bblyblog

08 December 2009

Minutes of the meeting, Thanksgiving 2009

Time: ~0800, the morning after Thanksgiving 2009

Place: The kitchen, Sergeantsville NJ

Members present (in order of appearance): Peter, BBly, Deborah S., John, Claire, DGBly, Molly.
MINUTES
Old Spellman family joke:

What are we this year — Polish or Russian?
Polish.
O thank God, I *hate* those long Russian winters!
— Peter Spellman

Deadly Medicine, Series at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington — Deb S.

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers: the story of a Muslim family of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. — Pete
Review in NY Times.
Also see Josh Neufield's wonderful webcomic, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, serialized in Smith magazine — BBly

"... this should appeal to their fans." — John Weingart, quoting the harshest criticism imposed by reviewers in the bluegrass magazines he reads.
Translation: Life's too short...

How is Your Brain Like a Zebra?, from a podcast ourDeb listened to last night as she was falling asleep.

Olivia Judson, every Wednesday in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times. — Pete
This week's post: An Evolve-by Date, on the importance of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Adam Gopnik, Angels & Ages — Claire
Review in Washington Post.

The Little Book (NOT Strunk & White!), about Vienna in 1890s, the height of civilization. — John
Review in January Magazine.

Bella Abzug's mock American Express ad. — John

We were talking about the existential questions young kids often ask their parents. Two of BBly's favorites, from his daughter Nelly:

Daddy, you remember the Big Dark?
Daddy, what makes them *do* that?

Deb remembered one she asked her mother: What Do Black People Use for Band-Aids?
All agreed: Great idea for a book title.
Back in the day, Deb Spitalnik recalled, Bloomingdale's had a counter for Charles of the Ritz, where they would formulate face powder based on your skin tone, then mix it up out of big glass jars.

John recommends Stephen L. Carter's New England White, et. al., mysteries —
Review, excerpt, and reading at NPR.org
And
John's Picks for movies to rent from Netflix:

I didn't hear the beginning of John's story about a party he & Deb went to at a Harlem home on 144th St between Convent & Amsterdam, where the owner had set up a jazz club in the basement: the joint was packed, with a kitchen in one corner and a jazz trio in the other — and all the musicians were white.

Deb Bly regaled us with many a tale of her old boyfriend Sam's mother Mickey Hurwitt and Thaddeus McDowell. (Darling? perhaps you'd like to write them up?)

Claire recalled BBly's post-prandial Sermonette on The Five Real Things in Life:

sex
bearing & raising children
taking care of the sick & helpless
teaching
making beautiful things

Everything else is logistics.

Too many TLAs around here. — Pete.

John's favorite xmas tree ornament: Merry Christmas from the Savages

Last but not least, the poem BBly meant to read at dinner, but left at home on the dining room table:

The Landing Game (April 23, 1500)

As our longboats approached,
I can tell you now, each of us aboard
struggled with a thrill of terror.

We could see men coming donw to the beach
in twos and threes—naked, young,
their skin the reddish-brown

of mahogany, their heads tonsured,
like our monks—butt for the fringe
of straight, dark hair below the ears.

Watching us, they gathered on the sand,
so by the time we reached
the river mouth almost twenty of them

waited, bows and arrows in their hands.
And we, all along rowing slowly,
came unarmed—such pounding

in my chest—with caution
our only strategy, our only noise
the creak-and-splash we made.

But how to greet them? How to show them
courtesy? No one spoke.
It simply happened—one of us tossed his hat

into the gulf between our languages,
and the youth who caught it
threw his feathered headpiece to our boat,

so all of us let fly, until the air was full
of hats and feathers, full of laughter
at the useless trade.

Disembarking then, we waded
through the surf, breathing anew
like divers coming up for air.

And they advanced, putting down
their bows and arrows, encircled us to see
our strangeness—our clothes, our skin,

our bearded faces, especially those
of us with sea-tinted eyes. They wanted
to stroke our hair, like lovers.

Faces reading faces, hands gesturing, pointing
toward the land or toward our ships
anchored six leagues out, and all of us

so fully absorbed in mutual scrutiny how could we
have imagined—mingling that day
on the beach—the exchange we'd made?

— Jane O. Wayne, in River Styx 80, Fall 2009

08 September 2009

Something to land on

I thump the spider on the outside of my sliding screen from the inside with my figernail, worried about finding her there, worried she'll get in. But, whereas an insect or slug would either fly away or fall, she just pops right back to the exact same spot as if held there by a strong rubber band, which, functionally speaking, she is, and grapples more deeply into the seam where the screen tucks in, like a — well, like a grappling hook, which she rather resembles, and I desist, knowing a repitition will injure her, perhaps fatally, if in fact I haven't done this already.

