In the News – Page 14

Artful Bullies

January 3, 2014 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Imperial Art Appreciation: Blue,” by JD Hancock on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons license.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

We are not transparent to ourselves. We have intuitions, suspicions, hunches, vague musings, and strangely mixed emotions — all of which resist simple definition. We have moods, but we don’t really know them. Then, from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch on to something we have felt but never recognized clearly before. Alexander Pope identified a central function of poetry as taking thoughts we experience half-formed and giving them clear expression: “what was often thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” In other words, a fugitive and elusive part of our own thinking, our own experience, is taken up, edited, and returned to us better than it was before, so that we feel, at last, that we know ourselves more clearly.

(Alain de Botton and John Armstrong [source])

…and:

I’m Working on the World

I’m working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.

Here’s one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple “Hi there,”
when traded with a fish,
make both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.

The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoot of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they are sleeping in the park!

Time (Chapter Two) retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time’s unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won’t be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.

Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don’t whine that it’s steep:
you’ll stay young if you’re good.
Suffering (Chapter Three)
doesn’t insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;
you’d feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.

Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach’s fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.

(Wislawa Szymborska [source])

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Midweek Science/Poetry Break: Diane Ackerman, “Night Letter to Loren Eiseley”

December 18, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, by Diane Ackerman Correct: no Midweek Music Break this week. I’ve been working on this year’s ~~Quirky~~ Eclectic Christmas Mix, which will show up here on Saturday, so am a little burnt out on music at the moment. :)

Instead…

I’ve been re-reading Carl Sagan’s Broca’s Brain, from 1979, which deals mostly with the edges which lie between science and, well, everything else. In one chapter, he discusses science fiction: what he likes and what he hates about it. And I came across this curious claim: “…in the verse of Diane Ackerman can be glimpsed the prospect of a mature astronomical poetry, fully conversant with standard science-fiction themes.”

Eh? I thought. Diane Ackerman writes science-fiction poetry?!? This turns out to be the case, all right — or at least, she has done so. I refer you to her collection called Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, for example, which includes (among much else) excerpt from a complete cycle, ~~perhaps~~ a collection of its own, called The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral.

In Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, I also came across the poem below. Not strictly speaking a “science-fiction poem,” nevertheless it does feature an imagined correspondence with one of the great workers at those edges between science and “everything else.”

Night Letter to Loren Eiseley

All night an illness barred me
from that loam-rich sleep
we mammals are born to,
we who lie flat for eight hours
in darkness, then rise, barely rested,
for half a sun, watch color TV
because ancestors had eyes cued
to ripening fruit, laze on platforms
in the sun, and still marvel
at hand-me-down miracles like birth.

Near dawn, I took your Immense Journey
from the shelf, and found myself soon
with lantern-jawed humans, trapped
in the Lost Horizon of our past,
with deft orb-weavers, oracular fish,
and marsh birds that stilt
from pond to pond. Then, nodding
in ricochet delight, I feasted
on the spellbinding fruit you grew—
that way of beholding
which is a form of prayer,
and, on the still white winter morning,
knew I would carry its seeds
to an unworldly place.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

Leavings

November 15, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: one of the photos in photographer Amy Regalia’s 2007 exhibit, Leavings.
For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.

(Marilynne Robinson [source])

…and:

Early Morning in Your Room

It’s morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-like
Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.
The gray light as you pour gleaming water —
It seems you’ve traveled years to get here.

Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve
It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery
Had its way, poverty, no money at least.
Or maybe it was confusion. But that’s over.

Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books:
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka’s Letter
to His Father, are all here. You can dance
With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling

With only one eye. Even the blind man
Can see. That’s what they say. If you had
A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton
Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home.

(Robert Bly [source])

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Midweek Music Break: Melodía Pegadiza, Part 2 (Pérez Prado’s “Patricia,” and the Mambo in General)

October 23, 2013 by John 7 Comments

[Image: Pérez Prado, in the imaginative eyes of the Mexican cartoonist (Saul Herrera) calling himself “Qucho.” I found the image on the Web right away; Qucho, only with some hunting. And I’m not sure this image appears even there, on his blog.]

It’s been a few months now since I posted the first of these Midweek Music Breaks on Latin-music earwigs from the 1950s. That post dealt with “Blue Tango,” by decidedly non-Hispanic classical composer Leroy Anderson. This week, we take a look at one of this genre’s hits penned by the self-styled “Mambo King,” bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado.

