Nature gregarious: plnats and other things that sprout

In which the weather is as natural as poetry, and vice versa.

Predicted lows and highs
for selective locales, Saturday, February 5, 1011:

Edmonton, Canada 5/40 snow
Denver 18/50 rain
Woodstock, N.Y. 22/33 snow
Bethany, Conn. 26/37 snow to rain
Sandusky, Ohio 25/29 snow showers
Chicago 25/31 snow showers
Gaithersburg, Md. 28/37 showers
Woodstock, Georgia 28/43 clouds/sun
Boston 29/35 snow
New York City 30/38 snow
Little Rock 30/48 sun
Greenville, S. Car. 30/53 showers
La Pine, Oregon 31/49 cloudy
Gulf Shores, Alabama 34/49 clouds/sun
New Orleans 37/47 sun
Portland, Oregon 42/52 rain
Gainesville, Fla. 42/63 showers
Vancouver, Canada 44/47 rain
Utrecht, Holland 44/49 cloudy
London, England 45/52 partly cloudy
Ghent, Belgium 48/51 cloudy
Huntington Beach, Cal. 48/71 partly cloudy
Los Angeles 48/76 sun
San Diego 49/65 sun
Cairo 55/68 partly cloudy
Taipei 63/74 sun
Sydney 75/102 sun

Has anyone else gotten lost in the new Google Art Project:

http://www.googleartproject.com/



(Alas, apparently I can't link to an extreme close up of the above on the project page. If you follow the above link, and go to the Frick - a favorite place of mine - you can get right in to brush stroke level - really amazing!)

That is frickin' amazing a_musing!

The Frick is one my favorites, too. And this site is wonderful.

Yes, newcomers, whomever you are, and if in fact you are: we consider photos natural too, and YouTube music offerings, and recipes, bombast, books, bird and animal sightings, anecdotes, grievances, cartoons, cats and dogs, links to articles and pix and other whatnot, and so on and so forth.

This is so wonderful...Another way to lose myself for hours.

A poem from some guy on the Internet

NOTHING COMES EASY

Our forests have no trees
Our streams contain no water
Our deserts are lifeless forms
Our food has no nutrition
Our friends are rip-off artists
Our loves fast-talking sharpies
Our co-workers seem to be
working against us
But so what? Our job is
to describe things--not become them
Nothing on television has prepared us
for nothing in our own lives

Maybe we're not used to being in bodies
It exposes us to all kinds of sensations
There is a natural order to things
Water doesn't struggle to run downhill
Still nothing is perfect
We words cover up as well as reveal
Nothing comes easy as nothing
worth knowing can be taught
Much like a car you'd drive home
or the homeless begging for change
Aren't we all begging for some kind of change?
We know we are

Yes we could say we seem
to be experiencing some difficulty
in getting our point across or we could say
getting through to you
is like trying to clean up
by bathing in raw sewage
It's simply a matter of lexical choices
but we would never do anything like that
You can trust us to speak your mind
& say what is in your heart
Nobody here but us words
Just try thinking without us

-Steve Toth, 2011

Not more rain!

This is my favorite Baudelaire. I couldn't find a translation that I approved of. Maybe someone else can help.

L'invitation au voyage

Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

Des meubles luisants,
Polis par les ans,
Décoreraient notre chambre;
Les plus rares fleurs
Mêlant leurs odeurs
Aux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,
Les riches plafonds,
Les miroirs profonds,
La splendeur orientale,
Tout y parlerait
À l'âme en secret
Sa douce langue natale.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

Vois sur ces canaux
Dormir ces vaisseaux
Dont l'humeur est vagabonde;
C'est pour assouvir
Ton moindre désir
Qu'ils viennent du bout du monde.
— Les soleils couchants
Revêtent les champs,
Les canaux, la ville entière,
D'hyacinthe et d'or;
Le monde s'endort
Dans une chaude lumière.

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

— Charles Baudelaire

And how would one know in advance what translation you approved of? Huh, citygirl? Like, would you approve of this (which I disclaim in advance, being merely the middleman in this transaction):

Invitation to the Voyage

Imagine, ma petite,
Dear sister mine, how sweet
Were we to go and take our pleasure
Leisurely, you and I—
To lie, to love, to die
Off in that land made to your measure!
A land whose suns' moist rays,
Through the skies' misty haze,
Hold quite the same dark charms for me
As do your scheming eyes
When they, in their like wise,
Shine through your tears, perfidiously.

There all is order, naught amiss:
Comfort and beauty, calm and bliss.

Treasure galore—ornate,
Time-glossed—would decorate
Our chamber, where the rarest blooms
Would blend their lavish scent,
Heady and opulent,
With wisps of amber-like perfumes;
Where all the Orient's
Splendid, rich ornaments—
Deep mirrors, ceilings fine—would each,
In confidential tone,
Speak to the soul alone
In its own sweet and secret speech.

There all is order, naught amiss:
Comfort and beauty, calm and bliss.

See how the ships, asleep—
They who would ply the deep!—
Line the canals: to satisfy
Your merest whim they come
From far-flung heathendom
And skim the seven seas. —On high,
The sunset's rays enfold
In hyacinth and gold,
Field and canal; and, with the night,
As shadows gently fall,
Behold! Life sleeps, and all
Lies bathed in warmth and evening light.

There all is order, naught amiss:
Comfort and beauty, calm and bliss.

Charles Baudelaire

the Fleurs du Mal website gives an average of 3 versions for each poem.

http://fleursdumal.org/poem/148

That's the page for your poem, ma petite citadine.

I think E. St. V. - M's version is the nicest, but then this kind of thing is so very subjective.

-X

pdub, this translator has taken liberties of which I do not approve. "Naught amiss"? That does not appear in the original. I would have said: There is nothing but order and beauty/ Rich, calm and lush. (Or I might have even said "luxurious, calm and voluptuous.") In places, it is a bit better than the other three I found. That first stanza is a killer to translate. I'm not sure how I would go about it.

Thanks, anna. The Aggeler's not so bad (not that I approve!) I suspect I would approve of no translation of my favorite Baudelaire:

Invitation to the Voyage

My child, my sister,
Think of the rapture
Of living together there!
Of loving at will,
Of loving till death,
In the land that is like you!
The misty sunlight
Of those cloudy skies
Has for my spirit the charms,
So mysterious,
Of your treacherous eyes,
Shining brightly through their tears.

There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.

Gleaming furniture,
Polished by the years,
Will ornament our bedroom;
The rarest flowers
Mingling their fragrance
With the faint scent of amber,
The ornate ceilings,
The limpid mirrors,
The oriental splendor,
All would whisper there
Secretly to the soul
In its soft, native language.

There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.

See on the canals
Those vessels sleeping.
Their mood is adventurous;
It's to satisfy
Your slightest desire
That they come from the ends of the earth.
— The setting suns
Adorn the fields,
The canals, the whole city,
With hyacinth and gold;
The world falls asleep
In a warm glow of light.

There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Probably someone smarter and more internet savvy than me posted this many, many nature threads ago, but I missed it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuRuwR2JSXI&feature=player_embedded

My life, it has a theme song. I am already in love, and this guy is about 20 years too young for me, but damn.

If someone posted that on any of the nature threads, Anna, I'm sure I would've remembered. Unless, of course, I was reading a book.

So, cittadina (your Italian name), the answer to this may strike you as obvious, and the question obtuse: Are you saying that in translating, the translator should bypass the urge to create a rhyme (in a different language than the original) and instead just go with the meaning of the poem?

Hell to the yeah!

Someone's been reading her Nabokov on translation.

Or, if she hasn't been, should.

Assuming she'd value concurrence from the man.

But then, Pound would disagree.

Oh, dear.

I'm not sure whether I should be taking offense right now.

"However, this doesn't mean those around you or trying to communicate with you fail to be confused." So on the mark.

15,16 Exactly, exactly, exactly my problem with the FdeM translation I have (McGowan), The words are forcefed into rhymes, but even my elementary language skills can see they often stray far from the French, and from CB's meaning and nuances.

I like faulkner. And Jewel.

Please don't take offense.

And I never stop jesting. I am a jest. I don't know how to stop. It's a condition.

Maybe you can find a translation that doesn't rhyme. That Aggeler guy seems okay. That's the second one of his translations I've preferred when I had a choice.

Sacre bleu! I almost missed my cue. For months I've been meaning to post this and could never find the right thread. Tomcat's have always been too erudite for me to squeeze this in:

For a long time The Idiot was my favorite book. I read it and then reread every seven or eight years; first in the Constance Garnett translation and then Magarshack, who it was said was similar, but I found him a bit more fluid than her. And then I got excited about the new translation by the husband and wife team, Pevear and Volohonksky, he providing the English to her Russian. Yes, perhaps it was more accurate (though what do I know?), but I found the P and V so tedious, I actually couldn't finish the book.

That's interesting. In what manner tedious? I had no bone to pick with their Brothers Karamazov but I felt like The Idiot was, um, dumbed down. Breezy. Light. It almost read like a season of Gossip Girl, if you know the program.

I don't know about Karamazov, but The Idiot was a hurried affair for Dusty, from everything I've read about it. Among other things, he had to pay some enormous sum to settle his gambling debts. So it could be that the two books are not comparable in the realm of translations. (I'm thinking out loud here.) That is, it could be that whatever smoothing out Garnett and Magershack did with loose bits and pieces made more of an improvement (to an English reader) than what might have been a more literal (and perhapos accurate) translation by P and V, with the result more evident in The Idiot than in Karamazov.

What struck me, and put me off, in that last read, which I didn't finish, were the comings and goings of characters, the prosaic, grungy details that I didn't recall in such abundance in the other versions.

Of course, Dusty working on the fly will jump into a scene, dialogue and description, and then twenty pages on reference a character you don't know is there, speaking, and the narrator (Dusty) says something like: "While they were discussing all this, Ipolit had entered the room."(!) So it's not like he's the smoothest of writers, which is okay--he's got other strengths--but perhaps one whose must hurried efforts can actually be improved by a less literal translation.

For a little diversion, how about a little music? I had the very great good fortune to see Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at Chicago's Symphony Center last night. The group is the same, although they did not play Coltrane. What a great evening!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKwiAjuabLM&NR=1

Ignorant Before the Heavens of My Life

Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness
of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.
As if I didn’t exist. Do I have any
share in this? Have I somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? Does my blood’s ebb and flow
change with their changes? Let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. Better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.

Rainer Maria Rilke

>26 copyedit52: reading that is a cruel blow in my hungover state.

ODE ON SOLITUDE
Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day.

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

He was 12 when he penned this poem. Poor Pope knew much physical pain during his 56 years.

27 - Yuck, sorry about that man. I managed to stamp mine out with coffee and eggs this morning. Care for some?

How do I get this thread to show up in my Your Posts?

Robert

>29 janemarieprice: great minds! I have wrestled mine into submish with Year of the Rabbit dim sum. But next time I'll take you up on the eggs for sure--expect me bright and early and looking like hell.

Now that you've posted, it should show up, Robert. You can also click the star to the right of Nature gregarious: plnats and other things that sprout and it will show up as a starred post, whether you post or not.

A surprising question from you. I thought you were the savvy one in all such things.

(also, that Pope better suits the mood. 12?!?!?!!?)

(snicker)

By This Age

By this age, the genius is usually dead,
either fallen in war
or victim of plots and kings,
or sleeping on his laurels,
or in a dungeon.

By this age,
the lover is a husband,
the actor a stage hand,
the champion a coach.

By this age the rebel
writes editorials,
and the revolutionary
his memoirs.

By this time
he who thinks young,
keeps his paints thick
his muse breathing deeply, and
knows now that evil is passing by,
good is passing by,
and no one is keeping
score anymore.

Gevorg Emin

In today's New York Times, a story from (hippypaul) Paul McFarland's small town in Arkansas:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/us/06earthquake.html?nl=todaysheadlines&em...

Earthquake preparedness in ... Arkansas? How counter-intuitive! Especially for shakers in the 4.0 - 4.5 range ("yawners"). But fascinating nonetheless. And lest I forget there was once a pretty large in AK wasn't there?

One Is One

Heart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shocked
stiff. You? you still try to rule the world -- though
I've got you: identified, starving, locked
in a cage you will not leave alive, no
matter how you hate it, pound its walls,
& thrill its corridors with messages.

Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl
in your cell but I'm deaf to your rages,
your greed to go solo, your eloquent
threats of worse things you (knowing me) could do.
You scare me, bragging you're a double agent

since jailers are prisoners' prisoners too.
Think! Reform! Make us one. Join the rest of us,
and joy may come, and make its test of us.

~ Marie Ponsot

This poem serves as the quote intro'ing Heart, You Bully, You Punk by Leah Hager Cohen

World renowned writer, Henri? Oh, pshaw.

Editorial addition: My pshaw is not meant as a comment on Leah Hager Cohen, but on Henri's intemperate enthusiasm concerning my own output.

Listen here Mister! You're read in Italy and Ireland, featured on the front page of Rolling Stone; you're read in the States and Canada; so yeah, man "world renowned". Can you dig it?

>40 absurdeist:. Don't forget Australia.

A poem. Not to be construed as an endorsement of either team. (I might take advantage of the national obsession to go to a movie.)

Searching for Pittsburgh

The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart
and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.
Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh
in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers. The authority of them.
The gritty alleys where we played every evening were
stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky,
as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning the Earth.
Locomotives driving through the cold rain,
lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water
flowing morning and night throughout a city
girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.
All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling
of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged
by the heart. Making together a consequence of America.
The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.
In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands
with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes,
amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined
house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound
of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made.

Jack Gilbert

37 - There's a pretty major fault there. If I remember correctly there was a huge one at some point in history that made the Mississippi run backwards, something I hope I'll never see (though I've seen the Intercoastal Canal run the opposite way twice).

ETA: 1812 New Madrid Earthquake

You beat me to the punch, Jane. I, too, was going to offer the New Madrid, Mo. earthquake as the strongest quake to hit North America as far as we know.

Robert, I keep my post selector on My Groups. That way I see every post in all my groups. I never have to worry about finding new threads and such. However, if you belong to a lot of active groups this can keep you busy for a while. I use the star to identify threads in which my post was the last one, the last time I visited the thread. That way I can see if anyone has responded. About a fifth of the time I get direct responses, the rest of the time the poster just ignore me. That's about right.

