07/19/07
Just Checking In
Hot and muggy -- not before a good bit of rain last week or so.
September 1959 ... The Tempos ... one-hit wonder ... Number 23 Billboard peak ...
"... when the summer's through."
Early 60s: Guess by link: "Johnny Angel," "Bye-Bye, Birdie" on Broadway, the Donna Reed Show, "Girl Crazy," sister in showbiz with last name spelled differently ...
"Will I see you in September ..."
Late 60s: doo wop gone from the airwaves, except for one group with really bad mop haircuts: The Happenings.
"... or lose you to a summer love?"
The 70s: oil crisis, recession, Watergate: American Graffitti soundtrack. Suzanne Somers: blond in the Mustang.
("I'll be alone each and every night / While you're away, don't forget to write!)
immortal 'high-school memory' melody to fade ...
"See You ... in Sep-TEM-ber ... ."
08/19/07
Gravity ... (pause for bluesy guitar lick) is pullin' against me ... .
Crushing heat wave abates ... clear night sky ... Carolina moon.
Don't remember how I got it, or what it exactly was ... . Very late 60s, magazine interview with Stan (The Man) Lee. Never saw any, any comic-book creative in any medium other than the comics themselves in those days. Yet, there it was. Some kind of counterculture mag (not Rolling Stone), it also featured a rating box for the best "comix" of the day, you know, the underground stuff like Robert Crumb and Vaughan Bode. It gave five stars to something called "Phoebe Zeitgeist." Huh? I'd head of all the other stuff rated, but not this thing. OK, fast forward the tape to high school field trip to the state capitol, early 70s. On our lunch hour, I head to a newsstand. I spot an issue of a famous LA counterculture mag of the day. It was like a dollar. That would be like spending six dollars on something like that now (OK, so, I'm bad at math ... .) Bought it anyway. No counterculture stuff in it, though. Just a "nothing" cover story and then ads for escort services inside. But, sure enough, it had a comic strip: Phoebe Zeitgeist. X rated for the era, drawn by no less than Wally Wood. The really controversial writer for Saturday Night Live (he died some years ago; forget his name, unfortunately) wrote the script. It wasn't particularly funny, though it was kind of naughty. Struck me as dumb. Tossed the rag about a week later. But that name, "Zeitgeist" -- it has stuck, for some reason.
Hope to see you in September. There could be some changes.
09/01/07
Ch ... Ch ... Ch .. Changes
Told you things might be different, didn't I?
This journal style {called 'Denim'} may not hold, but, frankly, LJ's other options were just not "me" -- these days, anyway. If I could just move some of these blocks around to a less kooky arrangement, I think I'd stick with it, but ... .
An off-shore system has brought rain and much cooler temps to our little bit of heaven (?) -- it almost feels like winter, compared to the high 90s of a fortnight ago. Current conditions kept me indoors all day, hacking away at a volunteer project that I actually got to work (to this point -- so far, so good). I've written before about how I like to use free software (open, free, whatever -- I just want to save money on things I can mess around with). Roughly two years ago, I spent like a whole day downloading OpenOffice -- I really didn't know what for, I just wanted to try it. I mainly messed with the word processor and the drawing program, the latter with little success. But today I got Draw to work good at what it's good for -- logos. The jury's still out on how well I managed managing databases. We'll see (gulp!).
Saw good friends at the local books-a-bazillion -- always nice. Also saw where "Layla" has written a book! Cool. I'm talking about the lady who married George Harrison in, like, the 60s, and then became the inspiration for Eric Clapton's "Layla and Other Love Songs" two-platter collaboration with Duane Allman and some friends. You don't need me to describe this LP to you, do you? It's on everyone's "all-time rock fave album" list. From the first chords of "Bell Bottom Blues" to the chirping effect fading the album out at "Thorn Tree in the Garden," this LP spoke immediately to its time so clearly that no one who heard it when it came out could ever forget it. They may have hated it, but they could not forget it.
It seems ol' Clap had fallen head over whatever for his best friend's super-cutey wife, and couldn't quite bring himself (at least at first -- so goes the story, as I recall) to take it further. He found this coffee-table book sitting around at a friend's house while so emotionally distraught he was nearly suicidal, and it inspired him to write (or at least get started on) the famous songs that were eventually featured on the LP. Evidently, the book's text was some English translation of the Persian story known as "Layla and Majnun."
The original Persian adaptation of this very old Arabic tale was written (as a poem, I think) by the Sufi mystic Nizami. Some warlord had just conquered Nizami's hometown, and he wrote the story in hopes of winning the new khan over. I don't know if it worked or not. But it is considered a classic of Persian literature, and it's supposedly laced with mystical overtones. It's also just a really strange, but strangely affecting, story about a boy (Majnun) who falls hopelessly in love at first sight with a girl (Layla) at the local Koran school on the first day of class in what would have been like, the first grade. He never touches the girl (who loves him, too) or anything, but her bigshot dad eventually gets so ticked at Majnun mooning over his daughter that he puts her into seclusion -- for life. Majnun eventually grows up a bit, enough to wander off into the desert to live as a hermit -- also for life. Sounds like the end of the story, right? Not by a long shot. Get a good translation. If you like to be told a classic tale, you won't put it down.
I'm mentioning all this for a reason. Translating these things into a foreign culture, not to mention the culture's language, is no mean feat. And it should not be taken lightly. Another very famous classic of this same genre has not been able to bridge the cultural divide -- to its complete misunderstanding.
Next time -- Rumi, and the Divan-i-Shams.
