'm not even going to quote here I stayed cool and gave a polite reply, and then a little bit of normal exchange again with the man sitting next to me, and then the woman said something loud again, and I said, about her friend, "He's got great dimples." And she tried to turn that into sounding as if I was making an insult, and said, "You have dimples too!" with severe hostility in her voice, and I said, "Yes I do, and that's because I'm a kid inside too." Then she toned down her voice a bit and said, "This guy is..." and trailed off without finishing, and then didn't look at me again.
I have never dealt with jealousy well in my life. I know that the most successful people in the arts are able to assume aloofness and keep a distance from such situations rather than allow themselves to be engaged by a person with such an attitude. And the most important thing is that a person in the arts be able to push it aside, clear the mind of the distraction from the hostility from a jealous person, and get on with the work. If the jealous attack becomes a distraction for the artist, the jealous person has won. And from the cultural conditions of the US these days, the jealous are highly successful at getting things the way they want.
For the poet the distraction that undermines the poet's work is one which would undermine the feeling the poet must put into language. In a society which has an elevated life of the arts the artist often faces the jealousy of peers but that is very different from what happens in the US today, because peers in the arts have to protect their own feeling in their work, so do not go so far as to undermine it in their society. In the US to think like a poet is taboo, that is to be full of the kinds of emotions of reverie and reflection that make poetry happen is anathema to what Americans want in their world. For example, if a poet is reflecting on what it must have felt to be a flower child in the 60s. I am not writing any such lines, but it looks to me like a good example. The poet then must go over the lines of reflection and reverie that would make the poem, say, if there were a line in the poem such as, "The days we carried flowers, the sweetness and the innocence..." The poet then has to go over the line in thought over and over again, gaining feelings that will be part of the living spirit of the poem.
In a book called Transparent Minds, by Dorrit Cohn, which is an analysis of narrative modes, with the subtitle of Narrative Modes of Presenting Conciousness in Fiction, Cohn quotes the German poet Schiller: 'Spracht die Seele, ach, so spricht schon die Seele nicht mehr,' 'When the soul speaks, alas, it is no longer the soul.' Cohn says the quote anticipates the enduring importance psycho-narration continues to have for the modern psychological novel. What of the post-modern, or psychedelic era, psychological poem? Louise Gluck's Averno follows a psycho narration that can be said to follow Schiller's quote as if as a guide to including the soul in a poem.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Psychedelia (this era continued)...
Pyschedelic was one brilliant coining of a word. From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
1956, of drugs, suggested by H. Osmond in a letter to Aldous Huxley and used by Osmond in a scientific paper published the next year; from Gk. psykhe- "mind" (see psyche) + deloun "make visible, reveal," from delos "visible, clear." Psychedelia is from 1967.
I don't think anyone can successfully deny that pharmaceuticals that alter brain chemistry and the mind are the major cultural feature in the West in the past 50 years, covering what is persistently still called "post" and "post-post" modern. Whether the era should be called the psychedelic or something else, I have no doubt that this attaching of "post" to modern is just an attempt to cover up the key cultural features, psychedelic and other features, since the 50s.
So, Osmond used the Greek word, "deloun", from "delos". But what makes clear? That was evidently the dream of Osmond and Huxley but the result on the mind of the mind altering chemicals has continued to be the exact opposite. There hasn't yet been found one that "makes clear". What they all continue to be is eruptive from the inside. The results are confusion, not clarity. And what the arts have done with the distorting effect is to use it as a tool. Distortion soon became the goal, and the vision, and the source of the beauty of the psychedelic.
A girl working in a coffeeshop yesterday recommended to me a current band that has a big following. I googled the band, MGMT, and the band is a psychedelic band of this decade. I found a free video by the band online.
The fact that psychedelic is enduring is just plain true. The question that has to be answered is whether it's the true identity of the entire era that has followed the modern. If I were to challenge it with the "tronic" suffix attached to "psyche", "psychetronic", that would just get the response that my word sounds too much like psychedelic anyway, and doesn't tap into anything familiar that would interest people much. "Tronic" is really a dull sounding thing. Psychedelic is wedded to the actions as well as the avoidances and evasions that people in the arts have taken since the 50s. Is "psychedelic" like "the jazz age", a lesser era with one that's much larger? The jazz age having been the closing stage of the modern era. But naming an era comes from all the cultural factors going on. Psychedelic has been around as long in span of time as the Rococco was, and promises to cover the time span of the Baroque era, and also probably as long as the Romantic era. The next question is whether "psychedelic" is going to keep taking on new parameters, or whether it's going to be taken as retro for the single decade of the 1960s, as just an occasional retro revival and not the defining feature of the entire cultural era. In the 80's pychedelia in popular music and video was very distinct from the 60s. Instead of the idealized promise of the Woodstock generation, 80's psychedelia took on the dark foreboding of apocalyptic images instead of a tool for self discovery and global awakening. As Prince's song lyric went in the 80's: "Let's go crazy, let's get nuts, maybe it's cause we're all gonna die..." In fact 80's psychedelia now gets far more attention than 60's psychedlia does. On the other hand, the video of the band MGMT looked a lot to me like a revival of the idea of psychedelia as an awakening of global peace and unity.
But what of the would be serious arts? Does psychedelia underscore literature and composition music and drama and the mixed medias? Does it underscore what are called "post" anything analyses? Does it underscore what academic programs produce, or does it underscore what, and only what, the academic programs have jammed into the lingua franca of the arts as "outsider art"?
1956, of drugs, suggested by H. Osmond in a letter to Aldous Huxley and used by Osmond in a scientific paper published the next year; from Gk. psykhe- "mind" (see psyche) + deloun "make visible, reveal," from delos "visible, clear." Psychedelia is from 1967.
I don't think anyone can successfully deny that pharmaceuticals that alter brain chemistry and the mind are the major cultural feature in the West in the past 50 years, covering what is persistently still called "post" and "post-post" modern. Whether the era should be called the psychedelic or something else, I have no doubt that this attaching of "post" to modern is just an attempt to cover up the key cultural features, psychedelic and other features, since the 50s.
So, Osmond used the Greek word, "deloun", from "delos". But what makes clear? That was evidently the dream of Osmond and Huxley but the result on the mind of the mind altering chemicals has continued to be the exact opposite. There hasn't yet been found one that "makes clear". What they all continue to be is eruptive from the inside. The results are confusion, not clarity. And what the arts have done with the distorting effect is to use it as a tool. Distortion soon became the goal, and the vision, and the source of the beauty of the psychedelic.
A girl working in a coffeeshop yesterday recommended to me a current band that has a big following. I googled the band, MGMT, and the band is a psychedelic band of this decade. I found a free video by the band online.
The fact that psychedelic is enduring is just plain true. The question that has to be answered is whether it's the true identity of the entire era that has followed the modern. If I were to challenge it with the "tronic" suffix attached to "psyche", "psychetronic", that would just get the response that my word sounds too much like psychedelic anyway, and doesn't tap into anything familiar that would interest people much. "Tronic" is really a dull sounding thing. Psychedelic is wedded to the actions as well as the avoidances and evasions that people in the arts have taken since the 50s. Is "psychedelic" like "the jazz age", a lesser era with one that's much larger? The jazz age having been the closing stage of the modern era. But naming an era comes from all the cultural factors going on. Psychedelic has been around as long in span of time as the Rococco was, and promises to cover the time span of the Baroque era, and also probably as long as the Romantic era. The next question is whether "psychedelic" is going to keep taking on new parameters, or whether it's going to be taken as retro for the single decade of the 1960s, as just an occasional retro revival and not the defining feature of the entire cultural era. In the 80's pychedelia in popular music and video was very distinct from the 60s. Instead of the idealized promise of the Woodstock generation, 80's psychedelia took on the dark foreboding of apocalyptic images instead of a tool for self discovery and global awakening. As Prince's song lyric went in the 80's: "Let's go crazy, let's get nuts, maybe it's cause we're all gonna die..." In fact 80's psychedelia now gets far more attention than 60's psychedlia does. On the other hand, the video of the band MGMT looked a lot to me like a revival of the idea of psychedelia as an awakening of global peace and unity.
But what of the would be serious arts? Does psychedelia underscore literature and composition music and drama and the mixed medias? Does it underscore what are called "post" anything analyses? Does it underscore what academic programs produce, or does it underscore what, and only what, the academic programs have jammed into the lingua franca of the arts as "outsider art"?
Friday, March 28, 2008
The only good art comes in isolation. There have to be groups, but that's not where the good stuff originates.
Gotta love Beethoven. This description from an internet site:
"The mature Beethoven was a short, well built man. His dark grey hair, then white, but was always thick and unruly. Reports differ as to the color of this eyes. His skin was pock-marked and his mouth, which had been a little petulant in youth, later became fixed in a grim, down-curving line, as if in a permanent expression of truculent determination. He seldom took care of his appearance, and, as he strode through the streets of Vienna with hair escaping from beneath his top hat, his hands clasped behind his back and his coat cross-buttoned he was the picture of eccentricity. His moods changed constantly, keeping his acquaintances guessing. They could never be sure that a chance remark might be misconstrued or displease the master in some way, for his powerful will would admit of no alternative view once he had made a judgement."
......
The one clause here that is not consistent with scholarly assessments of Beethoven is "by nature." It was outward behavior that observers superficially saw in him, but it's ridiculoous to call the composer's inner nature "impatient"!!! He would just have had too much to think about to be bothered by something trendy coming into conversation with him:
"By nature, Beethoven was impatient, impulsive, unreasonable and intolerant; deafness added suspicion and paranoia to these attributes. He would often misunderstand the meaning of a facial expression and accuse faithful friends of disloyalty or conspiracy. He would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, and he would turn on friends, dismissing them curtly as being unworthy of his friendship. But, likely as not, he would write a letter the next day or so, telling them how noble and good they were and how he had misjudged them.
.........
Beethoven was the child of a violent alcoholic father. From another site:
"In 1789, because of his father's alcoholism, the young Beethoven began supporting his family as a court musician."
Beethoven throughout his life fell in love with women unattainable for him:
"Although reports circulated among Beethoven's friends that he was constantly in love, he tended to choose unattainable women, aristocratic or married or both. In his letter to the “Immortal Beloved” (presumably never sent and now dated at 1812), he expressed his conflicting feelings for the woman who may have been the sole person ever to reciprocate his declarations. The long-debated riddle of her identity was solved beyond reasonable doubt in 1977 by the American musicologist Maynard Solomon. She was Antonie Brentano, the wife of a Frankfurt merchant and a mother of four. Conceivably, Beethoven's sense of virtue and fear of marriage contributed to his flight from this relationship, with its deeply shattering conflicts."
"Al-Anon? Scheist. What the hell is Al-Anon???"
......
Paul Bowles has long been a favorite author of mine and a model. I have had a picture in my mind from a photograph I saw years ago of Bowles sitting in the corner of q nearly bare room, except for a hookah pipe, dull grey mud baked walls in North Africa.
What I did not know!! And what a revelation!!! Just now finding out from the wiki on him that Bowles was a career composer!!1 And a long list of his works are listed on the site. Bowles, I am just now learning, and just now learning because as a reader of literature and writer I have simply only looked for Bowles' literary work... And here just coincidentally I decided to include him in the same posting that includes something about Beethoven. Bowles, another of the great ones who worked in isolation, except that he was with his wife Jane, lifelong companion, and he seems to have been personable and cordial with people.
I think this brief synopsis on the internet of a collection of Bowles' short stories says enough:
"James Lasdun in his introduction calls Paul Bowles 'One of the great outsiders of our time' and isolation is a major theme in these dark and often unsettling stories.
"An old woman lives in a cave untroubled by the scorpions that crawl over its walls. A splash of water triggers an explosion of violence. A young girl 'remembers' things back to front while the concluding story is presented as six letters written to a bitter, dying man..."
"The mature Beethoven was a short, well built man. His dark grey hair, then white, but was always thick and unruly. Reports differ as to the color of this eyes. His skin was pock-marked and his mouth, which had been a little petulant in youth, later became fixed in a grim, down-curving line, as if in a permanent expression of truculent determination. He seldom took care of his appearance, and, as he strode through the streets of Vienna with hair escaping from beneath his top hat, his hands clasped behind his back and his coat cross-buttoned he was the picture of eccentricity. His moods changed constantly, keeping his acquaintances guessing. They could never be sure that a chance remark might be misconstrued or displease the master in some way, for his powerful will would admit of no alternative view once he had made a judgement."
......
The one clause here that is not consistent with scholarly assessments of Beethoven is "by nature." It was outward behavior that observers superficially saw in him, but it's ridiculoous to call the composer's inner nature "impatient"!!! He would just have had too much to think about to be bothered by something trendy coming into conversation with him:
"By nature, Beethoven was impatient, impulsive, unreasonable and intolerant; deafness added suspicion and paranoia to these attributes. He would often misunderstand the meaning of a facial expression and accuse faithful friends of disloyalty or conspiracy. He would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, and he would turn on friends, dismissing them curtly as being unworthy of his friendship. But, likely as not, he would write a letter the next day or so, telling them how noble and good they were and how he had misjudged them.
.........
Beethoven was the child of a violent alcoholic father. From another site:
"In 1789, because of his father's alcoholism, the young Beethoven began supporting his family as a court musician."
Beethoven throughout his life fell in love with women unattainable for him:
"Although reports circulated among Beethoven's friends that he was constantly in love, he tended to choose unattainable women, aristocratic or married or both. In his letter to the “Immortal Beloved” (presumably never sent and now dated at 1812), he expressed his conflicting feelings for the woman who may have been the sole person ever to reciprocate his declarations. The long-debated riddle of her identity was solved beyond reasonable doubt in 1977 by the American musicologist Maynard Solomon. She was Antonie Brentano, the wife of a Frankfurt merchant and a mother of four. Conceivably, Beethoven's sense of virtue and fear of marriage contributed to his flight from this relationship, with its deeply shattering conflicts."
"Al-Anon? Scheist. What the hell is Al-Anon???"
......
Paul Bowles has long been a favorite author of mine and a model. I have had a picture in my mind from a photograph I saw years ago of Bowles sitting in the corner of q nearly bare room, except for a hookah pipe, dull grey mud baked walls in North Africa.