That New Madrid quake was a serious shaker, estimated in the 7.0 vicinity, possibly as large as 7.5. Considering that the largest quake I've ever felt was "only" a 6.7 -- Northridge ('94) -- and flattened a three-story apartment building in L.A. and collapsed freeway connectors and shut down I-10 out of Santa Monica for months, I've a healthy respect for New Madrid and that fault they've got. I forget what that '89 quake in Frisco during the World Series registered, but it was large enough to be felt down here in L.A.

I just made a little joke, and I got too serious responses. I look first at the threads to which I have posted, and if I am, say, going out, say to a movie, I leave Your Groups for another time or day. I want to see this thread, so I know that by posting to it I will. I had nothing to say, but I had a post to make. How to solve the conundrum?

You saw my solution, which was meant to be ironic. Oh, well.

Robert

Robert, allow me to sell you the irony emoticon I have invented, ^>.>^ ^_>^ ^

^>.>^ ^_>^ ^

Ha ha, oh, the whole thing doesn't show up because it thinks it's html. Back to the drawring board.

The Down Under Weather Report

We have had floods and cyclones - now we have fires in Perth, which took out an estimated 80 homes last night.

Here in Sydney, one of the so-far undamaged capital cities, we have had a heatwave for the last week or two, with consistent temperatures between 38-42, which translates to 100-107 F, even in the middle of the night. The whole state has been gasping for breath. A miraculous cool change came through yesterday afternoon, and it's now 19 degrees, or 66.2. A wind just blew up, and blew the heat away. It was amazing.

Sounds like we're all in different parts of hell.

My icy part sounds much preferable to your part. Glad you got your wind.

I don't know how you folks out east have managed this winter. We had a couple of inches more snow, they haven't gotten last week's out of the alley, they are predicting a bunch more for later this week with a very cold snap in the middle, and I was whining big time today about being very tired of shoveling. The MINUTE I can retire and get out of this nasty place during the winter I am going to.

Whining over; thank you.

It was in the low 40s (F) today and sunny, sunny, sunny. Still pockets of ice, but I managed to get a run in. A day or so like this every now and then sure helps my mood. More snow predicted next week.

I fell in front of a car today. Nothing happened except I dropped my computer and scared two drivers out of their wits. Otherwise, the weather is sunny but cold here.

Don't do that again.

Robert

urania, I'm with Robert. Please refrain from LTing and blogging while crossing the street.

An Old Life

Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
Then I sat in my blue chair
with blueberry bagels and strong
black coffee reading news,
the obits, the comics, and the sports.
Carrying my cup twenty feet,
I sat myself at the desk
for this day’s lifelong
engagement with the one task and desire.

Donald Hall

Except for Jane and the Kearsage Mini-Mart, Donald Hall has plagiarized my life. Did he have goats?

At first glance Hall seems to have been close to academia:

Born in 1928, the son of a businessman, Hall spent his boyhood in Connecticut and New Hampshire. He attended local schools, graduated from Harvard in 1951, and received a B. Litt. from Oxford in 1953. After a year studying at Stanford University, he taught at Harvard until 1957 and then at the University of Michigan until 1975.

But then there's this:

Hall's admiration for tradition and custom underlies his highly regarded memoir, String Too Short to Be Saved (1961), in which he nostalgically recounts his boyhood summers on his family's New Hampshire farm. At the time the book was published he felt that the world he described had vanished forever, but in 1975 he left his job at the University of Michigan, moved back to the farm ...

So there might have been goats. As for Jane, whom he mentions in the poem, and urania reprises:

A first marriage ended in divorce. In 1972 he married the poet Jane Kenyon. They lived and worked together until 1995 when Kenyon died of leukemia at the age of 47.

In an idle moment the other day I tried to teach myself something about poetic metre and feet.

Metrical Feet
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot!, yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl's trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long.
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng.
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride --
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer.

Samuel Coleridge

59: That's priceless. I didn't even hear of some of these metres (the two starting with amphi).

So what did he mean by that? Meter in English is based on stress; he was apparently doing something like Latin meter.

Robert

It's still based on stress, far as I can make out. 'long' = stressed, 'short' = unstressed.

BREAK, BREAK, BREAK
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of they crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Boots

We're foot-slog-slog-slog-sloggin' over Africa -
Foot-foot-foot-foot-sloggin' over Africa -
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again!)
There's no discharge in the war!

Seven-six-eleven-five-nine-an'-twenty mile to-day -
Four-eleven-seventeen-thirty-two the day before -
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again!)
There's no discharge in the war!

Don't-don't-don't-don't-look at what's in front of you.
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again)
Men-men-men-men-men go mad with watchin' em,
An' there's no discharge in the war!

Try-try-try-try-to think o' something different -
Oh-my-God-keep-me from goin' lunatic!
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again!)
There's no discharge in the war!

Count-count-count-count-the bullets in the bandoliers.
If-your-eyes-drop-they will get atop o' you!
(Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again) -
There's no discharge in the war!

We-can-stick-out-'unger, thirst, an' weariness,
But-not-not-not-not the chronic sight of 'em -
Boot-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again,
An' there's no discharge in the war!

'Taint-so-bad-by-day because o' company,
But night-brings-long-strings-o' forty thousand million
Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again.
There's no discharge in the war!

I-'ave-marched-six-weeks in 'Ell an' certify
It-is-not-fire-devils, dark, or anything,
But boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up an' down again,
An' there's no discharge in the war!

-Rudyard Kipling

An inch or so of overnight snow here in old Woodstock (as Van Morisson crooned it), just to remind us not to get complacent. And tonight, and the following two nights, a similar wintry reminder:

Tuesday: High 33° Low 4°
Wednesday: High 26° Low 9°
Thursday: High 19° Low 4°

65 - Supposedly snowing here tonight as well. At least the weekend and past couple days have been semi-warm - warm enough to melt some of the snow at any rate.

Very excited today; our second niece was born yesterday 3+ weeks early!

THE PULLEY
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/herbert/temple/Pulley.html

George Herbert (1593-1633), like his contemporary Robert Herrick (1591-1675), an Anglican divine, as well as poet, Herbert stood in contrast to the former as model of virtue, piety, and devotion. THE PULLEY is Herbert's most famous poem, and what some would call an example of metaphysical poetry.
As a follower of Rare Ben Herrick was not shy about celebrating slight disorders of the dress and other unadventitious wrappages.

Not far from Sandy's digs, but you hear winter rooftop stories in upstate New York too, and doubtless elsewhere as well:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/us/09roofs.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha...

First: congratulations to Jane on your second niece!

Second: It is cold here. COLD, COLD, COLD. Yesterday was warm enough to melt some of the snow, which made puddles and streams, which are now ice, because it is COLD. The ice makes it hard to go for a walk, much less a run, which wouldn't be pleasant anyway, because it is COLD. COLD, COLD, COLD.

I was puzzled, Thea, at what seemed your surprise at the COLD, then remembered you were in New Mexico--or somewhere warmer, at any rate--when we got an arctic blast in mid-January. Went well below freezing upstate, and in single digits in the city for a few days.

My last fuel delivery--every four weeks in winter--told me we consumed eight gallons of oil per day, on average, from January 9 to February 7. The coldest it has ever been before this year, it came to six gallons per day.

Congratulations, Jane! Me and my single niece are gonna ask for a second niece/little brother for her birthday this year, I think. Jealous.

On the other hand, it is several degrees above freezing and gloriously sunny in Vancouver today, so I'm also jealous of myself. Gonna ride ma bike.

So when I get ready to leave the office I am going to put my wool blazer on over the turtleneck, long underwear on under the skirt, socks and boots on my feet (good place for them, eh?) and don my very long wool coat with very long scarf and stylish hat. (Must have something stylish). I will then roast in the subway until I get to my stop and freeze in the four block walk home. But next week, maybe back to just the trench coat with the lining! :-D

Ran across this acknowledgment at the beginning of Our Beautiful Heroine that may ring a few Salonistas' bells.

I would like to thank Deborah Baker and the staff at The Overlook Press who have helped to publish this translation of my work. I hope that it will be as successful as THE OVERLOOK GUIDE TO SMALLSCALE GOATKEEPING. May it be overlooked by all cat-haters.

Overlook Press is headqaurtered in Woodstock. The novel features as a main character a cat...with a slavic surname...that is sentient. I am four chapters in and really enjoying it.

>70 copyedit52: Nay, nay, dear Peter, I'm not surprised at the COLD, but exasperated by the COLD. When I posted, it was 13 degrees F. I don't do winters well. I've lived in this part of the country since 1989, but, well, I suppose you can take the woman out of the southwest, etc., etc.

>73 slickdpdx: Slick, what are the odds of all those "inside" things coming together? Will await your review.

I do know Overlook Press, named after the mountain that overlooks town. They mainly publish local historical books: the town's renowned historian, at least locally, Alf Evers, died a few years ago. I also see that kukulaj was the most recent LT entrant on the book you're reading, slick: he works or perhaps even lives at the zen monastery on top of the mountain.

So, yes, I guess you could say that rang my bell. Good to see Overlook is also into goats now.

I've meant to read some Jacques Roubaud for awhile, slick; got a couple of his Dalkey Archives sitting around. You'll need to review it for us, a la your Thackeray piece from earlier today.

Overlook is a publisher I grab no questions asked the very few times I've ever encountered them.

Sounds like the cold back east's got some of you feeling the weather blues. So, for you, exasperated New Yawkers & Joizy peuple ...

Blues

Eighteen years I've spent in Manhattan,
The landlord was good, but he turned bad.
A scumbag, actually. Man, I hate him.
Money is green, but it flows like blood.

I guess I've got to move across the river.
New Jersey beckons with its sulphur glow.
Say, numbered years are a lesser evil.
Money is green, but it doesn't grow.

I'll take away my furniture, my old sofa.
But what should I do with my windows' view?
I feel like I've been married to it, or something.
Money is green, but it makes you blue.

A body on the whole knows where it's going.
I guess it's one's soul that makes one pray,
even though above it's just a Boeing.
Money is green, and I am gray.

Joseph Brodsky
from, So Forth: Poems,
a recent acquisition from the One Dollar Bookstore in Long Beach.

Dutch Interiors

Christ has been done to death
in the cold reaches of northern Europe
a thousand thousand times.
Suddenly bread
and cheese appear on a plate
beside a gleaming pewter beaker of beer.

Now tell me that the Holy Ghost
does not reside in the play of light
on cutlery!

A Woman makes lace,
with a moist-eyed spaniel lying
at her small shapely feet.
Even the maid with the chamber pot
is here; the naughty, red-cheeked girl....

And the merchant’s wife, still
in her yellow dressing gown
at noon, dips her quill into India ink
with an air of cautious pleasure.

Jane Kenyon

A SONG
Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauties orient deep,
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.

Ask me no more whither do stray
The golden atoms of the day,
For in pure love heaven did prepare
Those powders to enrich your hair.

Ask me no more whither doth hate
The nightingale when May is past;
For in your sweet dividing throat
She winters, and keeps warm her note.

Ask me no more where those stars light,
That downwards fall in dead of night;
For in yours eyes they sit, and there
Fixed become, as if their sphere.

Ask me no more if east or west
The phoenix builds her spicy nest;
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragment bosom dies.

Thomas Carew

Carew was influenced by the Poet Laureate of the time, 'Rare Ben' Jonson, and John Donne. A SONG is from POEMS (1640). a volume containing 100 poems and his only masque, COELUM BRITTANICUM (1643)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/thomas-carew

In a melancholy mood today, I went to find something by Anna Akhmatova.

‘Like a white stone in a well’s depths,’

Like a white stone in a well’s depths,
a single memory remains to me,
that I can’t, won’t fight against:
It’s happiness – and misery.

I think someone who gazed full
in my eyes, would see it straight.
They’d be sad, be thoughtful,
as if hearing a mournful tale.

I know the gods changed people
to things, yet left consciousness free,
to keep suffering’s wonder alive still.
In memory, you changed into me.

>78 Porius: Carew is wonderful. Cavaliers!

To My Inconstant Mistress

When thou, poor excommunicate
From all the joys of love, shalt see
The full reward and glorious fate
Which my strong faith shall purchase me,
Then curse thine own inconstancy.

A fairer hand than thine shall cure
That heart, which thy false oaths did wound;
And to my soul, a soul more pure
Than thine shall by Love's hand be bound,
And both with equal glory crown'd.

Then shalt thou weep, entreat, complain
To Love, as I did once to thee;
When all thy tears shall be as vain
As mine were then, for thou shalt be
Damn'd for thy false apostasy.

I wuz on the road today, in my guise as chauffeur (I still haven't gotten that cap), north, this time, to Albany (the one in New York, of course, Oregonians). Passed the following actual places named after fictional characters: Ichabod Crane Middle School and the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. Had tea and scones (hoo-hah) at what I suppose was teatime, in Hudson.

And in book news: though my book won't be released until febraio 25, the five stars in Rolling Stone Italia has apparently led to some preordering on amazon.it, where Penso, dunque chi sono? is presently no. 6 on the "alternative lifestyles" list and no. 9 on the memorie, or memoir, listing, a few spots behind Simone de Beauvoir.

81 - Not bad company you're keeping these days. :)

Piero, will there be a book tour of Italy? I don't say it in jest. I really think, if you're already top 10 and the book isn't even out yet, there would be a demand for your presence.

>82 janemarieprice:. If Simone were still alive, I do believe she'd say: "Jane, you really should go out and purchase the young man's(!) book, pronto."

>83 absurdeist:. And if there isn't, maybe I'll demand my own presence, say in September.

You'll need a book tour manager ya know.

Two from another Cavalier Poet

TO LUCASTA, GOING TO THE WARS
Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe n the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As thou too shalt adore;
I could not love thee, Dear so much,
Loved I not honor more.

TO ALTHEA, FROM PRISON
When love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my gates,
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fettered to her eye,
The gods that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swiftly round,
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the deep
Know no such liberty.

