Trees

I got stuck in a tree over the weekend and might not be able to blog for a few days. This happens sometimes.

There is a chance that I will have a guitar airlifted for the remainder of my stay, but I'd rather not risk transporting my laptop. Besides, the battery would not last too long.

Rather than leave my Monday readers high-and-dry, I had my hiking companion/rescue coordinator take down the first few lines of a Hoelderlin poem I felt was well-suited for the occasion. Unfortunately I could only remember the first two verses...

Was dämmert um mich, Erde! Dein freundlich Grün?
Was wehst du wieder, Lüftchen, wie einst mich an?
In allen Wipfeln rauschts,

Was weckt ihr mir die Seele? Was regt ihr mir
Vergangnes auf, ihr Guten! O schonet mein
Und laßt sie ruhn, die Asche meiner
Freunden, ihr spottet nur! O wandelt,

or, auf Englisch, courtesy of Michael Hamburger:

Why, Earth, around me glimmer your friendly leaves?
Why, little wind, as once do you breathe on me?
In all the tree-tops there's a rustling,

Why do you rouse my soul and stir up the past?
In me, you kindly ones? O be kinder still
And let them be, the embers of my
Joys! You were mocking me! Travel on then,

The poem, entitled Palinodie, has another few verses that you can read here. More interesting, I learned when reading about the piece that a "palinode" is a reversal of an earlier poem or statement. For some reason I'd never learned that.

Though I'd never consciously written a palinode of any kind, a likely subject arose in my path while hiking this weekend. I read on a placard that honeysuckle -- the plant whose appearance in midsummer always seemed to me so sweet, innocent and intoxicating -- is actually regarded as an invasive species in North America. It's sweet-smelling and attractive, but can hamper other growth.

See? I still learn things.

And lest you pick up the touch-tone and dial the volunteer fire department, I'll come out and admit that I'm not really stuck in any trees. I just might not post for a few days and thought I'd give a more interesting reason than an upcoming sales meeting.

Take care.

Century o century of clouds

Today I'd like to give birthday regards to Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky, better known as Guillaume Apollinaire, who was born on yesterday's date in Rome 127 years ago. This French poet and father of the surrealist movement is one of my favorite European poets, especially his 1913 collection, Alcools.

Rather than scrap together a biography here, I'd rather include some links to his works translated into English. This site has a number of selections in English. You can also find pretty good translations of my two favorite pieces of his, Zone and The Betrothal (Les Fiancailles) by clicking on the title of each in this sentence.

What I enjoy most about Apollinaire is his rhapsodic, dreamlike images and the way he mixes surreal elements with a sense of loss to give his poems a dramatic melancholoy. The poems are at times so solemn and melodramatic that they can bring the reader a sense of hope, or at least they do so for me.

A quote from one of his successors/counterparts, Czech poet Vitezslav Nezval, describes a method and motivation for making strange juxtapositions within verse that I find in Apollinaire's work as well as Nezval's. He writes:

Logically the glass belongs to the table, the star to the sky, the door to the staircase. That is why they go unnoticed. It was necessary to set the star near the table; the glass hard by the piano and the angels; the door beside the ocean. The idea was to unveil reality; to give it back its shining image, as on the first day of its existence. If I did this at the expense of logic, it was an attempt at realism raised to a higher power.

(taken from Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 1, University of California Press)

Finally, I'd like to honor Apollinaire with a piece from local international poetry site, Lingua Obscura, which owes a fair amount to Apollinaire's Les Fiancailles. This piece also goes out in honor of the total lunar eclipse, which is scheduled to occur over Kansas City skies around 5 tomorrow morning. Enjoy.

Guest post by Fred Hölderlin (1770 - 1843)

TO THE YOUNG POETS

Quite soon, dear brothers, perhaps our art,
So long in youth-like ferment, will now mature
To beauty's plenitude, to stillness;
Only be pious, like the Greeks!

