The Best American Poetry

Queens or Bust [by Andrei Codrescu]

  If you are moving to New York to do your obligatory two years of poetic apprenticeship among the sophisticated, critical, merciless, and horribly smart (or not) natives, be sure that you move to Queens. You heard me right. Not to Manhattan or G-d forbid to gluten-free Brooklyn, but to Queens.

The first thing about it, it's a lot cheaper.

The second, it's full of working New Yorkers of the sort that lace their boots tight, talk with an attitude, and go to Manhattan only if an exiled relative from Cincinnati comes back before dying.

The third thing is that they speak 167 languages in Jackson Heights alone, which is just one part of Queens.

The fourth thing is that the Unisphere from the World Fair that every American has tattooed at birth in the deepest part of the brain, is in Queens, too.

The fifth is that all your friends in Manhattan and Brooklyn have a hard time keeping a smirk off their mug when you tell them you live in Queens.

The sixth thing is the restaurants that deliver 24 hours any variety of non-American or American food your cholesterol-hungry heart might yearn for. The seventh is that. the best comedians are from Queens, like Don Rickles, as are other great Americans, like Cyndi Lauper, Nicki Menaj, and 50 cent. In passing, I'll say that the Queens zoo has a hell of a puma that looks you straight in the eyes until you feel lucky there are some bars between you.

I ended up in Queens because the Romanian Great Writers' League of Queens (as opposed to the Romanian Minor Writers' League of Queens) found me a studio in a lovely apartment building reminiscent of the best Soviet architecture, which costs me less than a parking place in Manhattan. I have a view of a fire-escape and a synagogue, which is all a writer needs: a means to escape from a fire into the arms of an unforgiving G-d. My friends from the Romanian Great Writes' League in Queens know everything about New York, all four boroughs, and can barely conceal their feeling of superiority, for at least one reason: no tourists. Manhattan is all tourists and Brooklyn is all slumming rich kids who want to be famous.

Nobody in Queens wants to be interrupted by gawkers while writing novels and poetry. Regular Quuenzites don't want to be famous at all: it might attract the IRS. So take it from one who's been everywhere, the breadth and length of US and other places where they speak pigeon English: do your time in Queens, young poet. And don't ever show your MFA in public. "Keep old hat in secret closet," as Ted Berrigan said, and you'll go back to flyover America with superpowers. 

[Editor's note: We thought this provocative and engaging article would best be illustrated by a couple of Queens, Elizabeth and Venus. -- DL] 
From the archive; first posted February 6, 2018

The first thing about it, it's a lot cheaper.

The second, it's full of working New Yorkers of the sort that lace their boots tight, talk with an attitude, and go to Manhattan only if an exiled relative from Cincinnati comes back before dying.

The third thing is that they speak 167 languages in Jackson Heights alone, which is just one part of Queens.

The fourth thing is that the Unisphere from the World Fair that every American has tattooed at birth in the deepest part of the brain, is in Queens, too.

The fifth is that all your friends in Manhattan and Brooklyn have a hard time keeping a smirk off their mug when you tell them you live in Queens.

The sixth thing is the restaurants that deliver 24 hours any variety of non-American or American food your cholesterol-hungry heart might yearn for. The seventh is that. the best comedians are from Queens, like Don Rickles, as are other great Americans, like Cyndi Lauper, Nicki Menaj, and 50 cent. In passing, I'll say that the Queens zoo has a hell of a puma that looks you straight in the eyes until you feel lucky there are some bars between you.

I ended up in Queens because the Romanian Great Writers' League of Queens (as opposed to the Romanian Minor Writers' League of Queens) found me a studio in a lovely apartment building reminiscent of the best Soviet architecture, which costs me less than a parking place in Manhattan. I have a view of a fire-escape and a synagogue, which is all a writer needs: a means to escape from a fire into the arms of an unforgiving G-d. My friends from the Romanian Great Writes' League in Queens know everything about New York, all four boroughs, and can barely conceal their feeling of superiority, for at least one reason: no tourists. Manhattan is all tourists and Brooklyn is all slumming rich kids who want to be famous.

Nobody in Queens wants to be interrupted by gawkers while writing novels and poetry. Regular Quuenzites don't want to be famous at all: it might attract the IRS. So take it from one who's been everywhere, the breadth and length of US and other places where they speak pigeon English: do your time in Queens, young poet. And don't ever show your MFA in public. "Keep old hat in secret closet," as Ted Berrigan said, and you'll go back to flyover America with superpowers. 

[Editor's note: We thought this provocative and engaging article would best be illustrated by a couple of Queens, Elizabeth and Venus. -- DL] 
From the archive; first posted February 6, 2018

Bianca Stone: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Daniel Schechner

_______________________________________________________

Set Designer

 

Once, Mark Leidner talked me into doing set design,

unpaid, in the Poconos

where I would be forever traumatized

by the overpopulation of deer,

growths on their bodies and bald patches,

limping and scarred from being hit by cars,

and the one the crew called “jawbone”

that kept coming around

because its jawbone was hanging off, unusable, from its head

while the body wasted away

and I brought out mashed potatoes

that it lapped up with a long tongue.

 

We had to fire the creepy sound guy

who was clearly on drugs

and I found a big plastic gallon of Dewar’s                                    

in the Airbnb cupboard

and a guitar

and got drunk alone on the deck of the cabin

amazed no one would join me.

I woke in the middle of the night

for my usual routine of self-hatred

until I realized how excruciating it all was

and instead wrote down on the set schedule

“remember how good it feels to be good to yourself”

carrying it around with me ever since.

Hoping I will.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else's Wedding Vows (Tin House Book / Octopus Books, 2014), The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation. She hosts Ode & Psyche Podcast, and lives in Vermont.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

                                    Detail from the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries (medieval French; now hanging in the V&A, London)

 

from "Julius Jaffe: The Poems" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Mystery
Julius Jaffe said, "Some may ask how God revealed

"The whole future of the world to Adam even before

"The world was created. Some may ask how Adam

"Witnessed this revelation even before the creation

"Of Adam himself." He went on, "Oy! Even to inquire
"Regarding the highest emanations of the sefirot
"Causes a judgment to be rendered upon us!"

Money

Shinderman said, "Oy, I had

"A big year but I had to give

"Most of it back in taxes."

Julius Jaffe said, "In this world

"Good fortune always comes

"With a price, baruch hashem!"

"Money is the easiest payment

"But if a fool wishes to pay differently,

"His wish will be granted. Oy vey!"

Marriage

Herman Fishman asked, "Esther Tabachnik,

Whom you will marry, is she your soulmate?"
Julius Jaffe said, "No, I have not that merit.
"Our sages teach that finding one's soulmate
"Is a miracle greater than parting the Red Sea."

 

"But an unmarried man can't make progress
"Toward his tikkun, the rectification of his soul."
He went on, "In fact, the more incompatible
"A man and his wife are, the greater is the
"Opportunity for spiritual work. Oy vey!"