09/02/07
This Divan is Not Furniture
The local poetry scene is buzzing with the news that an internationally known poet and translator is coming to town for Rumi's 800th birthday celebration next month. This American writer is best known for his translations of the 13th Century Persian mystic, all taken from a book called the "Divan-I Shams." Sounds like some kind of sofa with a frilly strip of fabric around the bottom, doesn't it? In Persian (sometimes called "Farsi" -- another misnomer, according to some sources), the title means The Work of Shams -- with the word "Shams" being an Arabic (I think) word for "light." The man in question was more fully known as "The Light of Tabriz" -- being a reference to his renown as a mystic from that city. The title refers to the profound effect knowing this man had on Rumi's life. The poetry as translated by Coleman Barks comes off as delicate and romantic, almost erotic in nature. It was madly popular in the 90s. And that's part of the problem.
Barks reportedly took the "word-for-word" Rumi translations made by a British colonel -- H. Wilberforce Clarke, who had converted to Islam in the 19th Century -- and "transcreated" them in a modern English idiom. Barks reportedly beheld a vision of Rumi that had the Moslem holy man offering his approval for the method. I won't argue with that, or with "transcreating," either -- as long as you know the language of the original, so you don't fall off course. Unfortunately, Barks reportedly (at the time, anyway) did not know any Persian. Uh-oh.
This has happened before. Back in the early 70s (I think), a charismatic Christian decided the King James translation of The Bible was too stilted and remote from modern English. So he just decided on his own to "rewrite" the King James Version -- without knowing any Greek or Hebrew. The book, known as The Living Bible, was a huge best-seller at the time. Unfortunately, this "translator" got a lot of stuff wrong, making incorrect guesses as to what the King James translators had intended, and he unintentionally put words and phrases in his version that were never in the Bible at all.
This is not as far-off a comparison as you might think, at least in terms of comparative religion. In much of the Persian-speaking world, Rumi's work is held as near-canonical Islam. While certainly no one (that I know of) considers Rumi's poetry a replacement for the Koran or the Hadith, many Persians esteem his work as an important medium for understanding the inner nature of Islamic sacred text. You have to be really careful in translating it, in other words.
What has happened since, to both Barks and the Living Bible guy, is that they teamed up later with knowedgeable linguists and scholars to revise or redo their "transcreations." I hope if Barks comes to our area as scheduled, he'll bring some important insights into this process. The upcoming conference should be well worth attending for that alone (and there's a lot more going on at this event, by the way. People I know are really looking forward to it.).
Rumi's "Divan-i Shams-i Tabriz" is held as a masterpiece -- poetically, ethically, spiritually. The intimate terms it contains are said to be metaphors, even allegories, for the spiritual states he and Shams experienced together (in what we might call "contemplative prayer.")
An online reference says (and I didn't know this beforehand) the Divan contains some 40-thousand "verses." While I don't know if that number refers to lines, quatrains, or whole poems -- even if it were 40-thousand words, it would be astonishing. FORTY THOUSAND! And it's only one of Rumi's many works!
Shams himself is said to have written excellent mystical verses -- but I know nothing about them. He comes off as kind of mysterious in sources I have consulted. Whatever the case may be, the point I'm trying to make is that we in the West know next to nothing about this mystical culture. I think we must not presume that we do. It is sacred, or at least near-sacred, to those who are knowledgeable about it.
The irony is that there are many poets in English who have written spiritually-rich material -- a body of work that has been largely (at least when I was in school) overlooked. Check out any edition of Emily Dickenson (I'll have more to say about her in an upcoming post) or George Herbert, or Auden's war sonnets, or Eliot's Four Quartets -- just for starters. If you read them with an open mind, I think you'll be astonished.
The bottom line? I don't think there is a conventional love story behind the relationship between Rumi and Shams. But there is a beautiful (and true) love story that involved a contemporary of Rumi's that you might want to know about.
More, next time.
09/03/07
The Power of Love
The year was 1202, in the Christian calendar. A highly controversial Muslim scholar was making the Hajj -- the trip to Mecca required of all believers (if possible) at least once in their lives. Traveling all the way from Damascus, this teacher of religious law was almost assassinated in Egypt by a type of fundamentalist of the day. This scholar was viewed by some authorities as a heretic, even dangerously so. But tradition allowed safety to pilgrims, so Muhiyuddin Ibn el-Arabi was OK once he approached the Holy City. One story says that, while circumnavigating the Ka'aba, el-Arabi spotted a beautiful teenage girl -- a Persian -- doing the same. She stopped his spiritual progress cold.
Her name was Nizam. She was said to be devout and well-versed in Islamic law -- unusual for a female, especially a teenager, of the era. She was traveling with a Persian community led by her father. If, as I suspect, she dressed much as traditional women in Iran do now, her face was unveiled. So, at least at some point, the middle-aged Ibn-el-Arabi could have seen her facial beauty. Another story (this one from Idries Shah's "The Sufis" -- my primary source for this post) says that el-Arabi was welcomed into this Persian community for the time of its stay.
El Arabi (in another source) apparently had no position at the time and probably little money. Said to possess a quiet dignity, he nonetheless taught his particular interpretation of Islamic law to ordinary citizens -- once reportedly having said the Day of Calamity (Judgment Day, basically) would surely be a whole lot closer when persons of eminence were interested in what he had to say.
But seeing Nizam in Mecca basically blew el-Arabi's mind. He began writing poems about her and his experience of loving her from afar, while in some kind of waking trance -- one in which he was basically "there, but not there." Shah reports el-Arabi confessing that he did not know what some of his poems even meant until years after writing them.
There is a translation on-line of one poem, in which he apparently watches Nizam and her family's caravan headed back home after the Hajj, saying how much he wants to scream curses at them for taking her away (my interpretation of this translation), but he just comes so unglued that he can't.