I wonder, as I walk to the kitchen to refill my coffee, what she's doing on my screen, high up like that, at eye level, then realize it's more her screen than mine — I merely rent it, while for her it's no different from the tree branch or the bush, from which she hangs her gorgeous deadly web. Our two worlds only intersect by accident: we humans manufacture objects and properties that we pretend to agree we possess; for the bugs & other tiny critters that live among us, these structures — including ourselves — are just something to land on.

29 August 2009

The fawn

Out of the background of joggers, speed walkers,
strollers, the saunterers with their leash-straining
pets, she gallops straight at me down the middle
of the street, so tall she can't be a dog, but too
small for a horse, stick legs drumming, black toes
clicking on the asphalt, just after I've pulled around
the corner, before I've picked up any speed; I jerk
my foot off the gas but can't find the brake, inch over
to the side, nearly taking the side mirror off
the parked cars at the curb
as she hurtles past, black eyes staring, wide,
unseeing, or in any case unmarking, a smear of
bright red on her chin makes me cry, "She's been hit!"
to no one who can hear
the fawn clatters by, nothing but running, running
for her life, for her death

24 March 2009

Morning bells

Ada Lovelace Day

It could be a thousand years ago. Maybe not. When the bell?

When the Roman Empire fell, the church used a bell
for a hell of devious scheme:
To summon their flock, they invented the clock
they made time with their new machine...

The mass bell at SS Simon & Jude cleanses the air of noise, driving city groan all the way to the horizon, each peal a stroke of the wet sponge down the slate blackboard, blackening it, its momentary purity pierced & puckered only by the come-and-get-it perorations of cardinal, bossy finch, lovesick chickadee — "O sweetie!"

After two dozen iterations, the door in the sky closes, erasing itself.... Crows crowd west, yelling, cars cram the sensorium with their belligerent being.

Left behind, I busy myself with shoveling empty time from here to there, until the next bell.

07 March 2009

Fifteen albums in 15 minutes (with bonuses!)

My friend John McDaid tagged me with this challenge, which really underestimates the amount of time needed for completing it. And when I finished, I realized I'd left a couple out!

Share
Saturday 07 March 2009 2:40 PM
Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world. When you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you're it!

(semi-chron order)