First, an (apologetically pedantic) aside about that name: Dámaso was his given name; Pérez, his paternal surname; Prado, his maternal surname. Thus you’ll find many references to him as simply “Pérez Prado” — which “feels,” at least to a native English speaker, like a first/last name combination. For all I know, this was common during his lifetime. Maybe he even got used to it: when someone shouted out “Pérez!” on a street corner, maybe he turned his head more readily than when they called for Dámaso. But really, it’s never quite correct to refer to him as plain-old Prado — like the Spanish national art museum. Speaking from experience, this is harder than it sounds. Nevertheless “Pérez Prado” is right — just like the dark-and-stormy-night author is never called simply Lytton but always Bulwer-Lytton.

Pérez Prado cut something of an exotic figure on the mid-20th century American musical landscape. Born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1916, he started out studying classical piano. By the 1940s, he had moved entirely into popular Cuban genres, specializing in the rhythm called the mambo.

What exactly is mambo, anyhow? Unfortunately, most of the descriptions of it are cast in terms of other styles which — presumably — you already do know enough about to discuss intelligently. One Joseph Levy, about whom I can report pretty much nothing at all, seems to have taken a special interest in Pérez Prado. At his site, he says of the mambo:

Prado’s conception of the mambo began to develop in 1943. He later said that four, five, and sometimes six musicians would often play after hours jam sessions on the tres (a small Cuban guitar) and the resultant cross rhythms and syncopation give him the idea. Jazz writer and critic Ralph J. Gleason reported that “Prez” talked to him about the mambo as being an Afro-Cuban rhythm with a dash of American swing. According to Prado, the mambo is “more musical and swingier than the rhumba. It has more beat.” He also explained, “I am a collector of cries and noises, elemental ones like seagulls on the shore, winds through the trees, men at work in a foundry. Mambo is a movement back to nature, by means of rhythms based on such cries and noises, and on simple joys.”

…The mambo as we know it today is actually a rhythm whose tempo may be slow or fast, and almost any standard tune can be set to its tempo. The saxophone usually sets the rhythm pattern and the brass carries the melody.

That reference to “cries and noises” and the squawks of seagulls may allude to Pérez Prado’s own style of band leadership. Often, you can hear him grunting aloud as though to punctuate the rhythm; sometimes these grunts are actually exultant variations of the imperative “Dilo!” (“Say it!”) and sometimes they seem — at least to me — just, well, grunts.*

Pérez Prado’s departure from Cuba is sometimes described as though he’d been ridden out of town on a rail, for tainting the purer strains of local music with foreign jazz elements. Well, maybe. Maybe the musical establishment of mid-twentieth-century Cuba was fiery, conservative, nativist; maybe people really did (still do) work themselves up into a frenzy of distaste over such matters, and not just in Cuba. What seems more likely, given what we could later tell of Pérez Prado’s ambitions: he just felt too constrained by a narrow — oh, say, island-sized — popularity, and left on his own. Whatever the case may be, when he left, he left for Mexico. And except for his big but fairly brief success in the US, from then on he seemed to present himself as a citizen of Mexico rather than Cuba.

His first introduction to US audiences came via across-the-border radio broadcasts from Mexico. He had a big hit there with a number called “Que Rico del Mambo,” which was repackaged and -recorded by American bandleader Sonny Burke as “Mambo Jambo.” That song’s success first brought Pérez Prado to the US.

“Patricia,” in 1958, was the last of Pérez Prado’s releases to reach #1 on US charts. To characterize it as infectious (as I, at least, am tempted to do) is to gloss over the recording’s supreme oddness. The orchestra’s swing is punctuated not so much by its leader’s vocal cries — it doesn’t seem to feature any of them — as by weird little bursts of horns and percussion which almost suggest to me a burp, or the compressed-lips Pppppbbbfffflllt! of a raspberry/”Bronx cheer.” But the tune itself seems to pinpoint a moment in time, in pop culture, captured by Federico Fellini in La Dolce Vita:

In [1960], even the composer Nino Rota would turn to mambo, reworking “Patricia” (Perez Prado) for the La Dolce Vita soundtrack. The song is used on several occasions, including in the “orgy” scene… As [the character of Nadia] prepares to take it all off, an inebriated guest calls for some “Middle Eastern music.” But in a truly exotica moment, the hi-fi needle falls into the groove of “Patricia.”

[source]

If you’re not familiar with that scene in the film, here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

To celebrate her recent divorce from Riccardo, Nadia performs a striptease to Pérez Prado’s cha-cha [JES: ???] “Patricia.” The drunken Marcello attempts to provoke the other partygoers into an orgy. Due to their inebriated states, however, the party descends into mayhem with Marcello throwing pillow feathers around the room as he rides a young woman crawling on her hands and knees.

(Ah, the early Sixties…) Of course, you can see this scene on YouTube, starting at around 3:55 into that seven-plus-minute clip.

Anyhow, here’s “Patricia,” as recorded by Pérez Prado’s own orchestra in 1958:

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To Emerge

October 4, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Video: Grinder & Coola Come Out of Hibernation. The two grizzlies were adopted in 2001 by Grouse Mountain Wildlife Refuge in Vancouver; the video was shot in 2011, on their tenth anniversary there.]

