"It's funny because it's racist."

This seemed appropriate since I have been trapped at one of our satellite offices all week with limited computer access. So even less posting then normal for a while probably. I am working on a post about summer reading. And by working on I mean I just thought of the idea about five minutes ago. I have a list of what I want to read though. In my head. The new Rushdie book, The Enchantress of Florence sounds perfect for a summer read. Excerpt here. Rave review here.

I am enjoying this new book about John Quincy Adams currently focusing on his role as a congressman after his presidency, his role fighting slavery in the House of Representatives and the defense of the Amistad escaped slaves. Adams was as excellent a statesman as his father but more neglected by history. In part due to an ineffective term in the White House caused mostly by being saddled with an opposition controlled Congress and Adams' stubborn refusal to remove various Jackson sycophants from his own Cabinet.

This book shows our sixth President enjoying more success in getting another chance at establishing his proper legacy. Another cool thing is that most of diaries are available on the web at the Massachusetts Historical Society. It is a little bit of work to decipher his handwriting but it is fascinating stuff. (OK, maybe that's a bit strong. I did read a few pages and they are okay but fact that they exist online I think is cool). Enjoy the weekend.

"In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire"

Normandy (picture is from a woman named Rachel. I found it on her blog via google)

[An address delivered for Memorial Day, May 30, 1884, at Keene, NH, before John Sedgwick Post No. 4, Grand Army of the Republic.]

Not long ago I heard a young man ask why people still kept up Memorial Day, and it set me thinking of the answer. Not the answer that you and I should give to each other-not the expression of those feelings that, so long as you live, will make this day sacred to memories of love and grief and heroic youth--but an answer which should command the assent of those who do not share our memories, and in which we of the North and our brethren of the South could join in perfect accord.

So far as this last is concerned, to be sure, there is no trouble. The soldiers who were doing their best to kill one another felt less of personal hostility, I am very certain, than some who were not imperilled by their mutual endeavors. I have heard more than one of those who had been gallant and distinguished officers on the Confederate side say that they had had no such feeling. I know that I and those whom I knew best had not. We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win; we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable; we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief. The experience of battle soon taught its lesson even to those who came into the field more bitterly disposed. You could not stand up day after day in those indecisive contests where overwhelming victory was impossible because neither side would run as they ought when beaten, without getting at least something of the same brotherhood for the enemy that the north pole of a magnet has for the south--each working in an opposite sense to the other, but each unable to get along without the other. As it was then , it is now. The soldiers of the war need no explanations; they can join in commemorating a soldier's death with feelings not different in kind, whether he fell toward them or by their side.

But Memorial Day may and ought to have a meaning also for those who do not share our memories. When men have instinctively agreed to celebrate an anniversary, it will be found that there is some thought of feeling behind it which is too large to be dependent upon associations alone. The Fourth of July, for instance, has still its serious aspect, although we no longer should think of rejoicing like children that we have escaped from an outgrown control, although we have achieved not only our national but our moral independence and know it far too profoundly to make a talk about it, and although an Englishman can join in the celebration without a scruple. For, stripped of the temporary associations which gives rise to it, it is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Full speech is here. There is another one here too.

from Wiki:

During his senior year of college, at the outset of the American Civil War, Holmes enlisted in the fourth battalion, Massachusetts militia, and then received a commission as first lieutenant in the Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He saw much action, from the Peninsula Campaign to the Wilderness, suffering wounds at the Battle of Ball's Bluff, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. He is also said to have shouted at Lincoln during the Battle of Fort Stevens, saying "Get down, you fool!" when Lincoln stood, making him a susceptible target.[1] He was mustered out in 1864 as a brevet Lieutenant Colonel after his three-year enlistment ended. Holmes emerged from the war convinced that government and laws were founded on violence, a belief that he later developed into a positivist view of law and a rejection of romanticism and natural rights theory. After his death two uniforms were discovered in his closet with a note attached to them reading, "These uniforms were worn by me in the Civil War and the stains upon them are my blood."

Le Chat Gris

Iggy (aka Figge, as in he's as big as a museum)

In the interest of equal representation and so as not to play favorites I present Ig. His brother may actually be inside the Prairie Lights bag. They like bags.

On a movie kick lately, the other night I watched "The Darjeeling Limited" and enjoyed it more than was expected. I like Wes Anderson films even if Owen Wilson plays the same character in every movie he has ever done. The DVD also has the short prequel film, "Hotel Chevalier", a must see as as it introduces a full version of the song "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)" by Peter Sarstedt. The film soundtrack is excellent as usual with Wes Anderson, a lot of Kinks and the scores from several classic Indian films. Check out the clip that someone obviously put some effort into.

"Clever as cold coffee and whisky..."