George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, with the New York Philharmonic (I think) and Oscar Levant at the piano (I'm sure). On two 78-rpm disks that you stacked on record changer (remember those?) and flipped over when it was half-way done. When I was three I could identify it if I heard it anywhere: "That's George Gershin's Rapiddy in Boo!" Later, I got my own 33-rpm LP of the Los Angeles Symphony that I wore out learning how to conduct in the basement.
I loved Henry Mancini in high school, when I first heard his music to the TV shows Peter Gunn and later Mr. Lucky. But the album that blew my mind was Quincy Jones Plays Henry Mancini. So cool and weird at the same time it made my teeth hurt (well, the orthodontia contributed).
Well, duh, Meet the Beatles. I don't remember which Xmas my sister and I got this album (1 for both of us), but we wore it out and two copies after that. For me, it was the first time I actually paid attention to what each person was playing and singing, and I learned ALL the parts; it's also when I learned to play air guitar.
Peter Paul & Mary: I can't remember which one I heard first — their eponymous debut, In the Wind, or Moving — but *that's* when I learned to play real guitar, so I could play in my first group: Bill, Phil, and Penny Ann. (We even had a secret name change, just like Noel Stookey: Phil's name was really Howie.)
Simon & Garfunkel: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme. S&G's first album after the triumph of the soundtrack for The Graduate, it contained lots of tasty finger-picking for me to learn, the better to lever my playing from OK to pretty good.
Judy Collins: In My Life. This is Judy crossing over, after years as a luminary in the folk scene, and what's best about this anthology is the writers she brings into the same room: Dylan, Richard Fariña, Kurt Weill, Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel, Randy Newman, Richard Peaslee, Donovan, John Lennon. Every song is a knockout, but the range is astonishing. And then there's the American George Martin, Joshua Rifkin, in charge of producing....
Burt Jansch. His debut album, before he teamed up with John Renbourn. Paul Simon had erroneously (I think) attributed "Angie" to Burt, so when I saw the album in a leftover bin I snatched it up. His version of the definitive finger-picking solo is a lot more raw — lots of string snapping and no muffled bass line. Plus I learned how to pop in a harmonic every once in a while whilst picking like mad — I had arrived.
Buffalo Springfield: Again, the second of their three albums. I'd bopped along with "For What It's Worth" and "Do I Have to Come Right Out & Say It" from their first album, and even worked a version of "Hot Dusty Roads" for my new group, Bill Bly, a Boy, & a Girl (don't ask), but when I heard Neil Young's "Expecting to Fly" and "Mr. Soul" they stoned me totally without need for chemical enhancement. And Steven Still's "Bluebird" is in my Top Ten Tewns of all time, and I'm um, still working on that acoustic riff in the middle.
Beatles again: this time Abbey Road. It's hard to think of a thing to say that hasn't already been said better by others about this work, but, apart from the utter coolitude of "Come Together," I'd have to say my favorite part is the inverted fade-out of "I Want You/She's So Heavy" — keeps getting louder and louder until it breaks the sound barrier (or your eardrums) and you can't hear it anymore. I wonder if the Singularity of Ray Kurzweil's techno-rapture's gonna be like that...
Laurie Anderson: Big Science. Hallelujah. After more than a decade of lyrics to make you gag, finally some to make you think. Very sexy.
Don Henley: The End of the Innocence. I listen to this with utter delight at least once a year — an absolute masterpiece. For someone who doesn't have much of a voice, Don sure wails the crap out of these dark, dark songs of modern-day disillusionment, and the man's got a man's heart. "The Last Worthless Evening" and "The Heart of the Matter" still just kill me.Randy Newman: Man, this is hard, but I think I have to go with Land of Dreams. Everything before that's just (only) brilliant, but "Four Eyes," "Follow the Flag," and "I Want You to Hurt Like I Do" simply change the rules about what a song can be and do to a person.
The Rutles: Archaeology. Yeah, I know it's a joke band, but have you ever listened to these so-called parodies? "Eine Kleine Middle Classe Musik" is pure genius, all the arrangements are tight as ticks, and the playing's clean but relaxed, just like you want a good band to be. And, well, they're funny.
Kate & Anna McGarrigle: Matapedia. As with Elvis Costello, I always found the McGarrigles' singing rather trying — though the songs were great, and I learned several to perform. But then I heard "Why Must We Die?" and I gave up being such a snob.
Warren Zevon: Life'll Kill Ya. My buddy John McDaid had only introduced me to selected Zevon songs a short time before, so the first full album I got ahold of was a revelation. I immediately learned "Don't Let Us Get Sick" and "My Shit's Fucked Up" for breaking the ice at parties, and I'm working on "You're a Whole Different Person When You're Scared" for the next Midnight Ramble....

The two I can't believe I left out? My sister Lynn reminded me of these when she tagged me back —

Soundtrack from the movie version of West Side Story. I loved the movie, of course, and have since tormented my Intro Theatre stoodies with it so I could watch it over and over, but the singing taught me how to sing. Whilst crooning along to "Maria" in the living room back home, I learned how to use vibrato, which didn't come naturally. Ditto singing with feeling. Shy boy learns to cope.
Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, recorded by Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Janice Harshanyi and Harve Presnell, soprano & baritone respectively. I first heard this in the mid-60s, and a couple years later my college choir sang it, with yours truly doing the countertenor solo, "Olim lacus colueram," the Song of the Roasted Swan. Since then its opening chorus "O Fortuna" has become a total cliché of satanic rituals in the movies, but the whole piece is still amazing. Turn the headphones up!

28 January 2009

Voices in the Line

When the telephone first came to our upcountry farm in Kula,
there was only one wire. The numbers were a digit different,

but it was the same line. When anybody's rang, ours rang
in the kitchen, and so rang the receivers in every other house.
No matter what somebody said, anybody could be listening,

and everybody knew it, so nobody ever said anything important
or personal on the phone. Phones were public, like a restroom

or a library is public. If the words were private, they were taken
outside or penned. Nobody ever called anybody for no reason,

and conversations were short. Before the telephone, we lived
alone where we couldn't even see the neighbors' lights at night,
but the wires shrunk the world. No longer was there anywhere

you knew anybody you couldn't call anymore. So we called.
Whenever we picked up the phone, there were voices in the line.

-- Eric Paul Shaffer, in Rattle 30, Winter 2008.

I know this guy's story. I was a kid when this happened to me, living in one of the first of a five-house plan in what used to be somebody's front forty, our yard still an open wound in the earth, the view still clear down to the creek and the two-lane up the opposite bank.