Great Books and the Abyss [by David Lehman]

When education and consumerism merge, students get what they want, and one thing they appartently want is all A’s – as striking students at the New School in New York City demanded in November. They also want an igloo of protection from the weather of reality. But the very virtue of great books is not that they protect and reassure us, but that they disturb us and make us confront those elements of actuality that are hardest to endure. Literature is not comfort food, even if there do exist good books that one can consume with the ardor of a teenager eyeing a box of chocolates.

A faculty committee formed to devise a safe, harmless great books course would realize pretty quickly that, with the possible exception of Jane Austen, almost every item on the list is vulnerable to objection. The Iliad glorifies war. The Odyssey perpetrates a double standard in which Odysseus is allowed the pleasures of Calypso while Penelope must resist the attention of her suitors. Genesis propounds creationism. Dogmatic Dante audaciously puts Mohammad in a low circle of the Inferno. Infidelity is good for a belly laugh in Chaucer. Rabelais is ribald. King Lear demonizes daughters. Swift’s Gulliver puts out a fire in Lilliput by urinating in it. The Oedipus cycle of Sophocles and the Oresteia of Aeschylus confront readers with parricide and matricide, respectively, which may trigger a mental upheaval if Freud was on to something. Freud’s work is itself verboten because he is out of intellectual fashion. Alexander Pope’s satirical masterpiece “The Rape of the Lock” has to go on the grounds that the very conceit of the poem trivializes rape.

In each case the protesters miss both the forest and the trees by focusing on a single fallen leaf. This is deliberate. The formula, derived from the acolytes of the arch-deacon of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, is to focus on the periphery, not the center, of the object of criticism. But the secret of The Odyssey is not that the hero favored by the gods belongs to the ruling class. The secret of The Inferno is not that it helped its author get back at his enemies. The point of Anna Karenina is not that her husband is a symbol of Russian Imperialism.

Hamlet engages us not because the prince’s treatment of Ophelia is caddish but because the prince raises the most pressing questions facing all of us. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Ernest Hemingway said. Yet you’ll not find the book on required reading lists, despite the appeal it has always made to young minds in formation. One complaint: the use of racist lingo, accurately reflective of the time of composition.  More recent protests center on the notion that the author, a white man, dared to write about slavery, as if that were a province reserved only for slaves and their descendants. Consider the harm this kind of thinking does to our idea of imaginative liberty. Now that you’ve heard the score of Porgy and Bess, would you really want to travel back in time and discourage the Gershwins from giving voice to denizens of Catfish Row? 

The censoring of bawdy works is a little like airbrushing the cigarette out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hand in a postage stamp. It puts the past sous rature (“under erasure”), as deconstructionists put it. The erasure robs the past of its pastness, its right to exist on its own terms, whether we approve of them or not, even if they strike some of us as either a dangerous precedent or a premonition.

Having twice mentioned deconstruction as a culprit that has bought us to, if not to the edge of the abyss, the unfortunate state of affairs that exists in our universities and colleges, I feel I should add a third example. Easy to do, because a basic tactic is to divide the world into binary oppositions, pick one out, and then flip the power status in the pairing.  Thus, traditionally the teacher rather than the student was “privileged.” Now, however, the student holds the face cards. A complaint from an enraged college kid, bogus or real, could cost the instructor his or her job. Teachers used to give grades. Now they are expected to give all A’s, while students get to evaluate their instructors with anonymity and without risk. A topsy-turvy world: the world of deconstruction.

In the 1960s at Columbia, the desire of students to confront the modern literature most likely to prove upsetting was intense. It led Lionel Trilling to devise such a course and then to reflect on the experience in a fascinating essay. Trilling writes that he had given his students a taste of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Nietzsche, Conrad, Thomas Mann and William Blake. “I have asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serous study, saying: ‘Interesting, am I not? And exciting if you consider how deep I am and what dead beasts lie at my bottom.” Trilling could question the maturity of students who moved “through the terrors and mysteries of modern literature like so many Parsifals, asking no questions at the behest of wonder and fear.” But the Columbia professor had no doubt that the teaching of modern literature -- including that which may be said to bear an adversarial relationship to the prevailing culture -- was worth doing well and with a full consciousness of what the enterprise entailed.

          In 1965, Trilling observed tartly that the “progressive educational prescription to ‘think for yourself’ . . . means to think in the progressive pieties rather than the conservative pieties (if any of the latter do still exist).” He could see that in the postwar era liberalism had for all intents and purposes emerged triumphant in the clash of ideas in the academy. The author of The Liberal Imagination might be expected to applaud the development, but Trilling valued the dialectic of ideas, where thesis meets worthy antithesis, and he foresaw danger in the hegemony of an ideology.

Of one thing there is little doubt. Reading the great books -- whether Plato or Machiavelli, Ovid or Milton, Montaigne or Lady Murasaki, Augustine or Emily Dickinson , Aristiphanes or Swift -- will continue to trigger an intense response and may even lead us to the terrors and mysteries of the Abyss.

-- For eleven years, David Lehman taught a course uncompromisingly called “Great Poems” at New York University.

Copyright © 2023 by David Lehman. All rights reserved.

What Broadway meant: Ethel Merman (1960)

 

Photographer Sarah Meunier does drag [by Tracy Danison]

Corrine works decadence at Cirque Eléctrique, a Paris cabaret. Photo © Sarah Meunier

When dancers and mountebanks were banned in the City of Light, while others quailed in their closets or pottered around snazzy country houses, Sarah Meunier was photo-reporting the Covid quarantine for The Best American Poetry’s “Beyond Words” section. In exclusive photos of a citizen sheltering in place, readers were able to experience Sarah’s unbreakable determination to lay bare the hidden realities of that “moment bizarre”.

 

Mlle Kiss is a hostess for hire. Photo © Sarah Meunier

Photographer Sarah Meunier has much more to reveal, including some girl cousins just up the road who have a taste for drag queens. A family person – no doubt acting in the same spirit that had me go spare shotgun for grampa Walter’s autumnal shoot in the black mud and rough hedge of northern Ohio and, no doubt, agreeing over a Sunday lunch – Sarah was induced to bring her camera along to places like Cirque Electrique, cabaret décadent, where the well-known cross-dresser queen Corrine plays out some of the best of contemporary Paris decadence in the best tradition of cabaret. So, even if you don’t care about Corrine’s sartorial fancies, Sarah says she recommends Cirque Electrique as especially good performance.

Sailor K loves making up. Photo © Sarah Meunier

Sarah’s approach has a way of getting at the flesh and blood of the people she’s photographing. She seems to want to put the on-looker face to face –  subject to subject – with the person depicted rather than to use technique to depict an (esthetic) interiority or quality in a looked-at object – subject to object. I am always aware that Sarah’s people eat, drink, laugh, dance, have job someplace. So, like me or you, Sarah Meunier’s drag-queens seem to be working their way through this, our vale of tears and guffaws.