Richard Lovelace (1618-1657)
An active Royalist Lovelace wrote poems based on his less than salubrious experiences, including warfare and imprisonment that dwell on sentiments of Courtly Love and Political Gallantry.
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/lovelace/

The God Forsakes Antony

When suddenly, at the midnight hour,
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts --
your fortune that fails you now, your works
that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions, do not mourn in vain.
As if long prepared, as if courageous,
bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all do not be fooled, do not tell yourself
it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As if long prepared, as if courageous,
as it becomes you who have been worthy of such a city,
approach the window with firm step,
and with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

And for those with a bit of Greek:

Σαν έξαφνα, ώρα μεσάνυχτ', ακουσθεί
αόρατος θίασος να περνά
με μουσικές εξαίσιες, με φωνές --
την τύχη σου που ενδίδει πια, τα έργα σου
που απέτυχαν, τα σχέδια της ζωής σου
που βγήκαν όλα πλάνες, μη ανοφέλετα θρηνήσεις.
Σαν έτοιμος από καιρό, σα θαρραλέος,
αποχαιρέτα την, την Αλεξάνδρεια που φεύγει.
Προ πάντων να μη γελασθείς, μην πείς πως ήταν
ένα όνειρο, πως απατήθηκεν η ακοή σου·
μάταιες ελπίδες τέτοιες μην καταδεχθείς.
Σαν έτοιμος από καιρό, σα θαρραλέος,
σαν που ταιριάζει σε που αξιώθηκες μια τέτοια πόλι,
πλησίασε σταθερά προς το παράθυρο,
κι άκουσε με συγκίνησιν, αλλ' όχι
με των δειλών τα παρακάλια και παράπονα,
ως τελευταία απόλαυσι τους ήχους,
τα εξαίσια όργανα του μυστικού θιάσου,
κι αποχαιρέτα την, την Αλεξάνδρεια που χάνεις.

Cavafy lived most of his life in Egypt.

Exiles

It goes on being Alexandria still. Just walk a bit
along the straight road that ends at the Hippodrome
and you'll see palaces and monuments that will amaze you.
Whatever war-damage it's suffered,
however much smaller it's become,
it's still a wonderful city.
And then, what with excursions and books
and various kinds of study, time does go by.
In the evenings we meet on the sea front,
the five of us (all, naturally, under fictitious names)
and some of the few other Greeks
still left in the city.
Sometimes we discuss church affairs
(the people here seem to lean toward Rome)
and sometimes literature.
The other day we read some lines by Nonnos:
what imagery, what rhythm, what diction and harmony!
All enthusiasm, how we admired the Panopolitan.
So the days go by, and our stay here
isn't unpleasant because, naturally,
it's not going to last forever.
We've had good news: if something doesn't come
of what's now afoot in Smyrna,
then in April our friends are sure to move from Epiros,
so one way or another, our plans are definitely working out,
and we'll easily overthrow Basil.
And when we do, at last our turn will come.

Constantine Cavafy

>88 copyedit52: oh, wonderful. I'll be in Izmir this summer for a wedding, and will spare a thought for the smallened, wonderful Greek world. Last time I was there I was reading Homer. This time, I think Hesiod.

In solidarity with the righteous in their moment of triumph:

Ithaka

When you set out for Ithaka
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon--do not fear them:
such as these you will never find
as long as your thought is lofty, as long as a rare
emotion touch your spirit and your body.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - you will not meet them
unless you carry them in your soul,
unless your soul raise them up before you.

Ask that your way be long.
At many a Summer dawn to enter
with what gratitude, what joy--
ports seen for the first time;
to stop at Phoenician trading centres,
and to buy good merchandise,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensuous perfumes of every kind,
sensuous perfumes as lavishly as you can;
to visit many Egyptian cities,
to gather stores of knowledge from the learned.

Have Ithaka always in your mind.
Your arrival there is what you are destined for.
But don't in the least hurry the journey.
Better it last for years,
so that when you reach the island you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth.
Ithaka gave you a splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn't anything else to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka hasn't deceived you.
So wise you have become, of such experience,
that already you'll have understood what these Ithakas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy

That is my favorite CP Cavafy...

Thank you very much Peter.

Poetry, the Jasmine Revolution and more:

http://www.betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/?p=7720

Imperious despot, insolent in strife,
Lover of ruin, enemy of life!
You mock the anguish of an impotent land
Whose people’s blood has stained your tyrant hand,
And desecrate the magic of this earth,
sowing your thorns, to bring despair to birth

--Abu al-Qasim al Shabbi (Tunisian, d. 1934)

I'm catching up. I picked up the paper this morning to read about Mubarak not stepping down and then, by lunchtime, he had.

>90 copyedit52:, 92

Also my favorite Cavafy. Both so appropriate to the moment. Thanks.

Books for Egypt.

I've made my pledge. I'm calling on the Salonistas to step up to the plate and make theirs.

so much great poetry on this thread.
Thank you everybody.

a (long) fascinating article on the decline of editing, I thought might interest not a few folks around here..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/lost-art-editing-books-publishing

SONG
Go, lovely Rose -
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired:
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Then die - that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

Edmund Waller (1606 - 1687)

A technical master.

Terrific article, tomcat: thanks for that. I could have highlighted just about all of it, which boiled down can be summed up by the following crass conclusion: money ruins everything.

Still, I couldn't help but note (in edited form, of course):

"For some years now … there have been murmurs ... that books are simply not edited in the way they once were, either on the kind of grand scale that might see the reworking of plot, character or tone, or at the more detailed level that ensures the accuracy of, for example, minute historical or geographical facts." (This last is my terrain.) "The time and effort afforded to books, it is suggested, has been squeezed by budgetary and staffing constraints, by the shift in contemporary publishing towards the large conglomerates, and by a greater emphasis on sales and marketing campaigns ... geared towards selling fewer books in larger quantities."

"It is not uncommon ... to wonder if there is anyone still alive who cares about hanging participles, or the difference between that and which." (No one is better than I am at recognizing the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses.)

"One freelance editor ... remarked that 'big companies used to have whole copyediting and proofreading departments. Now you'll get one publisher and one editor running a whole imprint.'" (In fact, this is why there are so many freelancers. Just about all the nitty gritty editing is now done by people who work out of their homes, like I do.)

"He adopted ... about 80% of the suggestions, then submitted to the attentions of "a completely brilliant" copyeditor and subsequently refined the book through four stages of proofs." (These suggestions are called "flags," in publishing vernacular, referring to comments on the text made to an author. No self-respecting copyeditor makes important changes without giving an author the opportunity to accept or reject them.)

LONDON
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Masks of weakness, masks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

William Blake (1757-1827)

Blake was dismissed as a madman in his day.

LONDON
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Masks of weakness, masks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

William Blake (1757-1827)

Blake was dismissed as a madman in his day.

LOVE AND A QUESTION
http://www.bartleby.com/117/4.html

This poem tells us that RF is not simply a 'realistic' poet, or an idyllic 'Nature Poet', or a poet we can mindlessly shove into one category or another. The poem has the eldritch spell of some hoary legend. Overtones of ancient ballads: 'he spoke the bridegroom fair', 'and, for all burden, care', and 'wished her heart in a case of gold and pinned with a silver pin.'

The poem tells part of a story but the reader is left to actually guess what happens. The setting is familiar enough - a country house, a man and his young bride, and a Stranger out of the Night - atmosphere is Derlethian. The Stranger, too, is something more than he seems; not merely a person but a portent: a figure of care and coming trouble. The poem ends as the title indicates with a Question.

Did you double up on the Blake, above, to see if anyone was paying attention, Peter? I often wonder that myself after posting.

102 - it bears repeating in my view.

By the way Peter, the Guardian featured an article on 'the lost art of editing' in yesterday's edition.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/feb/12/guardianreview

Yes. Tomcat posted it at #96 and I commented on it at #98. A good piece. The only aspect of it I question, and that struck me as an "axe to grind" amidst more solid opinionation, was the blame placed on twittering and the Internet as a factor in subpar editing. I don't buy it. The effect of money and marketing on the publishing industry--"neutral fact," as Orwell would have called it--is more to the point.

What Does It Mean

It does not know it glitters
It does not know it flies
It does not know it is this not that.

And, more and more often, agape,
With my Gauloise dying out,
Over a glass of red wine,
I muse on the meaning of being this not that.

Just as long ago, when I was twenty,
But then there was a hope I would be everything,
Perhaps even a butterfly or a thrush, by magic.
Now I see dusty district roads
And a town where the postmaster gets drunk every day
Melancholy with remaining identical to himself.

If only the stars contained me.
If only everything kept happening in such a way
That the so-called world opposed the so-called flesh.
Were I at least not contradictory. Alas.

Czeslaw Milosz

>105 copyedit52:, 96, 98

yes, I thought it was interesting as well, and I agree with you it's often about money. One of the most badly edited/proofed books I have read recently was A History of Russian Thought, high-end academic publisher, but the thing was riddled with typos and errors on every page. I was appalled.

My own books have been riddled with errors due to bad editors. I am a terrible proofer of my own work, and a really terrible typist (paws, you know), so I rely on my native speaker editor to pick up typos and stuff. Usually, however, he/she is not up to the job, and spends their time writing loong emails questioning me about my use of language (which drives me insane) instead of proooofing carefully. I do question the over involvement of editors in the process of creation, though (not to be taken personally, please).

I can imagine a modern editor going mad with a red pencil through all of Dostoevsky's locquacious ranting, for example, 'Be more concise' etc.

I also do quite a bit of editing myself, not your kind peter, but editing of writing written by non native speakers for a native speaker audience (Taiwan Tourism Bureau and Taiwan Stock Exchange are two of my major clients). Imagine how I feel when my work is 'corrected' by the department head (usually some old Taiwanese fool who got a phd in some two bit American college in 1951 and therefore, of course, speaks perfect English, better than mine..... and whose word must be respected because he is senior......Confucius he say etc etc)

*Murr bangs his head on the desk in despair at the universal stupidity*

FOR ONCE
THRUST upward your green shoots and drink
the rain
Tulip and daffodil! Not till I die
Shall my heart throb with such a spring again
Or from the wine-press of my ecstasy
Such purple waves flow o'er the city's towers,
Making a sunrise of the midnight seas,
And on far roads, like royal embassies,
Telling the green earth of my happy hours.

Not till I die shall such a spring return,
But memory will return, borne on faint airs,
And from the ashes of its ravished urn
Love will repeat the springtime of its prayers.
How then will look, 'mid such rememberings
These places, where the prints of ancient pain
Hold me, until, with laughter and with rain,
You come to me, O Spring of all my Springs?

They will be brimmed with tears intolerable,
They will be tender with an infinite light,
They will be sadder than a sunken bell,
They will be sweeter than a lover's night,
They will be exquisite with broken sighs,
And faintly whispered words that catch the breath,
They will be quiet as the wings of death,
That quiver between two eternities.

John Cowper Powys

More on editing, and editors: this from the seventeenth chapter of the yet untitled book I'm working on (third book in what now seems to be a triilogy). On a day when I visit the publishing house to drop off and pick up work:

Everyone was almost always busy, but Allan LeBlanc would find time for me. I’d slip into his cubicle, drop my book bag next to his desk, and ask about this or that problem I might have encountered in a manuscript. Sitting back in his swivel chair, he'd link his hands behind his head and in Socratic style answer my questions by posing his own.

Once, I asked him whether to emphasize a word or phrase by using quotes or an italic typeface

He answered: “How would a character express sarcasm?”

I replied: “You’re saying it shouldn’t be italics … ”

Allan grinned. “Right. It shouldn’t. Why not?”

“Well … I can guess, but why don’t you tell me, Allan.”

He leaned forward, excited; language and usage turned him on. “With sarcasm—or irony or mimicry—the word or phrase is not merely stressed, but inflected.”

“Yeah, I see … ”

“But if I’d said the word ‘sarcasm’ … ”

“It would be inflected, because in essence you’re quoting it … ”

“Right.” He plucked a page from a wire basket on his desktop. “Funny you should ask about that,” and plunked it down at my elbow.

A Xerox copy from a book I’d copyedited a few weeks before, his bold black writing in the margin connected with a bold line to a block of text circled within a paragraph.

“Yeah,” I said, frowning. “I didn’t know how to handle that—though in my defense, Allan, I hestitated over it, and had bad dreams about it that night.”

He laughed. We both knew what that was like.

A BROOK IN THE CITY
The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear
A number in. But what about the brook
That held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length
And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed
A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
From growing under pavements of a town;
The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
In fetid darkness still to live and run -
And all for nothing it had ever done
Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps
That such a brook ran water. But I wonder
If from its being kept forever under
The thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep.

Robert Lee Frost

Change of scene brings change of mood, but it is not merely the scene that is depicted in this poetry. The transformation of an old farmhouse into a city house is accentuated by the decline of a brook into a sewer. Recalling that 'the world is too much with us.' the poet wonders whether such change must not be paid for, whether the underground muttering of the debased steam might not:

. . .keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep.

comment by Louis Untermeyer, Frost's randy friend. Untermeyer had the incurable eye for the trim ankle. He troubled little about Samuel Johnson's warning about a second marriage: 'the triumph of hope over experience.'

Fifty-nine degrees on Friday. Everyone at the bread and soup shop in town was talking about it. Fifty-nine degrees! As if it were a done deal.

We'll see.

Thaw

I want to see a thaw, a drip, drip, drip on the morning leaves,
Rain writing on the window panes, a life-story of falling.
I want to see whiteness turn clear again
Until the road is a stretching liquid mirror,
A cracking one, but any will do.
Momentarily,
I want colour.

I can't bear to cast my eyes upon more hardness,
The rockiness of the fields on the way to school,
The hills of my homeland white like sleeping polar bears.
I want them to awaken with raw vigour.
Attack the landscape in the way I know they can.
Momentarily,
I want colour.

This whiteness all around is one I'd warmly welcome, usually,
But this frost, this frost, it’s rubbing off. I can do nothing.
I'll welcome you back, dear whiteness, in December’s fervent glow.
I'll watch and feast my eyes upon you without this weary natter.
For now, I just want mirrors on the roads, mirrors that shatter.
Just momentarily,
I want colour.

Seán O Muiríosa

Weather report from Chicago--thawing. It is predicted that we will have that 59 degrees on Thursday, proving that Chicago is ahead of New York This is the weather that gives us hope that a real spring and summer will arrive, and that there will be colour. It is also the weather that creates the "average" temperature.

Piero, you've mentioned many times that you tend not to finish many books, meaning the books you're not editing but attempting to simply read for fun. I think you should give Denis Johnson a shot. I'd start with his first one, Angels. It's barely 200 pages. I think it's right up yer alley. Denis Johnson has a similar early background as yours, and he dips into gnosticism & Buddhism (or at least his characters often do) throughout his novels.

I think you'd also like the short stories of Harold Brodkey. He's very autobiographical in his "fictions," like yours, and I think you'd maybe find a kindred spirit in his work.