Mrs. Wilson had the switchboard on a table in her dining room -- I saw it once when I went to play with her son Tad. She was in the kitchen, I think, and Tad showed me how it worked: pull this plug, stick it in this hole, crank the dial for numbers in the county seat 10 miles away, then you asked another operator for a hookup to Pittsburgh, where my grandparents lived.

The phone hung on the wall opposite our back door, in the short passageway between the dining room and kitchen -- a shiny black box with a hook but no dial, no white disk with number in its center. I'd sit there in a chair dragged from the kitchen table, holding the hook down with my free hand, talking into the heavy handset to pretend friends.

It was a party line, shared by six families, and the phone rang maybe once or twice a day; you listened to the pattern of rings to see if it was for you. Ours was long, short-short, long; the Clearys' up the hill was long, short, long-long. Mrs. Wilson did the rings by hand, pushing a spring switch on the panel next to the dial. I once asked her -- she was my Sunday School teacher that year -- who worked the switchboard when she was asleep. "Why, if somebody calls, I just get up and answer it. What do you think?" But what happens when you go on vacation? She just looked at me.

Our parents were our now-kids' age then, maybe younger; those of us watching our contemporaries roll off the table in ones and twos these days are beginning to realize there's a whole world evaporating atom by atom that will only be retrievable in little vignettes like Eric Paul Shaffer's poem -- and if I don't print out the blog for my descendants to find moldering in the bottom of a linen trunk (remember those?), it's likely this wispy commentary will vanish into the digital dark age like the rest of the artifacts we're impetuously entrusting to the cloud.

It's not just the world of quaint devices and their picturesque usage that's disappearing, but a world of relations to each other, as Shaffer's poem conjures with such lovely simplicity. Indirectly, he also evokes the world of silence and distance that his grandparents watched disappear, perhaps with the same nostalgia that he himself seems to be feeling now, and which may have supplied some motivation for writing the poem in the first place.

That silence and distance was not a gap in our relations -- as it appeared to technologists bent on improving "communication" -- it was a room, and each of us had one: in which to rest, to which to retreat, from which to sally forth when it was necessary to communicate with one another. There was peace in that room -- or maybe it just seems so to those of us too young to remember such a condition of things -- where tranquility was attainable in a way all but impossible in the noisy world today.

The heedlessness of technological progress is a dusty old trope -- think of the story of O say the Tower of Babel, or Icarus -- that doesn't much edify. The alarums about dwindling privacy among our young, who don't seem to know what the alarumists are even talking about, is probably in the same class of prudish or plain cranky ranting against change for ranting's (not change's) sake.

That doesn't make the prudes and ranters wrong. Here's what Kafka thought about "improving" communication:

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any help, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. The spirits won't starve, but we will perish.
-- Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenká, epigraph to John Durham Peters's Speaking into the Air.

24 January 2009

Flashback I

To the tune of "We're Havin' a Heat Wave..."

I'm havin' a flashback,
A terrible flashback...

Yesterday, believe it or not, I went Christmas shopping for my wife. Over the past few years, we've been having a serious motivation problem with The Holidaze — the decorating, the doing the shopping, the wrapping the presents, the getting everything shipped in time, then the scheduling the visits, the making the calls, the whole mishegaas. Now my wife's a fantastic decorator, and when it comes to online shopping, she could be a consultant — hm, maybe I'll mention that... — but I'm a failure at all these things, which doesn't help in the spirit of the season department. Long story short, we don't shop for each other until after we've (read she's) discharged our obligations in the friends & family department.

So yesterday I'm in Macy's, which I haven't visited in the better part of a year, grimly cruising the fragrance counters for my darling's favorite (I gotta say I like it too), when I feel my neck start to tighten up, my shoulders lift in a protective hunch, and my ears prick up as if I'm about to get conked from behind. I whirl around, but all I can see are three very tired looking but well-dressed ladies chatting across the aisle between two make-up stations, one of them sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes she's unpacking.

I'm so relieved I blurt out something totally stupid: "Make me up!" — my arms extended, throwing myself on their mercy.

They all look rather startled, but one of them sees that it's a joke — not likely a portly gent in a baseball cap & a ratty sweater is there for a facial — and plays along. "Where've you been?" she asks. "We haven't had you in the chair for ages!"

I can't keep it up, of course, so I say something lame like "Sorry, long day" and ask for the fragrance brand my wife reminded me last week that she really likes. By now the other two gals are cackling, perhaps at the image of my stubbly face under their hands. But in the end they do have mercy on me and direct me to the proper counter, right by the entrance to the rest of the mall.