What I did not know!! And what a revelation!!! Just now finding out from the wiki on him that Bowles was a career composer!!1 And a long list of his works are listed on the site. Bowles, I am just now learning, and just now learning because as a reader of literature and writer I have simply only looked for Bowles' literary work... And here just coincidentally I decided to include him in the same posting that includes something about Beethoven. Bowles, another of the great ones who worked in isolation, except that he was with his wife Jane, lifelong companion, and he seems to have been personable and cordial with people.
I think this brief synopsis on the internet of a collection of Bowles' short stories says enough:
"James Lasdun in his introduction calls Paul Bowles 'One of the great outsiders of our time' and isolation is a major theme in these dark and often unsettling stories.
"An old woman lives in a cave untroubled by the scorpions that crawl over its walls. A splash of water triggers an explosion of violence. A young girl 'remembers' things back to front while the concluding story is presented as six letters written to a bitter, dying man..."
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The Derriere Guard
The current American Arts Quarterly has a piece by Frederick Turner called Form and Content, subtitled What is Art About Now?
He begins by describing a group of artists and writers "in various genres and media" that meets in New York City, and met in October at a place called the Grand Central Academy of Art in New York City. There the group held its tenth anniversary festival. According to Turner the group calls itself The Derriere Guard. (That for one thing reminds me of a story in Buddhist writings I read a few years ago of a Japanese monk warning the novitiates to guard their asses. I won't make any references to current American politics here.) In the piece Turner describes the group as committed to revitalizing and reforming aesthetic culture through recovery of the traditional forms and genres and concerns of the arts.
I brought this up because it contrasts with my posting right before this one.
Turner says the movement sometimes called The New Classicism has been led by a composer named Stefania de Kennesey.
The article also says that Tom Wolfe spoke to the Derriere Guard.
He begins by describing a group of artists and writers "in various genres and media" that meets in New York City, and met in October at a place called the Grand Central Academy of Art in New York City. There the group held its tenth anniversary festival. According to Turner the group calls itself The Derriere Guard. (That for one thing reminds me of a story in Buddhist writings I read a few years ago of a Japanese monk warning the novitiates to guard their asses. I won't make any references to current American politics here.) In the piece Turner describes the group as committed to revitalizing and reforming aesthetic culture through recovery of the traditional forms and genres and concerns of the arts.
I brought this up because it contrasts with my posting right before this one.
Turner says the movement sometimes called The New Classicism has been led by a composer named Stefania de Kennesey.
The article also says that Tom Wolfe spoke to the Derriere Guard.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
What Is This Era?
A google of "tronic" and one finds that it's used as a name or title by an endless number of groups and individuals, more and more people always taking it up to identify themselves, and yet "tronic" hasn't gotten a place recognized as a word by any dictionary. What are these people doing using "tronic" as a name for themselves when it's not even recognized yet as a word?? Does tronic mean anything?? Does it have significance to all these people that overides it not having a specifically recognized definition yet?? The reason is that "tronic" is being widely recognized as a style, a fashion, a trend, a character, a quality, a feature, a distinction, a thing, a hidden effect, a hidden force, a binding energy, a movement....
I propose, for this era, adding ec to the tronic. Ectronic. The ectronic era.
The prefix ec's meaning: ec-, ex- [Greek, ek, ex] out, from, off exegesis act of leading out.
So, ectronic means out, from, off of tronic. It looks sheared off of "electronic".
Turning to the word "modern" for a moment:
From the online etymology dictionary, etymology of modern:
"of or pertaining to present or recent times," 1500, from M.Fr. moderne, from L.L. modernus "modern," from L. modo "just now, in a (certain) manner," from modo "to the measure," abl. of modus "manner, measure" (see mode (1)). In Shakespeare, often with a sense of "every-day, ordinary, commonplace." Slang abbreviation mod first attested1960. Modern art is from 1849; modern dance first attested 1912; first record of modern jazz is from 1955. Modern conveniences first recorded 1926. Modernize is from 1748 (implied in modernized).
modernism
as a movement in the arts, 1929, from modern (q.v.). The word dates to 1737 in the sense of "deviation from the ancient and classical manner" [Johnson, who calls it "a word invented by Swift"]. It has been used in theology since 1901.
......
It's been around long enough. Even "modern art" dates back to 1849. Let's find something new for the current period as an era. "Posts added to the word don't work. The word means "pertaining to the present". That's still what the word means just as it did 500 years ago. There can't be a meaningful "post- pertaining to the present". There's the present to deal with. The word "modern" itself won't run away. It can still be used by anyone who wants to use it. It will be here. Since the word was first coined in 1500, the Baroque, Roccoco, Neoclassical, and Romantic... And anything else?? Have all prevailed before the word "modern" for a cultural era came into use. Now "modern" can be given a vacation from its big job.
So on to the challenging question.
Some years ago I read somewhere in a book, don't recall for sure where anymore, modern (I think it might have been Tom Wolfe in a book on modern, and not postmodern, architecture) defined as meaning from units, or parts, manageable parts, as in modularity. I think this was an accurate understanding of modern as an era's definition, when modern in the 19th century began to take on its huge significance. Modern came to represent a cultural confidence that neatly definable units and lines would explain everything. Charts and grids were going unchallenged. That continued until the fateful day in July 1938 when Lise Meitner discovered atomic fission. She was working with Otto Hahn in Hahn's laboratory and she and Hahn were confused by something that did not fit the comfortable understanding of the atomic chart that had prevailed for many decades. The problem they were grappling with was that elements in the chart had formed that should not have according to the weights of neighboring elements. What they discovered was the isotope.
From the wiki on Meitner:
"This surviving correspondence indicates that Hahn believed nuclear fission was impossible. She (Meitner) was the first person to realize that the nucleus of an atom could be split into smaller parts: uranium nuclei had split to form barium and krypton, accompanied by the ejection of several neutrons and a large amount of energy (the latter two products accounting for the loss in mass).
Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted their results as being nuclear fission.[11] Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.[12]
Meitner recognized the possibility for a chain reaction of enormous explosive potential. This report had an electrifying effect on the scientific community. Because this could be used as a weapon, and since the knowledge was in German hands, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner together jumped into action, persuading Albert Einstein, who had the celebrity, to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt a warning letter; this led directly to the establishment of the Manhattan Project. Meitner refused an offer to work on the project at Los Alamos, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!"[13]"
From that point what has been called the post-modern era was born, because increasing explanation, modifcations, footnotes, were needed to satisfy the neat organization of modernism. Abstract lines became abstract expressionism. Classical music branched off into forms of improvisation. Literature broke off into its own fragmentary directions. This continues today and the understood task of the arts today is to guard and comprehend the impacts and effects on the human spirit of the pieces, the fragments, the fractures, and fractals, the broken lines and rays, the things disruptive that are unseen that disturb the sense of wholeness which humans need. So the era that follows the modern is eruptive and stunning and full of things that the senses don't grasp yet are impacted by fromm their effects.
The suffix -tron, as we know it in the formation of new compounds, from the online etymology dictionary:
As a suffix in new compounds formed in physics, 1939, abstracted from electron (Gk. -tron was an instrumentive suffix).
.........
The suffix -tron arose with the beginning of the demise of confidence in the modern era.
Okay, tronic sounds like chronic and tonic. But chthonic also sounds like those. Tronic also evokes electronic, which at first sounds of outdated interest in the information age. And yet however, electronic is just outdated enough, as the word romance was to the romantic movement; in other words, something that brings with it a renewal of old ideas in a time when all ideas are being disregarded.
The Ectronic people in the arts are the Ectronigardes. Avant garde means ahead of the mainstream, at the forefront, leading into the future on a linear path. Ectronigarde means confronting the eruption, confronting the unpredictable convulsions from the interior.
Esotronic, I think, would not work. "Eso" is the prefix for looking inward, but this era is eruptive, the reverse of the modern era. The modern was able to go into interiors with stream of consciousness and so without having to worry about the post 1939 eruptions. This era is about dealing with the eruptions, dealing with the outward moving out of control events.
......
Oh crap, these attempts of mine just sound too technological. Maybe we are actually in a long running psychedelic era which just doesn't get acknowledged because psychedelic still involves so much taboo breaking. In other words, the early stage of a long running psychedelic era. Did the word "modern" ever invoke such taboos that there was a fear of using it when it was known that the era being lived was by then the modern era?
I propose, for this era, adding ec to the tronic. Ectronic. The ectronic era.
The prefix ec's meaning: ec-, ex- [Greek, ek, ex] out, from, off exegesis act of leading out.
So, ectronic means out, from, off of tronic. It looks sheared off of "electronic".
Turning to the word "modern" for a moment:
From the online etymology dictionary, etymology of modern:
"of or pertaining to present or recent times," 1500, from M.Fr. moderne, from L.L. modernus "modern," from L. modo "just now, in a (certain) manner," from modo "to the measure," abl. of modus "manner, measure" (see mode (1)). In Shakespeare, often with a sense of "every-day, ordinary, commonplace." Slang abbreviation mod first attested1960. Modern art is from 1849; modern dance first attested 1912; first record of modern jazz is from 1955. Modern conveniences first recorded 1926. Modernize is from 1748 (implied in modernized).
modernism
as a movement in the arts, 1929, from modern (q.v.). The word dates to 1737 in the sense of "deviation from the ancient and classical manner" [Johnson, who calls it "a word invented by Swift"]. It has been used in theology since 1901.
......
It's been around long enough. Even "modern art" dates back to 1849. Let's find something new for the current period as an era. "Posts added to the word don't work. The word means "pertaining to the present". That's still what the word means just as it did 500 years ago. There can't be a meaningful "post- pertaining to the present". There's the present to deal with. The word "modern" itself won't run away. It can still be used by anyone who wants to use it. It will be here. Since the word was first coined in 1500, the Baroque, Roccoco, Neoclassical, and Romantic... And anything else?? Have all prevailed before the word "modern" for a cultural era came into use. Now "modern" can be given a vacation from its big job.
So on to the challenging question.
Some years ago I read somewhere in a book, don't recall for sure where anymore, modern (I think it might have been Tom Wolfe in a book on modern, and not postmodern, architecture) defined as meaning from units, or parts, manageable parts, as in modularity. I think this was an accurate understanding of modern as an era's definition, when modern in the 19th century began to take on its huge significance. Modern came to represent a cultural confidence that neatly definable units and lines would explain everything. Charts and grids were going unchallenged. That continued until the fateful day in July 1938 when Lise Meitner discovered atomic fission. She was working with Otto Hahn in Hahn's laboratory and she and Hahn were confused by something that did not fit the comfortable understanding of the atomic chart that had prevailed for many decades. The problem they were grappling with was that elements in the chart had formed that should not have according to the weights of neighboring elements. What they discovered was the isotope.
From the wiki on Meitner:
"This surviving correspondence indicates that Hahn believed nuclear fission was impossible. She (Meitner) was the first person to realize that the nucleus of an atom could be split into smaller parts: uranium nuclei had split to form barium and krypton, accompanied by the ejection of several neutrons and a large amount of energy (the latter two products accounting for the loss in mass).
Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted their results as being nuclear fission.[11] Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.[12]
Meitner recognized the possibility for a chain reaction of enormous explosive potential. This report had an electrifying effect on the scientific community. Because this could be used as a weapon, and since the knowledge was in German hands, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner together jumped into action, persuading Albert Einstein, who had the celebrity, to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt a warning letter; this led directly to the establishment of the Manhattan Project. Meitner refused an offer to work on the project at Los Alamos, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!"[13]"
From that point what has been called the post-modern era was born, because increasing explanation, modifcations, footnotes, were needed to satisfy the neat organization of modernism. Abstract lines became abstract expressionism. Classical music branched off into forms of improvisation. Literature broke off into its own fragmentary directions. This continues today and the understood task of the arts today is to guard and comprehend the impacts and effects on the human spirit of the pieces, the fragments, the fractures, and fractals, the broken lines and rays, the things disruptive that are unseen that disturb the sense of wholeness which humans need. So the era that follows the modern is eruptive and stunning and full of things that the senses don't grasp yet are impacted by fromm their effects.
The suffix -tron, as we know it in the formation of new compounds, from the online etymology dictionary:
As a suffix in new compounds formed in physics, 1939, abstracted from electron (Gk. -tron was an instrumentive suffix).
.........
The suffix -tron arose with the beginning of the demise of confidence in the modern era.
Okay, tronic sounds like chronic and tonic. But chthonic also sounds like those. Tronic also evokes electronic, which at first sounds of outdated interest in the information age. And yet however, electronic is just outdated enough, as the word romance was to the romantic movement; in other words, something that brings with it a renewal of old ideas in a time when all ideas are being disregarded.
The Ectronic people in the arts are the Ectronigardes. Avant garde means ahead of the mainstream, at the forefront, leading into the future on a linear path. Ectronigarde means confronting the eruption, confronting the unpredictable convulsions from the interior.
Esotronic, I think, would not work. "Eso" is the prefix for looking inward, but this era is eruptive, the reverse of the modern era. The modern was able to go into interiors with stream of consciousness and so without having to worry about the post 1939 eruptions. This era is about dealing with the eruptions, dealing with the outward moving out of control events.
......
Oh crap, these attempts of mine just sound too technological. Maybe we are actually in a long running psychedelic era which just doesn't get acknowledged because psychedelic still involves so much taboo breaking. In other words, the early stage of a long running psychedelic era. Did the word "modern" ever invoke such taboos that there was a fear of using it when it was known that the era being lived was by then the modern era?
Monday, March 24, 2008
The American Arts Quarterly in the current issue has a piece by Tom Jay which originally appeared in The Island Institute Journal, Spring 2007: The Necessity of Beauty.
In his piece he argues that postmodern aesthetics is expressed in the phrase, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
I really don't believe that that phrase is consistent with postmodern thought at all.
First, for starters postmodern is the as yet unnamed era, unnamed because American perspectives dominate the world right now and Americans simply have not felt motivated to give the current era any name at all.
