The Best American Poetry

Watching the Dodgers with Vin Scully, Second Inning

Every now and then life intrudes into the toy department.

-- Sportscaster Vin Scully [left, in his Fordham days, before he began calling the BrooKlyn Dodgers' games on the radio in the 1950s] on why LA shortstop Rafael Furcal was absent from tonight's game. Furcal and his wife were forced to evacuate their home in an area of La Canada Flintridge threatened by the massive fires.

-- sdh

On Movies and Beauties (part one) by Mark Strand

When I was very young, say, around seven or eight, I went in for cowboy flicks. I usually went with a pack of boys my own age; we paid our dime and watched a double feature. The National Anthem was played and sometimes there’d be a yo-yo contest. There were usually one or two cartoons, a serial of Superman or Captain Marvel and always Movietone Newsreels. I had no use for Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. I liked Randolph Scott, I guess because I admired his perfectly chiseled features and the fact that he didn’t sing. But I’ll talk about the male stars of my past at another time.

Now I want to discuss the females that I had begun to want to watch, the many on whom I developed a crush. I was nine or ten when I thought Esther Williams [left] was hot. It was her swimming, naturally, that did it for me. In those days I liked women who evinced some athleticism. I never really thought of them as women, but as grown up girls.  Esther Williams could swim. That was it for me. I thought her face a little broad, especially when she wore a swimming cap. The crush was short lived. I moved on. Athleticism ceased to be a necessity, since almost none of the female stars was athletic, at least not on screen. That is, with the exception of Ginger Rogers, whose dancing I considered a kind of athletic event. (As I grew older I ceased to think of it as merely that.) I should also mention Betty Grable [below right: the GIs' favorite pin-up girl in WW II], who does a terrific solo in “The Gay Divorcee.” But this and other Rogers/Astaire movies I saw sometimes as many as ten years after they first appeared.  It wasn’t simply Rogers's athleticism that got to me, it was her energy, her perkiness. That’s it: she was perky, despite those eyes that could be a shade soulful, a little hurt.

Other Perky cuties I had a crush on were Janet Blair, Joan Leslie. I have not seen Janet Blair since I was ten years old, so I can’t say what effect she would have on me now, but I recently watched “Flying Down to Rio” and took a good hard look at the young Ginger Rogers [left] but was not overwhelmed. More overwhelming was the seemingly endless Carioca dance numbers with Fred and an ensemble of hundreds (it seemed). And most overwhelming was Dolores Del Rio [below] to whom I had paid no attention when I was a boy. 

Ah Dolores! I ran into her once in an elevator in Mexico City back in 1953. I was with my father and he noticed her right away and practically fainted on the spot. She was then 48 and I was 19. She was still beautiful, but not the way she was in “Flying Down to Rio.” She was darkly glamorous, which is about all that I could be certain of in the few seconds we were on the elevator. In “Flying Down to Rio” you noticed the playful intensity of her eyes and her perfect features. But more about the true beauties next time.

-- Mark Strand

Mark Strand is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently New and Selected (Knopf, 2009) and Man and Camel (Knopf, 2008).  Read more about Mark Strand here.

Sneak Peek . . . The Best American Poetry 2009

From David Lehman's Foreword:

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her. Somewhere along the line, the notion took hold that poets were reluctant to write honestly about their peers. But in the absence of critics who are not themselves poets, surely the antidote is not to encourage the habit of rejection without explanation, denunciation without reasoned argument, and a slam of the gavel in high dudgeon as if a poem were a felony. Hostile criticism, criticism by insult, may have entertainment value, but animus does not guarantee honesty. As one who knows from firsthand experience what a book reviewer faces when writing on deadline, I can tell the real thing when I see it, and the hysterical over-the-top attack is often the product of a pose. Every critic knows it's easier (and more fun) to write a ruthless review rather than a measured one . . .

From Ashbery to Zapruder: The Best American Poetry 2009 launch reading on September 24.  Details here. (Books will be available for purchase.)

And don't miss the first time ever reading by the North Atlantic Poetry Organization Tea Club. Details here.

-- sdh

Film Still Series #125

From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman. Follow Bill's blog here.

William Waltz presents. . .a sestina by Noelle Kocot

Like a leaky zeppelin, National Night Out descends upon our cities the first Tuesday of every August. Some neighborhoods ignore it. Others, unfortunately, embrace it. This often leads to street blockades and forced mingling in the name of community and fun. The sad truth is the same hollow feeling that follows one home after an awkward wedding will very likely escort one through the streets after such a gathering. For poets the great pothole of awkwardness is met when an unfamiliar neighbor asks, “What sort of poetry do you write?” For the record, “human poetry” is my answer.