And there, after a relatively painless shopping experience, the creepy feeling comes over me again. I look out into the mall itself: the boutique eateries, the gussied-up dummies up against the glass, the weird counterpoint of too-loud, too-happy music that straddles the entrance to every store — and the terror rises exponentially. And I realize... I'm having a flashback.

Just before the holidays a year ago, I began what I now jokingly call my Misadventures in Retail. It was an odd year, 2007. At the beginning of it I went to work for a bunch of Aussies, editing an online arts journal that they were trying to take global, but my part of it was downsized six months later, and I got to be unemployed for the next six months while I scrambled to find something to do next.

Then I saw a posting for a job at a computer sales & service center in New York, and I thought — hell, I like helping people, I love computers (at least mine), and I need a job: what could possibly go wrong?

You never want to ask that question. It's like being disappointed in the results of the 2000 election but thinking, O well, how bad can it be? My friend Nemo did just that, and eight years later is still marveling at the humongous enormity of that particular failure of imagination.

I was hired as an intaker in the service department — in effect, a triage nurse at a computer hospital. I stood behind a horseshoe counter studded with cheap laptops and styrofoam pads, and did my best to counsel, console, and commiserate with folk who all too often had literally just lost their minds: it worked fine yesterday — a little slow, but it's been doing that, and now all I get is this black screen with a bunch of gibberish in different languages...

In chess, intakers would be pawns, the front line that absorbs the enemy attack. And some days it felt like that — people get really upset and irrational when you tell them that all their family photos are lost because the digital key broke off in the lock, or that their senior project for a bachelor's degree will cost them $1200 to retrieve (though it's free if we can't do it), or that their financial records for the past ten years are now totally toast.

It was harrowing, and exhausting, but I really enjoyed it, once I got the hang of the impenetrable intake forms and learned which technicians to bring the poor broken lambs to (and which techs it was best to cross the street to avoid). Sometimes there were miracles, sometimes disasters, sometimes things got worse the longer they stayed. But most of the time I could help, if only to help my customers learn the only real computer lesson there is: BACK EVERYTHING UP IN THREE DIFFERENT PLACES.

Trouble was, I was making more money on unemployment, and the two-hour commute (in the dead of winter) was just killing these old bones. So when a similar position opened up closer to home, I took it, even though it involved a 63-mile drive — not a great idea, given my tendency to act like the Avenger of Evil on the road (there's a reason for that: I am the Avenger of Evil).

And it's that gig that still gives me terrible flashbacks like the one I had yesterday at the Mall...

(to be continued...)

23 January 2009

Samizdat

My first and favorite experience in samizdat was The Pick-Pocket's Packet, published by the W.P.A.O.P.P. (Western Pennsylvania Association of Organized Pick-Pockets), Rich Kenny, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief.

It was eighth grade, that liminal year which in other municipalities would have been the last year of grammar school, but in those days, in our proto-burb just outside the orbit of metro Pittsburgh, the only school was Peters Twp. Jr.-Sr. High, still attached to McMurray Elementary ("grade school") where I first embarked on my journey towards Upper Education. [See photo.]

Over the summer, more than half of our male colleagues had vaulted into puberty, and now towered over us, deep-voiced and hairy, suddenly dazed by the presence of lumpy girls whom only months before they hadn't even been able to see.

It was a point of pride with shrimps like us (Rich & I were always in the front row in group shots) that we could travel faster in the halls between class periods than any upperclassperson, whose pockets sat at just about shoulder height on us as we zoomed in and out of clumps of flirtiing hulks, and boosting a wallet was pathetically easy.

But the idea was far more intoxicating than the actual experience, which inevitably involved having to give the dang thing back, with the social awkwardness and occasional contusion that resulted. So Rich, a boy of ingenuity and grit that I could only envy (in chorus once he socked a notorious bully in the jaw when the jerk blocked his way), started writing up our adventures, with the usual dilations, on pages of his yellow pencil tablet, which he ruled off into columns, drawing "wire photos" and ads around which he poured breathless accounts of our exploits, announcements of upcoming events, minutes of executive board meetings, and subtle satire of the school administration.

I wrote the gossip column, which I didn't do very well, and so didn't do very often, but I helped copy and distribute issues to the dwindling number of dweebs like us amongst our classmates. Eventually, I think, we were shut down by humorless teachers, who I now believe took the confiscated copies home and had a good yock with their families.