What is the aesthetic perspective on beauty in the current era? I don't believe the current era is much interested in beauty, because the machine has reached a level of devotion that excludes beauty entirely. The use of elements of science and technology to generate beauty in imagination was something going on in the last century, but no longer is. What people in the arts are doing with beauty now is mostly picking up pieces of what they can find, patching things together on their own. There isn't even currently any revival of a past era, such as the revival that created the neoclassical. Beauty today is in the desperate grab and the stubborn unrelenting unwillingness of someone in the arts to not let go of a piece of it.
Is the world beauty full?? I don't think so. Beauty does not result out of ugliness where there's something ugly arising from an action of people. There isn't any beauty in photography from inside the Nazi death camps, or inside any completely ugly result where ugliness was intended by antagonists. No there isn't. I think Jay gets confused by discovery and imposition. I don't believe death or decay or birth or any stage in the passage of life as the stage in itself has anything to do with beauty because that is marking of time. Something dying can be beautiful. But something dying can also be completely ugly. People depicted in the arts in glowing health, as in the Leni Wertmuller films, can be completely ugly. And likewise the self image as its promoted and sought today of glowing health is an ugly thing.
And in the current era there's little desire in the prevailing culture to keep something beautiful that is. There really is a fear of allowing beauty to exist because that creates a sense in the current era's thought that there might be something fragile, something vulnerable there, as if fragile and vulnerable is a fallability that only nature could allow for. What the poet feels is anathema today, and poetry and all of the arts are in as much danger as the idea of beauty. Jay asks the reader, "Remember lovely Persephone and Hades; together they constellate a somber truthful beauty, apart they become caricatures, cartoons of mortality and joy..." Poets still turn to Persephone and Hades, as Louise does, but that doesn't mean that simply asking to be read for these allegories or asking for Persephone and Hades to be remembered is going to be heard. Rather, the very raising this question of Persephone and Hades will get even the most credited and honored scholar or artist from the current era of thought the response, "That's crazy." Crazy is in it's taken for too full of feeling to be worth it.
In his piece he argues that postmodern aesthetics is expressed in the phrase, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
I really don't believe that that phrase is consistent with postmodern thought at all.
First, for starters postmodern is the as yet unnamed era, unnamed because American perspectives dominate the world right now and Americans simply have not felt motivated to give the current era any name at all.
What is the aesthetic perspective on beauty in the current era? I don't believe the current era is much interested in beauty, because the machine has reached a level of devotion that excludes beauty entirely. The use of elements of science and technology to generate beauty in imagination was something going on in the last century, but no longer is. What people in the arts are doing with beauty now is mostly picking up pieces of what they can find, patching things together on their own. There isn't even currently any revival of a past era, such as the revival that created the neoclassical. Beauty today is in the desperate grab and the stubborn unrelenting unwillingness of someone in the arts to not let go of a piece of it.
Is the world beauty full?? I don't think so. Beauty does not result out of ugliness where there's something ugly arising from an action of people. There isn't any beauty in photography from inside the Nazi death camps, or inside any completely ugly result where ugliness was intended by antagonists. No there isn't. I think Jay gets confused by discovery and imposition. I don't believe death or decay or birth or any stage in the passage of life as the stage in itself has anything to do with beauty because that is marking of time. Something dying can be beautiful. But something dying can also be completely ugly. People depicted in the arts in glowing health, as in the Leni Wertmuller films, can be completely ugly. And likewise the self image as its promoted and sought today of glowing health is an ugly thing.
And in the current era there's little desire in the prevailing culture to keep something beautiful that is. There really is a fear of allowing beauty to exist because that creates a sense in the current era's thought that there might be something fragile, something vulnerable there, as if fragile and vulnerable is a fallability that only nature could allow for. What the poet feels is anathema today, and poetry and all of the arts are in as much danger as the idea of beauty. Jay asks the reader, "Remember lovely Persephone and Hades; together they constellate a somber truthful beauty, apart they become caricatures, cartoons of mortality and joy..." Poets still turn to Persephone and Hades, as Louise does, but that doesn't mean that simply asking to be read for these allegories or asking for Persephone and Hades to be remembered is going to be heard. Rather, the very raising this question of Persephone and Hades will get even the most credited and honored scholar or artist from the current era of thought the response, "That's crazy." Crazy is in it's taken for too full of feeling to be worth it.
I tinkered just a little bit with words here in The Stray Cat Strut, by Brian Setzer and The Stray Cats. And I've arranged it into couplets. The original lyrics follow iambic pentameter brilliantly with some substitutions. And with lengthening of a few second lines Setzer was able to draw out all kinds of lyrical power with his singing. It's such a great song that it's easy for anyone to sing. And done with close variations of the iambic pentameter! What a testament to the venerable ip...
Oooooooh,
Black orange cat sittin' on a fence,
Ain't got enough dough to pay the rent
I'm flat broke but I don't care,
I strut right by with my tail in the air,
I'm a lady’s cat casanova with nine lives,
Gettin’ crap thrown at me by a mean old man,
Gettin’ my dinner from a garbage can,
I don't bother chasing mice around,
I slink down the alley lookin' for a fight,
Howlin' to the moonlight on a hot summer night,
Singin' the blues while the lady cats cry,
"Wild stray cat , you're a real gone guy"
I wish I could be as carefree and wild,
But I got cat class and I got cat style.
.......
I don't feel I can tinker with the fifth line quite right.
Oooooooh,
Black orange cat sittin' on a fence,
Ain't got enough dough to pay the rent
I'm flat broke but I don't care,
I strut right by with my tail in the air,
I'm a lady’s cat casanova with nine lives,
Gettin’ crap thrown at me by a mean old man,
Gettin’ my dinner from a garbage can,
I don't bother chasing mice around,
I slink down the alley lookin' for a fight,
Howlin' to the moonlight on a hot summer night,
Singin' the blues while the lady cats cry,
"Wild stray cat , you're a real gone guy"
I wish I could be as carefree and wild,
But I got cat class and I got cat style.
.......
I don't feel I can tinker with the fifth line quite right.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
the last metaphor...
American culture today reviles the metaphor. Will there be a day in the not too distant future of the last trope in America? Or will there be a reversal and a sudden suprising flowering of tropes into the heart of America?
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Today I've just received an arts journal in the mail for a second quarter free. American Arts Quarterly. I'm receiving this journal from my use of a research library in NY early last Fall and my signing of a guest book there. It has excellent pieces. As a poet with little extra money I'm delighted to receive this reading material. It includes pieces on De Chirico, on the Necessity of Beauty, on J.M.W. Turner called Emulous of Light, on Form and Content subtitled What is Art About Now? Some book reviews, exhibition reviews, and a poem on the back inside by Susan Thomas titled Arbus at the Met. One of my focuses in my own poetry is about art, and on specific artists and on their works.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Early last Fall on the upstairs floor of the Boulder Bookstore I observed a couple sitting in chairs together in the central area where large sized art books are put on tables. They were a middle aged couple. The woman was reading a large sized art book, holding the book up, and the man in a chair next to her looked bored, and he said, looking at the book, "He's crazy." The woman said, "Maybe he's crazy but it's fine art, dear."
From the wiki on Magritte:
"Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, a tailor, and Adeline, a milliner. He began drawing lessons in 1910. In 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water. The image of his mother floating, her dress obscuring her face, may have influenced a 1927-1928 series of paintings of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants, but Magritte disliked this explanation.[1] He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels for two years until 1918. In 1922 he married Georgette Berger, whom he had met in 1913.
Magritte worked in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926 when a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu), and held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton, and became involved in the surrealist group.
When Galerie la Centaure closed and the contract income ended, he returned to Brussels and worked in advertising. Then, with his brother, he formed an agency, which earned him a living wage.
During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II he remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton. At the time he renounced the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, though he returned to the themes later.
His work showed in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992.
Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967 and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels..."
The man in the bookstore was making a general brush off of all art, or all artists, or anything that looked like something that would be a kind of aesthetic intrusion on his world, and out of the ordinary in his world, among all things he was used to. He used the word "crazy" because he knows it's a form of assault against any intrusion on how simple he wants his world to be. But it was not simply a general statement about the world being crazy, or about a culture outside of his world being much more complicated than his own. It was an attempt at an assault on an individual artist, the producer of the work, an assault aimed at the character of an individual. In this case it failed in that sense because the man was not aware of anything about Magritte, and Magritte has been dead for decades. It does however succeed as an assault on the books themselves being sold in the Boulder Bookstore. As a tool for what that man wants, the accusation of "crazy" is so easy to make, it's safe to assume he would succeed with the character assault against living people in the arts.
From the wiki on Magritte:
"Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, a tailor, and Adeline, a milliner. He began drawing lessons in 1910. In 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water. The image of his mother floating, her dress obscuring her face, may have influenced a 1927-1928 series of paintings of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants, but Magritte disliked this explanation.[1] He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels for two years until 1918. In 1922 he married Georgette Berger, whom he had met in 1913.
Magritte worked in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926 when a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu), and held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton, and became involved in the surrealist group.
When Galerie la Centaure closed and the contract income ended, he returned to Brussels and worked in advertising. Then, with his brother, he formed an agency, which earned him a living wage.
During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II he remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton. At the time he renounced the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, though he returned to the themes later.
His work showed in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992.
Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967 and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels..."
The man in the bookstore was making a general brush off of all art, or all artists, or anything that looked like something that would be a kind of aesthetic intrusion on his world, and out of the ordinary in his world, among all things he was used to. He used the word "crazy" because he knows it's a form of assault against any intrusion on how simple he wants his world to be. But it was not simply a general statement about the world being crazy, or about a culture outside of his world being much more complicated than his own. It was an attempt at an assault on an individual artist, the producer of the work, an assault aimed at the character of an individual. In this case it failed in that sense because the man was not aware of anything about Magritte, and Magritte has been dead for decades. It does however succeed as an assault on the books themselves being sold in the Boulder Bookstore. As a tool for what that man wants, the accusation of "crazy" is so easy to make, it's safe to assume he would succeed with the character assault against living people in the arts.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
The Saltmen of Tibet and Lhasa in 2008
Last year I bought a video from the Boulder Bookstore called The Saltmen of Tibet. Last week, just before the uprising in Lhasa was brought to my attention in the news, I was looking through my CDs and DVDs and found it, I had forgotten all about. I put it on on my laptop. Early in the film two Tibetan peasant men are riding horses together through a wild plain, and one of them says to the other that when a man massacres his enemy the gods take the enemy to heaven.
Time Magazine last week called the uprising in Lhasa and which is spreading wider and wider and spilling outside of Tibet into China a Tibetan Intifadah. There have been cars overturned in Tibet, firecrackers lit. The Dalai Lama is trying subtly to defuse the situation because he believes exactly what the two men in the film mentioned above believe.
Time's news story, from Mar 14:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1722509,00.html
This is what the Dalai Lama said today:
"They simply rely on using force in order to simulate peace, a peace brought by force using a rule of terror," the Dalai Lama said in Dharamshala, his home since fleeing Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
The unrest in the vast Himalayan region, which began last week after the 49th anniversary of the 1959 revolt, is the biggest challenge to China's rule there in nearly two decades.
"Please investigate, if possible... some international organisation can try firstly to inquire about the situation in Tibet," the Buddhist spiritual leader said.
"Whether intentionally or unintentionally, some cultural genocide is taking place. There is some kind of discrimination: the Tibetans in their own land quite often are treated as second-class citizens," the Dalai Lama added.
"Some trusted group should go there and see how it happened," added the Dalai Lama, who has long complained that Beijing is flooding Tibet with Han Chinese in order to make the Tibetans a minority in their homeland.
It's really obvious that the Chinese believe they will drive the Tibetans down into obscurity because the Chinese believe the Tibetans are minority people in their west, and the Chinese have many minority cultures they have suppressed in their west for a very long time. The Tibetans are no locked into a tiny space as the Palestinians are where a closely gathered group of people can dramatically affect the occupation of where they live by throwing stones at soldiers and tanks. Tibet is the world's most important watershed, a huge country, incredibly strategic, the center of the Eurasian continent and the world's highest elevation. The Tibetans to the Chinese are just in the way...
Time Magazine last week called the uprising in Lhasa and which is spreading wider and wider and spilling outside of Tibet into China a Tibetan Intifadah. There have been cars overturned in Tibet, firecrackers lit. The Dalai Lama is trying subtly to defuse the situation because he believes exactly what the two men in the film mentioned above believe.
Time's news story, from Mar 14:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1722509,00.html
This is what the Dalai Lama said today:
"They simply rely on using force in order to simulate peace, a peace brought by force using a rule of terror," the Dalai Lama said in Dharamshala, his home since fleeing Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
The unrest in the vast Himalayan region, which began last week after the 49th anniversary of the 1959 revolt, is the biggest challenge to China's rule there in nearly two decades.
"Please investigate, if possible... some international organisation can try firstly to inquire about the situation in Tibet," the Buddhist spiritual leader said.
"Whether intentionally or unintentionally, some cultural genocide is taking place. There is some kind of discrimination: the Tibetans in their own land quite often are treated as second-class citizens," the Dalai Lama added.
"Some trusted group should go there and see how it happened," added the Dalai Lama, who has long complained that Beijing is flooding Tibet with Han Chinese in order to make the Tibetans a minority in their homeland.
It's really obvious that the Chinese believe they will drive the Tibetans down into obscurity because the Chinese believe the Tibetans are minority people in their west, and the Chinese have many minority cultures they have suppressed in their west for a very long time. The Tibetans are no locked into a tiny space as the Palestinians are where a closely gathered group of people can dramatically affect the occupation of where they live by throwing stones at soldiers and tanks. Tibet is the world's most important watershed, a huge country, incredibly strategic, the center of the Eurasian continent and the world's highest elevation. The Tibetans to the Chinese are just in the way...
My heritage: To put things in perspective. Along with 1/8th Roma I'm 1/8 Welsh 1/16th Scottish 1/16 Danish 1/8 English 1/8th St. Gallen Swiss 1/16th Francophone Swiss 1/16h French 1/4 German (Pennsylvania Dutch) It's quite possible that there's something else with the PA Dutch that I don't yet know about, possibly Native American.