(Hopper in the window)

Dialing While Intoxicated

Even this late I'm clever as cold coffee
and whisky. Scavenged that desperate pouch
of black shag I should've chucked ages ago,
ashes over-spilling the bread plate, butts
floating in backwash. Cup rings roam
the tabletop, the phone pad, half-stamp
my game of solo hangman. All of the E's
in "every ounce of everclear" busted
my bank long before tonight. But I dial on,
the kite and key of electric currency,
that flash of red, first frost in the maple trees:

in Amsterdam, look who's coming down the canal,
bicycle tires turning, up over the flock of bridges,
hump-backs bent and feeding, and round the crocus
and hemlock circle at Weteringschans. Who knows
which ex- is on the line? Then pub doors open
down Dorset Street, lights go off over Liffey murk,
the kitchen receiver sounds its dull double-bleat.
My sister, single now, searches for the phone.
And in Dunedin, the next day's already broken,
wobbled its way up summer twilight on sea legs,
half a year ahead. I could lick and tuck
one last roll-up, even call there collect.

John Hennessy


The poem is from the Poetry Daily archive due to be retired this week. Seemed like a good combination for a Monday. A pleasant weekend overall.

Last night I saw the surprise Oscar darling "Once". It was sublime and worth the hype. Check out his band The Frames doing the Pixies "Where is My Mind"....and this version of "Gigantic" with a kid's choir. He and his co-star of the film where on Jimmy Kimmel doing "Caribou" but I couldn't find it.

Nina!

This is Nina Simon''s “See-Line Woman” remixed. It was highlighted by one of the DJ's on KEXP's blog with a review of the album it came from, Verve Remixed, Volume 1.

Rauschenberg Dies at 82

Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing 1953

This would be my favorite concept of his. More from the Tate here.

UPDATE: More at Mark Hardin's Artchive in the Pop art section. Also there are some online linkls from Artcylopedia.

Mondays...

Image is from FFFFound. Today is too nice to be indoors. Push the button.

"Push It" - The Rosebuds (SaltnPepa cover)

(Flowers from side of the house.)

Summer Job

"The trouble with intellectuals," Manny, my boss,
once told me, "is that they don't know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,"
he said, "he gets to middle age—and by the way,
he gets there late; he's trying to be a boy until
he's forty, forty-five, and then you give him five
more years until that craziness peters out, and now
he's almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains
to himself that life is made of time, that time
is what it's all about. Aha! he says. And then
he either blows his brains out, gets religion,
or settles down to some major-league depression.
Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights
torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one."

from American Life in Poetry

"Though at the time it may not occur to us to call it "mentoring," there's likely to be a good deal of that sort of thing going on, wanted or unwanted, whenever a young person works for someone older. Richard Hoffman of Massachusetts does a good job of portraying one of those teaching moments in this poem."

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I thought I would finish up National Poetry Month as belatedly as I started to post about it. Kooser's column is another great source of poetry via E-mail. This seemed uncannily prescient.

Stupid University Job

Your loveliest of sway-backs;
of mine I was once ashamed,
and my uni-brow and crooked teeth,
and red hair my mother never let me wash
all winter,
afraid I'd catch a draft.
She wouldn't let me bathe, either,
which made gym class a horror.
I thought I had it bad
until I met that handsome Scottish man
whose parents tried to make him spontaneously combust
by feeding him haggis laced with gunpowder
and making him sleep in the stove.
Instead of an ear, he had a shiny, snail-shaped ridge.
I guess we all have our tragic flaw.
Mine is like that of the naked man
who holds up a sign that says "I'm naked"
and runs screaming through the park.
My handlers say I'm difficult,
but don't you believe it.
My soul still radiates a luminous intensity
despite this stupid university job.

by Sharon Mesmer
From The Virgin Formica

This comes about as close to describing my job as I can find in verse. Although it does beat the one I had after college where I was paid to watch people weld and make sure they didn't start any fires. At least I was mostly outdoors for that one. (The tiger picture is from the image blog FFFOUND!)

"I must down to the seas again..."

My sister has uploaded a few videos of my niece and nephew with my brother-in-law on the local beach near their house in Connecticut. I would have overdubbed it with some Pixies as a soundtrack but it is cute to hear them too. It makes me cringe to think of the hundreds of hours of film my Dad shot of our family and how easy it would be to torture all of us if he digitized them and uploaded them. My last apartment in CT was a leisurely ten minute stroll from the beach in the video. Good times.


I have been enjoying the PBS series "Carrier". The biggest achievement may be that the producers were allowed access by the Navy to film it in the first place. It's a little uneven so far still but very impressive especially with some of the high-definition shots.

David Sedaris has a piece in the New Yorker about smoking/not smoking.

Self Portrait

Self Portrait

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

Edward Hirsch
Special Orders



This from a daily E-Mail put out by Knopf Poetry from Random House. You can sign up for it at their website and peruse the archive of previous selections. Mr. Hirsch will be reading from his latest collection tonight in Iowa City at Prairie Lights Bookstore. Below is a clip for the author reading the poem. The Van Gogh self-portrait is from Wikipedia.