I've mentioned Raymond Carver already to you. As I think of others, I'll pass them along.

You make me feel like Liza Doolittle, Henry. And since I don't want to disappoint, mayhap I'll be pickin' up one or the other or both of those gents.

I hope you do check out those guys. Hopefully you won't be disappointed by them.

Not much going on. You know why? Martini's got a Comic Book Convention going on over on his thread, and then there's WWI happening on another thread. Ebb and flow, man. Ebb and flow.

THE BEAR
The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
And its choke cherries lips as if to kiss good-bye,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky,
Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall
(She's making her cross-country in the fall).
Her great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples
As she flings over and off down through the maples,
Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair.
Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage
That all day fights a nervous inward rage,
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces back and forth and never rests
The toe-nail click and shuffle of his feet,
The telescope at one end of his beat,
And at the other end a microscope,
Two instruments of nearly equal hope,
And in conjunction giving quite a spread.
Or if he rests from scientific tread,
'Tis only to sit back and sway his head
Through ninety odd degrees of arc it seems,
Between two metaphysical extremes.
He sits back on his fundamental butt
With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut,
(He almost looks religious but he's not),
And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,
At one extreme agreeing with one Greek,
At the other agreeing with another Greek
Which may be thought, but only so to speak.
A baggy figure, equally pathetic
When sedentary and when peripatetic.

Robert Frost

Here the human animal looking hopefully towards Science, longing for logick, but still leaning heavily on instinct, is caught midway between reason and emotion - a spectacle no less comick for being equally Pathetick. The poem begins with gentle humor and finishes with mocking wit.

Less than gregarious on this February day. I can't remember when the slate was blank. But I won't complain. It's been a rough winter on all the voters east of the Rockies.

THE BIRTHPLACE
Here further up the mountain slope
Than there was ever any hope,
My father built, enclosed a spring,
Strung chains of wall round everything,
Subdued the growth of earth to grass,
And brought our various lives to pass.
A dozen girls and boys we were.
The mountain seemed to like the stir,
And made of us a little while -
With always something in her smile.
Today she wouldn't know our name.
(No girl's, of course, has stayed the same.)
The mountain pushed us off her knees.
And now her lap is full of trees.

Robert Frost

Por, what about the non-voters?

I have nothing of interest to add today, but since Por is justifiably lonely, here I am. Hello.

You are a welcomed visitor Choc. William Cadbury's birthday has about 50 minutes left here in the Land of the Free.

Hibernation

In autumn I watch you, bear like, preparing your room
Against winter's weight. The bear, having eaten its way
To sleep, fills its cramped room with the breath of wild berry.
The snow batters its dirt walls, blankets them
In the silvery whiteness of a February moon.
The bear stirs ever so slightly, lost in the womb
Of its own winter dreams.

You, in your bear-like room, watch the days of winter
Grow long with white. Like the bear, you also have
Stored autumn, hanging your walls
With wild flower and root.
Daily, you move about your lavender and thyme,
Uneasy with your dreams of spring.

In March, the sun slides across the western sky,
Remaining a few minutes longer each day.
The bear, giant world that it is, makes one last turn on its axis,
While you, sensing the move of the bear,
Rotate each small pot just so,
Gathering the new and lingering light of a wakeful season.

Dale Edmands

Storms heading our way this late afternoon. Rain all weekend.

Piero, my man, I'm pimpin' you hard. Just added a new feature to the front page: "Next book," just below an updated TBR 2011 (thanks for the suggestion, slick) so know you're in our radar now. You're in our sights.

Gloriously warm today.

122> seems like this weekend our weather snuck out over to you, while your weather bolted out west ...

Piero,

I've just noticed the ten automatic recommendations that LT provides for Digging Deeper.

Besides your first metamemoir, the other nine include:

Chateau d'Argol
A World of Great Stories
Mulligan Stew: A Novel
The Same River Twice
Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr
Darconville's Cat
The Sleepwalkers
Miss Lonelyhearts
Skippy Dies

I've got 'em all, except the Tomcat Murr one (still on my wishlist), and read most of them, sans The Sleepwalkers

You're keeping some might fine company these days!

TO EARTHWARD
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The floor of - was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I live for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

Robert Frost

Where is Pietro? Anyone see or hear from him in the last couple of days?

Here I am, Gene. Crawling out of my cave. Truth is--make note of this; you won't hear it very often--I just dint have much to say.

>123 absurdeist:. I have no idea why LT generates the ten recommendations you note as a response to Digging Deeper. The only one of those I've read is The Sleepwalkers, which I liked quite a bit. In its portrayal of an historical era while telling a particular (three-part) story, it does bear some comparison to my book. But that's a stretch, I think, for an "automatic" recommendation.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for Penso, dunque che sono? to come out (this coming Thursday), and for the cover to appear on Internet book sites. I assume seeing an actual cover will make it more appealing, less an impostor. Still, there's apparently been sufficient advance orders to place it on the following amazon.it tag lists:

Memorie: 13 out of of 13,082
Stili di vita alternativi: 5 out of 108
Autobiografie generali: 37 out of 2,495

123 - Hold your horses on that one...it's snowing right now.

>126 copyedit52: I'm assuming it's some kind of algorithm that ranks total copies on LT against copies in the libraries of people who also have your book? That would explain the heavy Salon-reads presence. Like, bulk and concentration, or a refined version of "people who have this also have this"? It's why my recs are so useless--all I get is freakin' comic books, because in general I guess people who read comics only read comics.

>126 copyedit52:. An algorithm. How humbling. I now have to reassess everyone I thought I knew. All my LT virtual friends might be totally incorrect!

THE MOST OF IT
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush - and that was all.

Robert Frost

I love owls. (Aw Christ, I sound like that famous YouTube kid that says, "I like Toodles")

Anyhoo, we had 2 serenading Great Horneds the other night; one of them in the front yard. 'A beautiful, mournful duet.

'Reminds me of the the childrens classic that still brings a tear to the ol' Dawgs eye, Owl Moon.

Weather update from the hinterlands of the Northeast: It was 61 on Tuesday and 59 on Friday, and freezing on the days between, and then again between Friday and today (it was 13 degrees last night), with furious winds on Saturday. So some snow evaporated (though the landscape is still white) and melted to water in the driveway before freezing up and becoming a sheet of ice. I had to take the car down to the mailbox to avoid breaking my back.

Meanwhile, in my guise as chauffeur, I went down to JFK to pick up my daughter and her partner, who flew in from Seattle for a few days. He is a son of Portland (Oregon)--went to Roosevelt H.S. he told me--and since his field is art, if I can arrange reservations, I'll drive everyone to Olana today, to take the tour of Frederic Church's baroque house, with its Hudson River (Thomas Cole, etc.) paintings and Byzantine themed rooms.

Traveling Chicagoan, here. Were are in Hot Springs, Arkansas to visit my husband's only remaining aunt on his father's side. 90 years old, looking good, living alone (in an active community with many friends) and a delight. We took the long weekend to join his sister and family, since we never know how much time we have left to visit with her. Weather has been lovely--70s during the day. Wonderful trip and we are, from what I see, going to miss some truly nasty weather in Chicago today.

Hey Sandy, I had never heard of Owl Moon. I can't wait to get back to work and check it out. It sounds like the perfect read for my daughter and me.

Welcome, Texas person, to our unpredictable thread. We had another Texas person once, but he upped and moved to Georgia.

... well, not entirely unpredictable, come to think upon it. We are prone to associative connections, being human and all.

The Owl

When cats run home and light is come,
And dew is cold upon the ground,
And the far-off stream is dumb,
And the whirring sail goes round,
And the whirring sail goes round;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.

When merry milkmaids click the latch,
And rarely smells the new-mown hay,
And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch
Twice or thrice his roundelay,
Twice or thrice his roundelay;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Predicted lows and highs
and other salient so-called facts for selective locales
Monday, February 21, 1011

Edmonton, Canada -3/22
Woodstock, N.Y. 3/31wintry mix
Bethany, Conn. 8/37 wintry mix
Chicago 13/33 snow
Boston 14/35 snow
Sandusky, Ohio 15/34 wintry mix
La Pine, Oregon 21/40 snow showers
Denver 21/44
New York City 21/45 snow
Gaithersburg, Md. 26/66
Utrecht, Holland 30/39
Portland, Oregon 34/50
Little Rock 34/62
Ghent, Belgium 36/41
Austin, Texas 36/73
Vancouver, Canada 37/42
London, England 37/46
Huntington Beach, Cal. 42/59
Los Angeles 46/62
San Diego 47/58
Atlanta 48/68
Greenville, S. Car. 54/72
Gainesville, Fla. 56/80
Cairo 57/70
Gulf Shores, Alabama 57/71
New Orleans 59/75
Taipei 61/66
Sydney 64/72 rain

WE BREAK INTO OUR REGULAR BROADCASTING SCHEDULE FOR AN EMERGENCY:

I understand it's a slow holiday weekend around the salon right now, but for those of you who are here one of our very own -- a real life, under-appreciated writer who's just recently become published, needs our help and he needs it fast!

Polutropos, Andrew Stancek:

He needs our votes for his superb short story, "The Magician," that is in competition right now against several other stories (none of which are as good as Andrew's) in Bartleby Snopes.

Vote for Andrew's story, "The Magician," right here: http://www.bartlebysnopes.com/stories.htm

Don't drop the ball damn it, like you did for Solla's story a few months back in the same publication. Thankfully, the editors picked the ball up for her and published her story anyway, but can we always put our trust in editors? NO.

So, just click inside the little circle next to "The Magician" (fine, actually read my favorite story of Andrew's so far if you really must before voting for it) and hit enter, and let's help our dear friend maintain the momentum of his recent success.

This weather is just ridiculous. In the 60s and beautiful on Friday (though I was out late enough for the cold to reemerge), then cold, snow flakes, and insane wind yesterday. Today I spent volunteering in the park - mulching tree pits.

Big weekend of Cajun cooking as well - gumbo, white beans with tasso, stuffed bell peppers, cornbread.

It's beautiful! Screw this inside business, imma find a patio with a wireless connection.

CLOSED FOR GOOD
Much as I own I owe
The passers of the past
Because their to and fro
Has cut this road to last,
I owe them more today
Because they've gone away

And come not back with steed
And chariot to chide
My slowness with their speed
And scare me to one side.
They have found other scenes
For haste and other means.

They leave the road to me
To walk in saying naught
Perhaps but to a tree
Inaudibly in thought,
'From you the road receives
A priming coat of leaves.

'And soon for lack of sun,
The prospects are in white
It will be further done,
But with a coat so light
The shape of leaves will show
Beneath the bush of snow.'

And so on into winter
Till even I have ceased
To come as a foot printer,
And only some slight beast
So mousy or so foxy
Shall print there as my proxy.

Robert Frost

Two major bookstore chains in Australia have just closed their doors, Angus and Robinson, and Borders.

Interesting take on why Borders has closed down: http://newmatilda.com/2011/02/21/burned-borders-books

LATE WISDOM
WE'VE trod the maze of error round,
Long wandering in the winding glade,
And now the torch of truth is found,
It only shows us where we strayed:
By long experience taught, we know -
Can rightly judge of friend and foe;
Can all the worth of these allow,
And all the faults discern in those.

Now 'tis our boast that we can quell
The wildest passions in their rage,
Can their destructive force repel,
And their impetuous wrath assuage -
Ah, Virtue! dost thou arm when now
This bold rebellious race are fled?
When all these tyrants rest, and thou
Art warring with the mighty dead?

George Crabbe (1754-1832)

Good info, Choco. Seems to me the book business in Australia is less oiskasprecht (they didn't have that one in the Yiddish Dick and Jane aka George and Laura book, Henri) than here, though it doesn't sound good there either.

Today's personal book news (I am, admittedly, obsessed with this at the moment): though Penso will not officially be available untii Thursday, the cover image has finally appeared on amazon.it and some other Italian Internet booksellers. And with advance sales, my book was no. 5 today on amazon's alternative lifestyle list this morning, and and no. 4 on the memoir list:

http://www.amazon.it/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?__mk_it_IT=%C5M%C5Z%D5%D1&url=search-a...

Interesting. I'm looking forward to what scraps the Borders sales offer about here. Around here, Borders habitually put up stores near existing Barnes and Nobles in not-quite-as-good locations. The offerings are only modestly different. I don't think we lose anything with their shut-downs, and maybe have more room for some others.

That's exciting news, Piero. Seems it keeps climbing higher with every update! Hope it hits #1

I know I'm probably in the minority but I'll really miss the Borders that was within walking distance of our home. It was an excellent excuse to go for a walk any day. I'm addicted to bookstores, perusing bookshelves, searching for those proverbial needles in haystacks tucked away on a shelf somewhere, waiting for discovery. Borders was a refuge for me, and was once a truly singular store, with a classics literature selection that still makes me salivate in remembrance, unsurpassed by anyone's, indie-store or chain. And their effing governmental-like mismanagement and idiotic corporate leadership ruined it. Yeah, let's give Amazon control of our online business for eight years! That makes good business sense! Morons.

Andrew is closing in:

http://www.bartlebysnopes.com/stories.htm

Very exciting horserace here!

Next to Cavafy, Pablo Neruda is probably my favorite poet these days.

Took advantage of Borders' closing sale and bought The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Hope you won't mind if I quote extensively from it hereabouts ...

And the City Now Has Gone

How the clock moves on, relentlessly,
with such assurance that it eats the years.
The days are small and transitory grapes,
the months grow faded, taken out of time.

It fades, it falls away, the moment, fired
by that implacable artillery --
and suddenly, only a year is left to us,
a month, a day, and death turns up in the diary.

No one could ever stop the water's flowing;
nor thought nor love has ever held it back.
It has run on through suns and other beings,
its passing rhythm signifying our death.

Until, in the end, we fall in time, exhausted,
and it takes us, and that's it. Then we are dead,
dragged off with no being left, no life, no darkness,

no dust, no words. That is what it comes to;
and in the city where we'll live no more,
all is left empty, our clothing and our pride.

~ Pablo Neruda

Makes a nice thematic companion piece to Cavafy's "The City".

146> people with access to more than one computer (say, your work computer) ought to vote doubly that way too. I will tomorrow when I get back to work.

EF's in the catbirdseat. Long may he run.