As an editor, I often field a similar query, “What kind of poems do you publish?” Protocol suggests the professional editor should be thoughtful, forthright, and “creative,” given the possibility of a sale at hand. But in all honesty, we simply publish poems we like. An astute reader might be able to identify a Conduit type, but I believe that same person would testify that we cast a wide net. Nevertheless, I can think of four, five, or maybe six poets who, as a group, might best represent the Conduit poetic sensibility. Since their membership in this unholy cabal is unbeknownst to them, I’ll keep their identities secret. Well, except for one, the author of this week’s poem, “Brooklyn Sestina: June, 1975,” Noelle Kocot.

Although we first published Ms. Kocot in “Drunk Genius” (#6) and then again in “Pedestrian” (#7), “Big Bang” (#9), “Extinction” (#13), “Gray Matters” (#15), and “Last Laugh” (#19), I had never had the pleasure of meeting her until last November in New York. That’s not to say we aren’t friends. We have forged a friendship over the telephone and through letters. But it’s her poems that get her published. She’s an incredible poet, a true poet, prolific and profound, vulnerable and victorious in her pursuit of love and wonder.

"Brooklyn Sestina: June, 1975” first appeared in our “Pedestrian” issue and was later included in her award-winning book 4 (Four Way Books). As this poem demonstrates, the sestina is well suited to follow the poet’s searching mind and to contain, just barely but perfectly, the unwieldy stuff of life.

-- William Waltz

Brooklyn Sestina: June, 1975

How can I conjure the vivdness of the plastic
Blue and orange chairs we'd slump
Into every morning before the tyranny of fractions,
Each afternoon after the sadism of lunch?
We'd just played "Boys against Girls,"
"Girls against Boys," slamming each other's small bodies

Into a schoolyard fence, as if to add to the body
Of what American feminism had become, its piles of plastic
Dolls dismembered like Bluebeard's wives, only this time by girls
Of single mothers slumped
Into plaid couches, too tired or too drunk to fix those cleanly cut-out lunches
Like the ones beamed into their living rooms through the Cyclopean fractal

Blue-rimmed eye of the cathode ray refracted
By those radio ballads that sent everybody
Who'd ever broken up to sobbing in their McDonald's Muzak lunches.
Why is it that everything smelled like plastic
As the yellow heatwave slumped
Against my salmon-colored building where the girls

Were jumping rope (the older girls
Skipping double Dutch)? Could it have been the fractious
Yentas looking on from sweaty beach chairs clumped
Together in the shade, their widowed bodies
Already melted and annealed to a tanned and cracking plastic?
The housewives who went on serving each other lunch

Like it would never end? I would soon be off to lunch
Myself at Jewish camp with a girl
My age named Rachel, offering her what I'd plastic-
Wrapped the night before, her six-year-old fractions
Of hands fumbling over my body
In return before our midday swim. No Cold War, no economic slump

Could touch us in that Brooklyn; Brooklyn, the word itself seems holy, a Cabalistic lunchbox
Yawning open for all the world to fathom its great plastic
Letters stretched bodiless
Across the level see-saw of the summer heat like the broken balloon of a girl's
Insides, her future a fractal-
Patterned leaf dangling from her family tree of dusty plastic.

And the shoulders on the bodies of the girls
Who hadn't been pinned to their beds at night slumped in the lunchroom
Nonetheless, its fractured spoons and forks still scattering across the dance floor of my
                  dreams, a threnody of plastic.

-- Noelle Kocot

Available Surfaces VII: In the Palm of the Poet's Hand [T.R. Hummer]

With this post, I conclude my week-long stint as guest blogger for Best American Poetry. It has been a pleasure writing for this venue and for this audience. My thanks to David Lehman for the invitation, and to the staff for keeping an eye on the technical side of things--and for reading what I wrote.

Ron and Ruth were talking about Thomas Aquinas. As soon as we walked through the door, after Ron introduced Ruth and me very briefly, Ron had said, “Ruth, there’s a question about Aquinas I’ve been wanting to ask; let me ask before I forget.” And then the two of them were off and running into a theological thicket where I could not follow and frankly did not want to.

