[Hat tip to the Speak Coffee to Me blog’s consistently brilliant selections in its Ad of the Week series]
Midweek Music Break: “St. James Infirmary”
Laissez les bons temps rouler, eh? And among the songs often regarded as “typical New Orleans,” we have the subject of today’s Midweek Music Break.
No way could I even begin to match the masterful job of documenting its history which Robert W. Harwood undertook with his I Went Down to St. James Infirmary. One hundred ninety pages. Subtitle (all by itself practically a foreword to the book): Investigations in the Shadowy World of Early Jazz-Blues in the Company of Blind Willie McTell, Louis Armstrong, Don Redman, Irving Mills, Carl Moore, and a Host of Others, and Where Did This Dang Song Come from Anyway?
Briefly, though (and thank you, Wikipedia):
“St. James Infirmary Blues” is based on an 18th century traditional English folk song called “The Unfortunate Rake” (also known as “The Unfortunate Lad” or “The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime”)… “The Unfortunate Rake” is about a sailor who uses his money on prostitutes, and then dies of a venereal disease…
The title is derived from St. James Hospital in London, a religious foundation for the treatment of leprosy.
Doesn’t sound much like an invitation to party, does it? No good times rollin’ here! But then we find these relevant lyrics, almost sketching for us a picture of a completely classic New Orleans funeral march:
“Get six young soldiers to carry my coffin,
Six young girls to sing me a song,
And each of them carry a bunch of green laurel
So they don’t smell me as they bear me along.“Don’t muffle your drums and play your fifes merrily,
Play a quick march as you carry me along,
And fire your bright muskets all over my coffin…”
Here’s “The Unfortunate Rake,” in a suitably mournful interpretation by A.L. Lloyd (vocals) and Alf Edwards (concertina) (complete lyrics here):
[Below, click Play button to begin The Unfortunate Rake. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:59 long.]
[audio:unfortunaterake_alloyd_alfedwards.mp3|titles=’The Unfortunate Rake’|artists=A.L. Lloyd & Alf Edwards]
By the time Louis Armstrong got hold of it, “The Unfortunate Rake” had morphed into a mysterious What exactly is going on here? sort of song. Now it’s no longer the rake, but his woman laid out in the hospital. And the guy? Well, the sound is right. But the words? He’s strangely, awfully damn ready to sing his own praises…
I went down to the St. James Infirmary
Saw my baby there
Stretched out on a long white table
So cold… so sweet… so fairLet her go… let her go… God bless her
Wherever she may be
She can look this wide world over
But she’ll never find a sweet man like meWhen I die Baby in straight-lace shoes
I wanna a boxback coat and a Stetson hat
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So the boys’ll know that I died standing flat…
[Below, click Play button to begin St. James Infirmary (Louis Armstrong). This clip is 4:46 long.]
[audio:stjamesinfirmary_louisarmstrong.mp3|titles=’St. James Infirmary’|artists=Louis Armstrong]
Finally, we have straight-up instrumentals — no need for any of these to retain a single lugubrious scrap of “The Unfortunate Rake.” This is sweetly swinging Allen Toussaint, on the piano:
[Below, click Play button to begin St. James Infirmary (Allen Toussaint). This clip is 3:51 long.]
[audio:stjamesinfirmary_allentoussaint.mp3|titles=’St. James Infirmary’|artists=Allen Toussaint]
The Usefulness of Bad Things
[Cartoon found at the site of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Institute of Maryland.]
From whiskey river:
Bad People
A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks — what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams — that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god — who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge — can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.
(Robert Bly, Morning Poems [source])
…and:
We think hitting the ground, knocking over the barrier is a mistake, but the ground we hit, the failure we experience is not a mistake. The world is endlessly mysterious, experience is profound to a degree that will always surprise us. But it is never a mistake. To foster even a meager appreciation of that (and when we’re in the midst of a fall, meager is pretty big) is to begin to practice, to raise the bodhi-mind. It is the decision to stop complaining and to start paying attention. Contained in the fall is exactly what we need to stand. Everything we need is available, but we have to invite it.