Self Portrait- Edward Hirsch

UPDATE: NPR has an interview with Hirsch.

Kathleen Edwards - A Video Primer

"Juice Newton!?! Holy Shit, she's gorgeous."
Interview and some song snippets. Saw her recently on Austin City Limits show on PBS and was hooked. Darker humourous lyrics in her earlier songs. Below is a song off her latest record.

Kathleen Edwards-"The Cheapest Key"

"Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?"

Come, let me write. And to what end? To ease
A burth’ned heart. How can words ease, which are
The glasses of thy daily vexing care?
Oft cruel fights well pictured forth do please.
Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?
Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.
But will not wise men think thy words fond ware?
Then be they close, and so none shall displease.
What idler thing then speak and not be hard?
What harder thing then smart and not to speak?
Peace, foolish wit! with wit my wit is marr’d.
Thus write I, while I doubt to write, and wreak
My harms on ink’s poor loss. Perhaps some find
Stellas great pow’rs, that so confuse my mind.


Sonnet 34 of "Astrophel and Stella"
by Philip Sidney (1554-1586)


To continue with my not-so-daily posting of poetry, this was taken from an E-mail sent each day by Poetry Daily during April celebrating National Poetry Month. A contemporary poet selects a poem and then waxes forth on why.

Margret Rabb chose the poem above and says this, "As a quick review of all the reasons not to write, I find sonnet 34 of Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella sequence nearly ideal. When Astrophel, the star lover, sets out to write – presumably of his love for Stella yet again – he begins instead to interrogate himself about the capacity of language to hold and convey his emotions – in effect, to question the whole enterprise. Ironically, as the doubts themselves are written and answered they become evidence of the power of words to create complex and double emotional states. Like love, then, language is shown to be mysteriously organic, its meaning not subject to strict control and lying outside the boundaries of one-to-one correspondences. This disease is published indeed."


She goes on. To get a poem complete with its' own exegesis in your email for the rest of April go here. There is also a daily prose feature.

"C'mon Everybody"

It's not poetry but it's fun. I found this on a music blog and then could not find my way back. I should always remember to leave a bread crumb trail while surfing the web.

"April is the cruelest month..."

Nostalgia

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of
stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

--Billy Collins

I think I first heard the lines for the title of this post from the T.S. Eliot poem either from one of my Korean teachers while in the Army, or from a book passed on by my more literary brothers (and sisters) in arms, or I ran across it in a Peter DeVries novel. All of these are possibilities I am just not sure which occurred first.

I know for certain that I was not exposed to Eliot in high school. In fact for most of my life I had managed to avoid modern and contemporary poetry and it was only in my thirties that I began to fill that void. There is much to be wary of, especially in this town, but I won't mention any names. I wanted to start doing this a week ago but as the man says "...time enough and the world...". I chose Billy Collins because he is one of my favorites and I wanted to share audio of this poem to make a case for the importance of hearing poetry, whether it is by listening to or reading it aloud. It is also cool to hear the poem in the author's voice. I will continue to share poems and links to the best of my ability for the remainder of the month.

"Nostalgia" - Billy Collins

Another lame effort to keep my blog updated

Tron
by freres-hueon

The Tron video came from a link on Wired. Things are little slow today. So I took a trip back to '80s.

Muxtape

More ways to waste time at work online are probably not needed but this is a cool site along the lines of Imeem. It is been much discussed on the music blogs. Even New Yorker columnists are doing it.

Largehearted Boy pointed out this (snarky) favorite.

Rock Art

So I was following my Google Reader divining rod around the web and came across a collection of music blogs at the L.A Times, Soundboard. One of the posts was about rock show poster art booths at SXSW aka Flatstock. This post linked to the American Poster Institute where I found the above Calexico poster. It reminded me of all the great posters that were done for the Fillmore in San Francisco for the Bill Graham shows and some of the great ones still being done such as the ones for the Drive-By Truckers. Below is Calexico covering Alejandro Escovedo from the album Por Vida. Alejandro will be here in Iowa City next week.

"Wave" - Calexico (Alejandro Escovedo cover)

Raconteurs

I first saw this on I Am Fuel music blog. Unlike Joe Biden I (almost) always cite my sources. The second album of Jack White's side project is on sale today.

Domo Arigato Manny-san!

"Manny being Manny" is already in mid-season RBI form. A clutch Manny Ramirez hit in extra innings with two men on gives the Red Sox a 6-5 win on Opening Day in Tokyo. Papelbon had a shaky save giving up a run in the bottom of the 10th but then shut the A's down with 2 men on. I did not get up at 5am to watch this game. I did get up in time to see them from 4th inning until the 9th but had to go to work. I was following the game on my computer until I was called away for a meeting. I only found out they won a few minutes prior to posting this.