The poems are collected in a book called Tarjuman al Aswaq: "The Interpreter of Desires." Apparently the experience of loving young Nizam chastely became a kind of prism for el-Arabi to break down the light of his own soul and know himself better. British scholar R.A. Nicholson translated some of these poems back in 1911, and there have been more recent ones published as well.
The most famous lines (translated by Nicholson) are as follows:
My heart is capable of every form:
A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols,
A pasture for gazelles, the votary's Ka'aba,
The tables of the Torah, the Koran.
Love is the creed I hold: wherever turn
His camels, Love is still my creed and faith.
If el-Arabi wasn't in the soup with the religious authorities when he got to Mecca, he sure was by the time those words hit the street. The rest of these love odes shocked the entire Muslim world. It got so bad that el-Arabi was called back to Syria to face what Shah calls an inquisition. He defended himself so eloquently that the inquisitors let him go. He also wrote an extensive commentary to the Tarjuman that Shah says remains a Sufi classic.
The story doesn't end there: el-Arabi stayed in Mecca for three years (I presume the inquisition came after that), writing or dictating to a secretary a commentary on the Koran. I look forward to reading some of the translation someday. I say "some of it" for good reason. The Meccan Revelations is 37 volumes in length. Yes, that's volumes, not chapters. Volumes, as in "separate books."
So, we have a little book of red-hot love allegories, plus a super-long Koranic commentary (said to be highly nonlinear, even theosophical, in nature). That's the deal on el-Arabi, right? Nope. He kept writing books, so many the Arabic originals are said to fill several shelves in libraries. He died in Damascus about the time the young Rumi was probably getting going as a Shar'iah teacher in the mountains of Turkey. El-Arabi (you more commonly see "Ibn Arabi" these days, the "el" apparently being a glottalized resonant really hard for English speakers to pronounce). One of his courtesy titles is "Sheikh of Sheikhs" -- rendered "master of masters." He was from Spain, originally.
There is an entire English-language organization devoted to his teachings. You'll find the appropriate links in the Wikipedia. To this day, his work remains highly controversial among Muslims.
While we're looking for help in understanding this part of the world, we need to get the proper take on its seminal figures in history. Ironically, we're all attracted to the hardest ones for us to understand, like Rumi and el-Arabi. And, get this: Idries Shah claims Dante basically plagiarized el-Arabi's cosmology for his Divine Comedy. He also claims Carl Jung took the idea of the collective unconscious from el-Arabi's writings, but did not give him due credit. It doesn't stop there: a Sufi named Al-Ghazali wrote a book about a Conference of Birds many years before Chaucer did the same. And some say ol' Geoff's "Troilus and Criseyde" takes whole chunks from that other thing that got me started on this subject a few days ago: Nizami's "Layla and Majnun."
09/04/07
Mercurius Ah, um ... .
A few mistakes I've caught over the last three days of posts ...
The full title of the Clapton album is "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs." Duane Allman was invited to join the recording sessions after Clapton basically tracked him down at a concert. Derek and the Dominoes were already gigging in clubs by that time. Clapton got his rhythm section (Carl Radle and Jim Gordon) from Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishman (a live recording that is a classic). The keyboard man (Bobby Whitlock) came from Claptons' gigs with Delaney & Bonnie and Friends (another super live recording worth seeking out).
The album does not begin with "Bell Bottom Blues." The lead track is called "I Looked Away." The chords I was hearing in my head when I wrote that sentence a few days ago were the chords from D&D's version of Hendrix's "Little Wing." Hendrix himself died about two weeks after D&D recorded it. (The original is found Hendrix's best studio album: "Axis: Bold as Love.")
The Sufi who wrote the narrative poem known as "Conference of the Birds" was named Fariduddin Attar, not Ghazali. El-Ghazali wrote many Sufi masterpieces, just not that one.
The last post also had a lot of "fonky" writing in it I may clear up one day. It was mostly written off the top of my head, but I did have Shah's "The Sufis" in my lap for reference. If I'd just thumbed back two chapters or so, I would have caught the above mistake before posting.
In a post last month, I wrote that "Phoebe Zeitgeist" was drawn by Wally Wood. It was actually drawn by Frank Springer. The writer was Michael O'Donoghue. I'm sure interested parties have already trained their Googly eyes on screenshots of the strip at flickr. I have.
Also, let me drop a few more names ...
If you're interested in finding a more or less authoritative Rumi translator, you might want to look up Kabir Helminski. He's actually a leader of the Mevlevi Sufis in Turkey. The Mevlevis are the famous "whirling dervishes" -- the group Rumi founded. Helminski also has edited a collection of Rumi verse published by Shambhala. Some Coleman Barks translations are in it. I see it at the mega bookstores all the time.
Ibn 'Arabi was far from the first Sufi to write extensive theosophical works. One of his 11th Century forebears was Ibn Sina -- known as Avicenna in the west. Avicenna was a writer on a huge variety of subjects, and he (I think) influenced Aquinas.
It's probably worth reminding readers again of a caveat made earlier: This is a personal journal written by a guy with a bachelor's degree in English lit, and that's all. It presupposes no more than that. Nothing in this journal should be taken seriously or literally by anybody. It is for entertainment purposes only. Any "serious" writing in it is done to stimulate thinking and exchange, and to get off whatever chip mercurius_21 has on his shoulder at the time. The user info contains the theme of the journal. Writing in italics is my direct communication to you. Writing in regular font is from my persona, at least for the purposes of this journal. Mercurius_21 usually writes directly into the livejournal rich text editor, reads it over once or twice and then posts it. Corrections, apologies, explanations, emendations and the like usually come later.