Of mortal men think kindly, but love the gods!
Loathe drunkenness like frost! Don't describe or teach!
And if you fear your master's bluntness,
Go to great Nature, let her advise you!

translated by Keith Hoeller


asking great nature for advice -- photo by natalya

This post goes out to everyone, especially two of you with April birthdays. For those of you who are at work and/or not in a position to seek advice from great nature and must instead seek idle amusement on the Internet, you might enjoy this story about a drunk man parking his horse in the foyer of a Sparkasse.

Doing lines in the Land of Nod

My daily fun-facts calendar states today that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" during a six-day cocaine binge.

"That an invalid in my husband's condition of health should have been able to perform the manual labour alone of putting 60,000 words on paper in six days, seems almost incredible," said his astonished wife, Fanny.

I'm not sure if this makes me have more respect for the book or the drug. I just know this wasn't the kind of thing I learned about at the writer's museum in Edinburgh, which is dedicated to Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott as well as the "Treasure Island" author. The museum takes a historical but child-friendly approach, dedicating itself more to the passion of writing than the process.

RLS wasn't just an invalid as an adult, either. In the museum, there was a free watercolored booklet available that told the story of RLS's fever-ridden childhood, how he looked forward each evening to the arrival of the lamplighter, or "Leerie" in Scottland. The booklet is actually quite charming, but reveals itself in the last few pages to be a Christian parable, placed there by some Irish ministry group. Though this doesn't necessarily invalidate the story, I much prefer the unpurposed imaginations of RLS's "A Child's Garden of Verses."

I was going to include a verse-weed from my own weird kid's garden of verse, but I'd rather list these series of quotes from the great Scottish author, who lived from 1850-1894

• For God's sake, give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
• To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
• All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
• There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.
• Wine is bottled poetry.
• Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
• There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
• Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
• The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
• Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
• To forget oneself is to be happy.
• Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
• To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying "Amen" to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to keep your soul alive.
• Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police
• The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
• Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
• Youth is wholly experimental

Spring and All Aboard the Tit-Tanic

In the parking lot behind my lead-poisoned apartment sits a boat called the Tit-Tanic. I have no idea who this brave vessel belongs to, but one night R. Ketch Morse and I hatched a plan to take it all the way to Lake Titicaca. Provided the boat is still there on Oct. 31 (when my lease ends), we plan to sail by way of Brush Creek/Kansas River/The Ocean all the way to Titicaca, which at 12,536 feet is the highest elevated lake in the world. This is appropriate, seeing as how you'd have to be pretty high to even dream doing such a thing!

In honor of the lake and the mysterious flagship of 43rd Street, I give you Poem X of William Carlos Williams' "Spring and All." If the connections between modern poetry, Bolivia, and an abandoned motorboat seem tenuous, allow me to suggest that they are in fact, tenacious -- perhaps even titicaucus.

The Eyeglasses

The universality of things
draws me toward the candy
with melon flowers that open

about the edge of refuse
proclaiming without accent
the quality of the farmer's

shoulders and his daughter's
accidental skin, so sweet
with clover and the small

yellow cinquefoil in the
parched places. It is
this that engages the favorable

distortion of eyeglasses
that see everything and remain
related to mathematics--

in the most practical frame of
brown celluloid made to
represent tortoiseshell--

A letter from the man who
wants to start a new magazine
made of linen

and he owns a typewriter--
July 1, 1922
All this is for eyeglasses

to discover. But
they lie there with the gold
earpieces folded down

tranquilly Titicaca

WCW, 1923

this can apply to life as well

click to make readable -- image and text reprtinted from "The Star Wars Question & Answer Book About Computers" by Fred D'Ignazio, Random House, 1983, pilfered from the library at the now-nonexistent Roesland Elementary. More lessons from video cocktail tables to come.

the sad fate of mossby pomegranete

Though surfing the Web can be a time-and-soul-draining experience, www.archive.org is a sure thrill for online curiosity seekers, video clip collectors and fans of cultural ephemera. The site compiles a bunch of articles, software, recordings and multimedia for anyone to look through. The most extensive and fascinating collection of videos can be found in the Prelinger Archives, founded by Rick Prelinger in 1982. Dave Coates told me about this site while showing me a bunch of strange, strange clips therein.

