Net-Blind

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Fun situation: a crash-bang-thumper of a thunderstorm blew through our neighborhood the other night. No animate casualties, gratifyingly. But among the inanimate ones:

  • The Missus’s computer.
  • our network router
  • the base station of our cordless phone set
  • our phone service, briefly, and
  • either our DSL modem…
  • or my computer’s network card…
  • or both.

Not a happy Internet user here.

I”m hoping it will take only a day for me to get back online. (The Missus: not that lucky.) Until then, I’ll be checking my favorite haunts via Blackberry. And maybe even posting that way (as in the present instance).

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The Blogger to His Sanity Checks

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Here in the USA, April is National Poetry Month. (Yes, among all the other months it is. See here for a bunch of others — scroll down the page a ways. Frog Month! Straw Hats Month! National DNA & Genomics & Stem Cell Education & Awareness Month! (The posters for that last one are about eight feet wide but only a foot high.)) Every day during this time, the normally weekly newsletter of the Poetry Daily site will feature a favorite poem selected and commented on by an active poet. Yesterday, Julie Sheehan chose the following, from Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672):

The Author to Her Book

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.
In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.
In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

I’m curious to hear from RAMH‘s regular crowd of intelligent readers (and from any newcomers, for that matter):

What does this poem say?

Reason I ask is, Ms. Sheehan interpreted it in way I never ever would have come up with on my own. An excerpt:

“The Author to her Book”… has the fresh, direct and tough qualities of private language among familiars. We don’t hear so much as overhear it. Unstintingly, unsentimentally she describes the child: “ill-formed,” “in rags, halting,” “rambling brat,” “unfit for light.” The language is brutal, a brutality necessary to control the anguish of the mother, who knows her darling goes into a world as harsh as the one it leaves. At the matter-of-fact acknowledgment, “Yet being mine own, at length affection would / Thy blemishes amend, if so I could,” the poem gets down to the business of mothering. The speaker administers a practiced, vigorous spit shine of the kind that only mothers can give and only their children can endure. But by the end, the mother’s fear for her child is palpable. She is piling on the advice. The final couplet turns its attention on the “poor” mother whose financial circumstances are so harsh they “caused her thus to send thee out of door.” It’s all the more tender for the absence of self-pity, except for that “alas” in the penultimate line.

…She is relinquishing her poems out of love for them, just as a parent relinquishes her child to “take thy way where yet thou art not known,” but she’s hardly romanticizing that process. So we start the poem thinking the poet is abject (“my feeble brain”), but we end with tremendous respect for her strength.

(I can’t find the full commentary online, but that’s pretty much the part which confused and/or sobered me.)

Since first reading this, I’ve wondered if I’d been wrong about it all along. (And yes, I’ll let you know what that interpretation is/was, once I’ve heard from somebody else on the subject.)

By the way, Julie Sheehan is the author of — among other collections — Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise. For a certain sort of reader, that table of contents must be among the most charming imaginable.

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Ineffable

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[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard.

Some people say that the best stories have no words. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.

(Jeanette Winterson)

…and:

The Magic Mountain

A book opens. People come out, bend
this way and talk, ponder, love, wander around
while pages turn. Where did the plot go?
Why did someone sing just as the train
went by? Here come chapters with landscape all over
whatever happens when people meet. Now
a quiet part: a hospital glows in the dark.
I don’t think that woman with the sad gray eyes
will ever come back. And what does it mean when
the Italian has so many ideas? Maybe
a war is coming. The book is ending. Everyone
has a little tremolo in them; all
are going to die and it’s cold and the snow, and the
clear air. They took someone away. It’s ending,
the book is ending. But I thought — never mind. It
closes.

(William Stafford, The Way It Is)

…and:

The invisible and imponderable is the sole fact.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

[Read more…]

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Unreal-Life Dialogue: Midweek Music (Emmylou Harris) Edition

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[The scene: A Saturday evening in mid-June, 2011. A living room in suburban northwest Florida, USA. A man and a woman watch TV — something the man has chosen, because it is his birthday. A knock comes at the front door; The Pooch begins to bark madly, as usual, except she is also spinning: something she does only when someone she loves (or knows she will love) approaches the house.]

She: I’ll get it.

[She scoops up The Pooch and opens the front door. There on the porch stands a radiant silver beauty of a woman. The mystery woman smiles; it lights up the threshold and foyer like moonlight. When the mystery woman speaks, it is with a soft, sweet drawl.]