From whiskey river:

From Out the Cave

When you have been
at war with yourself
for so many years that
you have forgotten why,
when you have been driving
for hours and only
gradually begin to realize
that you have lost the way,
when you have cut
hastily into the fabric,
when you have signed
papers in distraction,
when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.

(Joyce Sutphen [source])

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Mark This Moment

August 30, 2013 by John 4 Comments

[Image: partial screen capture of a page at Google Books. The worker scanning the pages of The Coquette has allowed his or her gloved finger to be recorded for posterity.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.

But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.

Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.

(Jeff Foster [source])

…and:

The Good Life

You stand at the window.
There is a glass cloud in the shape of a heart.
The wind’s sighs are like caves in your speech.
You are the ghost in the tree outside.

The street is quiet.
The weather, like tomorrow, like your life,
is partially here, partially up in the air.
There is nothing you can do.

The good life gives no warning.
It weathers the climates of despair
and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,
and you are there.

(Mark Strand [source])

[Read more…]

The Golden Treasury‘s Author (1): Bertha Parker’s Early Years

August 24, 2013 by John 25 Comments

the closest thing to a first-person singular pronoun in Bertha Morris Parker's 'Golden Treasury of Natural History'

[See the previous entry in this series here]

Bertha Morris Parker was born in a small town named Rochester, Illinois — a few miles east of the state capital at Springfield — on February 7, 1890. Her father owned a drugstore in “the village” which, as near as I can determine, was at the corner of Main Street and John Street.

The Twist Building, Rochester, Il (early 20th century)

Here’s a photo of the store, at right (click to enlarge). The photo comes from an historical memoir of early Rochester, As I Saw It, by an author named Justin Taft with family ties to the area. The two-story building on the left was called the Twist Building — you can see the word “TWIST” on the facade, at the top — after a private telephone company which occupied the top floor. The H.D. Parker drugstore took up half the floor below it, just to the right of the stairway and the left of the bank.

The Twist Building itself burned “to the ground” in 1930, although the bank building survives (photo at left, courtesy of Google Street View).

I know little about the home where Bertha Parker grew up, except what she recorded in a collection of “autobiographical notes” in 1979*: “My family… lived in a big house surrounded by an acre of ground dotted with walnut and maple trees.” (I did find a report of Parker’s father having bought a house in 1904, but I don’t know if this was the house she grew up in.)

The drugstore sold lots of stuff besides drugs, of course. A history of Sangamon County, Illinois (published in 1881) says that Parker, with his partner at the time, “are engaged in selling drugs, groceries, hardware, queensware, etc., and have a large and lucrative business. In politics he is a Republican.” (Love that last bit.)

An elderly area resident recalled, in a 2004 interview, that the store included a soda fountain, and that out front — hence the cars at the curb in that old photo — stood the first gasoline pump in Rochester. It also “stocked tires, tubes, and those things that people needed for their cars,” cosmetics, and Victrolas (!). She added, with what I imagine to be a little touch of small-town insider’s whispered rumor:

I’m not even sure if he was a registered pharmacist, because there probably was very little prescription medicine at that time. Most everything was just sold over the counter. Medicines that were [sold] probably, the doctors told people what to buy and they’d go to the drugstore and buy it.

For schooling, Rochester offered but a single four-room building, with one teacher per room. Bertha Parker recalled that the seventh- and eighth-grade teacher did double (or rather, treble) duty as the school’s principal. Yet “the teaching staff was of higher caliber than one might expect,” thanks to the presence of a teachers’ college in nearby Springfield which supplied the outlying areas with a steady stream of well-educated, ambitious educators. Still:

…the curriculum was chiefly reading and writing and arithmetic. It offered no challenges. No child was ever asked to express an opinion of his or her own. No problems were presented without a pattern for solving them. There was always time for studying while other groups were reciting. Nothing was provided for those who did not need so much study time.

Most damning, perhaps, in Bertha Parker’s later memories — yet maybe the most important single fact in her professional life to come:

It apparently hadn’t occurred to the teachers in our school that interesting plants and animals were common in the vicinity of the school and could have been used to give children an excellent introduction to nature study.

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A Skin of Mirror

August 23, 2013 by John 8 Comments

[Video: “Eulerian Video Magnification,” by a team of researchers at MIT. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Keiji, a long-time Zen student, approached his master and said: “I don’t see how there can be any enlightenment that sets you free once and for all. I think we just get ever greater glimpses of Buddha-nature, the vastness that is our true Reality. It’s an ever-expanding process.”

The master replied, “That may be what you think. But what is your experience, your experience right now?”

Keiji was confused, “My experience right now, Master?”