THE ANSWER
My comforts drop and melt away like snow:
I shake my head, and all the thoughts and ends,
Which my fierce youth did bandy, fall and flow
Like leaves about me: or like summer friends,
Flies of estates and sunshine. But to all,
Who think me eager, hot, and undertaking,
But in my prosecutions slack and small;
As a young exhalation, newly waking,
Scorns his first bed of dirt, and means the sky;
But cooling by the way, grows pursy and slow,
And settling to a cloud, doth live and die
In that dark state of tears: to all, that so
Show me, and set me, I have one reply,
Which they that know the rest, know more than I.

George Herbert (1593-1633)

Like Robert Frost and W.H. Auden (his birthday today) Herbert had a 'literary' mother guiding his fledgling steps, or flights, as the case may be. She made sure that he wouldn't follow the path of the 'Roaring Boy' Robert Herrick; that his measures would be slow and dignified and eschew ever the light fantastic of the social dance floor. Thus he continued meditating, and praying, and rejoicing, till the day of his death; and on that day, said to Mr. Woodnoth, 'My dear friend, I am sorry I have nothing to present to my merciful God but sin and misery; but the first is pardoned; and a few hours will now put a period to the latter; for I shall suddenly go hence and be no more seen.'

His biographer Izzac Walton hoped to pass over into the next world in the manner of this Anglican Divine.

- All must go to their cold graves
But the religious actions of the just,
Smell sweet in death, and blossom in the dust.

The final lines were adapted by Walton from the dirge in James Shirley's CONTENTION OF AJAX AND ULYSSES
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/noa/pdf/27636_17th_U27_Shirley-1.pd...

Going Home

He came home. Said nothing.
It was clear, though, that something had gone wrong.
He lay down fully dressed.
Pulled the blanket over his head.
Tucked up his knees.
He’s nearly forty, but not at the moment.
He exists just as he did inside his mother’s womb,
clad in seven walls of skin, in sheltered darkness.
Tomorrow he’ll give a lecture
on homeostasis in metagalactic cosmonautics.
For now, though, he has curled up and gone to sleep.

Wislawa Szymborska

SO WE'LL GO NO MORE A ROVING
So we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out its breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day return to soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

One thing about Byron, the man knew the proper uses and means of laying on a good curse:

http://www.readytogoebooks.com/CM13.htm

One hopes that Elgin has indeed felt the full force of the curse.

And he knew a good love ditty, too:

Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart !
Or, since that has left my breast,
Keep it now, and take the rest !
Hear my vow before I go,

By those tresses unconfined,
Woo'd by each Ægean wind;
By those lids whose jetty fringe
Kiss thy soft cheeks' blooming tinge;
By those wild eyes like the roe,

By that lip I long to taste;
By that zone-encircled waist;
By all the token-flowers that tell
What words can never speak so well;
By love's alternate joy and woe,

Maid of Athens ! I am gone:
Think of me, sweet ! when alone.
Though I fly to Istambol,
Athens holds my heart and soul:
Can I cease to love thee? No !

He is indeed the hero of we philhellenes. All is dross that is not Hellena.

zenomax no doubt knows what's going on in his homeland, but perhaps others don't know about this yet:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110222/ap_on_re_as/as_new_zealand_earthquake

A_musing, come to my arms.

148: There used to be a wonderful bookstore in Portland called the Catbird Seat. It moved from its neighborhood to downtown in the mid '80s and folded.

>152 copyedit52: yikes!

I always feel a bit guilty going to a Borders (there are a few staying open in this area), not that that's ever stopped me. The 20% sale I attended this weekend wasn't good enough to do real buying, but I did find a few things on the $1 shelf. And Borders does not stock everything. I've been wandering around for a few months to find a some things on my list, which are never there. And usually I can get it cheaper on Amazon. Neither Borders nor B&N ever had The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which being by a Bronte you'd think would be around.

Mixed feelings. I just wish, like Choc's referenced article said, it hadn't done so much damage to smaller businesses on the way.

Whenever I'm tempted to go to Chapters, which is our local big box store, I just buy on Abebooks. It always seems to be cheaper, and stuff is easier to find.

Murr, come here! (But I do warn you, I smell of dogs...)

I'm hoping to snag some bookcases when the six borders that are disappearing around here finally go. So they'll be good for something.

THE QUIDDITY
My God, a verse is not a crown,
No point of honour, or gay suit,
No hawk, or banquet, or renown,
Not a good sword, nor yet a lute.

It cannot vault, or dance, or play;
It never was in FRANCE or SPAIN;
Nor can it entertain the day
With a great stable or demesne:

It is no office, art, or news,
Nor the Exchange, or busy Hall;
But it is that which while I use
I am with thee, and MOST take all.

George Herbert (1593-1633)

His chiefest recreation was musuck, in which heavenly art he was a most excellent master and did himself compose many divine hymns and anthems, which he set and sung to his lute or viol; and though he was a lover of retiredness, yet his love to music was such that he went usually twice every week on certain appointed days to the cathedral church at Salisbury; and at his return would say, 'that his time spent in prayer and cathedral music elevated his soul, and was his Heaven upon earth'; but before his return thence to Bemerton, he would usually sing and play his part at an appointed private music meeting; and, to justify this practice, he would often say, 'Religion does not banish mirth, but only moderate and sets rules to it.'

from Izzac Walton's Life of George Herbert

I'm tired of the cold. I've had enough of it. I protest.

THE COLD HEAVEN
SUDDENLY I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

William Butler Yeats (1912)

Hang in there PW, Spring is just around the corner. It's no consolation, I know, but it's on the chilly side out here in the land of sunshine.

And this land of sunshine down here is suddenly feeling autumnal. The turn of the year is approaching for us all.

Feels like the winter doldrums. Like being neither here nor there. Around the corner from spring? Doesn't seem so. But change is acomin', fer sure: I drive the missus down to the airport tomorrow so she can catch a plane to Barcelona, where she'll be for a while, between cruising for a couple of weeks to the watchamacallit islands and Morocco, maybe, unless they change the itinerary. Last year, you might recall, she landed in Santiago, Chile, a day before the earthquake hit. I will balance out her life by digging deeper into my skin.

160 - I agree.

Eyewitness news: Just got back from the city (JFK, actually). It is definitely still there.

I have got the winter doldrums in summer because I have a cold. Poor choccy. :(

There's a theory that made the rounds 'round here a while ago that a cold is a good thing because you needn't beat yourself up for not doing the things you're usually expected to do. Also, personally, as everyone in the nonvirtual world says--including me--I am a much nicer person when I'm sick.

>167 copyedit52: god, you're so right. I would kill for an incapacitating cold right now.

DIRECTIVE by Robert Frost
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704896104575139961752817010.html

The Unquiet City

we are succulents
our cool jade arms open
over clean tables our fine bone
china minds pull the strings
of our tongues together we plait
our thoughts with the television
back through the aerials and
transmission towers prodding
through the literal fog
the mechanics of which distance
does not startle us or the ears
pretend to hear the telephone
the page also wearies
us we have taken the meaning
out of things by laying them face to
face in our dictionary of emotions
we are so entirely alone that we
are unaware of it
and we enjoy the religion of solitude
because religions are at base
meaningless and we can turn
from them to a new hobby
to clean ashtrays or emptier
whiskey glasses we the women
of our building Margaret Gladys
Cecily Ida Eileen and I have
the cleanest washing on our block
we are proud and air our sheets
although it’s a long time since
any serious stain or passionate figment
seeped through that censorious cloth
we have plants one of us has a budgie
and I have three fish the details
are unimportant God does not come here often
we would be suspicious if he
did without an identity card
we collect each others’ mail
remind each other of garbage
days and are frightened
of the louts from the skating rink
but in the night I leave
my curtains open and air
my pendant tremulous breasts

Chris Mansell

Love that poem.

Today in Portland there is a dusting of snow. This means all the schools are closed. I took the bus to work and by the time we got downtown there was no snow at all. My co-worker said to me "How was Snowmaggeddon for you?"
Sigh.

It was a LOT worse in South Texas, very near the Mexicano border, a couple weeks ago...

I'm heading out to the Portland environs, very soon. 'Can't wait. Powell's Books! Agates on the beaches! Great coffee! Good pizza! Fit, trim people! Yee-haw!

A CONSIDERABLE SPECK
A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink
When something strange about it made me think.
This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,
But unmistakably a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt -
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn't want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered; I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.

I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise.
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

Robert Frost

Witty and critical. Not bitter. The criticism is only directed towards those who are unthinking (like that fatpfuck governor of New Jersey & Wisconsin's statesman gov.), too dull (the 'maverick') to act or even to reflect. Corporal bambam said he would get out and walk the picketlines with the workers, etc. It seems he's misplaced those 'comfortable' shoes. Does it have to do with all the dough he took from Goldman Sachs, et al? Were we to take our political complaints to another thread?

Spring has arrived here in South Carolina. My son has informed me that since the groundhog did not see his shadow, this is really spring and not a brief moment of pleasantness sent to make the return of winter all that harder to bear.

So my windows have been thrown open and our winter coats hung back in the closet.

I was in the process of envying your good fortune, Alison, or whatever you'd call it when reality cooperates with desire, and point out that up here, 500 or so miles to the north, I woke up to new snow filigreeing tree limbs and branches ... thick, wet snow, it turned out, that knocked out the electricity (and lights, heat, water, computer) about an hour ago. So I wasn't able to say all that until now.

There's an almost certain bulb and bud killing freeze ahead of me. Also, you'll have much of July and all of August to chuckle as you enjoy fresh breezes and long, pleasant evenings outside while I lay perfectly prone, under the wet and torrid blanket that is a southern summer.

I've always loved that poem, Porius.

173: Tell me when you are here! We should meet for coffee! Or maybe a voodoo donut. I've actually been wanting to get a Portland Meetup going, meet Slick and his lovely wife, and see Solla, and anyone else who lives in or visits the City of Roses.

I shoulda found and posted this poem about three threads ago (story of my life, being late to the dance), when we cited the ancient way New York City buildings (and apartments) are heated: from a central location (Con Edison), with excess heat released as steam through manhole covers in the street; which Henri pointed out was an eerie element in his favorite movie, Taxi Driver.

Manhole Covers

The beauty of manhole covers–what of that?
Like medals struck by a great savage khan,
Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,
Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,
Mottoed and sculptured to a turn,
But notched and whelked and pocked and smashed
With the great company names
(Gentle Bethlehem, smiling United States).
This rustproof artifact of my street,
Long after roads are melted away will lie
Sidewise in the grave of the iron-old world,
Bitten at the edges,
Strong with its cryptic American,
Its dated beauty.

Karl Shapiro

179 - You know what's amazing about the steam is that ConEd doesn't know where many of the pipes are or go. Older buildings that use steam pay a flat rate for it because they don't have any way to track usage. You can also run some pretty bitching generators off the steam and feed power back to the grid.

Somehow left the house without a book today and had some minor hysterics on the subway platform. Once on the train I noticed the guy next to me was reading (Sebald's The Rings of Saturn) and had an extra book in his pocket. It took some serious strength of will not to ask him if I could borrow it till one of us got off the train.

From the manhole covers vent the smoke of NYCs underbelly of corruption, crime, and vice. A veritable Inferno of infamy beneath the people's feet, the constant conflagration seeking release through manhole covers.

And sometimes stray voltage electrocutes people.

I dunno how it was down in NYC today but the weather up here is the worst. By which I don't mean blizzards or bone-chilling cold, which at least confers bragging rights. (See RidgewayGirl above, preemptively boasting about how miserable it will be in South Carolina this coming summer.) It's damp cold--nothing to boast about--with a nasty wind, and wet snow knocking out the electricity twice so far. I'd rather be in Philadelphia, as W.C. Fields used to say; but then it probably sucks there too.

Snow level drops to 1,000 feet tonight in Southern CA. Chino is just above 1,000 feet elevation. We've had the ground turn white with hail before, but never snow the thirteen plus years I've lived here. Can't wait. People up higher in the canyons of the coast of Malibu may need chains!

It's beautiful, clear and cold up here (in the 20s last night). everyone has stopped worrying about Snowmageddon / Snowpocalypse (=2 inches of snow, in Portland) but we are still walking around saying "brrrrrr".

THOSE IMAGES
WHAT if I bade you leave
The cavern of the mind?
There's better exercise
In the sunlight and the wind.

I never bade you go
To Moscow or to Rome.
Renounce that drudgery,
Call the muses home.

Seek those images
That constitute the wild,
The lion and the virgin,
The harlot and the child.

Find in middle air
An eagle on the wing,
Recognize the five
That make the Muses sing.

William Butler Yeats (1938)

I like it, Peter. But is it in fact five in the last verse, or should it be fire? If it's five, you'll have to explain that to me. The five senses?

Speaking of "five" ...

opening from Ode To Criticism

I wrote five poems:
one was green,
another a round wheaten loaf,
the third was a house, a building,
the fourth a ring,
and the fifth was
brief as a lightning flash,
and as I wrote it,
it branded my reason.

Well, then, men
and women
came and took
my simple materials,
breeze, wind, radiance, clay, wood,
and with such ordinary things
constructed
walls, floors, and dreams...."

~ Pablo Neruda

If it snowed locally last night, it didn't stick dang it!

Yes, I see, five it is, in the Yeats poem, because the fourth verse follows the third(!): the wild, the lion and the virgin, the harlot and the child.

Never mind, Peter.

183 - Was not so bad down here - very, very windy and raining most of the day but not so cold as it has been.

We're facing temps in the low 70's around here most of this week. Right now it's about 69, sunny with a light spring-like breeze. Yeah, spring is like a two-edged sword. Men, it brings the flowers and the trees into bloom, the insects are not fully oot 'n aboot, the temps are generally moderate and except for the rain, it seems purrfect. De it is a harbinger of deadly days to come. Days when the sky is a washed out blue leading to white, when the leaves all look like shoe leather and many of the flowers are thirsty nearly unto death, when the temps are so high for so long that even the A/C has a hard time. I spend my nights asleep, motionless, naked, on top of the covers.

Excellent stuff G.

Last summer, when we had a record breaking number of 90 degree or 90-plus days, I thought about that: living in the South. My blood felt like molasses and I was moving in slow motion; not with forethought, but in adaptation. So, though I poked fun at RidgewayGirl, it's not as if I don't understand.

Me, I don't even have air-conditioning. I have a big ceiling fan that I turn on at night to suck in the cooler air from outside. Last summer, alas, it didn't work so well. The air out there didn't cooperate. If you visit me this summer, Gene, bring your own A/C.