What most matters are the relative cultural influences from each of these groups. My mother made many Welsh dishes from my grandmother being raised by a Welsh American factory foreman, along with the source denied cultural influences and heritage of her Roma mother. So growing up the Welsh rarebit was a favorite of mine. I would love it now (and I never eat anything like it now because I am conscious of gluten and dairy intolerance). I have a big taste for Scotch, probably picked up from my Great Aunt Ruth, who, with my grandmother Katherine, on my father's side, was English/Scottish/Danish. From my Scottish/Danish great grandmother came the literary tradition, and it's probable that that came from the Danish gr gr grandmother. The Scottish were working class Presbyterians in Newark NJ in the mid 19th Century. The English American Long Island blue bloods of the Hamptons put my grandmother and great grandmother into Vassar and literary lives. The factory worker/blacksmith war hero Roman Catholic to his hero's grave gr gr grandfather who was a Francophone Swiss immigrant fought in his mid 40s in the Civil War from the very first battle of the war and into the Battle of Fredericksburg, and was disabled there, where he was discharged in one of the mushrooming of hospitals in Washington D.C. during Fredericksburg. (This intrigues me especially because it was there at that time and place that Walt Whitman was a nurse in those war hospitals, when he wrote Drum Taps). My father and one of his older twin sisters had French names, Eugene and Josephine. There's a portrait of a woman involving a family scandal from the French family, from circa 1850 to 1860, and it is a fine portrait clearly by a highly skilled painter. It doesn't fall at all into what art historians call "American primitive" which were the common family portraits of that era, and the portrait hangs in my cousin Barbara's house. The figure in the portrait is strikingly elegant, and very intelligent and aloof. The story is now only very vaguely remembered, too little to piece together. But from the census I suspect its about my French gr gr grandfather's remarriage. On the other hand the woman's elegance is not consistent with Constantine Beuret's occupations. The woman in the portrait bears a striking resemblance to my Aunt Josephine. And the love of the French language came down from my Aunt Jo and my father to me. Jo had a masters in French, and was a writer of PR for Exxon. I suspect that one or both of the two French women, the natural mother and the stepmother had a strong literary influence on my father and his sisters. On my father's side of the family there has been a love of painting going way back, and I think it came from both the Swiss and French families. My St. Gallen Swiss gr grandfather was raised by a stepfather who owned a saloon in Newark. My St. Gallen gr gr grandmother lost her husband three years into their settling in Newark NJ. My St. Gallen gr gr grandfather was a silver and probably goldsmith, and in the 1850 census he had three men working for him in his shop in Newark, not long before he died in NYC. My gr gr grandmother remarried. Hers is the odyssey I'd like to know most about. She had two more children by her second husband, who died. During the depression of the 1870s she and her children had fallen into deep poverty in the poorest part of Newark in an immigrant Irish neighborhood and with a Portugese neighbor, the Ironbound section of Newark. My gr gr grandmother and her daughter Emma, my gr grandfather's sister, pieced their own business together making a living selling hats in Newark, and by 1890 their business is listed in the Newark City Directory as Emma Geiser and Co., Milliners, and it's damned impressive for a single woman, and Emma was a lifelong single woman, in the late 19th Century to have owned her own business... Back to my mother's side, my mother had a love of singing and an extraordinary voice. My great Aunt Edith, the oldest daughter of my Roma blooded gr grandmother was a professional singer, and the exact details of that I don't know, but I did find out from the internet that in the mid 1950s Edith was on the board of a summer music camp around Black Mountain in North Carolina. The earlier part of Edith's and her husband's life is very sketchy in my knowledge. I suspect they were bohemian. I learned how to read aloud, to dramatize, from that side of the family, and I stood out from early in school in how I could do a reading. Along with that, surprisingly clear in my memory, I learned palm reading from them. Still, when I look at my lifeline it has a message which have actually lived. One more bohemian note, my Great Aunt Ruth lived in Greenwich Village in the 1920s and was trying to be a fiction writer. She moved in culturally elite circles, and on the 1930 census gave her occupation as fiction writer, and I know that did not develop. She first made the living for her family writing for a local newspaper in Westchester County NY. In the 1970s she made Who's Who of American Women as the long time etymology editor for Thorndike Barnhart Dictionary. Through my childhood and adolesence I received the new editions of the dictionary, and developed a love of etymology which I have now. My PA Dutch ancestors were long time farmers who managed usually to find ways to get out of all the wars, except that I have a Civil War letter from one, not exactly sure where in that line, who was a carpenter in the Civil War writing from West Virginia, a very sad toned letter. But still, not a soldier. My mother was born on a farm belonging to that family, which is now a northern suburb of Philadelphia, and from there, through my mother comes the love of the pastoral, and the landscape, and a detailed awareness of the agricultural landscapes of the Northeast and Midwest. My mother loved to account for each farm crop in sight in drives across agricultural landscapes. My father in turn loved to account for every industrial detail in drives across industrial landscapes. My grandfather Geiser owned a real estate business in the Newark NJ area, and, according to my father, at times when they drove across the then completely undeveloped Meadowlands of NJ would say to my young father, "Gene, someday this will all be developed..." My grandmother Katherine Gardner Geiser got her degrees in the classics at Vassar and from her I've gotten my ability to concentrate on reading regardless of anything going on around. Cousin Barbara says that one time when my grandmother was by then an elderly woman, in the apartment where my grandmother lived with my Aunt Jo, my cousin discovered that a pot with water that had been boiling had boiled completely dry, and my grandmother, who had put the pot on and did not know how to cook, was concentrating on one of the Greek tragedies.
What most matters are the relative cultural influences from each of these groups. My mother made many Welsh dishes from my grandmother being raised by a Welsh American factory foreman, along with the source denied cultural influences and heritage of her Roma mother. So growing up the Welsh rarebit was a favorite of mine. I would love it now (and I never eat anything like it now because I am conscious of gluten and dairy intolerance). I have a big taste for Scotch, probably picked up from my Great Aunt Ruth, who, with my grandmother Katherine, on my father's side, was English/Scottish/Danish. From my Scottish/Danish great grandmother came the literary tradition, and it's probable that that came from the Danish gr gr grandmother. The Scottish were working class Presbyterians in Newark NJ in the mid 19th Century. The English American Long Island blue bloods of the Hamptons put my grandmother and great grandmother into Vassar and literary lives. The factory worker/blacksmith war hero Roman Catholic to his hero's grave gr gr grandfather who was a Francophone Swiss immigrant fought in his mid 40s in the Civil War from the very first battle of the war and into the Battle of Fredericksburg, and was disabled there, where he was discharged in one of the mushrooming of hospitals in Washington D.C. during Fredericksburg. (This intrigues me especially because it was there at that time and place that Walt Whitman was a nurse in those war hospitals, when he wrote Drum Taps). My father and one of his older twin sisters had French names, Eugene and Josephine. There's a portrait of a woman involving a family scandal from the French family, from circa 1850 to 1860, and it is a fine portrait clearly by a highly skilled painter. It doesn't fall at all into what art historians call "American primitive" which were the common family portraits of that era, and the portrait hangs in my cousin Barbara's house. The figure in the portrait is strikingly elegant, and very intelligent and aloof. The story is now only very vaguely remembered, too little to piece together. But from the census I suspect its about my French gr gr grandfather's remarriage. On the other hand the woman's elegance is not consistent with Constantine Beuret's occupations. The woman in the portrait bears a striking resemblance to my Aunt Josephine. And the love of the French language came down from my Aunt Jo and my father to me. Jo had a masters in French, and was a writer of PR for Exxon. I suspect that one or both of the two French women, the natural mother and the stepmother had a strong literary influence on my father and his sisters. On my father's side of the family there has been a love of painting going way back, and I think it came from both the Swiss and French families. My St. Gallen Swiss gr grandfather was raised by a stepfather who owned a saloon in Newark. My St. Gallen gr gr grandmother lost her husband three years into their settling in Newark NJ. My St. Gallen gr gr grandfather was a silver and probably goldsmith, and in the 1850 census he had three men working for him in his shop in Newark, not long before he died in NYC. My gr gr grandmother remarried. Hers is the odyssey I'd like to know most about. She had two more children by her second husband, who died. During the depression of the 1870s she and her children had fallen into deep poverty in the poorest part of Newark in an immigrant Irish neighborhood and with a Portugese neighbor, the Ironbound section of Newark. My gr gr grandmother and her daughter Emma, my gr grandfather's sister, pieced their own business together making a living selling hats in Newark, and by 1890 their business is listed in the Newark City Directory as Emma Geiser and Co., Milliners, and it's damned impressive for a single woman, and Emma was a lifelong single woman, in the late 19th Century to have owned her own business... Back to my mother's side, my mother had a love of singing and an extraordinary voice. My great Aunt Edith, the oldest daughter of my Roma blooded gr grandmother was a professional singer, and the exact details of that I don't know, but I did find out from the internet that in the mid 1950s Edith was on the board of a summer music camp around Black Mountain in North Carolina. The earlier part of Edith's and her husband's life is very sketchy in my knowledge. I suspect they were bohemian. I learned how to read aloud, to dramatize, from that side of the family, and I stood out from early in school in how I could do a reading. Along with that, surprisingly clear in my memory, I learned palm reading from them. Still, when I look at my lifeline it has a message which have actually lived. One more bohemian note, my Great Aunt Ruth lived in Greenwich Village in the 1920s and was trying to be a fiction writer. She moved in culturally elite circles, and on the 1930 census gave her occupation as fiction writer, and I know that did not develop. She first made the living for her family writing for a local newspaper in Westchester County NY. In the 1970s she made Who's Who of American Women as the long time etymology editor for Thorndike Barnhart Dictionary. Through my childhood and adolesence I received the new editions of the dictionary, and developed a love of etymology which I have now. My PA Dutch ancestors were long time farmers who managed usually to find ways to get out of all the wars, except that I have a Civil War letter from one, not exactly sure where in that line, who was a carpenter in the Civil War writing from West Virginia, a very sad toned letter. But still, not a soldier. My mother was born on a farm belonging to that family, which is now a northern suburb of Philadelphia, and from there, through my mother comes the love of the pastoral, and the landscape, and a detailed awareness of the agricultural landscapes of the Northeast and Midwest. My mother loved to account for each farm crop in sight in drives across agricultural landscapes. My father in turn loved to account for every industrial detail in drives across industrial landscapes. My grandfather Geiser owned a real estate business in the Newark NJ area, and, according to my father, at times when they drove across the then completely undeveloped Meadowlands of NJ would say to my young father, "Gene, someday this will all be developed..." My grandmother Katherine Gardner Geiser got her degrees in the classics at Vassar and from her I've gotten my ability to concentrate on reading regardless of anything going on around. Cousin Barbara says that one time when my grandmother was by then an elderly woman, in the apartment where my grandmother lived with my Aunt Jo, my cousin discovered that a pot with water that had been boiling had boiled completely dry, and my grandmother, who had put the pot on and did not know how to cook, was concentrating on one of the Greek tragedies.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
August 2 and 3rd 1944
This is from an internet site, except that where the site says "gypsies", I've changed to Roma, other than the name of the night itself, the use by the Nazis of the racist name in their act...
Called by the Nazis "Night of the Gypsies", August 2/3, 1944, the SS rounded up the rest of the Roma by luring them out of the barracks with the promise of water and bread. Since it was well known by the SS that the Romany people would not go quietly to their deaths, the SS was prepared. After the Roma realized what was going on they fought back with their bare hands but they were no match for the clubs and guns of the SS. The Romany were loaded onto the lorries and driven to the gas chambers. Dr. Mengele drove the children under his care to the gas chambers and led them straight to their death. The Roma fought for their lives until their last breath.
Figures for the number of the Roma killed during the holocaust range from 200,000 to a conservative 500,000. Many were not registered at the camps and if they were registered, a simple 'Z" was placed where their name should be. My note: Zegeuner is German for Gypsy. Most of the Roma were either killed in transit or where they were captured with no record of their deaths. A more realistic number of Roma deaths is between 1.5 and 4 million, 80% of the European Roma, slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis.
Called by the Nazis "Night of the Gypsies", August 2/3, 1944, the SS rounded up the rest of the Roma by luring them out of the barracks with the promise of water and bread. Since it was well known by the SS that the Romany people would not go quietly to their deaths, the SS was prepared. After the Roma realized what was going on they fought back with their bare hands but they were no match for the clubs and guns of the SS. The Romany were loaded onto the lorries and driven to the gas chambers. Dr. Mengele drove the children under his care to the gas chambers and led them straight to their death. The Roma fought for their lives until their last breath.
Figures for the number of the Roma killed during the holocaust range from 200,000 to a conservative 500,000. Many were not registered at the camps and if they were registered, a simple 'Z" was placed where their name should be. My note: Zegeuner is German for Gypsy. Most of the Roma were either killed in transit or where they were captured with no record of their deaths. A more realistic number of Roma deaths is between 1.5 and 4 million, 80% of the European Roma, slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis.
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Roma, pronounced Rama
The Roma, called the Gypsies by Europeans, were mostly concentrated in Southeastern Europe until, in 1856, the were legally freed from slavery. There had been some freeing of the Roma from 1844 until the full legal abolition of their bondage. This led to a great wave of Roma immigration into the rest of Europe, to join other Roma who had made it into Western and Central Europe, and large numbers in this wave went to North America. This was when most of the Roma population of the US arrived, in their flight from Southeastern Europe after the abolition of their bondage. They arrived in North America first in a trickle of large bands in the 1840s, until they arrived in a surge in the late 1850s. They were among the great wave that included Irish and Central European immmigrants coming in that period. The Roma were the only ones among those immigrants who were actually being freed from slavery, which they had been in for over 400 years. What an extraordinary ghastly thing it must have been for these Roma, many of whom from their Indian origin were dark skinned, to witness slavery again upon arriving at the dawn of the American Civil War. And one can't doubt that many Roma in those closing days of the Antebellum era had to fight off and many failed to fight off being forced into slavery in the US in the late 1850s, being taken for African. And so it was the time period when my gr gr grandmother pictured to the left arrived and began having children, many children.
Rom, and Roma, are pronounced Rahm and Rahma. Probably from the Hindu divinity, Rama.
Rom, and Roma, are pronounced Rahm and Rahma. Probably from the Hindu divinity, Rama.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Is Spitzer meant to be a poet?