France Gaule – bills herself as a part-time local icon. Photo Sarah Meunier

The au délà du reel  ethetic in the Sarah Meunier’s drag queen photos is in the light and color reference. She frames the drag queen work-a-day with exoticness by tweaking colors that bring out a 60s street placard or an advertisement in Lifemagazine. Come crowding unbidden into mind a bizarre mix of American place – empty desert, grey city –  and marketing iconography  – paperback potboiler covers,  Winston cigarette packages, Marliyn Monroe.

A published version of Sarah Meunier’s As You Like It collection can be purchased by contacting Galerie Manjari & Partners site or from Sarah Meunier’s Instagram page.

Sarah Meunier’s work on African animals is coming up at Manjari & Partners later in February 2023.

John Forbes (Part 1) [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the death of John Forbes at age 47. Ironic, understated, comic and deceptively erudite, Forbes’ poetry represented for many Australian poets, as Ken Bolton writes, “a high-water mark against which to judge their own work.” A keen student of art history, philosophy, military history, and cultural theory, Forbes in his poetry married his intellectual fascinations to suburban Australian landscapes and 20th century ephemera in a conversational tone and colloquial voice that owed much to his early love of the New York School, in particular John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, on who he wrote his honors thesis and a completed (but never submitted) masters thesis respectively. 

 

A precocious talent, Forbes won a major literary prize at the age of 22 with his poem “Four Heads & how to do them.” The poem borrows for its starting point a Renaissance treatise on how to paint a “Classical Head” and proceeds to riff on the form, so that the Symbolist Head “No longer begins with even a mention of anatomy, / the approach in fact leaves one with the whole glittering / universe from which only the head has been removed.” The poem launched Forbes’ career and became an anthology staple. His second collection, Stunned Mullet, was funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority for the purpose of celebrating Australia’s bicentenary in 1988. It presented Forbes with the opportunity to take on the mantle of a "Public" Australian poet. He was, however, far too suspicious of authority for any such pretensions, and in the book’s central poem “On the Beach” the poet goes from answering the call of his vocation to seeing:

 

“Milled day-glo ephemera

sell you this image of Australia

& where it appears, flogged and true-blue,

your vocation looks

more like a blurred tattoo

or something you did for a bet

              & now regret, like a man

walking the length of the bar on his hands

balancing a drink on his shoe”

 

Yet it is precisely this cynicism and self-effacement which make him a fundamentally "Australian" poet, and validates the argument for his having been a national poet of a kind. Forbes’ persistent skepticism of those things which can at times make great claims for themselves, including those things which interested him most: politics, art, philosophy, poetry, is inherently, if not uniquely, Australian, and gives his poetry an ironic mode which recalls Robert Hughes' diagnosis of Australia's national character in which the country's convict past has made its people at once conformist and cynical of authority. Eschewing academia, Forbes made his living working menial jobs, including a long-ish stint as a furniture removalist, and the meagre art grants offered to poets in the 1970s and 80s. Forbes' view of the role of the poet in late 20th century Australia was perhaps best explained by his speaking grape in "Monkey's Pride", which Forbes viewed as a kind of manifesto: "Because society has elected me / to decorate / its falling / apart with a useless panache." In one of his later poems, "Anzac Day", Forbes opens with a favorable and sentimentalizing comparison of the Australian character against a list of foreign nations' military conscripts (England, France, Turkey, Germany), until the poem takes a muted but sharp turn towards its end to the current state of the nation, resulting not in patriotic pride but rather quiet disappointment:

 

Not so the Australians, unamused, unimpressed
they went over the top like men clocking on,

in this first full-scale industrial war.
Which is why Anzac Day continues to move us,

& grow, despite attempts to make it
a media event (left to them we’d attend

‘The Foxtel Dawn Service’). But The March is
proof we got at least one thing right, informal,

straggling & more cheerful than not, it’s
like a huge works or 8 Hour Day picnic—

if we still had works, or unions, that is. 

 

 

“On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra'' was published in Forbes’ posthumous collection Damaged Glamour, which features the poem's namesake painting, a glittering triumph of style over substance, on its cover. Forbes uses this perceived lack of substance as the substance for his poem: the extravagant, superficial display of wealth, the “sulking” royalty, the sycophantic hangers-on, the celebrity gawking—Forbes takes equal aim at both the super-rich and those who would worship such wealth, of whose gestures of contempt fail to mask “raw envy.” "On Tiepolo's Banquet of Cleopatra" exhibits Forbes' concision, his formal ability and superior talent to subtly shift perspectives: From the trashy contemporary glossy magazines the painting comically reminds us of, to the 18th century painting itself, to the protagonists from antiquity the painting represents ("our / contemporaries minus coke and sunglasses"), these shifts produce a sliding movement throughout the poem, with one perspective sliding out from beneath the other to assert itself, a rhetorical effect that creates an irresistible momentum. And if the poem’s social and political critique may itself be in some measure superficial (no matter how accurate), it arrives at a devastating final few lines. Agape, eclipsed by Eros, is absent from the painting. Where shall we place it? How about dragging it down to the basement to be tortured? "You wish, voyeur, you wish." In the culture of spectacle, Forbes suggests, the only way in which charity and kindness can capture either our attention or imagination is if they are being put on the rack. The human reflex to want to be witness to such brutality and callousness makes us, the readers, no better than those idlers gaping on the balconies.

 

On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra

Any frayed waiting room copy of Who

could catch this scene: flash Eurotrash

surveys a sulky round faced

überBabe who’s got the lot—what else

could this painting mean, except that

superstars can will their luck, or

just how little raw envy’s hidden by

contempt, so words like ‘Wow! Great

Tits!’ or ‘Comic Opera Wop’ sum up

the observer, not Anthony and Cleopatra,

attached to pets & entourages—our

contemporaries minus coke & sunglasses.

What’s that pearl without price she’s

dropping in her glass? A mirror of

their self-regard, replaced by each

others’ glances. Still, it glows, blue

& blank at the centre like their hearts,

flanked by idlers on balconies leering

& placing bets. But if they suggest Eros,

what role does Agape play in this--

downstairs & screaming, being shown The

Instruments? You wish, voyeur, you wish.

 

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: FEBRUARY 1, 2023

For today’s post I offer two poems written by amazing friends and poets with whom I have joyfully collaborated.  These (solo) poems are both called WHEN I WAS STRAIGHT—Maureen’s written first (from Little Ice Age, 2001) with Julie’s homage to follow (When I Was Straight, 2014).  