ALL THINGS CAN TEMPT ME
ALL things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman's face or worse -
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs;
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.

William Butler Yeats (1909)

Yesterday the melt finally uncovered the front gardens, revealing hyacinth shoots starting to poke up. This morning, they're covered with four inches of snow.

Katerine Anne Porter's Winter Burial:

Now crunches down the frozen stalk
On sterile snow;
Chill core of winter fruit in the mouth
Is bitter as a blow.

Pluck out this seed and bury it
Under a rock:
Against the winter measure of thin days
Tapped out upon a clock.

K.A.P. wrote little bits of poetry in three languages, each reflecting different parts of her life. Her English poetry is somber and mostly from her young days before the great stories; French is full of playful songs; Spanish poetry is revolutionary and often full of borrowings and mixed with English. But her story Flowering Judas is poetry all its own and may be the best of the lot.

An overnight snowfall here too, Sam. I haven't seen the ground since ... I don't recall.

Another Sarah

When winter was half over
God sent three angels to the
apple-tree
Who said to her
"Be glad, you little rack
Of empty sticks,
Because you have been chosen.

In May you will become
A wave of living sweetness
A nation of white petals
A dynasty of apples."

Katherine Anne Porter

Gearing up for Mardi Gras week: My Indian Red

Night's Mardi Gras

Night is the true democracy. When day
Like some great monarch with his train has passed,
In regal pomp and splendor to the last,
The stars troop forth along the Milky Way,
A jostling crowd, in radiant disarray,
On heaven's broad boulevard in pageants vast,
And things of earth, the hunted and outcast,
Come from their haunts and hiding-places; yea,
Even from the nooks and crannies of the mind
Visions uncouth and vagrant fancies start,
And specters of dead joy, that shun the light,
And impotent regrets and terrors blind,
Each one, in form grotesque, playing its part
In the fantastic Mardi Gras of Night.

Edward J. Wheeler

Two from Yeats

WORDS
I had this thought a while ago,
'My darling cannot understand
What I have done, or what would do
In this blind and bitter land.'

And I grew weary of the sun
Until my thoughts cleared up again,
Remembering that the best I have done
Was done to make it plain;

That every year I have cried, 'At length
My darling understands it all,
Because I have come into my strength,
And words obey my call';

That had she done so who can say
What would have shaken from the sieve?
I might have thrown poor words away
And been content to live.

(1910)

NO SECOND TROY
WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

William Butler Yeats (1910)

Spring is coming!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLTSFeWCvjU&feature=fvwrel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsTK2LHZKPQ&feature=fvwrel

>180 janemarieprice:

Somehow left the house without a book today and had some minor hysterics on the subway platform. Once on the train I noticed the guy next to me was reading (Sebald's The Rings of Saturn) and had an extra book in his pocket. It took some serious strength of will not to ask him if I could borrow it till one of us got off the train.

LOL PANICCCCC no book!

Another damp, miserable day. It's raining, the air a haze. With all the snow on the ground, there's gonna be some flooding in the lowlands.

The region hereabouts is laced with New York City reservoirs, which the old timers hate because entrepreneurs and other predators can't build fast food palaces on the protected land, which is owned by the city. I like that circumstance; it's blessing. From the turnoff to my neck of the woods all the way up Route 28 through the Catskills and Delaware County and Oneonta, maybe eighty miles, you won't find a single McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, or Taco Bell. But when the surface of the largest local reservoir, the Ashokan, gets too high and they release water from the spillway, it's bad news for the lowlanders. That happened a few years ago, which is why I know about it.

Melissa lives down there. She might come home from Hollywood and curse a blue streak.

We've had such perfect weather, the kind where you might want to bring a cardigan along just in case. Tonight the thunderstorm predicted for earlier today is finally arriving, leaving my greyhound a quivering mess who continually reminds me that the closet is the safest place to be.

They seem like such highstrung dogs. I've usually seen greyhounds out walking with their people and often shivering (in Portland it's often cooler than what they can bear with their thin layer of fur) and looking like they are crouching in on themselves. They sure are beautiful though. If I lived in a warm climate I know I would want to have one. I'd just feel so sorry for the poor thing though, in this kind of weather.

My kids and I saw someone with a miniature (Italian?) greyhound out at Saturday Market around Christmas time, and it was actually snowing (rare for Portland) and the poor thing kept raising first one foot and then another, all crouched together, trying to keep warm, and shivering like a whip. Many people passing by gave the oblivious owner very dirty looks.

Yes, Meatloaf was not at all sure that snow was something he could step on. He is supposed to wear a jacket when it's cold outside, but he does not believe in clothes for dogs--maybe the whippet felt the same?

With the exception of weather-based issues, he's very laid back and he's certainly the easiest dog we've ever had living with us. He's not high strung at all when it's not thundering, but he does go embarrassingly bald in places during the summer. Also, greyhounds have not been bred for brains.

Piero, how are sales in Italy? And any more reviews?

How is my book doing? Good question, choco. I thought i knew, and then I didn't. Last week my book was high on several amazon.it lists, including no. 3 on Memorie, no. 4 on Alternative lifestyles, no. 36 on Social Scienza Biografie. Then, I didn't check or a few days, and when I did, the book had disappeared from all those lists. Like a pin had been poked into my balloon.

But here's the odd thing (I'm approaching this as a mystery, which in fact it is): though the cover now appears on all the book listings but one or two, I'm not sure it's available yet, and was supposed to be on February 25. You know how on amazon it says that if you order today you'll get the book by, say, March 3 or whatever? There is no such notification on my book. Instead there's this:

Attualmente non disponibile.
Se ordini adesso riceverai un'e-mail con la data di consegna prevista, non appena avremo maggiori informazioni. L'importo ti sarà addebitato solo una volta spedito l'articolo. Venduto e spedito da Amazon.it. Confezione regalo disponibile.

Which seems to say it's not available yet. So I'm perplexed.

More on the Italian book business, or something:

http://www.google.com/search?q=9788897012023&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&...

Some of the listed websites take a long time to come up, but if they did, you'd see that almost all are online book sellers. There's also a TV book channel site where the publisher, Lantana Editore, evidently placed an ad:

http://www.bookchannel.it/bc/novita-editoriali/articolo.php?id=563

No reader has yet reviewed the book on any of these outlets.

More:

Just when it seemed my book had dropped off the face of the earth, I was heartened to find this:

http://www.deastore.com/libri/narrativa-moderna-e-contemporanea-dopo-il-1945-/CC...

At the deastore, whatever that is, my book is rated at no. 21 out of 78,755 products. Are all these 78,755 products books, or like amazon, do they also sell stereos, espresso makers, DVDs, and who knows what else? But I'm listed prominently at least, and apparently I'll be available in three days.

We'll see.

Maybe they haven't updated the Amazon site yet? Odd.

Glad to see they are still selling it, and haven't given it over to the Mafia. Keep us posted.

It does me good to share my fate with the virtual crowd. "This thing of ours," as the mafiosi might say.

IN MY CRAFT AND SULLEN ART
In my craft and sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms.
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With the nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Dylan Thomas

fantastic

>209 copyedit52:: In the past I've ordered several books at Deastore. They deliver prompty and their assortment is good enough for me. My other Italian internet book store is ibs.it. Also good, sometimes a book is available at one of them and not at the other, I don't have a preference.

Thanks for the info, Pim. This is a strange new world I've entered, and any clues I get from outside the Internet bubble are welcome.

I dropped a few positions at the deastore this morning (afternoon in Italy):

http://www.deastore.com/libri/narrativa-moderna-e-contemporanea-dopo-il-1945-/CC...

And that's all I'm going to say about that. A person can go crazy following this stuff.

212: I am always newly amazed by Dylan Thomas every time I see one of those famous poems that I've seen before many times. The juxtaposition of the words is just so fresh and shakes me out of complacency every time. He was just incredible. Spindrift pages? Towering dead? sullen art? How did he come up with these - how can any of us ever forget them?

Spring doesn't come here till April, nevertheless:

Early Spring

Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows’ wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,

hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Here is Dylan Thomas himself reading the poem in #212: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIoXV-HXobo

WHERE ONCE THE WATERS OF YOUR FACE
Where once the waters of your face
Spun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,
The dead turns up its eye;
Where once the mermen through your ice
Pushed up the hair, the dry wind steers
Through salt and root and roe.

Where once your green knots sank their splice
Into the tided cord, there goes
The green unraveller,
His scissors oiled, his knife hung loose
To cut the channels at their source
And lay the wet fruits low.

Invisible, your clocking tides
Break on the lovebeds of the weeds;
The weed of love's left dry;
There round about your stones the shades
Of children go who, from their voids,
Cry to the dolphined sea.

Dry as a tomb, your colored lids
Shall not be latched while magic glides
Sage on the earth and sky;
There shall be corals in your beds,
There shall be serpents in your tides,
Till all our sea-faiths die.

Dylan Thomas

>216 anna_in_pdx: well put anna.

From yesterday's Slate, a piece by Dahlia Lithwick (excerpted and edited) on a Supreme Court case concerning the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA):

... Oral argument did not go all that well for the company that wanted to be treated like a real, live boy. And so it was, perhaps, no surprise that the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that corporations do not have such a thing as "personal privacy" for the purposes of FOIA.

... Chief Justice Roberts spent the better part of the hour poking fun at AT&T's claim that the adjective personal means the same thing as the noun person, such that the statute's treatment of corporations as "persons" means that corporations are also somehow capable of getting "personal." As he explained at argument, that claim makes no sense. "I tried to sit down and come up with other examples where the adjective was very different from the root noun ... It turns out it is not hard at all. You have craft and crafty. Totally different. Crafty doesn't have much to do with craft. Squirrel, squirrely. Right? I mean, pastor—you have a pastor and pastoral. Same root, totally different."

The majority opinion continued the same jolly monologue ... with copious citations to Webster's that "the noun crab refers variously to a crustacean and a type of apple, while the related adjective crabbed can refer to handwriting that is 'difficult to read,'" and went on to observe that "corny can mean 'using familiar and stereotyped formulas believed to appeal to the unsophisticated,' which has little to do with corn--'the seeds of any of the cereal grasses used for food.'"

... Upon reading the opinion in its entirety ... after robbing AT&T of its last vestiges of corporate personhood (at least for FOIA purposes) the chief ... penned what might have been the funniest closing sentence in opinion-writing history: "The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally."

Wow, Roberts can write can't he? While they've already opened the floodgates for corporate personhood, and i am not forgiving or forgetting their decision on campaign finance, I am glad that they saw the ridiculousness of the theory taken to extremes.

Man that's heartening. Not so much the verdict (like Anna says, drop in the bucket), but the humour and humanity in a legal decision. Bureaucrats: the bar has been set.

Wow, I didn't realize the Supreme Court had such a supreme sense of humor.

What a perspicacious bubba you are, beelze. Here's the article from which I fashioned the excerpt:

http://www.slate.com/id/2286923/

Perspicacious?! Goldang, that's an awful thing to say to a body! Why, I've never been so insulted in all my...*consults Webster's*...oh, ahem, well thank you!

THE FOLLY OF BEING COMFORTED
One that is ever kind said yesterday:
'Your well-beloved's hair has threads of gray,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seem impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.'
Heart cries, 'No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.'

O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head,
You'd know the folly of being comforted.

William Butler Yeats
from IN THE SEVEN WOODS (1904)

I loved this song as a callow youth and still do as I approach my dotage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3HemKGDavw
And one more. This was something we had no way of anticipating at the time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tHHRpAzGcM

A message.

Dear Joanne

Dear Joanne,

Last night Magda dreamed that she,
you, Jack, and I were driving around
Italy.

We parked in Florence and left
our dog to guard the car.

She was worried because he
doesn’t understand Italian.

Lew Welch

The Makers

Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts,
And bones and cantilevered inference
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
In wind and time and change, and in the mind
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers
Of the city into the astonished sky.

They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationship, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marv elous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

Howard Nemerov

EARLY SPRING
ONCE more the Heavenly Power
Makes all things new,
And domes the red-plow'd hills
With loving blue;
The blackbirds have their wills,
The throstles too.

Opens a door in Heaven;
From skies of glass
A Jacob's ladder falls
On greening grass,
And o'er the mountain-walls
Young angels pass.

Before them fleets the shower,
And burst the buds,
And shine the level lands,
And flash the floods;
The stars are from their hands
Flung thro' the woods.

The woods with living airs
How softly fann'd
Light airs from where the deep,
All down the sand,
Is breathing in his sleep,
Heard by the land.

O follow, leaping blood,
The season's lure!
O heart look down and up
Serene, secure,
Warms as the crocus cup,
Like snowdrops, pure!

Past, Future glimpse and fade
Thro' some slight spell,
A gleam from yonder vale,
Some far blue fell,
And sympathies, how frail,
In sound and smell!

Till at thy chuckled note,
Thou twinkling bird,
The fairy fancies range,
And, slightly stirr'd,
Ring little bells of change
From word to word.

For now the Heavenly Power
Makes all things new,
And thaws the cold, and fills
The flower with dew;
The blackbirds have their wills,
The poets too.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1883)

Some Clouds

Now that I’ve unplugged the phone,
no one can reach me–-
At least for this one afternoon
they will have to get by without my advice
or opinion.
Now nobody else is going to call
& ask in a tentative voice
if I haven’t yet heard that she’s dead,
that woman I once loved-–
nothing but ashes scattered over a city
that barely itself any longer exists.
Yes, thank you, I’ve heard.
It had been too lovely a morning.
That in itself should have warned me.
The sun lit up the tangerines
& the blazing poinsettias
like so many candles.
For one afternoon they will have to forgive me.
I am busy watching things happen again
that happened a long time ago.
as I lean back in Josephine’s lawnchair
under a sky of incredible blue,
broken–if that is the word for it-–
by a few billowing clouds,
all white & unspeakably lovely,
drifting out of one nothingness into another.

Steve Kowit

DOTAGE
False glozing pleasures, casks of happiness,
Foolish night-fires, women's and children's wishes,
Chases in arras, gilded emptiness,
Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,
Embroidered lies, nothing between two dishes;
These are the pleasures here.

True earnest sorrows, rooted miseries,
Anguish in grain, vexations ripe and blown,
Sure-footed griefs, solid calamities,
Plain demonstrations, evident and clear,
Fetching their proofs ev'n from the very bone;
These are the sorrows here.