This from the news today, from the AP, with the byline of John Cloud:
"'His visage described discountenance.' Eliot Spitzer wrote those words about a character in a short story for his high school literary magazine. The sentence was florid in an adolescent way - Spitzer was always something of an intellectual show-off. Jason Brown, a friend from those days, later told Spitzer biographer Brooke Masters that Spitzer might simply have written, 'He was unhappy.'"
"But Spitzer's rather poetic sentence seemed apt on March 12, as he resigned as governor of New York in a brief press conference, the culmination of a 48-hour melodrama sparked by revelations that he had been a client of a prostitution ring..."
"'His visage described discountenance.' Eliot Spitzer wrote those words about a character in a short story for his high school literary magazine. The sentence was florid in an adolescent way - Spitzer was always something of an intellectual show-off. Jason Brown, a friend from those days, later told Spitzer biographer Brooke Masters that Spitzer might simply have written, 'He was unhappy.'"
"But Spitzer's rather poetic sentence seemed apt on March 12, as he resigned as governor of New York in a brief press conference, the culmination of a 48-hour melodrama sparked by revelations that he had been a client of a prostitution ring..."
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
poetry book sales
The head book buyer of the Boulder Book Store last night said that last month Boulder was the leader in US sales of Charles Simic's poetry collection of late and new poems, The Voice at 3:00 AM. Nineteen copies sold nationwide and the fact that this single little poetry book reading group chose Simic's book for its reading choice accounted for nearly the book's entire sales in the US. And Simic is the Poet Laureate of the US right now.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Simic
I'm looking at Simic as a whole now dominated by the influence of his immigration, his crossing. I believe now that many of his poems turn on going from old country knowledge to his reshaping into an American. My views that I wrote below were not well formed before the book club. The group brought me insight into his work and since I have had some ideas. I made the entry below my view on Simic's poetry have been transformed:
The Boulder Bookstore poetry book reading group is reading Charles Simic's The Voice at 3 AM. I'm not certain how this evening is going to go for me, second visit to the group. The last one I liked Gluck's Averno too much for the group, when the consensus from all of them, and the group's been evidently going for awhile, was that they didn't like Averno. And I've been reading and studying Gluck for years. I don't like Simic so I'm going to read one poem of his from the book, as the moderator suggested to everyone in e mail they do for the book being long. I plan to read: What Gypsies Told My Grandmother When She Was a Young Girl.
Simic's book is full of cliched bias language. It's all been seen too much. It sounds to me like he's just trying to imitate James Wright and other male writers who used the line break exclusively in US poetry in the mid through late 20th Century. James Wright was a great poet, one of the best. Imitating though gets stale. The Gypsies poem annoys me because he is just pulling out a stereotype to prove nothing except that he can get an image from a stereotype. I'm going to write a response poem to Simic's poem in which my great great grandmother, pictured to the left, meets Simic's grandmother.
It's 5:07 PM, I'm in the Paradise Restaurant, and the book group meets at 6:30. I probably won't go now that I think about it.
The Boulder Bookstore poetry book reading group is reading Charles Simic's The Voice at 3 AM. I'm not certain how this evening is going to go for me, second visit to the group. The last one I liked Gluck's Averno too much for the group, when the consensus from all of them, and the group's been evidently going for awhile, was that they didn't like Averno. And I've been reading and studying Gluck for years. I don't like Simic so I'm going to read one poem of his from the book, as the moderator suggested to everyone in e mail they do for the book being long. I plan to read: What Gypsies Told My Grandmother When She Was a Young Girl.
Simic's book is full of cliched bias language. It's all been seen too much. It sounds to me like he's just trying to imitate James Wright and other male writers who used the line break exclusively in US poetry in the mid through late 20th Century. James Wright was a great poet, one of the best. Imitating though gets stale. The Gypsies poem annoys me because he is just pulling out a stereotype to prove nothing except that he can get an image from a stereotype. I'm going to write a response poem to Simic's poem in which my great great grandmother, pictured to the left, meets Simic's grandmother.
It's 5:07 PM, I'm in the Paradise Restaurant, and the book group meets at 6:30. I probably won't go now that I think about it.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Just bought a book today that has some great stuff on meter: Structural Functions in Music. Wallace Berry. Chapter Three, the last chapter, is on Rhythm and Meter. He spends some time on a definition of meter and its entanglement with rhythm.
Some points in the chapter that stand out immediately:
He begins the chapter with the statement, "All element processes are rhythmic..." And to figure out what he means by "element processes" one has to go back to the second chapter, which is on texture, and deals heavily with rhythm and meter.
He develops his definition of meter by defining pace, pattern, and grouping. It's how he looks at meter as grouping that is especially valuable, I think. And in the chapter he eventually gets to "weak-strong combinations" and from there to our poetic feet and applies them.
What especially interests me here is how Berry brings out the flexibility in grouping meter.
Meter as rhythm he calls the energy dispelled in relation to the extent of eventfulness in the sucession of impulses... Now seeing energy dispelled in a poem is a new perspective for me...
I have never studied texture in music, and now I'm launched into thinking about texture in poetry.
Some points in the chapter that stand out immediately:
He begins the chapter with the statement, "All element processes are rhythmic..." And to figure out what he means by "element processes" one has to go back to the second chapter, which is on texture, and deals heavily with rhythm and meter.
He develops his definition of meter by defining pace, pattern, and grouping. It's how he looks at meter as grouping that is especially valuable, I think. And in the chapter he eventually gets to "weak-strong combinations" and from there to our poetic feet and applies them.
What especially interests me here is how Berry brings out the flexibility in grouping meter.
Meter as rhythm he calls the energy dispelled in relation to the extent of eventfulness in the sucession of impulses... Now seeing energy dispelled in a poem is a new perspective for me...
I have never studied texture in music, and now I'm launched into thinking about texture in poetry.
The soul is dead in the water in American poetry?
Recently on another poetry blog someone responded to some things I said about the soul in poetry and on poets' writings about the soul proclaiming that the soul in American poetry is, to quote: "dead in the water".
I'm finding that bringing up the soul as dealt with by important poets stirs up very strong reactions from a conservative branch of American poets today. Is this a conservative idea that the soul in American poetry is dead in the water, and perhaps from ones who could even be called poetry's own neocons, and therefore a right wing version of what the left used to say decades ago in literature about God, "God is dead"? Is there a difference between saying "God is dead" and saying "the soul is dead in the water"? I actually want to believe there is since my literary roots have so much of those existentialist ideas about God, and yet here I am today focusing on writing about the soul. And poetry's protoneocons are the ones challenging me for doing this.
I'm finding that bringing up the soul as dealt with by important poets stirs up very strong reactions from a conservative branch of American poets today. Is this a conservative idea that the soul in American poetry is dead in the water, and perhaps from ones who could even be called poetry's own neocons, and therefore a right wing version of what the left used to say decades ago in literature about God, "God is dead"? Is there a difference between saying "God is dead" and saying "the soul is dead in the water"? I actually want to believe there is since my literary roots have so much of those existentialist ideas about God, and yet here I am today focusing on writing about the soul. And poetry's protoneocons are the ones challenging me for doing this.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
influential song lyric from my youth
I heard the song Flirtin' With Disaster three times in different spots in Boulder on this day, and my guess is on the same radio station playing; on the Hop Bus, in Paradise Bakery Restaurant, and in Peaberry Coffee late at night. By the band Molly Hatchett It came out in the years I got a car. The car was a pea green Dodge Scamp. This song was playing on the radio that I had in my college dorm room, and in the first summer I had the car. It played over the time period I exited Bard College...
The metrics of this song lyric if it's read as a poem is a string of trochees which was common for song lyrics in the period.
Hearing the song one always hears the lyric start with lines that if read in conventional metric rhythm is:
FLIRTin WITH diSASter
Therefore in trochees it can be read with great power.
However, the lyric is sung by the band with a trick of suppressing the stress on flirt. As a result it's sung as flirtin with dis SAS ter and therefore SAS bears all the stress weight of the entire line, and the metrics become a kind of classical Greek meter that might have been sung by the ancient Greek poets. From SAS the song spins into complex tumbling stresses, a fractal stress structure.
Im travelin down the road,
Im flirtin with disaster.
Ive got the pedal to the floor,
My life is running faster.
Im out of money, Im out of hope,
It looks like self destruction.
Well how much more can we take,
With all of this corruption.
Been flirtin with disaster,
Yall know what I mean.
And the way we run our lives,
It makes no sense to me.
I dont know about yourself or,
What you want to be - yeah.
When we gamble with our time,
We choose our destiny.
So many poets' entire lives can be described by this song over the centuries,and the ones to come... Okay, for its language it's a simple song lyric, and yet it's got something universal to say about the life of the artist... Caravaggio, Keats, Alcaeus, Mozart... really, the list would be endless... And the saying done here is in the metrics entangling with the basic meaning, not a narrative, not fractured the way what's taken as acceptable for publishable poetry today, but certainly a confessional...
The metrics of this song lyric if it's read as a poem is a string of trochees which was common for song lyrics in the period.
Hearing the song one always hears the lyric start with lines that if read in conventional metric rhythm is:
FLIRTin WITH diSASter
Therefore in trochees it can be read with great power.
However, the lyric is sung by the band with a trick of suppressing the stress on flirt. As a result it's sung as flirtin with dis SAS ter and therefore SAS bears all the stress weight of the entire line, and the metrics become a kind of classical Greek meter that might have been sung by the ancient Greek poets. From SAS the song spins into complex tumbling stresses, a fractal stress structure.
Im travelin down the road,
Im flirtin with disaster.
Ive got the pedal to the floor,
My life is running faster.
Im out of money, Im out of hope,
It looks like self destruction.
Well how much more can we take,
With all of this corruption.
Been flirtin with disaster,
Yall know what I mean.
And the way we run our lives,
It makes no sense to me.
I dont know about yourself or,
What you want to be - yeah.
When we gamble with our time,
We choose our destiny.
So many poets' entire lives can be described by this song over the centuries,and the ones to come... Okay, for its language it's a simple song lyric, and yet it's got something universal to say about the life of the artist... Caravaggio, Keats, Alcaeus, Mozart... really, the list would be endless... And the saying done here is in the metrics entangling with the basic meaning, not a narrative, not fractured the way what's taken as acceptable for publishable poetry today, but certainly a confessional...
Monday, March 3, 2008
There's a lot more that goes on in a bohemian watering hole than just what poets talk about so I will have to broaden my scope here to cover the whole thing. Just have to think about how to approach this in my posts... This is a cyberspace dive....
Saturday, March 1, 2008
aging as a poet...
From Rilke's Letters on Cezanne, I identify with much of this (except fortunately so far with Cezanne'e health issues, but without health insurance in the US I can't say how long I can be so lucky. The way the monster TB is heading down the highway things get more like what comes around goes around all the time.)
"... Cezanne, sick, old, and isolated, is seized by a rage. Coming home in the evening, he'll start boiling up over some change (a change caused by industry and development in the town of Aix where Cezanne lived), works himself into a fury, and finally, noticing how it exhausts him to be so angry, he'll promise himself: I'll stay home; work, just work, nothing else."
And yes I so do identify with that. I go out on the little deck in the middle of the night and am calmed by the cool air and the stillness.
Continuing: "And then from these changes for the worse in the little town of Aix, he makes a horrified inference about what must be happening elsewhere. Once, when the conversation turned to present conditions, to industry and all that, he burst out with terrible eyes: 'Ca va mal... C'est effrayante la vie!'"
"Out there, something vaguely terrible on the increase; a little closer by, indifference and mockery, and then suddenly this old man in his work, painting nudes only from old sketches he had made forty years ago in Paris, knowing that Aix would not allow him a model. 'At my age, "he says "I couldn't get a woman below fifty at best, and I know it wouldn't even be possible to find such a person in Aix.' So he uses old drawings as models. And lays his apples on bed covers which Madame Bremond will surely miss one day, and places a wine bottle among them or whatever he happens to find. And makes his 'saints' out of such things; and forces them to be beautiful, to stand for the whole world and all joy and glory, and doesn't know whether he has persuaded them to do it for him..."
In an essay by Paul Levine published several years ago called Two Journeys he describes a poet he knew who was unsuccessful at getting recognition. Levine says of the man, "... To put it bluntly he was and is what the world might call 'a failed poet' though he is a gifted writer. He is both unlucky and without any clout in what I will call the 'church temporal' of poetry, that world of ass-kissing and favor trading that brings so much useless work to acclaim. He had decided that even without a publisher he would put together his complete poems..." Of course Levine is a snot bag here because everyone knows that people who write poetry get satisfaction publishing their chapbooks without ever becoming famous, and it's not necessary except for famous writers who get off on being coronated at conferences every summer to describe everyone who doesn't become famous as a 'failed poet'.. Levine goes on to say, "This man knew, as all of us who write poetry know, that if the work is worthy eventually it will find its readers. It may take more years than we have, as it did in the case of Dickinson and Kit Stuart, but our job is the work of creation and as such it never ends..."
But for the poet it might be impossible to answer this problem with Cezanne's answer: "I'll stay home; work, just work, nothing else," because the poet might not be able to write without being emotionally entangled with the people who are in the surrounding community, who are in their own villages like Aix... In other words Cezanne could work in his apartment and stay away from the village's small town vices, the brothels and the young women, and the bored wives of any age, curious about the old genius, and its dives, but a poet cannot stay out of trouble and expect to write anything that will last...
"... Cezanne, sick, old, and isolated, is seized by a rage. Coming home in the evening, he'll start boiling up over some change (a change caused by industry and development in the town of Aix where Cezanne lived), works himself into a fury, and finally, noticing how it exhausts him to be so angry, he'll promise himself: I'll stay home; work, just work, nothing else."
And yes I so do identify with that. I go out on the little deck in the middle of the night and am calmed by the cool air and the stillness.
Continuing: "And then from these changes for the worse in the little town of Aix, he makes a horrified inference about what must be happening elsewhere. Once, when the conversation turned to present conditions, to industry and all that, he burst out with terrible eyes: 'Ca va mal... C'est effrayante la vie!'"