Mystery Woman: Hey there Missus. I’m Emmylou. Mr. Simpson at home tonight?

She: Why yes. Yes, he is. Would you like to come in?

[Finally the man — who has heard nothing of the dialogue to this point — pauses the movie, a little annoyed that the rhythm of this great action-suspense-thriller heist flick has been interrupted.]

He: Is that the pizz— Holy shit.

MW: Hey there, John.

He: But you’re — you’re—

MW: Uh-huh. Just here to play something for you, if that’s all right.

[She retrieves an acoustic guitar from the porch, comes in, sits down and makes herself comfortable, and begins to sing.]

He: [Picking self up from floor] My God…

She: Hmm. Can I get you anything, Emmylou? Water? Glass of wine? Coffee?

MW: That’d be sweet of you, ma’am. Just water for now. [Turning to the man.] Like to hear somethin’ else?

He: Er, uh, well… [nervous laugh] That was a bit somber, y’know? Maybe something more—

MW: [not-at-all-nervous laugh] More up-tempo? More birthdayish?

He: Oh, I don’t want—

MW: That’s all right, not a problem. Thank you, Miz Simpson.

[Mystery Woman takes offered glass of water, drinks deeply. He is hypnotized by the way Mystery Woman swallows. He swallows a little, himself.]

MW: Let me see… OK, hit it, boys.

[A band magically appears behind her.]

MW: There y’go. [She laughs softly.] Just like candles: one Cadillac for each decade. Hope y’all liked it.

He: I— I—

MW: Anything else you’d like to hear right now?

He: Well, I know there’s no way for you to— I mean, that little thing you did with Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch for O Brother, Where—

MW: You might be surprised what I can do.

[She snaps her fingers. The band disappears, and is replaced by a suddenly coalescing Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch.]

MW: Ready, girls?

[Below, click Play button to begin Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 1:57 long.

[audio:didntleavenobodybutthebaby_harriiskrausswelch.mp3|titles=’Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby’|artists=Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch]

[Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch ripple, turn translucent, and return to the ether.]

He: I— I’m speechless.

MW: Thank you. I’m so glad. I’m such a fan of your blog, you just don’t know. Especially that entry you posted back at the end of March. [Mystery Woman smiles. He falls to floor again.]

[Mystery Woman stands, leans guitar against the sideboard. Mystery Woman opens her arms, and He steps into them.]

MW: Y’all have a nice night, now.

[Mystery Woman leaves. He turns to She, who is impaling Him with a glare.]

She: You want to explain what just happened, “Mr. Simpson”?

He: Well, back in March, I wrote a post, sorta magic realis— No, forget it. I’m not sure I understand it myself.

She: [nods, apparently accepting this] I will say, that’s one beautiful woman.

He: Isn’t she, though? Isn’t she just? Have you ever seen hair like that? And that smile. [Shakes head.] And didn’t she look great in jeans? And the boots—

She: Okay, okay, enough of that. Back to the movie.

__________________________________

Hat tip to Jules for the NPR clip. Thank you again!

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Book Review: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

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Over at The Book Book, I’ve posted my recent review. This time around, the subject is Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow, first published in 1996.

Russell seems one of those novelists in the enviable position of writing whatever she wants, irrespective of genre. The Sparrow (and its 1998 sequel, Children of God) are frank science fiction. Since then, she has to my knowledge written no science fiction at all. Instead, she’s written a novel about Jews in World War II-era Italy; one about an unlikely participant in the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference; and, most recently, a Western/mystery about Doc Holliday. I mention this because (among other implications) it shows her to have a wide-ranging mind and an awareness of the importance of history — even in the writing of fiction.

In bare-bones form, The Sparrow‘s plot might be described thusly:

  • We meet aliens.
  • Some very pleasant and some very unpleasant things happen.

But there’s nothing bare-bones about the book. It’s well-researched. It’s well-written. It tugs in multiple directions at once — sympathy, laughter, wonder, horror. It provokes thought as well as sensation. When you turn the last page you may think (as I did): Damn. Now that was a read! It won numerous awards, and sold — continues to sell — quite well.

Yet somehow I’d managed to get through the last 15 years without ever hearing of it, or Russell,until Marta mentioned it and its sequel in an offhand comment back in January (with intriguing follow-up comments both from her and from a/b). Weird.