09/06/07
My Dream Machine
It's black. I like black.
It has a screen you can pick up with one hand easily (like Shuttle's) -- and it goes from portrait to landscape mode like an iPhone. The screen is like that SONY electronic book reader, but better. No flicker rate, no refresh, no blinky-blink at all. Text on the display looks exactly like it does on a piece of paper. Paintings look like an archival quality photo of the canvas. Photos look like they do in a gallery, except without the glare.
It comes with a little box that looks like one of those mini-itx computers: it's about the size of a mass-market paperback, but it's a little wider, for a CD or DVD (data -- you'll see why in a minute) slot.
The keyboard is nice and full-featured. Typing on it is like tapping a touch screen. It might even be a touch screen. No mouse -- I prefer a trackball (easier on the wrist.). Classy look, but practical. Pressing down on the ball changes its responsive capability. Squeezing the side of the base a certain way resets the tracking action to "glassy." It never slows the more you use it, like trackballs I've used (and quit). Both are wireless. And both are computers.
The screen is a computer, too. They're all networked. The mini-itx thing is the server. You can use it as the home-system server, or as a hub in a larger one, or as a virtualizer, or database host, or whatever else servers do now. You'd just have one of your own. That you could turn off and stick in your coat pocket.
You'd type in a simple code and your machine would access everything you need. The security would be the machine's responsibility, not yours. You'd just know how to use your machine responsibly and safely, like driving a car (all my readers are safe drivers, naturally!)
There would be one basic program on your computer -- hypertext. Think about it: no internet as we know it, no browsers, no search engines, no fiddling around hoping you find something. All that (and much more) is already in the hypertext spec. Your operating system would be like the inside of your TV -- no user-serviceable parts. A book or article? Let hypertext find it. A painting or photo? Switch to hypermedia mode, and then do the same.
What, no movies? No music? Those are add-ons. The players could be the same size as your server, even stackable on it. You could disconnect them (with a command -- everything's wireless), stick one in your coat pocket or a pouch with a miniature display, and watch a movie on the bus. Slide it into a bay in your car's dashboard and listen to recorded music or broadcast programming. Phone call? Pull out the itty-bitty earbud thingy or talk to the dashboard, and you're communicating. GPS? You've got it already. Use it with your widescreen TV? No problem.
Hey, iPods, Zunes, TiVOs -- we're almost there now, right?
Wrong! Take hypertext. We don't use it. It was invented in the 1960s, and we still don't use it. What's "http" ...? Hypertext Transfer Protocol. But we use it to transfer marked-up rich text, not hypertext. Rich text is what I'm using now: plain text that's networkable, with some extra word-processing features -- in other words, when it was invented it was considered (I suppose) feature-"rich." There are efforts now to upgrade that standard, but they don't involve anything significant like hypertext -- at least how hypertext has been described to me.
Hypertext would BE the graphic user interface. Your OS would be like the BIOS now on your computer's main chip. Embedded. Maybe you'd access a few settings now and then, after consulting a manual. But not something you'd mess with ordinarily. Software would be something you'd add yourself -- I don't want to put the software companies out of business. I just don't want them hosting my computer, and limiting me as to what I can and can't do with it. That's what laws are for. (And I don't mean liberty-limiting or freedom-denying laws. I mean, like driving on the right side of the road, knowing what a stop sign is for, etc.)
I can hear the screaming from Redmond and Cupertino already. Hey, Bill and Steve -- don't get mad at me! We're all about the same age, and I do like your stuff! I just want my home computer to be what I want -- a convenient and compact electronic library for my home. It would have my stuff in it (like a filing cabinet or a bookshelf), and it would "go to the (public) library" for me. The machine could still do spreadsheets and word processing and graphic design, and it would let me play music or movies or 3-D games on it. Software companies could make a lot of money selling me stuff to put on my computer that would extend its capabilities in responsible directions I choose. They could sell me the media players or gameboxes, even the hardware with their OS built in as "firmware." But it would do what (within the "driving-on-the-right-hand-side-of-the-road" law) I want.
What I've got now is a fixed-screen spreadsheet reader with an expensive OS that has "accessories," solitare games but fewer features than the business version has. I have to buy or go to considerable time and trouble to download software just to get it to attempt to do what I need. The machine is heavy, clunky, and I have to buy furniture just for it -- wires hang everywhere to connect to "peripherals" that do only what the manufacturer of each peripheral device wants me to do with it. They're not real computer "dispositives" designed to do, within their design limits, what I need them to do.
I'm no disciple of Richard Stallman, whose vision I feel largely benefits academe. I'm no rabid fan of Linus Torvalds, whose work mainly represents the interests of computer engineers. Henry Ford gave my great-grandfather's generation a car they could, with hard work and vision, afford to buy. It was rugged and could take them places where they could not easily ride a horse-driven coach. And you could set the transmission (with an attachment) to churn butter! My grandfather learned to drive it as a teen, and he stayed out of the WWI trenches as a Marine by using that driving skill to steer generals around in a Jeep. I'm not some off-the-left-wall wacko! My family taught me their values as bedrock Republicans -- both sides! It's been nearly a hundred years since the A Model! Where's the Computer Age's A Model? Where?
But what I want takes software called "hypertext." And, as far as I know, no machine currently manufactured for the consumer can run it. Why?
09/08/07
The Belle of the Invisible
OK – late 70s, Great Performances on PBS. My b&w portable TV (a graduation gift) sitting on some second-hand furniture. I think that was the scene, anyway. Could have been early 70s, living room b&w (living color was downstairs – a split-level thing, readers). She was beautiful, sweet, nice, and had haunting eyes that drooped at just the right curve to elicit melancholic sympathy from the audience. I wish I could remember her name right now.