"Out there, something vaguely terrible on the increase; a little closer by, indifference and mockery, and then suddenly this old man in his work, painting nudes only from old sketches he had made forty years ago in Paris, knowing that Aix would not allow him a model. 'At my age, "he says "I couldn't get a woman below fifty at best, and I know it wouldn't even be possible to find such a person in Aix.' So he uses old drawings as models. And lays his apples on bed covers which Madame Bremond will surely miss one day, and places a wine bottle among them or whatever he happens to find. And makes his 'saints' out of such things; and forces them to be beautiful, to stand for the whole world and all joy and glory, and doesn't know whether he has persuaded them to do it for him..."
In an essay by Paul Levine published several years ago called Two Journeys he describes a poet he knew who was unsuccessful at getting recognition. Levine says of the man, "... To put it bluntly he was and is what the world might call 'a failed poet' though he is a gifted writer. He is both unlucky and without any clout in what I will call the 'church temporal' of poetry, that world of ass-kissing and favor trading that brings so much useless work to acclaim. He had decided that even without a publisher he would put together his complete poems..." Of course Levine is a snot bag here because everyone knows that people who write poetry get satisfaction publishing their chapbooks without ever becoming famous, and it's not necessary except for famous writers who get off on being coronated at conferences every summer to describe everyone who doesn't become famous as a 'failed poet'.. Levine goes on to say, "This man knew, as all of us who write poetry know, that if the work is worthy eventually it will find its readers. It may take more years than we have, as it did in the case of Dickinson and Kit Stuart, but our job is the work of creation and as such it never ends..."
But for the poet it might be impossible to answer this problem with Cezanne's answer: "I'll stay home; work, just work, nothing else," because the poet might not be able to write without being emotionally entangled with the people who are in the surrounding community, who are in their own villages like Aix... In other words Cezanne could work in his apartment and stay away from the village's small town vices, the brothels and the young women, and the bored wives of any age, curious about the old genius, and its dives, but a poet cannot stay out of trouble and expect to write anything that will last...
Thursday, February 28, 2008
writing the profile
Okay, the Poets Who Blog site recommends a thorough profile. What key points in a poets' life should be in the profile? A couple of days ago I got into a conversation with a young man just out of college about Thomas Mann's work and Hesse. I told him how I first came to read Steppenwolf. I'll fill in more details here: I was in my very early twenties and had a roommate who was a terrible alcoholic at age 29, and came from a brilliant and troubled family of brothers who were raised in orphanages in the worst part of Chester PA. This roommate could not read and had taught himself to play guitar quite well. One of his brothers was a writer and had died of the DTs in Chester PA. The house I lived at this time was in the Hudson Valley of NY twenty or so miles from Bard College. My roommate, Frank B., often passed out on the kitchen floor after coming home from work, stretched out with his arm toward his cat's bowl, his cat named Linda after Linda Ronstadt. Frank had a framed picture of Linda Ronstadt on his wall. When I was prepared to leave the house to move somewhere else Frank came to my door, drunk, with a bag full of books. He said he wanted me to have the books. They were his brother's who had died. And in the bag of books that had belonged to the dead young writer was Steppenwolf, a paperback with a film of dirt on it, which I tnen read... I was trying to write short stories at that time and was having a very hard time getting it. I was exchanging many letters at that time, this was long before e mail, with a woman a few years older than me who belonged to a family that had been a friend of ours all through my growing up. But I just discovered this young woman, who did not seem young at all, but to me seemed enormmously experienced. We wrote to each other about writing short stories, and we exchanged our first attempts at writing short stories. She gave me the first compliment of my life, asking me how I was able to make the stories so real. I don't know if she ever continued to write any more. My father saw her a few times over the years and each time told me she asked about me. She was a graduate of Radcliffe. The letters broke off when she married a man who had a catamaran, and they spent a long time going around the Caribbean on his catamaran...
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
the beautiful poetry reading line up
Robert Hass and a number of other poets are giving readings up in Greeley Colorado next week in accordance with a writers' conference there. I just found out about it yesterday, probably won't be able to make it anyway unless I find someone to ride up. Looking over the necessary column of publicity photos with the slight blurbs that go with them, and I hardly notice the writing, who does, and no one is meant to, all of the poets are shown ridiculously touched up and stylized in their photographs. One would have to believe that there is no such thing as a poet in America with a physical blemish or scar of any kind, that nothing of the hazards of life could ever touch the charmed existence of American poets. Then my desire was to see the most beautiful young woman poet pictured, as has been the motivation for many choices I've made concering poetry over the years. Poets and Writers magazine has a photograph of a photogenic woman stylized and posed on its cover this month, a writer I probably never would have heard of had I not bought the Poets and Writers issue for its lists in the back. Poets and Writers Magazine appears to be striving to compete with Hollywood to find a Paris Hilton for American publishing. The consequence of that striving is exactly the consequence to American acting, the reason that the Oscars themselves were handed over by the judges this year almost entirely to Europeans, including all four of the acting Oscars. It's really getting very hard to trust a line up of poets at a reading, exactly as it's becoming very difficult to trust what guides American acting or any of the arts, that is, photogenic appearance and nothing more.
Monday, February 25, 2008
In the country of the one armed bandits the blind man is king.
In the country of the rumor mongers the deaf mute is king.
(Do not ask me what happens when the country of the rumor mongers goes to war with the country of the one armed bandits, but such a scenario must be inevitable.)
In the country of the rumor mongers the deaf mute is king.
(Do not ask me what happens when the country of the rumor mongers goes to war with the country of the one armed bandits, but such a scenario must be inevitable.)
Being a poet in a White flight destination, 2008
There has to be argument, there has to be the fight (with rules), before any good idea is going to result...
I've lived too long already in a town with a decades long legacy that has combined the notion that always fails of monocratic thought, too much money, and too long having been so called gentrified, that is, too White. The neighborhood where I live, on the edge of Colorado University, decades ago was a Black neighborhood, and today the University itself with a student population of 30,000, prided itself last year on reaching an African American enrollment of 100. 100. The city of Denver has a good sized African American population. The state's flagship university's enrollment is determined by the people who control the state, and these days the county of Boulder reflects in terms of its racial attitudes the state as a whole. The Coloradan day to day is very much like John Denver, with the mask, the utter unwillingness to engage in any sort of discourse, let alone any discussion that would lead to intelligent products of debate. I think part of this Colorado characteristic is from the long history in the state relative to the length of the state's existence of tourism. Colorado was not a state in which a pioneer trail crossed. It sought people from the East Coast with money, to come, spend, and go back, very early in its history. As a result the Coloradan developed probably the thickest mask of any subculture in American life, that is, to welcome the wealthy tourist from somewhere east, and to retain an extreme suspicion of the outsider at the same time. What this has led to is revulsion in the state to cultural synthesis of any kind.
I've lived too long already in a town with a decades long legacy that has combined the notion that always fails of monocratic thought, too much money, and too long having been so called gentrified, that is, too White. The neighborhood where I live, on the edge of Colorado University, decades ago was a Black neighborhood, and today the University itself with a student population of 30,000, prided itself last year on reaching an African American enrollment of 100. 100. The city of Denver has a good sized African American population. The state's flagship university's enrollment is determined by the people who control the state, and these days the county of Boulder reflects in terms of its racial attitudes the state as a whole. The Coloradan day to day is very much like John Denver, with the mask, the utter unwillingness to engage in any sort of discourse, let alone any discussion that would lead to intelligent products of debate. I think part of this Colorado characteristic is from the long history in the state relative to the length of the state's existence of tourism. Colorado was not a state in which a pioneer trail crossed. It sought people from the East Coast with money, to come, spend, and go back, very early in its history. As a result the Coloradan developed probably the thickest mask of any subculture in American life, that is, to welcome the wealthy tourist from somewhere east, and to retain an extreme suspicion of the outsider at the same time. What this has led to is revulsion in the state to cultural synthesis of any kind.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
I keep going back to an essay by Sandra M. Gilbert that appeared in Poetry, September 2003 on structuring a book following how six contemporary poets did it, the essay titled Of First and Last, and Midst. I still have the grey covered Poetry issue, now a relic from before the current Foundation era of the magazine. I was using a photocopy of the article from this issue, while this issue was slowly mouldering in a storage locker for two years, but now I'm using this original again. It has some old coffee stains on the cover. It and other books and papers on a table in the chain Paradise Bakery in Boulder, where I'm writing and using wifi right now, drew a suspicious stare from an older lady coming in to this very sunlit back room of the restaurant. Gilbert asks, "... Do our poetic personalities--our authorial "personae", as the New Critics used to put it,--manifest themselves in our aesthetic "first and last, and midst"...? She looks first at Laurie Sheck's Black Series which I'm going to look for online and purchase later this afternoon, because I'm reminded of how much I identify my own work with what Gilbert says about Scheck's. Gilbert doubts Scheck's solemnity, but it sounds appealing to me, since I beleive there's just too much lack of solemnity in so much American poetry these days...
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Taking issue with Donald Revell's translator's afterword to his translation, 2007, of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell. Revell begins his afterward by saying modernity's adventure begins with Huckleberry Finn. Revell goes on to say, "I see Arthur Rimbaud smiling, giving up on writing even as he begins, knowing in his soul the only reason for doing a poem is never to do it again: to abandon it, along with all the other poems, to the tender mercies of Aunt Sally; to light for unincorporated and unbound territories where poetry is innocent of even every word. So Modernity begins as an outrageous innocence, a recklessness with nothing but further recklessness in mind, as anything further would be End..."
Revell twists Rimbaud into American mysficatory discourse and turns modernity, an urban phenomenon, into Huck Finn, and attempts to turn all of modernism on its head into an American heartland discourse.
Revell twists Rimbaud into American mysficatory discourse and turns modernity, an urban phenomenon, into Huck Finn, and attempts to turn all of modernism on its head into an American heartland discourse.
My apologies for my blog's lack of grace. I'm still getting used to organizing it, how much I can put in it, all the things that make for clarity and um, dirt?
Friday, February 22, 2008
Today, always the back and forth struggle with ideas of the poems and the making of the poems... I feel I can never stray too far from making at this stage of life. I know I would not have the courage to put down writing poetry for a year, explore one thing, and then come back to poetry. Probably though that would lead to better poetry from me at this stage of my life. So here I am starting to launch into matters of soul, will, intellect, and feeling that I am losing track of the making of poems. I don't like the word "doing" for this. But perhaps doing is what goes into those matters that become the content of poems, and doing needs to be for the poetry to be worthwhile much more than the ordinary doing, I think, much more than doing love, and errands, and material matters..
....
Got a rejection from Mobious on this day entirely because I submitted to them poems in which lines were too long for their guidelines. I've never looked for line length in guidelines. I sent three poems to them in which I had been experimenting with very long lines, which I haven't been doing lately anyway. They want a maximum of 50 characters in a line.
....
Got a rejection from Mobious on this day entirely because I submitted to them poems in which lines were too long for their guidelines. I've never looked for line length in guidelines. I sent three poems to them in which I had been experimenting with very long lines, which I haven't been doing lately anyway. They want a maximum of 50 characters in a line.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Can discourse like this be rearranged and turned into poetry? This is from writing by David Horowitz. Its language as it stands now is in rigor mortis:
"Reagan had the heartland in him, the faith in people and their will to be free, which is America’s founding faith. It is naïve; it is wildly optimistic. But it works."
I recommend trying to save as many words in this, while allowing for new modifiers to be added, and allowing for rearranging in any way possible, to turn the underlying violent intent of Horowitz's message here into one of the highest tolerance possible.
.......
The word "heartland" was coined by the English geopolitician Halford John MacKinder in 1919. It did not exist prior to MacKinder's use. Never in the time of the American frontier was there such a word as "heartland". The mystical notion of an American heartland has arisen only since WW2.
From the wiki on MacKinder:
In 1904 Mackinder gave a paper on "The Geographical Pivot of History" at the Royal Geographical Society, in which he formulated the Heartland Theory. This is often considered as a, if not the, founding moment of Geopolitics, as a field of study, although Mackinder did not use the term. Whilst the Heartland Theory initially receiving little attention outside geography, this theory would influence the foreign policies of world powers ever since.
His next major work was in 1919 - Democratic Ideals and Reality - was a perspective on the 1904 work in the light of peace treaties and Woodrow Wilson's idealism. This contains his most famous quote: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World." This message was composed for world statesmen at the Treaty of Versailles; the emphasis on East Europe as the strategic route to the Heartland was interpreted as requiring a strip of buffer state to separate Germany and Russia. These were created by the peace negotiators but proved to be ineffective bulwarks in 1939. Although Mackinder was anti-Bolshevik (as British High Commissioner he tried to unite the White Russian forces), the principal concern of his work was to warn of the possibility of another major war (a warning also given by economist John Maynard Keynes).
Enter the Nazis
The Heartland Theory was enthusiastically taken up by the German school of Geopolitik, in particular by its main proponent Karl Haushofer. Whilst Geopolitik was later embraced by the German Nazi regime in the 1930s, Mackinder was always extremely critical of the German exploitation of his ideas. The German interpretation of the Heartland Theory is referred to explicitly (without mentioning the connection to Mackinder) in The Nazis Strike, the second of Frank Capra's Why We Fight series of American World War II propaganda films.
The mystificatory heartland created by the American right has perverted principles that belonged to many of the early American religious groups. One very good example is how the heartland myth perverts this classic Shaker folk hymn by eviscerating love from their message:
Tis the gift to be simple,
'tis the gift to be free,
'tis the gift to come down
where we ought to be,
and when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained
to bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
to turn, turn, will be our delight
till by turning, turning we come round right.
"Reagan had the heartland in him, the faith in people and their will to be free, which is America’s founding faith. It is naïve; it is wildly optimistic. But it works."
I recommend trying to save as many words in this, while allowing for new modifiers to be added, and allowing for rearranging in any way possible, to turn the underlying violent intent of Horowitz's message here into one of the highest tolerance possible.
.......
The word "heartland" was coined by the English geopolitician Halford John MacKinder in 1919. It did not exist prior to MacKinder's use. Never in the time of the American frontier was there such a word as "heartland". The mystical notion of an American heartland has arisen only since WW2.