But O the folly of distracted men,
Who griefs in earnest, joys in jest pursue;
Preferring, like brute beasts, a loathsome den
Before a court, ev'n that above so clear,
Where are no sorrows, but delights more true,
Than miseries are here!

George Herbert

Of course I am not nearly as confident as old Herbert about the pie-in-the-sky but it doesn't get in the way of my enjoying his poetry.

While having second thoughts about going to Italy this year I came across this:

Consolation

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon’s
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

Billy Collins

Peter! I just finally ordered Digging Deeper. Should be here soon!

Lovely poem today, but does it smack of sour grapes?

Congrats, comrade, in nabbing that rare book.

And no--no sour grapes. I am not a sour grape kinda guy. Rather, it's a combination of realizing, and accepting the fact, that my fantastic run of good fortune appears to be over: the Rolling Stone Italia review fueled a lot of book buying for Penso, dunque che sono? but now it appears to be fading (the effect of the media is startling), leaving me back where I started; though the book is still for sale, and I suppose in bookstores. It's almost a relief that I won't be the sensation that for a while I'd hoped I would be.

Which allows my usual manner of operation to come to the fore: to follow the omens and inclinations life deals, which are now pointing west. To Portland, Oregon, no less, where I have a standing invitation from my daughter's partner's parents to visit. A car trip, I'm thinking (out loud), this summer, from San Francisco/Berkeley up Route 101, to Oregon, then Seattle, and if I'm still standing, maybe even a stopover in Vancouver, for a cup of coffee with the punkish Martini.

Oh, so you'll be in Frisco will you, but you can't, can't be BOTHERED to make the measely seven hour trek down south to beautiful Chino? Just stick a dagger in my heart why don't'chu!

Since I'm just speculating (who would take care of my cats, for instance?): I'll fly out to San Diego, drive north to L.A., then on to Ojai, for old times' sake, Santa Cruz, the Bay area, Mendocino, Eugene, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Juneau, and on up to the North Pole.

Isn't Los Angeles the place where if you drive through it you come out the other side grimy? Kinda like Tokyo?

Robert

THE RETREAT
Happy those early days! when I
Shined in my angel-infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, celestial thought,
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two, from my first love,
And looking back (at that short space)
Could see a glimpse of his bright face;
When on some GILDED cloud or FLOWER
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A sev'ral sin to ev'ry sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright SHOOTS of everlastingness.
O, how long I travel back
And thread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain,
Where first I left my glorious train;
From whence th' inlightened spirit sees
That shady city of palm trees;
But (ah!) my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move,
And when this dust falls to the urn
In that state I came, return.

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)

H.V. was a Welsh physician of hermetic leanings whose verses are fraught with eldritch & alchemical matters. Vaughan was influenced by George herbert and he was, in turn, a shaping force upon Wordsworth. His twin brother Thomas was also a poet/Alchemist who blew himself to smithereens toying with the dusky matter.

Contemplating Hell

Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,
My brother Shelley found it to be a place
Much like the city of London. I,
Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,
Find, contemplating Hell, that it
Must be even more like Los Angeles.

Also in Hell,
I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens
With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,
Very quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great leaps of fruit, which nonetheless

Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos,
Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than
Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which
Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere.
And houses, designed for happiness, standing empty,
Even when inhabited.

Even the houses in Hell are not all ugly.
But concern about being thrown into the street
Consumes the inhabitants of the villas no less
Than the inhabitants of the barracks.

Bertolt Brecht

The snow drops and helleborus are flowering now. The crocus and hyacinth will be next. But probably after another storm.

Forsythia is in full bloom. Daffodils and hyacinths are blooming also. Tulips are up but not yet blooming. The Tulip Tree is in full bloom, all pink and white. Next month the Azaleas and Dogwoods bloom and then Atlanta truly looks like an Azalea garden. Leaves are showing on some of the deciduous plnats, too. On a none too happy note the green ground cover is returning. You know, the stuff lawn mowers and Saturdays were made for. That stuff. Spring does have its downside, too.

Turtles are returning to the surface of the pond. Brenda saw a couple of large bass from the gazebo. She tried to feed the fish the other day, but it's too soon yet.

We're having mixed rain with the sun trying to break through but not having much success. It's a little chilly today. The last week or so has been mostly pleasant.

242> Love that poem, Piero. Hell is Freeway Traffic Jam Eternal.

Heading to Pauley Pavillion (UCLA) this afternoon to see my daughter perform in a pre-gymnastics meet "competition" for kids with special needs. They'll do their thing for half an hour and then the "typical" kids will take over. It's amazing how much Megs can do. Gymnastics has been wonderful OT (Occupational Therapy) for not only her physical coordination but her self-confidence and happiness as well.

Light rain all day, temps in the fifties, air a-haze and downright foggy in spots. Everything evaporating, melting, though the dirty snowbanks along the road are persistent. The streams and criks running chocolate brown; my driveway still a sheet of ice.

Raw Spring, how I love that time of year. Out here in room temperature land I can only read about it.

Actually, this is the season between spring and winter. It doesn't have a name that I know of. In Vermont they have a mud season, but that's synonymous with spring. Maybe we should have a contest like they did to come up with brunch. Maybe this time of year, in this particular place, can be wring, or sprinter.

As for room temperature, let me confess before you read it in black and white, Peter: I stole that from you, to describe California weather, and squirreled it somewhere in Digging Deeper.

C52, is Digging Deeper available for an ordinary man with an ordinary laptop? I've never read an e-book or internet book, or whatever. What's the best way to get it quickly?

By the way, though Trieste is about a 20 minute drive (LWalser must be a fast walker), I have yet to track down your Think...I took a wrong turn tonight and ended up in Italy, but the book stores would certainly have been closed at the time.

I don't know how fast she walks, but Lola does have a wicked sense of humor.

And no, Digging Deeper is not available as an e-book or via the Internet, even for an extraordinary man like yourself. It's got to be purchased in paper, like an old-fashioned book. I'd send you a copy, but who knows when it would get to Ljubljana and how much it would cost?

As for Penso, I see it listed in numerous Internet sites but have no idea if it's in bookstores, or what the hell is going on, for that matter. So before you trudge off to Trieste, call to see if your not so local bookstore has a copy.

well congratulations, then. i thought on your page it said internet...I'll check Am. UK,then. (the family is broke, prospects are dim, and i just ordered five books. i am humbled by my transgression so why not add yours if I can)

As or penso, i insist on going. if they don't have it will rant.

that was easy. digging deeper is on its way, to be sent tomorrow and arrive any time in march.

And just lie that, with your purchase, I dropped from being the 495,552nd most popular writer on amazon.co.uk to being the 41,116th. How amazing is that?

Watching Nicol Williamson & Vanessa Redgrave in SHERLOCK HOLMES thing. How magnificent they are.

Me too! Great minds ...

Fee ah such stuf ass cdispy cddeems ah made uff.

Apropos of which, or vitch, one of the better books I copyedited: Confessions of a Homing Pigeon

ANTHEM FOR A DOOMED YOUTH
What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wifred Owen (1893-1918)

Yes sir his poems have been set to musick. Owen was one of the more technically innovative versifiers of his generation. He lost his life a week before the armistice.

Today is Sheila's birthday. Since I don't know the time she was born, and being born in Australia even makes the astrological day confusing to me, I was going to present three Sabian, metaphorical interpretations, from The Astrology of Personality, by Dane Rudhyar, for her to either identify with or not. But one of them stood out so clearly, I decided to go with it:

16 degrees, Pisces:

IN A QUIET MUSEUM, AN ART STUDENT DRINKS IN INSPIRATION. Subjective source of strength around all manifestation. Communion with accumulated race power. Deep, vibrant realization.

Happy Birthday Sheila! and Happy Lundi Gras. Have some Tipitina.

HAppy Birthday! Pisces rock! Especially when they are herrings!! woooohooo!

More on the Italian Book Business

This Italian caper of mine, this Big Deal on Madonna Street, truly is a mystery. For almost two weeks I've been charting my book's fortunes on amazon.it, only to discover that amazon just opened its franchise in Italy in November 2010. And that there are at least half a dozen Italian Internet book outlets, which, for all I know, might sell more books than amazon. Feltrinelli.it, for instance; and this outfit, called, Fnac.it, whose top book sales by American authors, or authors previously published in the U.S. (I still can't read Italian), looks like this:

Libri> Romanzi e racconti>Narrativa straniera>Americana

1. Libertà
Jonathan Franzen

2. Vicino a te non ho paura
Nicolas Sparks

3. Club dei filosofi che volevano cambiare il mondo (il)
Laura J. Snyder

4. Canzoni per la scomparsa
Steward O’Nan

5. Un taxi chiamato fedelt?
Patti Kim

6. Il freddo modifica la traiettoria dei pesci
Pierre Szalowski

7. Consigli per gli acquisti
Jerry Della Femina

8. The Fighter
Bob Halloran

9. Ossessione
Elizabeth Kostova

10. Fiumi profondi
Various authors

11. Chiamami col tuo nome
Andr? Aciman

12. Nuovo battito (un)
Jodi Picoult

13. La chiave di casa
Tatiana Salem Levy

14. Bussola di no? (la)
Anne Tyler

15. Terra di nessuno
Frenando Bonassi

16. Nei suoi occhi
Nora Roberts

17. Neve cade sui cedri (la)
David Guterson

18. Non mi ami ancora
Jonathan Lethem

19. L'ultimo inverno
Paul Harding

20. Vita privata di una sconosciuta
Elena Mauli Shapiro

21. Segreto di boschi e di stelle (un)
David Guterson

22. Morning glory
Diana Peterfreund

23. Uomo di berlino (l')
Dan Vyleta

24. Penso, dunque chi sono?
Peter Weissman

25. Uccello del paradiso
Joyce Carol Oates

26. Infedelt?
Christina Schwarz

27. Lamento del bradipo (il)
Sam Savage

28. Crazy friend. io e philip k. dick
Jonathan Lethem

29. Posto delle balene (il)
Jean-Marie Le Cluzio

30. Primo amore e altri affanni
Harold Brodkey

Dear Copy52,

I will go to Trieste with a large Slavic friend and take care of this. It will be easy. I know you wrote elsewhere that you have no taste for alcoholic funs, but it might help you to know that in Slovenia a 2 deciliter beer is called an Italijanček because it is so small. The average Slovene order is the half liter. So Italians think Slovenes are giants. I'm sure we can get to the bottom of this quite quickly.

By the way, how does it feel to be so far behind 'Various Authors'?

>259 copyedit52: awww noooo, how sad. I wish that really was my astrological reading. But there has been some confusion, folks, and though I appreciate your birthday greetings enormously, please save them until 7 May. I posted a happy birthday thing for Murr in the birthday thread, and people have interpreted that as being about me. I do apologise for being confusing. I didn't mean to be.

So Murr, that astrological reading is for YOU. Happy 9024th birthday Murr.

And thank you all so much - it's rather nice to get birthday greetings out of season, if somewhat awkward.

And Piero, that list is fantastic. If it was beating all the popular twerps like Jodi Picoult and Nicholas Sparks, if it was me, I'd start worrying about the intelligence of my book, to appeal to the masses so easily. But 24th is IMO an astounding success for a literary memoir.

That was Murr? Holy mackeral, or herring!

And check out that Harold Brodkey at #30. Certainly not as high as yours, Piero, but being that it's the translation of First Love and Other Sorrows, a book I've recommended to you, I think that might be a sign that you need to read it.

Did you notice, Henri, that I actually finished a book yesterday? The excellent Sneaky People by Thomas Berger. Let me bask in that awhile, willya?

Going to be really busy the next few days so here's my last Mardi Gras linkage. Y'all have a good one.

Danny Barker & Baby Dodds Trio; My Indian Red
Professor Longhair; Go To The Mardi Gras
The Meters; Hey Pocky A-Way

Has anyone noticed yet that the glittery .gif is in Italian? I was proud of that, even though we are not glittery .gif people.

Have a swell time, Jane. And yes, Muse, of course the Italian glitter was noticed. I've been staring at it awhile.

THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander as they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I wake some day
To find they have flown away?

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

It's still below freezing, but it will warm up today they say. The ground is covered with stryofoam-like snow, though there are stretches of brown leaves visible in the forest, and a three-foot path of moss and grass on one side of the house, no doubt from the heat the house emanates. There's also a small river in the forest, created by yesterday's snowmelt. Hearteningly, I heard three different kinds of birds out there this morning, squawking and chirping and beeping.

The missus e-mailed from her hotel in Barcelona, in what she says is a less traveled part of the city. I told her about the big soccer game today, at the Nou Camp. Arsenal (from England) will play mighty Barca in a crucial Champions League game. She says she's neither seen nor heard evidence of it so far.

Call It Music

Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song
in my own breath. I’m alone here
in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky
above the St. George Hotel clear, clear
for New York, that is. The radio playing
“Bird Flight,” Parker in his California
tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering
“Lover Man” just before he crashed into chaos.
I would guess that outside the recording studio
in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas,
it was late March, the worst of yesterday’s rain
had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird
could have seen for miles if he’d looked, but what
he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes,
shook his head, and barked like a dog-–just once-–
and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him
he’d be OK. I know this because Howard told me
years later that he thought Bird could
lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep
for an hour or more, and waken as himself.

The perfect sunlight angles into my little room
above Willow Street. I listen to my breath
come and go and try to catch its curious taste,
part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes
from me into the world. This is not me,
this is automatic, this entering and exiting,
my body’s essential occupation without which
I am a thing. The whole process has a name,
a word I don’t know, an elegant word not
in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word
that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed
what he said that day when he steered
Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles
beside him while the bright world
unfurled around them: filling stations, stands
of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets
from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all
so actual and Western, it was a new creation
coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker
someone later called “glad,” though that day
I would have said silent, “the silent music
of Charlie Parker.” Howard said nothing.
He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights
to their room, got his boots off, and went out
to let him sleep as the afternoon entered
the history of darkness. I’m not judging
Howard, he did better than I could have
now or then. Then I was 19, working
on the loading docks at Railway Express
coming day by day into the damaged body
of a man while I sang into the filthy air
the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me
before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone,
eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced.
“The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro,”
they later wrote, all that rising passion
a footnote to others. I remember in ‘85
walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school
where he taught after his performing days,
when suddenly he took my left hand in his
two hands to tell me it all worked out
for the best. Maybe he’d gotten religion,
maybe he knew how little time was left,
maybe that day he was just worn down
by my questions about Parker. To him Bird
was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note
going out forever on the breath of genius
which now I hear soaring above my own breath
as this bright morning fades into afternoon.
Music, I’ll call it music. It’s what we need
as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds
blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean,
the calm and endless one I’ve still to cross.