(Bonnie Myotai Treace [source])
The Fundamental Things Apply
[Below, click Play button to begin well, playing. During this time, volume control will appear at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:22 long.]
[audio:lovewalkedin_errollgarner.mp3|titles=’Love Walked In’|artists=Erroll Garner]
On March 1, 1991 — twenty years ago yesterday — I got an email from a stranger who’d downloaded and read an unpublished story of mine.
The story in question, “The Last Supper,” was a slender-little-nothin’ of a horror story about a church congregation who disposed of each pastor, when they tired of him, by consuming him at a communal covered-dish meal. My new correspondent just wanted me to know (a) she had enjoyed reading it and (b) in a word, Eeeeewww…!
Gross-out aside, the tone of the note was a little fangirlish. And in my reply, I — who’d written but not yet published a mystery about an email stalker — was simultaneously a little puffed-up and evasive.
Unfortunately, neither of us retained a copy of that first exchange. We both remember it, though — oh yes we do. And we both remember (in sometimes excruciating detail <g>) the long-term effects…
Erroll Garner’s piano provides the soundtrack to this post: “Love Walked In.” Seven years after George Gershwin composed the music, Ira Gershwin added the lyrics, the first verse of which goes:
Nothing seemed to matter any more,
Didn’t care what I was headed for.
Time was standing still,
No one counted till
There came a knocking at the door.
The rest fits, too.
Love you, Baby.
[Comments closed for this post, obviously.]
Perspective, Proportion, Sweet Spot
[Image: “Perspective,” a portion of Engineered Biotopes; this was an entry in a 2010 Greek architectural competition called “Piraeus Tower 2010 — Changing the Face/Façades Reformation.” For more on the competition, and this entry in particular, see this page at the Bustler architecture/design site.]
From whiskey river:
To My Doppelganger
You were always the careful one,
who’d tiptoe into passion
and cut it in half with your mind.
I allowed you that, and went
happier, wilder ways. Now
every thought I’ve ever had
seems a rope knotted
to another rope, going back
in time. We’re intertwined.
I’ve learned to hesitate
before even the most open door.
I don’t know what you’ve learned.
But to go forward, I feel,
is to go together now. There’s a place
I’d like to arrive by nightfall.
(Stephen Dunn [source])
…and:
It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short just wants to be.
(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything [source])
Updates: Watson on Jeopardy!
If you were interested in the subject at all, you’ve probably read all about it already. But for what it’s worth, I updated my “What Is Hubris, Alex?” post of a couple days ago with three longish comments recapping the three nights’ programs.
The first one is here; scroll down on that page for the others.
“What Is Hubris, Alex?” *
I’d heard of this little demonstration of computing power some time ago; last week I caught a documentary about it on PBS’s NOVA program. On the way into work today, I also heard a more up-to-date report of it on NPR’s Morning Edition. The event itself takes place tonight through Wednesday, during the regular Jeopardy! broadcast time slot.
One of my favorite moments in the NOVA program: The Watson project leader at IBM, David Ferrucci, was for a while quite discouraged with Watson’s performance in dry runs. He’d invited his two small children to the set to watch one of these earlier tests. Onstage, Watson’s screen was set up as in the above video, between two human competitors. The part of the “host” was played by a comedian. Every time Watson got a question wrong (which happened many times during that stretch), the host laughed and made a wisecrack. Because, y’know, the wrong answers were often surreally wrong. People in the audience and Watson’s competitors always laughed at the host’s commentary.
What did Ferrucci’s kids take away from the experience?
Not that they’d witnessed something important, an historic event.
Not that machines aren’t as “smart” as humans, nor even as “smart” as their advocates claim.
To my knowledge, they didn’t remember — all kid-like — something completely irrelevant like the vending machines.
No, what they got was emotional confusion:
Why was that man picking on Watson, Daddy? Why was he making fun of him? And why was everyone else laughing and applauding with the man? Didn’t that hurt Watson’s feelings?