“Yes. Do you know yourself as Keiji, having ever-expanding experiences of Buddha-nature? Or do you know yourself as Buddha-nature, having the experience of Keiji?”

(unsourced)

…and:

No one has ever seen fish.
Fish secrete highly reflective compounds
That act as a skin of mirror.
It is thought the fishes’ sides
are painted in landscapes,
mountainous.

(Annie Dillard [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin'”

August 21, 2013 by John 24 Comments

When Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'” first came out in 1964, I wasn’t paying much attention to contemporary popular music. But when I did hear it the first time, even benighted I recognized what a great song it was. I could feel my mind and spirit churning restlessly: the lyrics (which I never had trouble hearing) ostensibly addressed parents and other authority figures, but seemed meant to be heard by me and my peers. It described the dangers of the coming years: conflict and tumult, bubble and ruin, destruction and, finally, the joy of a fresh start. It didn’t say anything (nor did I think) about how, exactly, all this would come to pass. But ye gods, what a stirring (and literate) bugle call…!

I still marvel that the lyrics, and the very title, work at all. The times they are a-changin’ sounds like the malformed offspring of Appalachian corn and parody Italian (The meatballs, they-a so spicy!).

The way things played out over the next few years — around the world, not just in the US — seemed to bear out the song’s prophecies, such as they were. But then, more or less without warning, all the excitement dissipated. Having driven many of us insane, Nixon suddenly was gone. Having reached a plateau, the revolution ran out of gas. Music followed suit; with bubble-gum and disco, the medium’s core felt hollowed out. And since 9/11, oh gods…

On my (rare) pessimistic days anymore, I now imagine that the song sends the opposite message. It seems a lament sung to aging lefties who can find only traces of their own (half-forgotten) idealism in the faces of their kids and their neighbors. People we elected in hopes of turning things around simply haven’t turned out as promised — or, at any rate, as we imagined they promised. The country seems sliding into a slough of suspicion, paranoia, flimsy justifications for militarism, institutionalized intolerance, and careless consumerism.

Luckily, I don’t feel nearly so gloomy on most days: most people are better people than they think they are, or (at any rate) than they will consistently allow themselves to be.

When Dylan’s Love and Theft album came out in 2001 — hailed (like so many of his albums in terms like “He’s back!” — I found myself less than bowled over. But the album has grown on me with replaying. And just like the first time I listened to that album, when I get to the last track* and find an alternate out-of-nowhere take (from 1964, no less!) of “The Times, They Are a-Changin’,” why, my old spirit soars anew.

[mp3-jplayer title=”The Times They Are A-Changin'” tracks=”timeschangin_alt_bobdylan.mp3″ captions=”Bob Dylan (alternate version: ‘Love and Theft’ / 2001)”]

[Lyrics]

____________________

* Your own copy of the album/CD may not include it; it’s a bonus track on the digital edition.

From the Outside In: the Golden Treasury‘s Endpapers

August 8, 2013 by John 3 Comments

[See the previous entry in this series here.]

Adult readers know unambiguously what it means to “read a book.” They have an image of someone — most often themselves? — sitting somewhere in a comfortable chair, on a commuter train or in an airport terminal, good lighting from over the shoulder… The book lies open in their hands or lap, somewhere in the middle, with a sheaf of pages pinned in place behind each thumb. Because, y’know, whether the book in question is a potboiler or a metaphysical treatise, that’s where all the action is — in the middle. It’s the heart of the book.

But just inside the front and back covers? Those “pages,” the endpapers, serve a purely physical function; they’re where the dynamic stresses are greatest, where the tension between spine and glued contents would most likely result in tearing and/or separation. In a book, they’re the analogue of a painting’s picture frame: they physically hold it all together, hence are important, but they have no real point otherwise. They’re to be gotten through.

But kids harbor fewer clearcut preconceptions. From their perspective, the very first spread of paper and the very last might well be places to expect the most drama, the most meaning. And in a book or elsewhere, when faced with a large two-page spread of blank paper, few kids could resist the temptation to scribble, to color, to fill. Leaving them empty would be such a waste, no?

I don’t know, but can guess, that artists and illustrators love having the freedom to fill whole tabloid-sized sheets of whitespace, too, free from the constraints of story and the rigid geography of text on the page. Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, hated the tedium of the daily strip format: day after day, year after year, working within the same narrow rectangle. (It especially had to frustrate him as the creator of such an undisciplined protagonist.) If I remember correctly, he stipulated in his contracts that if you wanted the daily strip, you had to give him a half-page on Sunday, to fill with whatever layout he wanted. His Sunday strips dazzled, even before you’d read any of the text in the speech balloons.

The publishers of kids’ books, especially illustrated ones, know all this. And the publishers of great kids’ books pull out all the stops.

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