The next year we both crossed the Rubicon into adolescence, and somehow drifted apart. I saw Rich again over a decade ago at some anniversary of our graduating class, and though I recall that he hadn't changed much (except for the mustache), I don't remember anything we said, not even if The Pick-Pocket's Packet came up or not.

I can't say my writing career began there -- I had at least ten more years of goofing off to get out of my system -- but it was a great wonder to me to watch a "piece" take shape under Rich's hand, in #2 pencil on cheap yellow paper, and I think it was then I realized dimly that somehow everything I read had been written by someone in a manner not unlike this, whatever happened to it afterward in its journey towards print that landed it, however briefly, before my eyes.

And somewhere, sometime, I said to myself: I want to do that.

[Originally appeared in Ye Antient Blogge, 14March 2002.]

14 January 2009

blue knit gloves on the window sill...

I want to say to the father at the bus stop every morning fall winter spring with his now two crazy boys yelling running stomping staggering nonstop right up the bus steps when it finally comes that there is a pair of boy-sized blue knit gloves lying on the window sill next to the door of the house on the corner where they wait that must well might belong to one of his sons who probably lost them some mornings back in his wiggling & ramming around with his brother boiling off all that excess energy that'll get imperfectly bottled & contained some tens of minutes later when he spills out of the bus into the hive where it's their job to effect such translations but without his gloves that some thoughtful passerby must have found & put on the window sill in case their owner or owner's parent more likely came looking for in all the places they could've got lost that would certainly include the bus stop right at the top of the list [for anybody who went to look] if anybody thought about it but probably they just bought new ones or had a spare pair because this wasn't the first time & boys are always losing things that don't mean anything to them except that somebody wants them to wear them but will sooner or later get in the way or just disappear the way things do. But they haven't disappeared they're right there on the window sill bright blue the color of nothing else but a little boy's gloves so they'll stick out in the visual field when you go lookng for them on the ground in the woods on the hall floor among the boots [to be continued...?]

10 January 2009

Snow falls in the rising light...

... bringing it back down from the opaque dome just beyond the trees' reach, dropping it on them, the sidewalk, the tops of cars patient as cows lined up to wait out the first storm of the year. The squirrel is pissed, but the crows flap on, kidding & laughing, towards their sunrise staff meeting in the oaks around the old folks' home, where they'll decide, among other things, what to do about the weekend. The squirrel just won't shut about it, but what else can he do? The light's all over everything now, burying it, there's no hiding from anything.

15 December 2008

Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui

This past weekend the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, of which I am a whisky tenor, performed the Vivaldi Gloria and Bach's Magnificat (the one in D). Both are magnificent, dancing works to sing, and I love the Magnificat especially, it being the first major work of his that I performed in my half century of choristing.

The tenor aria in that work, "Deposuit," is one of the most exciting, testosterone-fired solos in the repertoire, with its heroic text, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek." One o' these days, I'm gonna get up the nerve to try it in public.

But the best alternative for a choral tenor is the "Fecit potentiam," with its extended fireworks in the opening lines, which then spreads its contagious enthusiasm to the other sections of the choir. Again the text is not what you'd call reassuring: "He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts."

It's that last line that has been haunting me in the past weeks: at first, it was part of the refrain of my rejoicing at the "decisive victory" (love the sound of that!) my team enjoyed in last month's elections (along with the well-known parody of "Fascination" — It was schadenfreude, I know...).

Some weeks on, the giddiness has evaporated as abyss beneath abyss opens its maw our under economy, the days get shorter, the moon gets closer, the weather weirder, and somehow the idea that this one reversal in the political climate of my mother country will heal the world of hurt we're in right now seems remote.

Back in September, I read James Woods's bracing review of my idol Marilynne Robinson's new novel Home in the New Yorker, in which she diagnoses our peculiar malady: "Americans never think of themselves as sharing fully in the human condition, and therefore beset as all humankind is beset." For good or ill, that imagining of our hearts is in for a bumpy ride, and I doubt if negativity will pull us through.

My only consolation these days is poetry. As Octavio Paz reminds us in his magisterial book of poetics, The Bow and the Lyre, "Poetry changes, but it does not decay. Societies decay." Last week, as I read the chapter on Rhythm, I came across this prescient passage (the book was published in 1973):

[T]he real tradition of the United States, as is manifested by Whitman, was the future: the free society of comrades, the democratic new Jerusalem. The United States has not lost a past; it has lost its future. The great historical plan of that nation's founders was thwarted by the financial monopolies, imperialism, the cult of action of action's sake, the abhorrence of ideas. [67]

Puts things in perspective: sure sounds like the place I'm still living in. Maybe we can change (yes we can), but in the meantime, I'm signing up for Hugh McLeod's less Romantic take on the subject, "You are either a poet or a corpse."