The highway of electronics history is, as they say, littered with the road-kill of assertions that thus-and-such task will never be successfully performed by a computer. So I lay no bets on the outcome of this Jeopardy! challenge.
________________________________
* Note that this can refer to human hubris, either on the part of Watson’s designers and builders, or — to the contrary — on the part of everyone who thinks this will validate the conventional wisdom: that a computer cannot out-“think” a human on any task requiring natural-language processing.
More interesting, maybe, to wonder: Will it someday refer to machine hubris?
Rigged — Involuntarily — for Silent Running
Grrrrr.
…Grrrrr…
…oh, and in case I haven’t said recently: Grrrr.
As a good number of you already know, ’cause I’ve already told you: I cannot comment on your blogs during the work day. (I’ll detail some technical reasons for this at the end.) This post is to let you know that during those eight-ish hours of every weekday:
(1) If the main part of your blog’s address ends with wordpress.com, I can read it and comment there only via my BlackBerry. This is unchanged from recent months.
(2) If your blog’s address ends with blogspot.com, I can still read it during those hours. However, whether I can comment there at all then depends on two things:
(2a) If comments on your blog are entered on a completely separate page from where the posts are displayed, I can comment only via BlackBerry.
(2b) If comments must be entered on the same page as your posts, in a little box at the foot of the given post, I can’t even use my BlackBerry to enter them.
(3) If your blog’s address ends with things like livejournal.com or tumblr.com or ning.com or posterous.com or various other standard social-networking addresses, I can’t comment during work hours, probably at all.
(4) If your blog’s address ends with anything other than any of the above — that is, if you have your own domain name (as is true, e.g., with Seven-Imp — or with RAMH itself, for that matter), no change: I can both read and comment freely during work hours, just as I always have.
Note that the above supersedes any earlier email you may have gotten from me on this subject.
All of which means that you won’t see any sign from me that I’m actually still reading — and being engaged by — your writing on weekdays, unless I can post comments via BlackBerry… and maybe not even then. (If you monitor your site’s traffic, you will however still see my footprints in the damp ground outside, under the windows.)
To say that this drives me crazy really understates the case. I am, oh yes, annoyed. I am wroth. I am, indeed, mightily pissed off.
___________________
Landscapes, Perceived
[Image: a view of the Preseli Hills in north Pembrokeshire, West Wales. See the note below
for more information.]
From whiskey river:
Landscape and Soul
Though we should not speak about the soul,
that is, about things we don’t know,
I’m sure mine sleeps the day long,
waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake,
preferably by joy, but sadness also comes
by surprise, and the soul sings its songs.And because no one landscape compels me,
except the one that’s always out of reach
(toward which, nightly, I go), I find myself
conjuring Breugel-like peasants cavorting
under a Magritte-like sky — a landscape
the soul, if fully awake, could love as its own.But the soul is rumored to desire a room,
a chamber, really, in some far away outpost
of the heart. Landscape can be lonely and cold.
Be sweet to me, world.
(Stephen Dunn [source])
…and (additional text italicized):
You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.
You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.
And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.
(Wendell Berry, from Hannah Coulter [source])
Hello, World
An old 1960s TV program called Checkmate featured a striking title sequence: as the credits displayed on-screen, the background showed what appeared as a pool of swirling paint of multiple contrasting colors. (I say “appeared” because in those pre-color television days, the paint actually displayed as shades of gray. You can see it here, in the midst of a bunch of other old shows’ openers.)
It used to fascinate me to watch how each color remained itself, especially at the core of its own smear, but also subtly changed at every point where another color butted up against it. And, of course, that other color also changed…
Regular readers here probably know by now that good friend a/b, which is to say Ashleigh Burrows, is — when not wearing that bloggerly persona — known in real life as Susan “Suzi” Hileman. And that name (at least for readers in the US) will probably set off another wave of associations: Suzi Hileman was one of the most seriously wounded survivors of the Tucson shooting a couple weeks ago. Indeed, she’s the one most in the news lately, as the neighbor who accompanied nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s meet-and-greet.
Here’s Suzi on last night’s NBC Dateline:
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