She had many powerful roles on stage, film and screen. She was the lead in “I Am a Camera” – the play before the movie before the musical that was by then called “Cabaret.” She did a lot of other stuff that was great. She didn’t have this “I am a stage actor doing this for money” air – rare back then. Just everything she did had this quiet edge to it. This was her biggest role: Emily Dickenson in “The Belle of Amherst.” She was magnificent in that play.
Which was completely wrong.
I don’t know who’s reading this, so just to keep it PG, I used the word “wrong.” I meant to write something else.
She had red hair. By some accounts, it was curly. After she was 24 (I think), she only wore white. She was not a recluse, not a hermit, not agoraphobic. She was the town’s unofficial florist. Everybody in town knew Emily had this incredible “green thumb.” Contemporary descriptions run to ecstasy over her floral exhibitions. She did stay close to home. Unmarried women of her era pretty much had to.
That the picture we all have of Emily Dickenson in our heads comes from that photo of her we all know – or maybe a drawing based on that picture from a book jacket. She was a teenager when it was taken. Like the one of Rimbaud taken in a later era, it is striking. As if there is some latent grandeur held closely inside that diminuitive body.
But, look closely at an archival quality repro of Emily’s photo. Her lips and eyebrows are very light-colored, but her hair – straight, pulled back – is the color of india ink. A form of heavy shoe polish called “bootblack” would have done the trick. I think she is wearing a dress from her mother’s – maybe even her grandmother’s – era.
You see, her father was a big-shot lawyer in town. Their house was the first brick home ever built in Amherst. And he was a strict Puritan: to them, red hair was a bad sign. But his brilliant daughter Emily’s scalp was abloom with it. Having your photograph made back then was expensive, a very big deal. You couldn’t very well put her in a maidenly dress with all that red hair sticking out, could you? What would the neighbors think when they come to call and see the devil’s daughter grinning back from inside a flowery dress right there above the mantel? Egad!
Years later, Emily wanted to marry a certain guy she’d known for years. He wasn’t good enough for Daddy Dickenson, though. And this guy’s health got worse when he found that out. Emily’s would-have-been beau died a year or two later, and that’s when Miss Em put on a white dress. The only color she would ever wear again.
She apparently confined herself afterward to the Amherst home and its grounds, growing flowers in the back yard (I guess) in season, and later, growing exotic plants in a “conservatory” – a kind of 19th Century hothouse the family had built for her to use as such.
She wrote thousands of poems – yes, thousands – all in draft form with little notes and alternate words to the side. She was a careful writer who broke all the rules of 19th Century poetics. Nobody wrote in common meter – “Harrumph! That’s for hymnals!” Nobody bent language or invented words (all usable linguistically) – “Humph! We only use the Queen’s English here!” And nobody, but nobody, wrote without punctuating anything. “Ho! What would the British say if they read this? We’d be a laughingstock!”
Even critics writing nearly a hundred years after Emily died thought of her as some spinster Grandma Moses who wrote verse as a hobby, like knitting sweaters. It was really good, they said, in spite of all the “primitive” irregularities.
They weren’t “primitive” – they were innovative. They weren’t a hobby – they were a serious endeavor intellectually. They weren’t an accident – they were spiritual meditations on ultimate questions. This tiny redhead in white nobody took seriously had the heart of a lion. And it roared, very quietly, in verse. The quiet was not from timidity; it was from control (as in “self-control”).
Even her sister, who had (with an editor friend) to collect her writings after Emily’s death and put them in a publishable form (for that era), called her sister a “scintillating spirit.” The introduction to that edition (available on gutenberg.org) also denies that Emily was a recluse.
All three editions Emily’s sister brought out do not contain all of her sister’s poems. They were originally stitch-bound in a certain order (Emily died of kidney failure and was unable to communicate toward the end of her time). That order has since been published as a scholar has reconstructed it. And the poems appear (according to at least one researcher) to imply some kind of story – a strange facet that scholars are still debating.
They did not understand this scintillating spirit. And we don’t, either. We just thought we did. She was not the “belle” of Amherst. She was its sage.
09/12/07
BASIC Magic
I liked getting them every week. They were interesting, and they were a window on a world I wanted to know more about.
They were flyers that came on, I think, a Thursday. By Friday, most of them were littering the parking lots and sidewalks around our elementary school. I usually took mine home, but sometimes they were at least left in the appropriate trashcan.
They featured a cover story, maybe on a news topic, plus little blurbs for ordering classic literature, usually edited for childrens’ or pre-teens’ reading ability. I ordered a few books, I think, but mostly I just checked out the blurbs to give me some indication of whether or not to get the book out of the library. Sometimes, I did. I remember reading Fahrenheit 451 that way.
They were called the Weekly Reader, and they were published by Scholastic Book Services. Sometime in the early 1980s I recall reading a news story that Scholastic was in serious financial trouble. Book publishing was going through a period of “consolidation,” and Scholastic was getting squeezed out of the business.
Now, it’s worth millions.
It was 1999, maybe 2000. I was covering state news, and I was always hunting for new story ideas. One day, I bought a book (don’t remember what it was) and got charged the Canadian price by mistake. So, at the earliest opportunity, I headed back to the out-of-town bookstore for a “price adjustment.”
While standing at the register there, I noticed something that struck me. The list of bestsellers (I don’t recall if it was the NYT or what) was dominated by a series of books, all with “Harry Potter and ...” in the title. I’d never heard of this series, and I asked the clerk.
She told me some of the books were actually paperback versions of the hardback, published (and this was really strange) while the hardback was still on the bestseller list! Instead of getting my money back for the other book, I pulled out a dollar or two from my pocket to (with the refund) pay for the paperback of the first book, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.”