From the wiki on MacKinder:
In 1904 Mackinder gave a paper on "The Geographical Pivot of History" at the Royal Geographical Society, in which he formulated the Heartland Theory. This is often considered as a, if not the, founding moment of Geopolitics, as a field of study, although Mackinder did not use the term. Whilst the Heartland Theory initially receiving little attention outside geography, this theory would influence the foreign policies of world powers ever since.
His next major work was in 1919 - Democratic Ideals and Reality - was a perspective on the 1904 work in the light of peace treaties and Woodrow Wilson's idealism. This contains his most famous quote: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World." This message was composed for world statesmen at the Treaty of Versailles; the emphasis on East Europe as the strategic route to the Heartland was interpreted as requiring a strip of buffer state to separate Germany and Russia. These were created by the peace negotiators but proved to be ineffective bulwarks in 1939. Although Mackinder was anti-Bolshevik (as British High Commissioner he tried to unite the White Russian forces), the principal concern of his work was to warn of the possibility of another major war (a warning also given by economist John Maynard Keynes).
Enter the Nazis
The Heartland Theory was enthusiastically taken up by the German school of Geopolitik, in particular by its main proponent Karl Haushofer. Whilst Geopolitik was later embraced by the German Nazi regime in the 1930s, Mackinder was always extremely critical of the German exploitation of his ideas. The German interpretation of the Heartland Theory is referred to explicitly (without mentioning the connection to Mackinder) in The Nazis Strike, the second of Frank Capra's Why We Fight series of American World War II propaganda films.
The mystificatory heartland created by the American right has perverted principles that belonged to many of the early American religious groups. One very good example is how the heartland myth perverts this classic Shaker folk hymn by eviscerating love from their message:
Tis the gift to be simple,
'tis the gift to be free,
'tis the gift to come down
where we ought to be,
and when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained
to bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
to turn, turn, will be our delight
till by turning, turning we come round right.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Threads right now in this blog: Photogenics ruining American poetry (but then, ruin undoes the intent of photogenics anyway, so their goal will never succeed), Revell perverting Rimbaud, Recombining, soul, soul and self, being not afraid with one's art to fail, self transformation, cultural stagnation impacting on one's self, empathy, ingenuity, separation, grace, to grok, Yeats, Louise Gluck, Hell, heartland, wild, wildly, cutting off friendship and relationship, classical music and classical instruments in poetry, Camus, Basquiat, Keats, the closing of bohemian haunts and memories of them, the origin of the world, Courbet, Whistler, art curating, social clumsiness, beauty and ugliness, the artist-scientist, beflugler, tourbillon...
Monday, February 18, 2008
Why do poets write about the soul? How much of the poets' population comes around eventually to writing about the soul? Just a minority who stand out for doing it? Or more?
From Louise Gluck, Averno, pg 29, section titled Echoes:
Once I could imagine my soul
I could imagine my death.
When I imagined my death
my soul died. This
I remember clearly.
My body persisted.
Not thrived, but persisted.
Why I do not know.
.......
The soul first appears in Averno on pg. 17, section titled Persephone the Wanderer.
Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise
the three levels of the known world ,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.
You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?
White of forgetfulness,
of desecration-
.................
Marina Tsvetaeva:
If your soul was born with wings
What does a hut mean or a palace of kings!
What -- Genghis Khan, and what -- a horde!
I have two foes in the whole world,
They are two twins in one image united:
Hunger of hungry and glut of glutted.
Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, April 1994,
Edited by Dmitry Karshtedt, November 1996.
........
In the book club meeting at the Boulder Bookstore this past week a man at the meeting went on at length about his discomfort, and one could feel his discomfort when he was done explaining, with Gluck writing about the soul. He completed his thought by saying Gluck doesn't have authority to write about the soul. I suggested that Gluck with the musical allusions that are in Averno but perhaps without any references (at least that I or anybody there could see) might be guiding the entire book by one classical composition, and perhaps, just a shot in the dark suggestion by me, Liszt's Sonata in B Minor, which as I suggested that pointed out that piece is seen as a journey of the soul. I forgot to say that it's a journey of a dark soul.
........
Yeats, Dialogue of Self and Soul
Yeats looks here in this poem surprisingly closer to what has been Gluck's work in its looseness of line than one would expect of him...
My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?
My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees
Is Sato’s ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady’s dress and round
The wooden scabbard bound and wound,
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.
My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect its wandering
To this and that and t’other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery
Heart’s purple-and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier’s right
A charter to commit the crime once more.
My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone.
Ii
My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies?
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what’s the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action, or in thought;
Measure the lot to forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
.......
A poem of mine on the mind and the soul:
Fields and Souls
Fields that souls passed on might go
to, to rest for eternity;
fields and souls, such distance for
the ideal.
There are mountain parks to drive to;
you are visiting the neighborhood
of Everest, climbing. Here you were
fighting the urge
to stay put to keep at hammering.
..........
Etymology of soul from the wiki:
Modern English soul continues Old English sáwol, sáwel, first attested in the 8th century (in Beowulf v. 2820 and in the Vespasian Psalter 77.50), cognate to other Germanic terms for the same concept, including Gothic saiwala, Old High German sêula, sêla, Old Saxon sêola, Old Low Franconian sêla, sîla, Old Norse sála. The further etymology of the Germanic word is uncertain. A common suggestion is a connection with the word sea, and from this evidence alone, it has been speculated that the early Germanic peoples believed that the spirits of deceased rested at the bottom of the sea or similar. A more recent suggestion[1] connects it with a root for "binding", Germanic *sailian (OE sēlian, OHG seilen), related to the notion of being "bound" in death, and the practice of ritually binding or restraining the corpse of the deceased in the grave to prevent his or her return as a ghost.
The word is in any case clearly an adaptation by early missionaries to the Germanic peoples, in particular Ulfila, apostle to the Goths (4th century) of a native Germanic concept, coined as a translation of Greek ψυχή psychē "life, spirit, consciousness".
The Greek word is derived from a verb "to cool, to blow" and hence refers to the vital breath, the animating principle in man and animals, as opposed to σῶμα "body". It could refer to a ghost or spirit of the dead in Homer, and to a more philosophical notion of an immortal and immaterial essence left over at death since Pindar. Latin anima figured as a translation of ψυχή since Terence. It occurs juxtaposed to σῶμα e.g. in Matthew 10:28:
— καὶ μὴ φοβηθεῖσθε ἀπὸ τῶν ἀποκτεννόντων τὸ σῶμα, τὴν δὲ ψυχὴν μὴ δυναμένων ἀποκτεῖναι· φοβεῖσθε δὲ μᾶλλον τὸν δυνάμενον καὶ ψυχὴν καὶ σῶμα ἀπολέσαι ἐν γεέννῃ.
Vulgate: et nolite timere eos qui occidunt corpus animam autem non possunt occidere sed potius eum timete qui potest et animam et corpus perdere in gehennam.
KJV "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."
In the Septuagint, ψυχή translates Hebrew נפש nephesh, meaning "life, vital breath", in English variously translated as "soul, self, life, creature, person, appetite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion"; e.g. in Genesis 1:20:
— וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ הַמַּ֔יִם שֶׁ֖רֶץ נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה
LXX καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός ἐξαγαγέτω τὰ ὕδατα ἑρπετὰ ψυχῶν ζωσῶν.
Vulgate Creavitque Deus cete grandia, et omnem animam viventem atque motabilem.
KJV "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth."
Paul of Tarsus used ψυχή and πνευμα specifically to distinguish between the Jewish notions of נפש nephesh and רוח ruah (also in LXX, e.g. Genesis 1:2 וְר֣וּחַאֱלֹהִ֔ים = πνευμα θεου = spiritus Dei = "the Spirit of God").
From Louise Gluck, Averno, pg 29, section titled Echoes:
Once I could imagine my soul
I could imagine my death.
When I imagined my death
my soul died. This
I remember clearly.
My body persisted.
Not thrived, but persisted.
Why I do not know.
.......
The soul first appears in Averno on pg. 17, section titled Persephone the Wanderer.
Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise
the three levels of the known world ,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.
You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?
White of forgetfulness,
of desecration-
.................
Marina Tsvetaeva:
If your soul was born with wings
What does a hut mean or a palace of kings!
What -- Genghis Khan, and what -- a horde!
I have two foes in the whole world,
They are two twins in one image united:
Hunger of hungry and glut of glutted.
Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, April 1994,
Edited by Dmitry Karshtedt, November 1996.
........
In the book club meeting at the Boulder Bookstore this past week a man at the meeting went on at length about his discomfort, and one could feel his discomfort when he was done explaining, with Gluck writing about the soul. He completed his thought by saying Gluck doesn't have authority to write about the soul. I suggested that Gluck with the musical allusions that are in Averno but perhaps without any references (at least that I or anybody there could see) might be guiding the entire book by one classical composition, and perhaps, just a shot in the dark suggestion by me, Liszt's Sonata in B Minor, which as I suggested that pointed out that piece is seen as a journey of the soul. I forgot to say that it's a journey of a dark soul.
........
Yeats, Dialogue of Self and Soul
Yeats looks here in this poem surprisingly closer to what has been Gluck's work in its looseness of line than one would expect of him...
My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?
My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees
Is Sato’s ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady’s dress and round
The wooden scabbard bound and wound,
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.
My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect its wandering
To this and that and t’other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery
Heart’s purple-and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier’s right
A charter to commit the crime once more.
My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone.
Ii
My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies?
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what’s the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action, or in thought;
Measure the lot to forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
.......
A poem of mine on the mind and the soul:
Fields and Souls
Fields that souls passed on might go
to, to rest for eternity;
fields and souls, such distance for
the ideal.
There are mountain parks to drive to;
you are visiting the neighborhood
of Everest, climbing. Here you were
fighting the urge
to stay put to keep at hammering.
..........
Etymology of soul from the wiki:
Modern English soul continues Old English sáwol, sáwel, first attested in the 8th century (in Beowulf v. 2820 and in the Vespasian Psalter 77.50), cognate to other Germanic terms for the same concept, including Gothic saiwala, Old High German sêula, sêla, Old Saxon sêola, Old Low Franconian sêla, sîla, Old Norse sála. The further etymology of the Germanic word is uncertain. A common suggestion is a connection with the word sea, and from this evidence alone, it has been speculated that the early Germanic peoples believed that the spirits of deceased rested at the bottom of the sea or similar. A more recent suggestion[1] connects it with a root for "binding", Germanic *sailian (OE sēlian, OHG seilen), related to the notion of being "bound" in death, and the practice of ritually binding or restraining the corpse of the deceased in the grave to prevent his or her return as a ghost.
The word is in any case clearly an adaptation by early missionaries to the Germanic peoples, in particular Ulfila, apostle to the Goths (4th century) of a native Germanic concept, coined as a translation of Greek ψυχή psychē "life, spirit, consciousness".
The Greek word is derived from a verb "to cool, to blow" and hence refers to the vital breath, the animating principle in man and animals, as opposed to σῶμα "body". It could refer to a ghost or spirit of the dead in Homer, and to a more philosophical notion of an immortal and immaterial essence left over at death since Pindar. Latin anima figured as a translation of ψυχή since Terence. It occurs juxtaposed to σῶμα e.g. in Matthew 10:28:
— καὶ μὴ φοβηθεῖσθε ἀπὸ τῶν ἀποκτεννόντων τὸ σῶμα, τὴν δὲ ψυχὴν μὴ δυναμένων ἀποκτεῖναι· φοβεῖσθε δὲ μᾶλλον τὸν δυνάμενον καὶ ψυχὴν καὶ σῶμα ἀπολέσαι ἐν γεέννῃ.
Vulgate: et nolite timere eos qui occidunt corpus animam autem non possunt occidere sed potius eum timete qui potest et animam et corpus perdere in gehennam.
KJV "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."
In the Septuagint, ψυχή translates Hebrew נפש nephesh, meaning "life, vital breath", in English variously translated as "soul, self, life, creature, person, appetite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion"; e.g. in Genesis 1:20:
— וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יִשְׁרְצ֣וּ הַמַּ֔יִם שֶׁ֖רֶץ נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה
LXX καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός ἐξαγαγέτω τὰ ὕδατα ἑρπετὰ ψυχῶν ζωσῶν.
Vulgate Creavitque Deus cete grandia, et omnem animam viventem atque motabilem.
KJV "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth."
Paul of Tarsus used ψυχή and πνευμα specifically to distinguish between the Jewish notions of נפש nephesh and רוח ruah (also in LXX, e.g. Genesis 1:2 וְר֣וּחַאֱלֹהִ֔ים = πνευμα θεου = spiritus Dei = "the Spirit of God").
Friday, February 15, 2008
Quote from Basquiat.net:
What identifies Jean-Michel Basquiat as a major artist is courage and full powers of self-transformation. That courage, meaning not being afraid to fail, transforms paralyzingly self-conscious 'predicaments of culture' into confident 'ecstasies of cultures recombined.'
How does one reach the level in writing poetry of not being afraid to fail, and transforming predicaments of culture into ecstasies of cultures recombined?
In an essay by Stephen Burk on Gluck's structures, in a collection edited by Joanne Feit Diehl, "Gluck's recent insistence that she is "drawn to the unfinished, to sentences that falter,' and 'dislikes poems that feel too complete' sees less descriptive than aspirational. Elsewhere Gluck implies that her mucch-emphasized self-breakings and self-transformations arise as healthy reactions to what would otherwise be her destructive 'dependency or addiction' to self punishment and self control... Gluck's drive to repudiate, revise, and draw new conclusions from old operates not only within her poems, but from one book to the next..."
So then Gluck works on paralyzingly self-conscious 'predicaments of culture' but her recombination does not become confident 'ecstasies of cultures recombined. Or at least, I'm not seeing that happening in her work. But, I might discover something of that I haven't seen yet, so I'll be looking closely at her recombinations...
.............
What identifies Jean-Michel Basquiat as a major artist is courage and full powers of self-transformation. That courage, meaning not being afraid to fail, transforms paralyzingly self-conscious 'predicaments of culture' into confident 'ecstasies of cultures recombined.'