When I Was Straight  (by Maureen Seaton)

When I was straight I dreamed of nipples,
my dreams were crowded with cleavage and yin,
I read a book that said if you are fickle

about sex, note your obsession in dreams
then do the opposite in real life. This
made sense, my boyfriend said, although it seemed

oddly like a game of Exquisite Corpse
to me. We'd make love, I'd dream of figs,
that drizzled pink, and sometimes I'd lapse

into madrigals (meaning: of the womb), big
leap from the straightforward sessions in bed
of linearity and menthol. Legs

would cross and uncross in my dreams, heads
fall back with me at the throat. I adored
the winged clavicle, that link between breast-

bone and scapula. Straight as gin, I poured
myself into pretense and fellatio,
you could count on me for bold orgasms, for

trapeze art and graceful aerobics, oh
there is no lover like a panicked lover.
Once I dreamed of abandoning the Old

Boyfriend Theory of Headache and Blunder-
buss. Believe me, I said, this will hurt him
more than me, but the dream laughed! Torture

me, I thought, now that even my id
has turned against me, there is something fragile
here to lose, exquisite truth, and I did.

 

When I Was Straight  (by Julie Marie Wade)

I did not love women as I do now.
I loved them with my eyes closed, my back turned.
I loved them silent, & startled, & shy.

The world was a dreamless slumber party,
sleeping bags like straitjackets spread out on
the living room floor, my face pressed into a

slender pillow.

All night I woke to rain on the strangers' windows.
No one remembered to leave a light on in the hall.
Someone's father seemed always to be shaving.

When I stood up, I tried to tiptoe
around the sleeping bodies, their long hair
speckled with confetti, their faces blanched by the

porch-light moon.

I never knew exactly where the bathroom was.
I tried to wake the host girl to ask her, but she was
only one adrift in that sea of bodies. I was ashamed

to say they all looked the same tome, beautiful &
untouchable as stars. It would be years before
I learned to find anyone in the sumptuous,

terrifying dark.

Ed. note: See also https://marshhawkpress.org/denise-duhamel-in-praise-of-colette-inezs-pay-yourself-first/ for Denise Duhamel's essay in praise of Colette Inez. Here's how it begins. <<<< In 1990 I had the pleasure of reading with Colette Inez in a library in Tarrytown, NY.  We bonded immediately—we were both wearing all black.  We both had (dyed) red hair. We were both Geminis with June birthdays. We were both of French heritage. Colette had a French mother and French-American father who was really a Father (a priest!) which deserves its own essay, of course, and of which she wrote brilliant poems and a heart wrenching memoir The Secret of M. Dulong. >>>

2AM, and the Rabbinical Students Stand in Their Bathrobes [by Yehoshua November]

2AM, and the Rabbinical Students Stand in Their Bathrobes

2AM, and the rabbinical students stand in their bathrobes
at the edge of the yeshiva parking lot, watching
the practiced motions of muscular firemen disembarking
from their engine. Soon, it will be determined
the youngest student in the building
pulled the basement alarm
after learning, over the dormitory pay phone,
his parents, back in Baltimore, intend to end
their nineteen year marriage before Passover.
The only one the rabbis have not accounted for
crouches in his closet behind a row of black sports coats.
And because the yeshiva caters to souls
but also bodies,
the early morning mysticism class
on why the Divine Presence cannot dwell
amongst those plagued by sadness
has been cancelled.

-- Yehoshua November

first posted on Verse Daily

RENOIR: Grand Illusion (1938) [by Lewis Saul]

 

 

Screenplay by Charles Spaak and Jean Renoir.

Renoir was 43 when he directed Grand Illusion.

One of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Renoir directed several terrific films before this one: Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932) -- an electric performance by Michel Simon -- and The Lower Depths (1936); and a few great ones after this one, Rules of the Game (1939), for example.

But I don't believe he made a greater film than this one, filmed between the two world wars.

**

 

If you haven’t seen this great masterpiece, do so immediately. We’ll wait.

 

SPOILERS AHEAD

 

Check it out:

• Lt. Maréchal (Jean Gabin) is singing along to a gramophone record of an old French song, “Frou Frou.” The gramophone itself clues us in that this is World War I.
• A dissolve and Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) and his aide walk through the door. The transition is disconcerting. It is difficult to know where we are. A different gramophone dominates the right side of the frame and the observant viewer will notice that right behind it there is a poster on the wall — in German! Stroheim throws back a brandy with his stiff, unbending posture. Note how Renoir parallels this action in the scene when Boeldieu dies.
• Another dissolve and we are looking at the countryside through the window of a train. In a few seconds we land on a sign which reads, “Prisoner-of-War Camp Nr. 17 — Officers’ Camp.”
• The prisoners are lined up in a courtyard. Captain Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Maréchal both yawn. The camp regulations are read. A humorous bit of business occurs towards the end of the commandant’s long list of “forbidden” actions: an older German officer begins to intone “strictly forbidden, gentlemen!” in German, after the commandant recites the rules. Maréchal — amused — repeats the German phrase to Boeldieu, ironically.
• We meet a Frenchman, a Jew named Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) who is opening a large parcel from home, stuffed with delicacies which — as we will see in a few frames — is better food than what the Germans are eating.
• GERMAN OFFICER #1: “This tastes like an old sock.”
• GERMAN OFFICER #2: “What do they feed the French?”
• GERMAN OFFICER #3: “Cabbage. But they have their parcels.”
• GERMAN OFFICER #1: “And the Russians?”
• GERMAN OFFICER #3: “Cabbage roots. But no parcels.”
• GERMAN OFFICER #2: “And the English?”
• GERMAN OFFICER #3: (in English): “Plum pudding!”
• Cartier (a fantastic Julien Carette) is crawling through the escape tunnel the prisoners are digging. Something is happening outside, and one of them pretends to go to the latrine to check it out. He runs into the German officer, Sgt. Arthur (Werner Florian) who is accompanying a detail carrying a dead body on a stretcher. Arthur informs him that the man was shot trying to escape.
• After getting rid of some tunnel dirt in the garden (a scene reprised in John Sturges’ The Great Escape [1963]), the men gather around a trunk of feminine clothing. A young, angel-faced soldier is talked into trying on a dress. “Funny, isn’t it?” he repeats as he preens.
• But no one is laughing. Renoir gives us a gorgeous, slow leftward pan, revealing face after face of these women-starved men, stunned with shock at the sight of this beautiful “woman.”
• Renoir pulls the camera back as we see the men working on their “costumes.” Note how he never lets the scene become static — everyone is busy with their work, and the dialogue flows naturally.
• As the conversation winds down, the fifes begin to play outside. From a tight shot, he pulls the camera back as the men huddle around the window. He is shooting from outside the window now. Very effective composition.
• Cartier’s shtick when he burns the pants he was ironing is hilarious.
• After a FTB, we see a poster proclaiming a German victory at Douamont (the date would be February 26, 1916) …
• Later, Maréchal interrupts the variety show with the news that the allies have retaken Douamont. He orders the band to play The Marseillaise. Gabin moves towards the edge of the stage and glares ferociously at some German officers, as the surging patriotic feelings from the song swell up in the background. Michael Curtiz seems to have been inspired by this scene in his 1942 film, Casablanca.
• Elision: Maréchal is in solitary. We aren’t given any explanation, but it will later become clear that he probably was caught trying to escape.
• Yet another poster: “German Troups Recapture Douamont” (April 17, 1916) …
• [note all the parallelism in this film!]
• MONTAGE of the train ride to Wintersborn … another parallel.
• Another multilingual conversation:
• RAUFFENSTEIN: (showing a large gun): “We have 25 more guns like this one.”
• BOELDIEU: “Uh-huh.”
• RAUFFENSTEIN: “I suppose you know the Maxim gun?”
• MARÉCHAL: “Very well, sir.” (He jabs a finger towards his broken arm.) “But personally, I prefer the restaurant!”
• RAUFFENSTEIN: “Touché … Maxim.” (He suddenly switches to English.) “That reminds me. I used to know a girl there in 1913. Her name was, ah — Fifi.”
• BOELDIEU: “So did I!”
• Rauffenstein is showing off the impossibility of escape:
• “A 120-foot drop!” (He has inadvertently told them the exact amount of rope they will need!)
• BOELDIEU: “So kind of you to show us around the grounds.”
• The five new roommates are discussing the diseases of the different classes (Rosenthal caught something from a “brunette” who was a friend of his mother!)
• ROSENTHAL: “We’d each die of our own class diseases, if war didn’t make all germs equal.”
• Rosenthal has some kind of hand-made map. Maréchal comes over to see it. Notice the detail in the set design! Renoir pulls back the camera ever so slightly, and we suddenly notice a new character on the right side of the frame — a Black man, who is working on some kind of wood burning art.
• The map will become an important artifact much later. Kurosawa was inspired by ideas like this.
• ROSENTHAL: “That means walking 15 nights on six lumps of sugar and two biscuits a day.” Again, prefiguring a future scene …
• Maréchal is braiding a long section of rope. The lookout alerts everyone that the guards are coming to search the room. Boeldieu hides the rope outside the window.
• Inspection. Notice the way Renoir handles this scene; he creates a dramatic entrance for Rauffenstein. Six guards enter the room. The camera faces the door, and remains there until all six guards have walked past. He then pans left to Maréchal reading, while a guard searches his pillow. Reading from a book:
• “I am weary as a girl after 22 nights of love.” “Twenty-two nights of love. Imagine that!”
• The camera pulls back slightly and pans to the next prisoner, who is also reading a book. The guard taps his leg and he lifts them, allowing the guard to search his blanket.
• Another leftward pan and we settle on the Teacher (John Dasté) and his guard, who makes him stand up and inspects the stool he was sitting on.
• The camera pans left again, to a guard who is just standing there. Suddenly his expression changes and he snaps to attention and barks: “Achtung!”
• The camera now pans right, as Rauffenstein makes a dignified entrance. “Continue!”
• A conversation that would never occur in the next world war: Boeldieu rises as Rauffenstein approaches. They salute each other:
• RAUFFENSTEIN: “Give me your word that you’ve nothing in here against regulations.”
• BOELDIEU: (for a split second, Boeldieu offers up the tiniest of smirks [after all, the rope is hanging outside the window and is — truthfully — not “in here.”]) “You have my word.” Raufffenstein bows slightly and salutes … “But why my word and not theirs?” He indicates the others with a shake of his head.
• RAUFFENSTEIN: “The word of a … Rosenthal … and a Maréchal?”
• BOELDIEU (firmly): “It’s as good as ours.”
• RAUFFENSTEIN (not convinced): “Perhaps.”
• FTB. Boeldieu and Rauffenstein are in the Prussian’s chapel-like large room, conversing about their mutual acquaintance, Boeldieu’s cousin, the Count. Notice the way that the two are virtually mirroring each other’s movements — the walk, the cigarettes, etc. And then a perfect parallel of the previous search scene, with a bit more detail:
• BOELDIEU: “Why did you make an exception of me by inviting me here?”
• RAUFFENSTEIN: “Why? Because your name is Boeldieu, career officer in the French Army, and I am Rauffenstein, career officer in the German Imperial Army.”
• BOELDIEU: “But my comrades are officers, as well.”
• RAUFFENSTEIN: “A Maréchal and a Rosenthal, officers?
• BOELDIEU: “They’re fine soldiers.”
• RAUFFENSTEIN: “Charming legacy of the French Revolution.”
• BOELDIEU: “Neither you nor I can stop the march of time.”
• RAUFFENSTEIN: “Boeldieu … I don’t know who will win this war. But whatever the outcome, it will mean the end of the Rauffensteins and the Boeldieus.”
• BOELDIEU: “We’re no longer needed.”
• RAUFFENSTEIN: “And don’t you find that a pity?”
• BOELDIEU: “Perhaps …”
• Boeldieu’s plan is to stage a concert (the arts are “allowed”) with flutes and anything the prisoners can bang on …
• Another lovely composition. Maréchal on the left, Boeldieu on the right, and in the center a large cage with a squirrel within. Both Gabin and Fresnay have lots of cute business with the little fella.
• Just as Boeldieu predicted, the prisoners are lined up in the yard after their cacophonous concert. Roll call. Boeldieu’s name is called; no response. We hear a flute. Maréchal and the others look up, trying to locate the source of the sound.
• Cut to Rauffenstein, also looking for the culprit. The camera pans the walls of the fortress, and finds Boeldieu sitting on a beam, playing his flute.
• (Kosma’s score kicks into full gear here (wonderful!)