I did not finish the book. I did not get the chance.
Someone I worked with saw me with the book as I was preparing my story. She insisted that I sell it to her on the spot, because her daughter just HAD to have one, and have it now! I finished my story, and, five dollars later, the book was hers.
I managed to read about 50 or so pages, plus skims of the rest. And something about this book struck me: its language.
It was written in BASIC English.
BASIC stands for British American Scientific Industrial Commercial {actually British American Scientific International Commercial}. It is an artificial version of English created by C.K. Odgen and I.A. Richards in the 1920s. I had (many years before that) read their book outlining the concepts behind BASIC. It allowed for proper nouns and new technical terms outside its “basic” vocabulary of 850 words. It also allowed for some British or American “idioms” in its very simple grammar, as well.
BASIC was championed by Winston Churchill as a viable “lingua franca” for world use, and Ogden was also involved in that effort. Beyond that, I’d all but forgotten BASIC. But here before me was a novel written in that language!
The author was no Jane Austen or George Eliot, that was clear. But the way this hitherto unknown “J.K. Rowling” built the narrative was based on the inner structure of BASIC! Each episode was built from smaller story elements very carefully, as if laying one brick on top of another.
While not masterful literature by any stretch, the Harry Potter book I (partially) read instead seemed to be masterful linguistics!
It’s no wonder those books broke records in sales and formed worldwide blockbuster movies. It was in their structure to begin with.
The American publisher who saw what these books could accomplish?
Scholastic.
9/13/07
More, basically ...
It's funny to learn how, on Wikipedia, that Joanne Rowling (which I bet is really pronounced ROE-ling) has taken heat from conservative Christians and liberal feminists alike for her work on Harry Potter and his friends. To me the magic is in the language, not the "spells." Also, the story is apparently set in upper-class England, and the female characters probably act in a manner that is appropriate to the setting of the story. (Mercurius_21 has not read any more Harry Potter, nor has he seen any of the films. He is not English, upper-class or otherwise.)
It might also be worth mentioning that I also read Orwell's "1984" as published (and edited, apparently) by Scholastic, as a teen. When I came across a description -- many years later -- of some of the book's more gruesome parts, I was startled. I would have remembered that -- had I read it. Then I recalled why some teachers didn't like Scholastic -- they said at the time that Scholastic's "editing" of classic literature sometimes went beyond mere trimming to fit the shorter attention spans of children. Some considered their "adaptations" to be a form of censorship. I don't know if that was true in the case of "1984", if I just blocked out that part, or got bored and skipped some important pages. I'm not in the business of promoting Scholastic. I wanted to discuss how an idea can sometimes take shape and grow in ways we don't always notice.
Stay tuned for future posts of Mercurius_21 and his travels (or -ails, as the case may be). He has always yearned to write travelogue.
9/19/07
A Comic Tale
Before I migrate into "It’s Nice to Go Trav’ling" mode, let me add an update on a post I made some months back.
The graphic series that served as a "pre-quel" to Stephen King’s "Dark Tower" novels has concluded. There may be a continuation of that story line next year, but for me, the initial seven-part series has satisfied my interest. It was excellent – dark and twisted as any movie made from one of King’s books, but hardly straying from its "morality-tale" center. The art had a cinematic style, but it was more given to portraiture than trying to look like a still-frame snapshot of the dialogue. Even the action sequences had this "Frederick Remington gone mad" look that really made the series a keeper.The storylines for "X-Men" and "New X-Men" have run their course – with the X-men story still in "neverending" mode, while the New X-Men story formed a complete arc with a few ends left dangling tantalizingly.
The best is last: Joss Whedon’s "Season 8" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are those (like me) whose second impressions of the first five issues were, like, "is this all?" I think the beginning of the Faith story arc lays those doubts to rest.
Guest writer Brian K. Vaughn has stepped up to make an excellent beginning on Faith’s story, with Joss remaining in the background as the "producer." It takes real character to allow a guest writer to do your own writing effort one better, and it can only mean that Joss is just getting warmed up. I really look forward to the future of this story, whoever writes it.
However, there have been some nitpicks about the artwork. Georges Jeanty is the series's Penciller Prime, and he is wisely avoiding the mistake of making either Buffy or Faith look too much like Sarah Michelle Gellar and Eliza Dushku. Those excellent actors have moved on from their BtVS roles, and they deserve flourishing careers elsewhere in the supercompetitive entertainment business. But the characters of Buffy and Faith are iconic, and, while Jeanty’s renderings do "borrow" some characteristics of Sarah Michelle and Eliza, he steers clear of trying to copy exactly their look from the TV series. (As for the third lead female, Aly Hannigan's Willow Rosenberg -- the most highly skilled actress on the show inhabited her character so fully Jeanty had no choice but to make Willow look the way Aly did on BtVS. I understand she's applying the same method to another character now.) This, to me, gives even more life to those two characters – preserving their mythic status while keeping them relevant to you and me.
Meanwhile, cover artist Jo Chen is getting the look of Sarah Michelle and Eliza (and Alyson too!) in her renderings. This is consistent with publisher Dark Horse’s earlier Buffy comic: the company published storylines independent of the TV series in comics with dual covers, one by the comic artist (or a guest cover artist) and another with a publicity photo from the TV series. A reader could pick one or the other; a dedicated collector could get both.
The current Jo Chen covers (with separate Jeanty "variant" covers in limited release) offer to take that concept one step further: Chen pays homage to the photo covers of Dark Horse’s previous Buffy effort (now being issued in trade paperback) but her paintings are consistent with (even making a wry comment on) the action inside. Jeanty avoids doing a cover "frame" of the story, and instead makes his own comment on the narrative with his variant covers. Brilliant, just brilliant.