Among the videos Dave played for me were instructional videos for police on how to deal with belligerent or mentally handicapped citizens, some kind of filmstrip from the '50s for kids about removing living organs from pets, and the crown jewel of the Internet Archives, "One Got Fat."

"One Got Fat" is ostensibly a 14-minute filmstrip about bicycle safety (Interlude Films, 1963, Dale Jennings, writer/director). It features 10 bike riders facing various safety obstacles on their way to a park nine blocks away. Which sounds tame enough. Except that the cyclists are monkeys, and all but one are led by their own carelessness head-on into steamrollers, manholes and other dangers. The death masks of the monkey cyclists are pretty severe, and it's hard to believe they showed this to kids (a dozen or so comments on the archive.org site are from people who remember being freaked out by the film in grade school). As Dave put it, it's interesting to see something from an era before irony, when the accepted way to try and get kids to behave was to scare the hell out of them.

Don't be mistaken, though. "One Got Fat" is great fun. The monkeys each meet their grisly fates in ridiculous ways and their names are as colorful as their costumes. Names include: Rooty Toot Jasperson, Slim Jim McGutney, Filbert Bagel, Stanislaw Higginbottum, Tinkerbelle McDillingfitty and my personal favorite, Mossby Pomegranete (e-mail mossby@gmail.com). I think it would be great if they each had their own trading cards, complete with photos, stats and safety information. The film also boasts a delightful fanfare, stirring narration from Edward Everett Horton and some bizarro cinematography.

You can find "One Got Fat" by going to archive.org, finding the "moving pictures" menu and locating the Prelinger Archives, where several viewing options and more information are available. Or, you can see it here on google video. Ride safe and love it.

a stomach for schlegel

Fred Schlegel, 1772-1829
Excerpts from the literary aphorisms of Friederich von Schlegel

• One must drill the board where it is the thickest
• In poetry, too, all that is whole might be only half-done, and yet all that is half-done might actually be a whole
• A classical work doesn’t ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it
• Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man; so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object of art
• In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.
• A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
• …the most necessary: for whenever we do not restrain ourselves, the world will restrain us; and thus we will become its slave. The highest: for we can restrain ourselves only in those points when we have infinite power, in self-creation and self-destruction.
• Not art and works of art make an artist, but sense and enthusiasm and instinct.
• Good drama must be drastic
• The historian is a prophet looking backwards
• Every concept of God is idle talk. But the idea of the Godhead is the idea of ideas.

because we're young

Tonight while discussing the pending revolution with caligula jones, the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner-authored manifesto of Expressionist group die Bruecke (the bridge) came to mind. It is, in the original:

"Mit dem Glauben an Entwicklung, an eine neue Generation der Schaffenden wie der Genießenden rufen wir alle Jugend zusammen, und als Jugend, die die Zukunft trägt, wollen wir und Arm- und Lebensfreiheit verschaffen gegenüber den wohlangesessenen älteren Kräften. Jeder gehört zu uns, der unmittelbar und unverfälscht das wiedergibt, was ihn zum Schaffen drängt."

Which means:

"With the belief in evolution, in a new generation of creators and art lovers, we call on all youth, and as youth, which carries the future, we want to gain freedom of movement and life against the well-entrenched older forces. Everyone who renders what impels him to create directly and without adulteration is one of us."

Kirchner wrote this in 1906.

gangster poetry

Went to the Joplin history musem today to pick up a book and wound up poking around for a while. There was a neat display on spook light, the ghostly glow emanating from what is thought to be the spirit of a Confederate officer looking for his head. Apparently the bastard was so big and mean they executed him by cannon instead of the standard firing squad.

The most striking display, however, were the photos and timeline of Bonnie & Clyde, who shot and killed a detective while hiding out in Joplin. Also included was a poem by Bonnie Parker entitled "Outlaws." For all I know this poem is widely known, but it struck me so much I copied it down on the back of one of the color-me-in Diplodicus papers near the musuem's exit.

Rather than type it all out I'll post the poem as I saw it in the museum.