08 September 2008

Something to land on

29 August 2008

The fawn

24 August 2008

The sun slips

The sun slips, demure yet sure, out from hiding behind the maple that overhangs the playground where the workmen pound & shout. Behind me, upon an aural bed of late August crickets, a single locust echoes: sliding in, then blazing.

25 February 2008

Eli3

Today is the birthday of my grandson, Elijah Bly Arougheti. He's 3.

In his honor, I've prepared my first podcast.

To play it in your browser (and sing along):

Elijah3.mp3

For the multimedia version, head on over to:

Elijah3 {at} dot-Mac

05 October 2007

Australia Project: Will of the Cockroach

Last week I had the pleasure of seeing some new plays in Manhattan, part of the Australia Project, a production of the Production Company, an Australian-American alliance, which put on eleven new plays over the past three weekends at Chashama 217, on East 42nd St between Third and Second Aves.

Stupidly, I'd written the address down as 217 *West* 42nd St, believing that this was the same Chashama Theatre in which I'd seen my friend Lan Tran's performance piece How to Unravel Your Family some years back, and so emerged into the flashing lights of the Times crawler only to find the building I sought boarded up, the only door to the construction site guarded by a screaming woman who attacked anyone who came near her. You gotta love Times Square.

Thinking quickly, I whipped out my cellphone and dialed the author of the play I'd come into town to see, Alexandra Collier, an Australian lass I'd met (by phone only) in the heady days of Arts Hub US, for which she'd written three wonderful features. Ally gave me the proper address of the theatre, and said she was sure I could sneak in, but at that point I'd have to cross half the island at its widest point, so we agreed to meet at intermission; fortunately, her play went on last of the four in that evening's offering.

No one looking like Ally's AH contributor photo appeared before the second act started, so I sat in the back alone to watch Continuing Occupation by Van Badham, a savage latter-day David-Rabe-type satirical comedy with a dotty-to-the-max Mom; Jenni, the cool narrator daughter, home for her 21st birthday party, and her nasty violent incestuous necrophiliac brother, who works for Halliburton Iraq and brings barbecued baby limbs to the party for everyone to eat. Fun for the whole family.

Ally's play, Will of the Cockroach, was less phantasmagorical than Continuing Occupation, but had its surreal dimension as well. A young Ozzie pair, D and Susie — he a writer, she a dancer (I think) as well as D's support and stay — try to cope with no money in a vermin-infested dump in Brooklyn. They're on a road trip from Oz, which has tested their relationship, but they're still very much in love, not to mention lust. The point of divergence is living in NYC, which Susie finds exhilarating (if forgivably exasperating) because Americans are always looking FORWARD, on their way, the past doesn't determine them, they can make themselves over — something it seems she's burning to do. But D is rooted in his homeland — this is what the road trip has taught him — he even has an imaginary channel on the map on which he writes his stories that leads straight through the earth to the beach where he longs to be, and every once in a while he gets a whiff of that clean ocean air that he's suffocating without.

Into this interesting mix of emotions erupts the Cockroach, a hefty guy in a brown leather coat, wearing a mask with antennae and extra appendages under his arms (the costume was very poor theatre, but, had the lighting been better, was otherwise perfect). Both D & Susie are horrified and disgusted by him, but Susie is also fascinated by his staying power: he's a survivor, and that's what she wants to be; a survivor, in fact, is what she is.

Predictably, Cockroach comes between D and Susie, though he's only symbolic of what's ultimately going to pull them apart: she wants to stay, he needs to go back home. So even though D manages to kill Cockroach off, Susie gets the last word: she repeats Cockroach's refrain, I'll be here until the end.

Much more engaging than its predecessor, and the acting, given the dismal circumstances of the production, was quite good: Tim Major (from Brisbane) was folorn as you could want as D; Mary Jane Gibson (from Newfoundland) sexy and spirited as Susie; and Joel Israel (from NYC) a stolid but winning Cockroach. Were I directing, with unlimited budget, I'd have done something creepier with the lighting and choreography, but I thought May Adrales did a servceable job in letting the play tell its own story.

Ally portrayed the relationship between D and Susie with wise compassion and a sure hand — unhappily, they seemed headed for a break-up even without the Cockroach's intervention, but that development itself was also deftly handled.