I only hope the early success of this line does not cause its creative team to rest on its laurels. It’s "early days" as they say in the UK: the arc of Buffy’s final story is just beginning. Here's hoping they keep up the good work and even continue climbing, if possible.
To me, that’s what life’s all about: ever striving to be better while helping those around you. At this point, Season 8 is doing both. Kudos, guys -- but no laurels.
Not yet.
9/21/07
"'T'aint Nobody's Business But ..."
It's dark when we meet, on the other side of town. Away from the street lamps, we carefully take separate routes to our rendezvous.
It's in a downtown cafe, softly lit for "intimacy," near the corner of a well-worn street in the older part of town. Our eyes meet, we smile, and we think of the passion about to issue forth.
I bring my latest poems of love. She brings her baby and her husband. A bunch of other people are there waiting for us.
Say, wha'?
It's Open-Mic Night at the Gran Cru Cafe*! We join all our friends to share our scars and our stories in the language of verse. Our bag is a blend of many varieties, many experiences, many styles. We poets have our love of life, and we express our passion in words that make their own rules.What's odd about all this is, that's about the only place we ever meet, she and I and this group of language-lovers. Our backgrounds are frequently in opposition to each other in a town filled with paradox. The crosscurrents and ironies of life are met in sharing verse -- nothing else like it in the world. ("What is the color of a peace conference?" a crayon-wielding Linus asks his dumbstruck sister, Lucy.)
What's really odd is that we get along so well, she and I. On another day of the week, we attend church -- in the same town! The same denomination! We have a lot in common, right?
Wrong. I probably would not set foot in her church, unless I had a really good reason. Hell might well freeze over before she might set foot in mine.
Her church endorses (I think "endorse" is apropos -- I could be wrong) a form of sacrament mine adamantly opposes. A form of the sacrament of marriage. More precisely, just who can marry whom. Even more precisely, what gender of who can marry what gender of whom. With the public side of the private life of the person doing the marrying mixed in.
When I started this live journal, I made myself a promise I would not use it as an editorial soapbox. I could express my opinion, but I would not try to convince anyone else of it.
I'm going to stick to that tonight. You have the right to your stance on these matters, and I have mine. The reason I'm going on about this is that the titular head of our denomination (called a "communion") met this week with members of its American wing to discuss the issue one-on-one. I don't know what came out of it. I do know this: I do not want a split. Our denomination -- regardless of its many disagreements -- has a certain "take" on Christianity, one that I found friendly to me from the first minutes of attending my first service at one of its churches. I've since then found friends within the traditional form of that denomination, and it has made all the difference in my life since that first day.
It seems to this layman that the current disagreement falls over some fairly fine points of theology (based on variants in certain forms of Biblical exegesis) -- but our two sides hold firm in their viewpoints over that, because both sides feel the issue involved is very important. I agree that it is. I just hope something can be worked out that we can all live with.
I would hate for the argument to one day ruin my rendezvous.
*name changed to protect the atmosphere of my post
9/28/07
"And now for something completely different ... ."
As you can see, dear reader, I have changed a few things. New icons, and a more dramatic look. The title from the old look was a favorite cut from my favorite studio album of master Texas blues rocker Johnny Winter. The album title was "Still Alive and Well." The LP cover had a shot of Johnny brushing back his trademark albino white hair, while holding a custom-looking resonator guitar, probably a National Steel.
The whole thing about my "All Tore Down" phase is that I was undergoing a period of self-doubt (not the usual kind -- at least for me), but some serious loss of what the heck is going on. The phase recently reached a breaking point -- and, well, I'm still here. But I'm also a little different. So I thought some change would do me good on LJ, too. A new title, some icons from one of LJ's best cottage artisans, and maybe a different 'tude to the posts from now on. We'll see.
In the meantime ...
There are some things I'd like to clear up. The previous post may have seemed on the surface to have been about sex -- or maybe a particular kind of sex. It wasn't. It was about triggers. Triggers are those things that make us react automatically, in a reflex "knee-jerk" kind of way. They are good, sometimes. When you see a freight train coming straight for you, you got to move, buddy, or go splat. When you see a lovely woman (in my style of thinking, anyway) smile at you beguilingly, you feel a certain trigger effect. Right?However, triggers can trick you, sometimes. Our society is very complex technologically, but I'm not sure the human animal is getting more complex with it. I see trigger reactions all the time that seem, to me, to be uncalled for. People can use a few English words, and -- alakazam! -- get exactly the reaction they want from millions of people. Sometimes, you're hearing straight talk. But shock effect, slant, meaning distortion, context destruction, and so forth, also can be used to powerful effect nowadays.
Advertisers depend on those triggers to get you to buy the product or service they're selling to you. Politicians do the same. And lots of other people depend on these little verbal triggers to set you and me on a course of action they choose.
But is it one we choose? That's my point. Read the last post again, just the first little bit before the LJ cut (that's the "Read more" thing): you see how I'm triggering you in the first part, leading you to believe I'm heading to a romantic tryst. But go to the cut, and you can see I was talking instead about something else!
Yeah, there were other things in there, too. Regular readers of my LJ know this already: I like to do the multi-level thing when I post. But in case you're new: it's what this journal is all about. No code speech here -- just some good, old-fashioned nonlinear thinking, typed directly (most of the time) into LJ's Rich text editor. WYSIWYG -- as long as you're looking occasionally outside the magic box of literalness.
Sometimes, I even surprise myself. In fact, I often do.