• All hell breaks loose. Cut to Maréchal and Rosenthal tying their rope to the window. Rosenthal goes first. Renoir ratchets up the tension by having Maréchal hide behind a post, as some guards walk by. He then makes it down, and the two men scurry off into the night.
• Where did they go? Eight minutes of film will elapse before we discover what happened.
• Cut to the guards, shining a spotlight on Boeldieu. He taunts them with his flute. They begin to fire at him.
• Cut to Rauffenstein, hearing the gunfire. He is alarmed. He arrives on the scene and tries to reason with Boeldieu — in English!
• RAUFFENSTEIN: “Have you really gone insane?”
• BOELDIEU: “I am perfectly sane!”
• After several warnings, Rauffenstein shoots him. Guards arrive to inform him about the escape. He leaves, moving past the camera, which does a quick rack-focus on the soldier who remains in the frame. Brief, but beautiful.
• Cut to a disconcerting ECU of a box which contains religious paraphernalia (a crucifix, two candles, etc.) … the camera stays close on the man holding the box. He is wearing a crucifix and German “iron cross.” He turns, as Renoir pulls the camera back a bit to reveal Rauffenstein and his aide. The priest puts on his coat which has a Red Cross armband on it.
• A lot of filmic information to absorb in a few seconds. Why a priest? Renoir is conveying that Boeldieu is not yet dead, but seriously injured.
• Last line from his deathbed:
• “For a commoner, dying in war is a tragedy. But for you and me, it’s a good way out.”
• Rauffenstein gets up for a drink. Boeldieu dies. Rauffenstein closes his eyes and gets up and goes to the window, where he prunes a dead bloom from his plant.
• Renoir now turns away from everything and everyone with whom we have spent the past hour or so. The film now becomes a duet, a trio … a quartet …
• Another disconcerting cut to a woman walking down a country road with a white horse.
• Renoir can be devilish with his set-ups. Here he pans 90 degrees right and stops — we expect to see our heroes. We do not. But momentarily, we hear Maréchal’s voice:
• “We should’ve avoided the road.”
• The camera now pans downward and we find the two men, huddled in the tall reeds.
• There is a lovely axial cut here, where the medium shot turns into a close-up.
• Again, some clever presagement:
• ROSENTHAL: “He’s gone.”
• MARÉCHAL: “What? Didn’t you notice it was a woman?”
• (It’s impossible to tell for sure if this is Elsa (Dita Parlo) or not, but this bit of dialogue reverberates later then they are lucky enough to stumble upon a house with only a woman and a child in it.)
• Rosenthal has a bad leg and is in obvious distress. Maréchal offers him his sugar ration. There is not much left. He gives the sugar to Rosenthal, who catches on and realizes that Maréchal has been doing without, saving what’s left for the crippled man. Maréchal is returning Rosenthal’s previous kindness when he shared his parcels.
• The journey continues. Rosenthal is resting, holding up his bad leg and balancing himself with a staff.
• MARÉCHAL: “You coming or what?”
• ROSENTHAL (starting to walk): “I’m doing the best I can.”
• They trudge along. Suddenly, some spectacular scenery comes into view. Watch carefully! Rosenthal seems to take a moment to appreciate the beauty. He turns his head, taking it all in, despite the misery.
• The companions are starting to get testy:
• MARÉCHAL: “You and your foot!”
• ROSENTHAL: “It’s not my fault! I slipped.”
• Immediately after this line, Renoir holds the camera on the scenery, as the two men pass the camera.
• Cut to a new view of a sloping mountain. The men re-enter the frame. The tension bursts:
• MARÉCHAL: “You slipped! That’s all I hear. If you get us caught, you’ll explain you slipped? We’re out of food. Might as well give up now.”
• ROSENTHAL: “Gladly. I’ve had enough too.”
• MARÉCHAL: “Had enough of me?”
• ROSENTHAL: “Damn right! If you only knew how you make me sick!”
• MARÉCHAL: “Well, the feeling’s mutual. You’re a dead weight. A ball and chain. I never could stomach Jews!”
• ROSENTHAL: “A bit late to realize that! Clear out, you’re dying to.”
• MARÉCHAL: “You said it!”
• ROSENTHAL: “Get lost! I’m sick of your ugly mug!”
• MARÉCHAL: “I’m going! You’re on your own now! So long! (Maréchal leaves.)
• ROSENTHAL: “So long! Go ahead! (he raises his staff above his head) … “I’m so happy I could sing …” (singing): “There once was a little steamboat / which had ne-ne-never gone to sea …”
• Cut to Maréchal, who continues the song:
• “After five or six weeks at sea / the supplies were al-al-almost gone for good.”
• He gradually stops singing, realizing the ugly reality of the last line. Note the camera’s hold on the countryside, as Gabin walks out of the frame again!
• Cut to Rosenthal, sitting, forlorn. He is centered perfectly in the frame. Suddenly, Maréchal appears, only his torso in the frame.
• ROSENTHAL: “Why’d you come back?”
• The camera pans up to Maréchal’s face.
• “Come on. Let’s go, fella.”
• He tenderly helps Rosenthal to his feet, as they exit the frame. Renoir again holds on the background for a second …
• DISSOLVE to yet another scenic backdrop. Maréchal is helping Rosenthal along, as they trudge up a steep hill.
• The richness of all that follows would not have been as powerful if Renoir had not taken the time to give us the men’s travels and travails.
• They arrive at Elsa’s little cottage house. They hide in the barn. They hear something. Maréchal stands ready with a big club. A cow walks in … followed by Elsa, making her entrance in the film at the 1:34 mark (she’s billed second in the credits!)
• Because the cultured Rosenthal can speak German, they can communicate with Elsa.
• FTB. Picture of Elsa’s dead husband, killed at Verdun.
• ELSA: “The table’s too big now”
• … as Renoir’s camera moves to the big table, which could seat eight — finally revealing little Lotte (Little Peters, who died of the flu just weeks before the film was released).
• Maréchal’s duet with the cow:
• “Relax, it’s only me! You don’t mind if a Frenchman feeds you?” (he gives the cow a firm pat) … “you smell like my grandfather’s cows. A good smell.” (he lets out a little laugh) …
• “You’re a good cow from Würtemberg and I’m a working man from Paris, but we can still be pals! You’re a poor cow. I’m a poor soldier. We each do our best.”
• Again, he gives the cow a little thump. He leaves the barn. But Renoir keeps the camera on Bessie. She lets out a loud moo.
• Renoir gives us some important information in a throwaway line. Elsa asks Maréchal to get some water in German. Rosenthal quickly translates, but Maréchal says he understood her.
• “For 18 months I never understood the guards. But her, I understand!”
• Thus we know how long they were imprisoned.
• FTB. They have constructed a little manger for Christmas. Rosenthal has carved some potatoes into little toy figures …
• ROSENTHAL: “Isn’t my little donkey cute? And my ox? And the infant Jesus?” He smiles broadly, turning towards Maréchal: “An ancestor of mine.”
• They’ve been there awhile now. The attraction between Elsa and Maréchal is evident.
• They’ve bid each other “bon soir.” He and Rosenthal enter the bedroom and close the door behind them.
• CUT. We see that there are two connecting rooms. Maréchal closes the door to his own room and picks up a little apple from the bureau, which he begins to eat. (The music swells.) Just as he reaches the other door — still open — Renoir shows us his mastery of composition …
• The camera is behind Maréchal with Elsa, beautiful in black, is just above Gabin’s right shoulder. He walks towards her, slowly. They embrace, and …
• FTB. (this is the only example in the entire film where we run into a rough splice, not corrected in the restoration.) The “swelling” music of the love scene is brutally interrupted by a new cue … faster, jaunty.
• FTB. The men are talking just outside the house. Maréchal can’t bring himself to tell Elsa that they are leaving. Rosenthal volunteers to do it.
• He enters the house and speaks with Elsa. He then opens the window, revealing Maréchal. Note the composition! The open window is like a painting framed within another painting!
• They say goodbye. The men disappear into the darkness and Renoir cuts back to Elsa, putting away the dishes.
• FTB. Huge snowy mountains. The camera tracking here is virtually identical (parallelism) to the previous scene when we first spot the two men in the ditch by the reeds! Ninety degrees to the right and then downward, where we find the two men in deep snow. Even the conversation is similar — about whether or not to leave this spot or wait until it gets dark …
• MARÉCHAL: “We’ve got to end this war and make it the last.”
• ROSENTHAL: “Don’t count on it”
• How prescient!
• CUT to German soldiers, following the tracks in the snow. One of the soldiers points. Others raise their guns. A few shots are fired before the sergeant tells them to stop firing — they’ve already reached Switzerland.
• SERGEANT: “Don’t shoot, they’re in Switzerland.”
• SOLDIER: “Good for them.”
• Final shot: the two men are trudging through a field of virgin snow.