If I had a quibble, it would be that Cockroach's wisdom about surviving in New York was rather abstract, rather than exhibiting the native New Yorker's absolute and detailed mastery of the subject. On the other hand, in his terms, New York's a fairly recent development on the planet, which is his bailiwick, not just NYC today.

In short, I was charmed, and look forward to seeing this play in a more robust production, which it definitely deserves.

As it happened, Ally was delayed, and snuck in herself just before her play started, sitting next to me, unwittingly for both of us. After the curtain call, we got to chat very briefly, but she was mobbed by admirers, and I really had to fly in order to catch my boat, which in the event I missed by six minutes, stranding me for another hour until the next one. But the ferry terminal's always a rich environment for people-watching, not to mention having Roberto Bolaño's fine story "The Insufferable Gaucho" to read in the New Yorker. So the minutes flew. And I got home in one piece, my main goal of the day.

05 July 2007

My Mother and the Snake

I had seen the snake before.
I had watched the copperhead unwind itself
from the gut and leather bindings
of a pair of snowshoes that hung on the wall
in my father's woodshop, though what
it was doing there, I do not know. Another time,
it slithered away from the woodpile,
what at first seemed a nest of dead leaves
unfolding in one smooth rope of molasses
and honey. Its scales sparkled in the sun
as it paused to look back at me, the topaz
eyes so unlike anything I'd ever looked into
it froze me with its cool enchantment,
like a girl in a fairy tale who forgets
who she is, a small bell at the back
of my head chiming poison, poison,
until I turned and ran.

I don't know where the snake came from,
or how it found its way to my parent's farm,
just that my mother feared it, as she feard
for us kids that summer, running half-wild
in field and forest, as cancer spread its slow
venom from her one breast to the other.
I feared it too, but abstractly,
its danger coiled like the secret
of my mother's illness in some
dark crevice of family.

Until the afternoon the blunt,
wedge-shaped head rose,
hissing from the grass
where the sprinkler spun
gold over our bodies, and my mother
whirled in out of nowhere with the ax
from the wood pile, chopping
and chopping — my gentle mother
whom I'd seen save a choking chick,
turn a birthing lamb, murse baby rabbits
the dogs brought in with droppers of warm milk —
hacking and hacking at it.

Until the writhing, bronze ribbon lay still
and she pulled us close, tears
running down her face, and sent us
to bring stones to pile on the body,
while the sprinkler twirled on,
splashing us with water from our own well,
washing the snake's blood away.
As if it were not the beginning of the end
of a world, as if what I saw written
on my mother's face was not the story
of just how many ways there are
to be exiled from Eden.

— Allison Townsend, in River Styx 74, 5-6.

15 June 2007

Brave New World at 75

As physics has developed, it has deprived us step by step of what we thought we knew concerning the intimate nature of the physical world. Color and sound, light and shade, form and texture, belong no longer to that external nature that the Ionians sought as the bride of their devotion. All these things have been transferred from the beloved to the lover, and the beloved has become a skeleton of rattling bones, cold and dreadful, but perhaps a mere phantasm. The poor physicists, appalled at the desert that their formulae have revealed, call upon God to give them comfort, but God must share the ghostliness of his creation.
— Bertrand Russell, in The Scientific Outlook (1931), writing about Huxley's Brave New World 75 years ago, cited in Caitrin nicol's "Brave New World at 75"in [link] New Atlantis: a Journal of Technology and Society, Spring 2007.

Unlike the other great dystopias, Huxley's World State, though totalitarian in its orthodoxy, is ostensibly ordered on the wants of the goverened rather than the governors. Threats are rarely used or needed. Rule by bread and circuses has proved more potent than force — and more pernicious, precisely because every means of control is a perversion of what people really want. The only people with any capacity for dissatisfaction are a handful of Alphas, who are as unable to articulate their objection as Russell is. It is difficult to reject the sinister when by slight distortion it masquerades as the sublime. Why feeling should be able to distinguish these things while reason cannot is an interesting question, one which could be left forever unsettled by tinkering, through biotechnology or psychological control, with what Huxley (in a later foreword to the book) called "the natural forms and expressions of life itself."
— Caitrin Nicol, ibid.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
— Aristotle, from Quote of the Day

03 June 2007

On becoming kipple

He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, natually, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in the stricken living room alone with the lungless, all penetrating, masterful world-silence.
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 447-8, LOA edition.

25 May 2007

Sunset Blvd blazed...

Sunset Boulevard blazed, empty, rinsed in sunshine, the stray cars like bugs streaming in the footprint of a vast lifted rock.
— Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet, 124.