BTW -- I've gone back and edited some previous "All Tore Down" posts for clarity. If one or more struck you the first time around, you might want to eyeball it again, just in case I've really changed stuff. In some cases, I have edited a few details.
9/29/07
... better known as Bill the Cat!
Nothing likes the shock of the new, except the new itself. When you travel about in spacetimedimensionworld (reality, to the humdrum), it's best I think to realize this head on. There are lots of children who have no childhood -- much worse is to grow up and never realize what happened (or didn't).
The cure for childhoodlessnessosis? Better get yourself some futureshock right away, swallow it down (it stings a little, like bad sherry), and get it flowing in your system. One reality *urrp!* and you're ready to go!
Gentlemen, swing your walking stick merrily down Magical Mystery Lane! Ladies, spin your invisible parasol as you waltz up the Golden Road of Realized Reality! (You can switch that around, if you're so inclined.) It doesn't matter, really. As long as you're ready for the Shock of the New, you're still goin' strong!
There are no half measures in The Zero-Sum Game. You have to take it whole. It's now -- or never.
10/3/07
Sketchy
... and there was majik in the air, majik all around, and more majik below us. Ah, the good old days we're going to have ...
...love.
... with that olde black majik called ...
10/8/07
Another Strange One
Methinks it's almost as good as "mirrormask" ... .
Question: How good is New X-men 42?
Hope that clears up any confusion about what I was going for in the last post. (Maybe a capital "M" would have helped -- y'thinks?)
10/12/07
It also would have helped to spell "Majik" right ...
Such nonsense about a comic-book character with lots of blond hair, little bitty horns on her head and goat legs! (And black lipstick, too!) But I digress ... .
It just occurred to me today that the most monstrous evils in this world are committed one person at a time -- at least at first. What also occurred to me is that acts of grace are committed exactly the same way -- at first. The point (I guess) being that certain types of acts can build in their effects, become cumulative.Like the parable of the mustard seed: one mustard seed (actually, one grain of one mustard seed) with enough "faith" to start growing on a desert mountainside can eventually, through billions of generations of mustard seeds, change the erosion pattern of that mountain and, thus, "move" it. Of course, it would take someone with a very long-range imagination to see that ... .
Is faith, then, a catalyst for grace? It would seem so. Could "cockeyed optimists" (read: "the meek") one day inherit the earth?
Meanwhile, "Peanuts" is so cool to read in daily sequence. (Fantagraphics)
10/23/07
No, wait ... no, don't ... no, do ... no -- oh
It's all in the timing, wouldn't you say?
If time worked backwards, why would it ever want to go forwards? Forward motion is not where it's at, at all! If it was, we would not spend half our time wishing for some halcyon past and the other half fearing some future apocalypse. (Actually, I like Jack Kirby's spelling: "Apokalips." Sort like somebody named Apoka had really nice lips. Maybe she did.)
You see, time is what we have as a gift, but it works backward -- because our world is upside down from the real world. So we move in opposite synchrony from the other end of the infinite ellipse (Elli's lips? OK, n-e-v-e-r m-i-n-d ... .) That's right, our world is fake -- a backwards and upside down imitation of the real one. So to move forward in time, we're actually moving backward (with respect to the real world), and to move backward (only in daydreams) we must move forward (in the same respect to reality).
This is so: when we move back in time in daydreams, we must extrapolate a fake future and impose it on the past to make it seem like a lost paradise. It never really happened (of course not -- nothing we do or remember ever does), so we impose in our minds an unreal set of assumptions about how good it was way back then compared to now (Now is a fraud, of course. Stay with me here. Or leave.). And we do the same for the future ("It's just going to be horrible!").
Sometimes reality rips into Fraudworld: chaos invades and (of course) looks like streamlined organization, disasters actually happen (instead of nonactuallynothappening) and are made much worse by our incompetence (which would be competence if our spacetimedimensionworld actually worked in true forwardfuturepastnonreversemotiontimespace). This can be seen from the doublereverse negations I just used -- those offer the potential for reality intrusion.
That's why we must follow our hearts but watch our steps. You never know for sure which direction you're moving in.
10/30/07
Ashes By Now
The things we lose in the fire don't matter. The things we bring to the fire do. The fire consumes things for a reason: they are there to be consumed. If we value them overly, and we grieve their losing, then we fool ourselves to the fact of fire. We are children of fire, we need fire to live, we are fire inside.
It is fully the opposite when we lose each other to the fire. We have every right to grieve then. When the fire overtakes us, we have nowhere to go.
The fire consumes with, or without, us. That is why we honor it: in fascination, it is our enemy; in community, it is our friend. And it remains, with or without us. And it remains in us, like it or not, for our time.
Our inheritance, we can only pass it on.
Carefully.
"Just like a wildfire, you're runnin' all over town!
As much as you burn me, baby, I should be ... ." *
*lyrics copyright Rodney Crowell
10/31/07
Happy Halloween!
As the witching hour approaches ...
It's the one-year anniversary of my first (meaningful) post in this live journal. (I had posted a couple of nothing entries earlier that week.) I've taken most older entries from the archives, but I do remember having made some comments that night that led to me making other comments in the days and weeks that followed. If you've been reading along (and I have no idea if you have), you know this particular lj has gone through several phases over the last 12 months. It's been a remarkable journey. I wouldn't trade it for anything. No, not even for a job that would have kept me living where I enjoy living.I have come to a crossroads, and I'm not sure yet what it means for this lj. I hope I can continue it. Even if I can't, nothing can change what it's meant to me to talk out loud into this Rich text editor ever so often. I hope you have enjoyed this year's worth of entries as much as I have enjoyed writing them.
There may be more
.
... may the sacred dead rest in peace.