 

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Three): Rebecca Holifield [by Angela Ball]

Unidentified Apple Picker

(1)
Black-and-white 3/4 length re-
print of Grover Cleveland Alexander (left)
and an unidentified man (right), apple-
picking. Both wear three-piece suits, overcoats,
[canes] and [top] hats. Posing for the camera,
each reaches up to grab an apple
gloved in a branch. Down
to bite an apple. Back to throw
an apple like a baseball. Forward
to shake hands.

(2)
Grover Cleveland Alexander and unidentified
man here called Apple Picker. Yesterday
may forget your name, Mr. Picker, but
because of you I remember the whole round
feeling of apple in hand, the steady reach
up, the snapping pull down. The sluice
from the bite. The sun in our eyes.

-Rebecca Holifield

About the poem:

“Unidentified Apple Picker” was inspired by a photograph in the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. This poem is part of my master’s thesis, “Digital Pastoral,” which theorizes a few ways in which the internet and the digital archive have altered the tradition of the pastoral poem, at least in my own work. If the internet is the city in which we get lost, it is also the pasture in which we can find ourselves again. This poem begins with stuffy-sounding found text, describing the found image, and gradually redirects until it ends on a connection to the personal, the sensory. From the vague and impersonal, we make our own connections and imbue things with our own meaning. From the search engine comes the search, from the search comes the image, and from the image comes the personal connection we form with it. - Rebecca Holifield

 Rebecca Holifield is a poet with a Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Two): Rebecca Holifield

Rebecca Holifield’s brilliant and enticing poem, “Unidentified Apple Picker,” does not depend upon the photograph it speaks to. Indeed, the poem places the photo at further removes by telling us that it is “3/4-length” and a “re- / print.” Nonetheless, we are provided the positions of its two inhabitants and what they are wearing. One is a baseball player, a famous pitcher called “Grover Cleveland Alexander,” named for an even more famous person, a president, whose most notable accomplishment may have been marrying his much-younger ward.

Why the brackets around “cane” and “top”? For me, they function to emphasize the photo’s distance from us in time—and that time’s degree of formality.

Indeed, the poem’s details consistently emphasize one another, with “Grover Cleveland Alexander”’s almost too-elaborate name contrasting with “unidentified man”’s total lack of one.

Part of the poem’s quaint, Victorian formality is its highly posed nature, mimicked by the lineation of the second half of section (1). The poem is arranged as formally as the photograph, to humorous effect, as its images reference Grover Cleveland Alexander’s more famous role, as pitcher rather than “picker.”

Section (2) addresses itself to the speaker’s relationship to and with the second man, who is here somewhat more fulsomely identified as “unidentified / man here called ‘Apple Picker’.” Then, following a wonderfully deft personification of the past, “Yesterday / may forget your name,” the speaker exuberantly dubs him: “Mr. Picker,” a move all the more comic because parenthetical.

And it is “because of you,” because of the second, anonymous man, that the speaker, and we, receive the encompassing epiphany of the last four lines:

     the whole round

     feeling of apple in hand, the steady reach

     up, the snapping pull down. The sluice

     from the bite. The sun in our eyes.

Our kinesthetic, tactile experience of apple picking ends with the double climax of “The sluice / from the bite” and “The sun in our eyes”—the dazzlement of looking upward at a ripe apple—and our dazzlement by the photograph the poem develops just for us. Its darkroom, the poet’s mind; its emulsion, words.

-Angela Ball

Devil #2 [by Miranda Beeson]

   
      #2 Devil

Manolo me Mammon      

                You gold-encrusted god of plenty

Park me on Park Avenue

                Gild my walls. Chandelier my halls

 Jet my days. Jaguar my bluestone nights

                Pool me in my private Mediterranean

Yacht me & unstopper me

                Margaux & Coach me

Cover me in coin. Booty & Botox me

                Multiply my capacity for rapacity

Artichoke roast & spit me

                Braise & flambé me

Let me live in your insatiable need

Kaveh Akbar: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kaveh Akbar. Photo by Paige Lewis

________________________________________________________

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

 

I can’t even remember my name, I who remember

so much—football scores, magic tricks, deep love

so close to God it was practically religious. 

 

When you fall asleep in that sort of love

you wake up with bruises on your neck. I don’t

have drunks, sirs, I have adventures. Every day

 

my body follows me around asking

for things. I try to think louder, try

to be brilliant, wildly brilliant. We all want

 

the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,

like the first man to hear a parrot speak) but we live

on an enormous flatness floating between

 

two oceans. Sometimes you just have to leave

whatever’s real to you, you have to clomp

through fields and kick the caps off

 

all the toadstools. Sometimes

you have to march all the way to Galilee

or the literal foot of God himself before you realize

 

you’ve already passed the place where

you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember

the being afraid, only that it came to an end.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (Penguin Classics 2022). In 2024, Knopf will publish Martyr!, Kaveh’s first novel.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                         Fiona Banner, Simpleton, Simpleton, Simpleton, oil on found painting, 77 x 127.5cm, 2021.

                              

 

Squib 485 [by Alan Ziegler]

Baseball Portfolio #1: The Story is in the White Space

 

The Tears of Antigone: An Astrological Profile [by David Lehman]

Antigone, a classic Aries with Sagittarius rising and a fair amount of Leo and Gemini in her chart, epitomized the feminine powers extolled by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. She was very beautiful, with a profile like that of Greer Garson in Pride of Prejudice,and  a force of personality that overshadowed that of her  worthy husband, Walter Pidgeon, the perfect number two man, in Mrs. Miniver. He could cross the Channel in his little skiff to keep the evacuation of Dunkirk; she beat that by single-handedly disarming a German soldier.

In Chinese astrology, Antigone was born in the year of the rat, a sign that explains her quality of eagerness and readiness. The rat is the first of the twelve Chinese signs, representing industry, not disgusting vermin. As a matter of honor, a female rat will not procrastinate but will use trickery if need be to achieve her ends. In the competition to cross the river, the rat jumped on the back of the ox, and got off before the shore, winning the race over the tiger, the snake, etc. What she didn't realize was that she  (as a water sign) would need to unite with a cheerful, extroverted goat (earth). The goast doesn't always communicate his needs, but if he is able to keep up with the charismatic rat, the relationship will endure.

Antigone rates very high in intensity of sex appeal, the passion she arouses varying directly with the likelihood of no consummation. Her Capricorn asleep in midheaven January and her Mars victorious in April are usually cited as reasons for this particular enchantress's eternal fate, making her a symbol of resolve and heroic resistance, who would live to an grand old age if she werren't willing to die for the sake of a principle.