Anyhow, it’s great. Put aside any qualms you might harbor about science fiction or, for that matter, about theology. Brace yourself for confronting some of those very unpleasant things. And dive in.

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Awake, Really Awake… for Good or Ill

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[Image: “Insomnia, or Nocturnal Awakening,” by “neosurrealist” artist George Grie; I found it here. Click the image for a larger view. More, in the footnote to this post.]

From whiskey river:

The Whale

It is 1970
and the summer of love is over.

I am three years old, barefoot,
running along the surf
near Florence, Oregon,

where an eight-ton sperm whale
beached itself and died, the carcass
rotting now,
an entrance carved into its massive flank
for cases of dynamite, 500 pounds of explosives
necessary to rend open the interior
so scavengers can pick the skeleton clean —

but for me, it is the doorway to another world,
the body of the sacred I might enter into,
its eyes drained of all but a giant benevolence,
flukes wide as the tailfins of bombers
overhead, my mother

hoisting me to her hip as engineers argue
blasting caps and stand-off distance,
equations to undo the intricate puzzle
of muscle and bone —

the way life waits for us all
with great patience, the electrons orbiting
in their shells like distant planets we never see,
the constellations which bind the universe
undone this day, at least for this one body
beached on the sand as we witness the blast
from the sawgrass dunes,

the sudden
jolt of nerves as the body absorbs
the shockwave, beach-sand shot upward
in jets of tissue and meat,
the local news reporter dropping to his knees
to cover his head with a clipboard
while the cameraman does the same,
my mother shielding me with her torso
turned away from the blast

and I remember everyone smiling
afterward, laughing, each of us amazed
the day a god was blown to pieces on the beach
and we all walked away from it, unscathed.

(Brian Turner, from Phantom Noise [source])

…and (including extra highlighted text):

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

(Richard Dawkins, from Unweaving the Rainbow [source])

…and:

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

(Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451 [source])

[Read more…]

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Kin-Smitten

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For weeks recently, I was obsessing over the prospect of a block of time now past (March 16-20) loosely referred to as SibFest ’11. Making travel arrangements. Delegating or automating certain must-do everyday tasks because I wouldn’t be around to do them for real (hello, midweek and Friday RAMH posts!). Packing. Touching base with the other participants. Pretending to focus on the day job for eight hours a day…

SibFest ’11 was the second time my sisters, brother, and I turned a chunk of the calendar into an island, insulated by design from our “normal” lives. I’d visited my brother for a few days a couple years ago, and my sisters, too, came by for a day. For SibFest ’11, though, we all traveled to a location roughly midway between New Jersey and Florida.

The plan, you wonder? None. Between arrival and departure, we just winged it.

Here’s what we did, loosely: talked, ate, slept, talked, laughed, talked, ate, drove to the store (or restaurant, or “attraction”), talked, walked around, talked, laughed, slept, talked… Two of us might go out to run an errand, while two of us stayed put. We took some unscheduled time to ourselves each day, with little or no interaction (reading, doing email and other quick online activities, napping). But really, we just made it up as we went along. “What do you want to do now?” “Anybody for a walk?” And so on.

It was great — for me, especially. I mean, I know the other three (who live within an hour of one another) welcomed the opportunity to see me and to “get away from it all.” But when I moved to Florida in ’93 to be with The Missus-to-Be, I never imagined that whole years might pass during which I wouldn’t see Connie, Cindy, and Mike. Not that I’d have decided otherwise, but I never considered the psychological implications of going that long without seeing their eyes light up (or fill, as the case may be). It seemed impossible that they might someday sit at a table with me and talk about people with whom they’ve been friends for ten, fifteen, almost twenty years… but whom I’ve never met.

But that didn’t matter, from mid-day Wednesday through Sunday morning. There we all were at the South Carolina coast.

People who know us have said they’d love to have been a fly on the wall to overhear the conversation at SibFest ’11. But you know what? I think no one but the four of us could have made sense of it for more than ten or fifteen minutes. We fell instantly into the familiar mode: speaking English, yes, but a peculiar sort of English needleworked onto and through a warp and weft of memories — in-jokes, lightning-bolt events in our pasts, old neighborhood characters, things we’d once promised and never delivered, things we’d delivered without advance warning, things small at the time but hugely inflated in retrospect (and vice-versa), wishes and dreams and deliriums and disappointments, people we’d forgotten, places we never got to and places we saw far too often, ice-cream flavors and TV shows, music and gardens, the theater fire, the church, the schoolyard, lilacs and hollyhocks and lacecap hydrangeas, how-come and I-always-wondered transitions, childhood crushes and kids who freaked us out, whatever-happened-to questions, the swallowing up into history of people we’d sat next to for years, first library cards and wardrobe accidents, run-ins with police, misfortunes (and near-fortunes) of love…