How does one reach the level in writing poetry of not being afraid to fail, and transforming predicaments of culture into ecstasies of cultures recombined?
In an essay by Stephen Burk on Gluck's structures, in a collection edited by Joanne Feit Diehl, "Gluck's recent insistence that she is "drawn to the unfinished, to sentences that falter,' and 'dislikes poems that feel too complete' sees less descriptive than aspirational. Elsewhere Gluck implies that her mucch-emphasized self-breakings and self-transformations arise as healthy reactions to what would otherwise be her destructive 'dependency or addiction' to self punishment and self control... Gluck's drive to repudiate, revise, and draw new conclusions from old operates not only within her poems, but from one book to the next..."
So then Gluck works on paralyzingly self-conscious 'predicaments of culture' but her recombination does not become confident 'ecstasies of cultures recombined. Or at least, I'm not seeing that happening in her work. But, I might discover something of that I haven't seen yet, so I'll be looking closely at her recombinations...
.............
Monday, February 11, 2008
Curt. This word is extremely useful for the recombining by the artist while at the same time it describes the suffocated American discourse which is so publicly advocated in American life. The poet therefore can use the curtness of the failed American discourse as a tool for cultural recombination.
curt [kurt] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective, -er, -est.
1. rudely brief in speech or abrupt in manner.
2. brief; concise; terse; laconic.
3. short; shortened.
[Origin: 1620–30; < L curtus shortened, short, cut short]
curt
1366, from L. curtus "(cut) short, shortened," from PIE base *(s)ker- "to cut" (see short). Sense of "rude" is first recorded 1831. The L. word was adopted early into most Gmc. languages (cf. Icelandic korta, Ger. kurz, etc.) and drove out the native words based on P.Gmc. *skurt-, but Eng. retains short.
curt [kurt] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective, -er, -est.
1. rudely brief in speech or abrupt in manner.
2. brief; concise; terse; laconic.
3. short; shortened.
[Origin: 1620–30; < L curtus shortened, short, cut short]
curt
1366, from L. curtus "(cut) short, shortened," from PIE base *(s)ker- "to cut" (see short). Sense of "rude" is first recorded 1831. The L. word was adopted early into most Gmc. languages (cf. Icelandic korta, Ger. kurz, etc.) and drove out the native words based on P.Gmc. *skurt-, but Eng. retains short.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
To Grok. Used by a woman speaking to me online. I could not recall having heard this word before. A woman who is a brilliant scientist said to me, "I am not going to grok with you anyway." (It makes perfect sense because I'm not an academic, and therefore in academic terms I don't share that woman's world, let alone league.)
I've been asking around in person about this word to find out who knows of it, and so far among many people, besides the physicist, the only other person has been a cab driver I took a cab from the other day who didn't hesitate over the word. And he agreed it's a great word. I told him I'd mention him in my blog. (And the cab driver is not in my world, and not in the physicist's world.) Also, a young woman who studies dance who works at Saxy's Cafe, while she did not know the word when I first mentioned it, has taken an interest in it and has been looking for it. She said she did see it in some text she had for a class, and she said she might not have noticed it if I hadn't brought it up.
Now that I have begun focusing on this verb, "to grok", it looks to me that the actions of intuitive communication and empathy that this verb is meant to describe take place in the pool of emotional bond which snakes along the shifting boundaries of cyberspace and real person life. I think it describes an action that joins very gregarious in person facade, the thickening mask of current American culture, with the crude communication of cyberspace, and I think that to grok can mean to bring these together to then generate empathy and intimacy.
To Grok:
grok [grok] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation Slang.
–verb (used with object)
1.
to understand thoroughly and intuitively.
–verb (used without object)
2.
to communicate sympathetically.
[Origin: coined by Robert A. Heinlein in the science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)]
grok /grok/, /grohk/ (From the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", by Robert A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning literally "to drink" and metaphorically "to be one with") 1. To understand, usually in a global sense. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. Contrast zen, which is similar supernal understanding experienced as a single brief flash. See also glark. 2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient understanding. "Almost all C compilers grok the "void" type these days."
The synonyms on thesaurus.com from Roget's are not really consistent with the definitions. Something tells me synonyms are just working their way up. I don't see adore, love, glory in, in the definitions that I've seen at all, and these synonyms are lacking connections to "to empathize".
Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus - Cite This Source - Share This
Main Entry: delight in
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: adore
Synonyms: admire, adore, amuse oneself, appreciate, be content, be pleased, cherish, dig*, eat up*, enjoy, feast on, glory in, grok, groove on*, indulge in, like, love, luxuriate in, relish, revel in, savor
Antonyms: abhor, condemn, despise, detest, hate
Synonyms for "to empathize" have much closer connections to the usage of "to grok" than the ones given by Roget's for "to grok". I'm zeroing in on "to grok" as a kind of love through the mind, empathy through sharing of thought, something at a much deeper level of thought than an ordinary conversation over a drink, and a passionate bond, a rush from the body's oxytocin that is especially caused by shared thought, thought that is deep listening and shared thinking and shared empathy at the same moment, perhaps a way of communicating that builds on the communication in a much more highly developed way that John Gray argues for in his When Mars and Venus Collide, a concentrated conscious effort between two people to focus on natural oxytocin.
Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus - Cite This Source - Share This
Main Entry: empathize
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: identify with
Synonyms: comprehend, feel for, imagine, put oneself in another's place, relate to, share, stand in one's shoes, suffer with, sympathize, understand
Main Entry: feel sorry for
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: feel compassion for
Synonyms: bleed for, comfort, commiserate, condole with, console, empathize with, express sympathy, feel for, grieve with, have mercy on, lament for, open one's heart, pity, sympathize, sympathize with
Main Entry: identify with
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: understand
Synonyms: ally, associate, empathize, feel for*, relate to, respond to, sympathize, understand
Main Entry: relate to
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: have connection with
Synonyms: comprehend, connect, empathize, identify with, link with, stand in one's shoes, sympathize, understand
Main Entry: sympathize
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: feel for
Synonyms: ache, agree, appreciate, be compassionate, be understanding, bleed for*, comfort, commiserate, compassionate, comprehend, condole, empathize, grieve with, have compassion, identify with, love, offer consolation, pity, show kindliness, show mercy, show tenderness, side with*, tune in*, understand
Antonyms: disapprove, disregard, ignore
.........
From Camus, The Fall:
"... Have you never suddenly needed understanding, help, friendship? Yes, of course. I have learned to be satisfied with understanding. It is found more readily and, besides, it's not binding. 'I beg you to believe in my sympathetic understanding' in the inner discourse always precedes immediately 'and now, let's turn to other matters.' It's a board chairman's emotion; it comes cheap, after catastrophes. Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain, but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in a mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them.."
(And in fact I identify with that last line lately very strongly.)
"... May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends! Those whose duty it is to love us- I mean relatives and connections (what an expression!)- are another matter..."
......
Sylvia Plath, Suicide Off Egg Rock:
Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled
On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,
Gas tanks, factory stacks- that landscape
Of imperfections his bowels were part of-
Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.
Sun struck the water like a damnation.
No pit of shadow to crawl into,
And his blood beating the old tattoo
I am, I am, I am. Children
Were squealing where combers broke and the spindrift
Raveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.
A mongrel working his legs to a gallop
Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.
He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,
His body beached with the sea's garbage,
A machine to breathe and beat forever.
Flies filing in through a dead skate's eyehole
Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.
The words in his book wormed off the pages.
Everything glittered like blank paper.
Everything shrank in the sun's corrosive
Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.
He heard when he walked into the water
The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.
I've been asking around in person about this word to find out who knows of it, and so far among many people, besides the physicist, the only other person has been a cab driver I took a cab from the other day who didn't hesitate over the word. And he agreed it's a great word. I told him I'd mention him in my blog. (And the cab driver is not in my world, and not in the physicist's world.) Also, a young woman who studies dance who works at Saxy's Cafe, while she did not know the word when I first mentioned it, has taken an interest in it and has been looking for it. She said she did see it in some text she had for a class, and she said she might not have noticed it if I hadn't brought it up.
Now that I have begun focusing on this verb, "to grok", it looks to me that the actions of intuitive communication and empathy that this verb is meant to describe take place in the pool of emotional bond which snakes along the shifting boundaries of cyberspace and real person life. I think it describes an action that joins very gregarious in person facade, the thickening mask of current American culture, with the crude communication of cyberspace, and I think that to grok can mean to bring these together to then generate empathy and intimacy.
To Grok:
grok [grok] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation Slang.
–verb (used with object)
1.
to understand thoroughly and intuitively.
–verb (used without object)
2.
to communicate sympathetically.
[Origin: coined by Robert A. Heinlein in the science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)]
grok /grok/, /grohk/ (From the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", by Robert A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning literally "to drink" and metaphorically "to be one with") 1. To understand, usually in a global sense. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. Contrast zen, which is similar supernal understanding experienced as a single brief flash. See also glark. 2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient understanding. "Almost all C compilers grok the "void" type these days."
The synonyms on thesaurus.com from Roget's are not really consistent with the definitions. Something tells me synonyms are just working their way up. I don't see adore, love, glory in, in the definitions that I've seen at all, and these synonyms are lacking connections to "to empathize".
Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus - Cite This Source - Share This
Main Entry: delight in
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: adore
Synonyms: admire, adore, amuse oneself, appreciate, be content, be pleased, cherish, dig*, eat up*, enjoy, feast on, glory in, grok, groove on*, indulge in, like, love, luxuriate in, relish, revel in, savor
Antonyms: abhor, condemn, despise, detest, hate
Synonyms for "to empathize" have much closer connections to the usage of "to grok" than the ones given by Roget's for "to grok". I'm zeroing in on "to grok" as a kind of love through the mind, empathy through sharing of thought, something at a much deeper level of thought than an ordinary conversation over a drink, and a passionate bond, a rush from the body's oxytocin that is especially caused by shared thought, thought that is deep listening and shared thinking and shared empathy at the same moment, perhaps a way of communicating that builds on the communication in a much more highly developed way that John Gray argues for in his When Mars and Venus Collide, a concentrated conscious effort between two people to focus on natural oxytocin.
Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus - Cite This Source - Share This
Main Entry: empathize
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: identify with
Synonyms: comprehend, feel for, imagine, put oneself in another's place, relate to, share, stand in one's shoes, suffer with, sympathize, understand
Main Entry: feel sorry for
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: feel compassion for
Synonyms: bleed for, comfort, commiserate, condole with, console, empathize with, express sympathy, feel for, grieve with, have mercy on, lament for, open one's heart, pity, sympathize, sympathize with
Main Entry: identify with
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: understand
Synonyms: ally, associate, empathize, feel for*, relate to, respond to, sympathize, understand
Main Entry: relate to
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: have connection with
Synonyms: comprehend, connect, empathize, identify with, link with, stand in one's shoes, sympathize, understand
Main Entry: sympathize
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: feel for
Synonyms: ache, agree, appreciate, be compassionate, be understanding, bleed for*, comfort, commiserate, compassionate, comprehend, condole, empathize, grieve with, have compassion, identify with, love, offer consolation, pity, show kindliness, show mercy, show tenderness, side with*, tune in*, understand
Antonyms: disapprove, disregard, ignore
.........
From Camus, The Fall:
"... Have you never suddenly needed understanding, help, friendship? Yes, of course. I have learned to be satisfied with understanding. It is found more readily and, besides, it's not binding. 'I beg you to believe in my sympathetic understanding' in the inner discourse always precedes immediately 'and now, let's turn to other matters.' It's a board chairman's emotion; it comes cheap, after catastrophes. Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain, but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in a mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them.."
(And in fact I identify with that last line lately very strongly.)
"... May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends! Those whose duty it is to love us- I mean relatives and connections (what an expression!)- are another matter..."
......
Sylvia Plath, Suicide Off Egg Rock:
Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled
On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,
Gas tanks, factory stacks- that landscape
Of imperfections his bowels were part of-
Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.
Sun struck the water like a damnation.
No pit of shadow to crawl into,
And his blood beating the old tattoo
I am, I am, I am. Children
Were squealing where combers broke and the spindrift
Raveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.
A mongrel working his legs to a gallop
Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.
He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,
His body beached with the sea's garbage,
A machine to breathe and beat forever.
Flies filing in through a dead skate's eyehole
Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.
The words in his book wormed off the pages.
Everything glittered like blank paper.
Everything shrank in the sun's corrosive
Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.
He heard when he walked into the water
The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Do men instinctively wait until the last minutebecause this raises testosterone in the male? According to John Gray, author of the Venus/Mars books, this is the case, and it sounds right to me. And maybe it's from the last minute that the greatness of great haunts and dives comes. But then if that's the case, that would mean if there were no men in the world, the world would be void of haunts and dives. Could that be true??? I don't think so...
Saturday, January 26, 2008
How might I meet a middle sister? All my adult life I have gone out with and known only big sisters. I've decided to make it a goal to discover who the elusive middle sisters are, and find them in a crowd...
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
German: beflugle
flugle means flights, and beflugle is an idiom that means to inspire, literally, to give flight to
French: tourbillon
In literal translation to English this means whirlwind. As an idiom it means a climax, sexual climax, and for now I don't know all the ways it could be used. Came across it when I discovered Rimbaud's poem Marine, which was the first Vers Libre, French free verse, poem.
flugle means flights, and beflugle is an idiom that means to inspire, literally, to give flight to
French: tourbillon
In literal translation to English this means whirlwind. As an idiom it means a climax, sexual climax, and for now I don't know all the ways it could be used. Came across it when I discovered Rimbaud's poem Marine, which was the first Vers Libre, French free verse, poem.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Yes, we were like twins...
From across the industries we knew by sight, the air coming
from East, from the ponds and stacks and fires and mounds
surrounding my cousin’s home
my cousin running ahead
and then quitting
bending over
the secret to stopping a cramp he said
breathing in what was coming from the walls “... gunpowder...”
I was quitting with him
From across the industries we knew by sight, the air coming
from East, from the ponds and stacks and fires and mounds
surrounding my cousin’s home
my cousin running ahead
and then quitting
bending over
the secret to stopping a cramp he said
breathing in what was coming from the walls “... gunpowder...”
I was quitting with him
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