Philip Levine

268> I did notice that you'd rated it 5 stars, but I didn't put it together on my end that that meant you'd just finished the book. Good for you! Now get crackin' on the Brodkey!

Glitter and Glam rocks, Muse!

Henri, you misunderestimate me. Would I give a book I couldn't finish five stars?

Maybe Jane appears in one of these pix, if in fact she's there:

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Mardi-Gras/ss/events/en/030411mardigras

COME IN
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music - hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

To dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it could still sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went -
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.

Robert Frost

277 - Tragically no I wasn't down this year which makes it 6 years in a row I've missed it. My uncles (who live elsewhere as well) spent the day sending me steadily degenerating messages about all I was missing. :( Perhaps next year the weddings that keep us from being able to get down will be finished with.

Account

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.

Czeslaw Milosz
Berkeley, 1980

Just caught up on this thread today. Was way behind. Say, whatever happened to our friend in Bend?

I f I remember correctly, an old-timer in BK waxed on and on to me one day about the glory days of the St. George. Apparently it had a swimming pool and a ball room and was quite the place.

Someone needs to make a movie or write a book with a Porius character. I'd do it, but I've got a day and night job and he'd be on to me, assuming I found the time. Also, I'm not even nearly good enough to write him.

Alas, our friend in Bend--La Pine, to be exact--appears to be gone, kaput. Efforts have been made to bring her back, both via private messages and personal e-mails, without result.

I recall seeing the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights before it became a condo, or whatever. It was in fact famous for its swimming pool. Long before that, as a child thumbing through black and white photo albums (the kind where the photo was inserted between four corner whatchamacallits), I saw my parents there, looking quite young, celebrating their marriage in the ballroom, I suppose was. Though where they got the bread for it is beyond my ken: the St. George was Brooklyn's Waldorf Astoria.

THE HUNCHBACK IN THE PARK
The hunchback in the park
A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water
From the opening of the garden lock
That lets the trees and water enter
Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark

Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup
That the children filled with gravel
In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
Slept at night in a dog kennel
But nobody chained him up.

Like the park birds he came early
Like the water he sat down
And Mister they called Hey mister
The truant boys from the town
Running when he had heard them clearly
On out of sound

Past lake and rockery
Laughing when he shook his paper
Hunchbacked in mockery
Through the loud zoo of the willow groves
Dodging the park keeper
With his stick that picked up leaves.

And the old dog sleeper
Alone between nurses and swans
While the boys among willows
Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
To roar on the rockery stones
And the groves were blue with sailors

Made all day until bell time
A woman figure without fault
Straight as a young elm
Straight and tall from his crooked bones
That she might stand in the night
After the locks and chains

All night in the unmade park
After the railings and the shrubberies
The birds the grass the trees the lake
And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
Had followed the hunchback
To his kennel in the dark.

Dylan Thomas

Robert Shea's birthday. Here's his writing partner on the subject of - is. They're both dead, seems just the other day I read their wickedly pfunny trilogy. Is it possible?!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCIqFAdI6eI&feature=related

That series was such a big lifepath-twisting deal for me growing up. Dig y'selves up and get back to it, Roberts!

Soggy day. Rain's been falling all day, with five inches expected overall. What with the melting snow in addition, there are flood watches all over the Hudson Valley. Luckily, I live on high ground.

286 - Hope you skirt the worst of it.

The rain has been making me sleepy all day and just kicked up in time for me to go home. Boo.

Ash Wednesday

Part I

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

T.S. Eliot

Horrible 8.9 earthquake has struck Japan. Tsunami has hit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/12/world/asia/12japan.html

AMONG THOSE KILLED IN THE DAWN RAID WAS A MAN AGED 100
When the morning was waking over the war
He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,
The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,
He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone
And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.
Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun
And the craters of his eyes grew springshoots and fire
And all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.
Dig no more for the chains of his gray-haired heart.
The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound
Assembling waits for the spade's ring on the cage.
O keep his bones away from that common cart,
The morning is flying on the wings of his age
And a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand.

Dylan Thomas

Hey everyone, there was an enormous earthquake off of Japan--I'm super worried for all my friends in Tokyo right now--and they are suggesting tsunamis as far as Taiwan. Everyone send our tomcat good wishes.

Second that.

Third.

Update on the tsunami

The tsunami spawned by a massive earthquake in Japan raced across the Pacific Ocean early this morning, heading toward Hawaii and threatening to swamp low-lying areas of the U.S. West Coast between 11:00 and 11:30 a.m.

Sirens woke residents in the middle of the night in Hawaii, where the governor ordered the evacuation of coastal areas. People waited in long lines stocking up on gas, bottled water, canned food and generators.

The first waves to hit Hawaii could reach six feet high and were expected to hit about 3:00 a.m. local time (9:00 a.m. EST).

The tsunami slammed the eastern coast of Japan, sweeping away boats, cars, homes, and people as widespread fires burned out of control. It's traveling at 500 mph--as fast as a jetliner--and likely won't change speed until it hits a large area of land, said Kanoa Koyanagi, a geophysicist for the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

Philipines spared.

no damage here. ALthough I am increasingly worried about a quake in Taiwan now. We haven't had any here for a while, and no huge one since 1999. We are due, and these things usually have a knock on effect.

Terrible images from Japan.
Thanks for your concern.

Good to hear from you, 'Murr. Martin, keep us updated on your friends. We have friends here who are waiting to hear from family members in Japan.

Thanks for caring, Thea. I've heard back from most everyone--mostly safe but mostly shaken up. A couple of people I haven't heard back from, including my dear friend Hiroko, who lives in Tokyo and planned me the best surprise party for my 25th birthday. She took me to Odaiba, which is this kind of entertainment or date district on Tokyo Bay, and I saw it on fire last night and I know how much she likes to walk there and man I hope she's all right.

I'm also a bit pissy at the news media of the world for perpetuating what my friend called "tsunamigeddon". The Philippines were supposed to be inundated--the Pacific was supposed to be swept clean--and of course I'm glad those things didn't happen, but last night I was up fretting and wondering whether to wake up my family, who live right by the water in Victoria, and get them to higher ground. Although it's not just media--local media were actually relatively responsible here, confining their tsunami warning to north of Port Renfrew on the west coast of Vancouver Island, which makes sense because of the direction and if you look at the map you realize the Olympic Peninsula is actually in the way and my family are fine. But then the official tsunami warning site was making no such distinctions, basically throwing a warning out to everybody from Alaska down to Mexico, which is so cry-wolfy it pisses me off. Makes it especially impressive that the journalists showed such common sense. You did something right for the first time ever, Vancouver Sun!

Why am I talking about the Vancouver Sun? Poor Japan.

Tomcat - Glad to hear you're alright.

Martin - I hope you hear from your friends soon.

Sounds like all of the family on our end is fine. Still waiting for word on family friends in Sendai.

Glad to hear it, Jane, and thanks. Hope your friends turn up all right.

Photos from Japan:

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/03/earthquake-in-japan/100022/

298> something I learned last night that might give some credence to the potentiality that Victoria or other first-glimpse, what would seem like "sheltered" seacoasts, could've been in danger, is that these tsunami waves are so powerful with massive convoluted intensifying reverberations that they can literally wrap around a peninsula or an island and strike any shore within the Pacific, even if that shore is on the opposite side of an island, not in a direct, exposed line from the quake's epicenter.

>302 absurdeist: yikes! glad it didn't happen that way. And yeah, I guess I should cut them some slack on the massive convoluted intensifying reverberations. I can barely calculate a tip.

Prosody 101

When they taught me that what mattered most
was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping
over the page but the variations
in that line and the tension produced
on the ear by the surprise of difference,
I understood yet didn’t understand
exactly, until just now, years later
in spring, with the trees already lacy
and camellias blowsy with middle age,
I looked out and saw what a cold front had done
to the garden, sweeping in like common language,
unexpected in the sensuous
extravagance of a Maryland spring.
There was a dark edge around each flower
as if it had been outlined in ink
instead of frost, and the tension I felt
between the expected and actual
was like that time I came to you, ready
to say goodbye for good, for you had been
a cold front yourself lately, and as I walked in
you laughed and lifted me up in your arms
as if I too were lacy with spring
instead of middle aged like the camellias,
and I thought: so this is Poetry!

Linda Pastan

For some reason, Piero is in a good mood today. Thus he craves something upbeat, and a bit whimsical:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1OAkWGUMKY

300 - Crossposted yesterday but glad to hear all are well. We heard from the last of the family friends and everyone is ok so that's a relief.

Problem in Japan: my best Japanese friend is ok, but he is cut off from dozens he knows north of Tokyo, including Sendai and Fukushima

Well, my peoples are all fine, except that one friend is currently unable to get through to her uncle in Fukushima. She is from what was a bushi (samurai, military elite) family when Japan had such things, and when I was there last she told me all about the old family home in Fukush. and a fascinating and strange inheritance dispute that had broken out over it, where the uncle in question, who is the oldest brother, had married a woman with two kids, whom he'd adopted, and since they were his children he felt they should inherit the house, and the memorabilia that went with it, including the ancestral daisho (paired katana and wakizashi) and armour, as well as the family graves. The other uncles and aunts, including my friend's father, were not cool with this, because the kids were not blood relations--when she told me about it, the word yosomono or "outside thing" was used frequently. But the thing is that none of the young people in the family wanted the inheritance, because it would have meant moving up to Fukushima and sweeping graves for the rest of their lives. So the whole family went up for two weeks for this big summit meeting, and when nothing came of it the young people went home and back to work but the old people just stayed and stared balefully at each other for I don't know how long--weeks--until the older of the adopted kids, who was a teenage rebel type whose only dream as to be on Tokyo and who saw the cage closing in, ran away, and everybody was all "well, point proven", and when the found her she refused to come home because she was happy down south being a kogyaru, and I just looked up the relevant emails to remind myself of some details and it turns out that this is actually way to complicated a story to summarize at any reasonable length (Japanese inheritance law!), but the point is that all of this happened, and now the house is destroyed, and thus the best-laid plans of mice and men. Such a strange feeling. I hope her uncle's okay.

Martini, that would make one heck of a novel.

God, wouldn't it! I'll mention it to her--but uh, not today.

You were there when you were twenty-five, you wrote above. And if I recall from other postings elsewhere, you were in Japan for two years? A few years?

What brought you there, Martin? And what were you doing while there?

Now this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110313/ap_on_bi_ge/as_japan_earthquake

>311 copyedit52: well, the first time I was there was in 2001-02, when I was 21, and the second time was in 2004-05, and I turned 25 while I was there. Two years altogether. I went because I used to go to my theory prof every week and fret about how bourgeois it was to even consider an academic future, and finally she got tired of listening to me and said "Martin, you seem like you need a break from school. How bout you go teach at my friend's ESL joint in Nagoya?" And I was basically a child and it was amazing. I taught English for a year and fell deeply in love with everything about Japan, and as soon as I graduated from high school I went back--but Tokyo this time, and instead of meeting a Japanese girl and going into deep cover the first time, I went with my girlfriend from home, and we lived in a tiny concrete box, which involved lots of fighting but also lots of joyful tymez. I still taught, part time, but I got a job that let me be an office dude, doing curriculum dev-type stuff for an ESL company, and then I hooked up with this gross rag run by a bunch of embittered gaijin drunks, called Japanzine, and if you see it on the internet just know that I am not responsible for the racist comics. It was an amazing way to get out and do things and get a cheque for it, anyway. There might still be a couple of my articles up online, but last I checked they were drowned by things like my facebook profile and librarything reviews.

God, I'm yammering here. Point is, Japan is the best place in the world and I am shit-scared about this nuclear reactor thing. They are so kind and do not deserve this.

I feel like this came out like some kind of narrativization of my resume, but fuck it, I been drinking.

These are indeed distressing times, Martin. I think I'll join you in that drink.

The japanese are resilient. They will bounce back.

313, 314

Yammer away, Martin and pour one for me. I've finally heard that our friends' family members are all accounted for... and yet the rest of the news is so very bad.

>314 QuentinTom:, 315 thanks, and yes, and thanks. And Thea, I'm so glad. They are a nation of utter ridiculous heroes Here is something sombre and yet somehow comforting: the death poem of the great Matsuo Bashō.

旅に病んで
夢は枯れ野を
かけめぐる

Tabi ni yande
yuma wa kareno o
kakemeguru

Falling ill on a journey
my dream, above withered fields,
wanders

Martini man,

I think you could write that Japanese epic family saga tome someday, don't'chu? You've got the outline already there.

Yesterday my wife and I were able to get away for the day, just the two of us, and we went to the Huntington Beach Pier and just happened upon their annual Kite Festival. It was mesmerizing. Synchronized swimming does nothing for me, but synchronized kites?--I had no idea I was such a fan. Man it was so cool to see. I probably sound like a geek, but I'd never even heard of synchronized kite flying before. Here's a clip from last year's event:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsVyzD9LLRA

YELLOW TULIPS
Looking into the vase, into the calyx, into the water drop,
Looking into the throat of the flower, at the pollen stain,
I can see the ambush love sprung once in the summery wood.
I can see the casualties where they lay, till they set forth again.

I can see the lips, parted first in surprise, parted in desire,
Smile now as the silence falls on the yellow-dappled ride
For each thinks the other can hear each receding thought
On each receding tide.

They have come out of the wood now. They are skirting the fields
Between the tall wheat and the hedge, on the unploughed strips.
And they believe anyone who saw them would know
Every secret of their limbs and of their lips,

As if, like creatures of legend, they had come down out of the mist
Back to their native city, and stood in the square.
And they were seen to be marked at the throat with a certain sign
Whose meaning all could share.

* * * * *

These flowers came from the shop. Really they looked nothing much
Till they opened as if in surprise at the heat of this hotel.
Then the surprise turned to a shout, and the girl said, 'Shall I
chuck them now
Or give them one more day? They've not lasted so well.'

'Oh give them one more day. They've lasted well enough.
They've lasted as love lasts, which is longer than most maintain.
Look at the sign it has left here at the throat of the flower
And on your tablecloth - look at the pollen stain.'

James Fenton

The Daylight Savings Time
THREAD SWITCH

http://www.librarything.com/topic/112006