Antigone lived centuries before the Gregorian calendar regularized things. Consequently, the exact date of her birth is the subject of controversy, with some favoring April 9 and others April 12.

Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, was also his sister. As Sophocles recounts in the third play in his Oedipus cycle, . She rebelled against the tyrannical rule of Creon, who didn’t let her bury the dead body of her brother Polyneices.  In a fierce display of hubris Creon ignored the contradiction between his son Haemon’s love for Antigone and his own authority to boss his son around.  Everyone died in the Greek manner, Haemon killing Antigone and then taking his own life.

If it was Creon’s tragedy, it would have been a bore and a box office failure. Just as Shakespeare preferred dealing with Antony and Brutus rather than wasting his genius on Caesar, so Sophocles cast into the starry heavens the vision of Antigone as loyal, faithful, rebellious, loving, self-sacrificing, steadfast. To be a rebel while proving your loyalty is a consummation devoutly be to be wished, and Antigone in Paris emerged as one of France’s most alluring leading ladies, a symbol of resistance against the Nazis during World War II.

As Sophocles maintained, one look at the world would prompt any baby to return instantly to the womb. Making the best of a bad business, Antigone decided to act even at the expense of her own life and love, thus ensuring that she would always be the young attractive woman she was at the time of her death. Did she want children? No one thought to ask. But her treatment of her brother came to a high  erotic climax without violating the tabu on incest.

According to Indian astrology, merely bearing the name Antigone gives you a leg up on the trail to creativity.

When Antigone’s moon is in Jupiter or Neptune, she is willing to engage in moral dilemmas in the public eye. Of average height, with brilliant eyes, a mesmerizing oval face.

Asteroid 129, named after her,  was discovered on February 5, 1873 at Clinton, NY by C. H. F. Peters. It is about 84 miles in diameter.

Squibs 480-484 [by Alan Ziegler]

480:I strive to arrange my life like a European meal, concluding with my salad days.

481: By all means bring a knife to a gun fight in addition to your gun.

482: I see someone I used to know across the street. As I approach, I realize it is not my old friend. Undaunted, I say, “Hey, Stanley, great to see you! How’s Veronica and life on the rodeo circuit?”  The stranger stares blankly, then a glint of recognition. “Christopher,” (not my name) he says, “I still feel bad about that night, and how is Gloria and life at the clinic?” We talk until we are all caught up and part ways.

483: Paul Langston was once called upon to inquire, in response to a phone message, “Who in the Sam Hill is Sam Hill?”

484: Steve Allen interrupted himself while chatting with guests on his radio show to observe that the coffee he continued to sip was now lukewarm, and he would have sent it back had it been served that way. I feel similarly about my body.

Learning how to be dead [from "Mr. Palomar" by Italo Calvino]

<<< A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture. A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important to him, and makes him say, 'How could I have lived without having read it!' and also, 'What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements to not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his whole life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading. 

This is the most difficult step in learning how to be dead: to become convinced that your own life is a closed whole, all in the past, to which you can add nothing and can alter none of the relationships among the various elements. Of course, those who go on living can, according to their shifting experience, introduce changes in the lives of the dead, too, giving form to what had none or what seemed to have a different form: recognizing, for example, a just rebel in someone who had felt doomed to neurosis or delirium. But these are changes that matter mostly to the living. It is unlikely that they, the dead, will profit by them. Each individual is made up of what he has lived and the way he has lived it, and non can take this away from him. Anyone who has lived in suffering is always made of that suffering; if they try to take it away from him, he is no longer himself. >>>

-- sdl

Happy birthday, Mozart -- and Jerry Kern [by DL]

Spring 68 at Columbia was the season of the strike,
the occupation of the buildings (Low, Hamilton, Avery
Mathematics, and Fayerwether where a righteous
mininster married a young couple), and Mitch and I
went to the West End Bar to talk tactics because
we knew the "tactical patrol force" (TPF) was
going to come and hit hard. The days went by
and the arm bands worn by angry students
went from green (amnesty for protesters)
to black (mourning for Alma Mater). But I still
had my Music Humanities final to face and I
was so ignorant I did the only thing I could do:
bought Bach's "Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott,"
Mozart's Jupiter, Beethoven's 3rd, 5th, and 7th,
and Brahms's 4th. On the final the professor
played something we had not heard in class.
It was the slow movement of the 7th.
And that summer in Oxford
I heard the opening of the last movement
of the Jupiter every hour
on the hour. Years later I learned
Mozart's birthday, the 26th of January,
was also that of Kern, Jerry Kern
of Show Boat and Swing Time,
"The Way You Look Tonight"
and "Long Ago And Far Away." So I will just say
to both of these great composers: happy birthday!

Spring 68 at Columbia was the season of the strike,
the occupation of the buildings (Low, Hamilton, Avery
Mathematics, and Fayerwether where a righteous
mininster married a young couple), and Mitch and I
went to the West End Bar to talk tactics because
we knew the "tactical patrol force" (TPF) was
going to come and hit hard. The days went by
and the arm bands worn by angry students
went from green (amnesty for protesters)
to black (mourning for Alma Mater). But I still
had my Music Humanities final to face and I
was so ignorant I did the only thing I could do:
bought Bach's "Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott,"
Mozart's Jupiter, Beethoven's 3rd, 5th, and 7th,
and Brahms's 4th. On the final the professor
played something we had not heard in class.
It was the slow movement of the 7th.
And that summer in Oxford
I heard the opening of the last movement
of the Jupiter every hour
on the hour. Years later I learned
Mozart's birthday, the 26th of January,
was also that of Kern, Jerry Kern
of Show Boat and Swing Time,
"The Way You Look Tonight"
and "Long Ago And Far Away." So I will just say
to both of these great composers: happy birthday!

They Didn't Believe Me (Jerome Kern's breakout song: 1917 )

And when I told them

How beautiful you are

They didn't believe me

They didn't believe me

Your lips, your eyes

Your curly hair

Are in a class beyond compare

You're the loveliest girl that one could ever see

And when I tell them

And I certainly am going to tell them

That I'm the man whose wife someday you'll be

They'll never believe me

They'll never believe me

That from this great big world you've chosen me!

 

"Yonder, a Rental" [by Anna Maria Hong]

Time to howl at the celestial sphere,
that full frontal silver dollar, the very
paintball of pallor and elemental other.
It’s all or nada as noonnight’s empanada

discloses her pretty quarter, the priest’s collar
hung high on the hook of evening’s fluent
wall. Hung like a juror bent on acquittal
who can’t stall any longer, you’re a cobbler

hawking copper coins in an Oriental
bazaar. The Sultan’s power went horizontal
long, long ago. It’s fine to be sentimental,

though there’s no need to bother. Grab a handful
of shine like a disc of doll hair, a dollop of Neufchâtel,
                                                           valor and force, vital—

from Ecotone