The best thing about being alone with the other three? I think it’s the utterly effortless unguardedness. We sometimes talk about competing as siblings — living up to some standard set by one or more of the others — but that’s got nothing to do with how we interact. We don’t have to squeeze words in edgewise. We don’t have to match rhythms, playing catch-up or slow-down. Do, or not, but there really is no try.

What a great, great, great time.

Thanks so much, kids. Love you.

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It Calls Me On and On

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[Image: audio-animatronic scene at the 1960s-era Disneyland “Carousel of Progress” display. See yesterland.com for more information and a larger version of this image.]

From whiskey river:

The Bones
(excerpt)

…Shells were to shut out the sea,
The bones of birds were built for floating
On air and water, and those of fish were devised
For their feeding depths, while a man’s bones were framed
For what? For knowing the sands are here,
And coming to hear them a long time; for giving
Shapes to the sprawled sea, weight to its winds,
And wrecks to plead for its sands. These things are not
Limitless: we know there is somewhere
An end to them, though every way you look
They extend farther than a man can see.

(W. S. Merwin [read the whole thing here])

…and:

We clutter the earth with our inventions, never dreaming that possibly they are unnecessary — or disadvantageous. We devise astounding means of communication, but do we communicate with one another? We move our bodies to and fro at incredible speeds, but do we really leave the spot we started from? Mentally, morally, spiritually, we are fettered. What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?

(Henry Miller [source])

[Read more…]

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Midweek Music Break: Scott Joplin’s “Solace”

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I caught 1973’s The Sting on TV recently. By now, I’ve seen it often enough that the kick of the plot has pretty much evaporated, leaving behind the not inconsiderable on-screen pleasures of watching the cast at work. (Robert Shaw as Doyle Lonnegan, I just learned from Wikipedia, did not have to fake his limp: “Shaw had slipped on a wet handball court at the Beverly Hills Hotel just a week before filming began and had split all the ligaments in his knee.”)

To which I’d have to add, always, the textural pleasures provided by the soundtrack.

It’s hard not to like Scott Joplin’s ragtime music, which — though already out-of-date in the real-world 1930s — somehow “sounds” right to our ears for that period. It’s so… so… so bubbly, y’know?

But one song always stood out in my mind as the best of the lot — and although Joplin wrote it, it didn’t even sound like ragtime, to my uneducated ears: “Solace.”

[Below, click Play button to begin Solace. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:34 long.

[audio:solace_joplin.mp3|titles=’Solace’|artists=by Scott Joplin-Marvin Hamlisch on piano]

The complete title of the song is “Solace: A Mexican Serenade”; published in 1909, it was, says at least one source, “the only work by Joplin to employ a tango rhythm.” Which caught me completely by surprise — not that my ears are any smarter about tango than about ragtime. But when I heard “Solace,” I just couldn’t picture a couple of sleek and smoldering Spanish dancers clinched together, eyes locked, as they swirled about on a dance floor.

According to the All Music Guide to Classical Music, however, the “Solace”-as-tango story isn’t quite that straightforward:

[Solace] is a four-minute gem of a habanera, which, as one might divine from the word, has roots in Havana. There is also in Solace something of the tango form, which, though distantly related to an African folk dance tradition, is more recently of the same Latin extraction as the habanera. Solace is, then, a true musical mish-mash…

Fans of George Bizet’s Carmen are invited to sit back, listen to Solace, and enjoy the same gently rocking habanera rhythm as is heard throughout the Frenchman’s famous Habanera.

So, since you, too, may wonder about that comparison… here’s Bizet’s “Habanera”:

[Below, click Play button to begin Habanera (from ‘Carmen’). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:11 long.

[audio:habanera_bizetcarmen.mp3|titles=’Habanera (from Carmen)’|artists=Bizet-London Festival Orchestra]

How about that?

[At the time this posts on Wednesday morning, I’ll be in mid-air, en route to a four-day reunion with my sisters and brother. If all goes as planned between now and then, though, another of these magically pre-created missives will appear on Friday. I will be checking in online “for real” from time to time, too, both here and via email.]

 

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