Nothing against the Heavenly Doctor, mind you: I’ve read a pound or two of Aquinas in my time, though I’ve never found him terribly appealing (Augustine and Duns Scotus are more my speed, not that it’s a horse race). But Ron’s question was something very specific about a particular passage in the Summa Theologica. I was lost before the question was out of his mouth. Ruth, on the other hand, rode it like a surfer rides curl; she could quote chapter and verse, and pursued the problem Ron raised as adeptly as a trained theologian. As we sat down, the small room filled with the intensity of their talk. Ignored for the moment—for about twenty minutes in fact—I looked around

Out the casement window several ragged-looking palm trees were visible. Beyond them there was a brightening of the air, a sort of aura, that indicated water that I could not see from here; we were not far from the shore. This description might indicate we were in a balmy sub-tropical region, but in fact it was Weymouth in the United Kingdom; the water just out of sight below the window frame was the English Channel. As Ron and I had driven into Weymouth, I had noted the presence of palm trees along the beach with surprise: this hardly seemed the place for them; and indeed they hardly seemed to be prospering. Yet there they were—and they were just one among many surprising things about this place, and this day. 

"The Burning of Los Angeles" -- view from my street (by Mitch Sisskind)

Per the focus of this site, i always try to give a literary slant to things. So let's recall the painting from "Day of the Locust" ---->>

BAP 2009 Kickoff Reading: Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 7PM

On September 24, 2009. at 7 PM, in the New School's Tishman Auditorium (66 West 12 Street, ground floor), series editor David Lehman will host a gala launch reading for The Best American Poetry 2009, and it's free so we hope everyone will come except for freeloading ill-mannered creeps but there aren't any of those, are there, in the soi-disant poetry "community."
Among the contributors to BAP 2009 who have agreed to take past I mean take art I mean take part (steady, girl) are
John Ashbery
Mark Bibbins
Suzanne Cleary
Billy Collins
Mark Doty, Margaret Gibson, Douglas Goetsch, Michael Grabell, Dolores Hayden, Jennifer Michael Hecht reading the late Sarah Hannah's "The Safe House," Richard Howard, Tina Kelley, Phillis Levin, James Richardson, Mitch Sisskind, Tom Sleigh, Craig Morgan Teicher, Matthew Zapruder.
I'll be there! Look for me.
-- Molly Arden

The Amy Lowell No One Knows

The Taxi

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

-- Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Available Surfaces VI: Writ in Water [T.R. Hummer]

The place I spent my boyhood was landlocked; we were far from the ocean, and from any other kind of major body of water, whether significant lake or river. There were not even streams in that terrain: the water table was deep and did not break through the deep and fertile layers of soil laid down there millennia ago when our region was a shallow sea. Once those waters departed, there was nothing to replace them except what fell from the sky. The rich soil was not colonized by farmers until deep well technology made it possible to drill through thick layers of limestone to tap the aquifer there.

In the absence of natural standing water, our countryside was dotted with artificial ponds; these had started as watering places for livestock and fulfilled that function, but the landscape rapidly adopted them as part of the ecology. Unlike in drier and less arable regions, our little lakes did not sit uneasily or anomalously where they were constructed; they did not look like constructs at all, but quickly settled in and became necessary not only for cattle but also for a large array of flora and fauna that arrived with amazing speed from sources that were not immediately apparent. They were appropriated and integrated in such a way that one could hardly imagine the area without them. From the air, one could see that they speckled the landscape like scattered flecks of mica.

A quarter mile from our house, on the other side of a gradual upward slope (at the top of which my father had built his barn), there was one such pond. About five acres in extent, it was of medium size by the standards of that place, and well located, with an enormous oak tree just behind the dam providing both stability and, at the right time of day, shade. That was clearly by design, as the oak was older than the pond. Other, smaller trees—willows, mostly—had sprung up in the meanwhile, but not so many as to make any area impassable or inaccessible. The water was deepest by the dam; on the other side, there were extensive shallows where our cattle came to wade out, cool themselves, and drink. This they did on a very regular schedule, in the early morning and near sunset. They were often accompanied by their bird familiars, cattle egrets, which during the summer followed the herd continually, eating insects flushed out of the grass by the movements of the cattle; sometimes they rode on cows’ backs, picking bugs off the coats of the black angus my father favored and bred.

"The Sixties" [by James K. Baxter]

The Sixties
        for Louis Johnson

    'The icy dawn of the sixties'--
    Yes, you have it there.
    Today I saw a black sperm whale
    Rolled on the rocks at Pukerua Bay.   

    The stench grew loud as I came near,
    Gulls were grabbing at the kill.
    From that sleek projectile body
    Jutted a gigantic reddened phallus
    Mauled by the Cook Strait squid.   

    Under the sunset fires it seemed to be
    The body of our common love
    That bedrooms, bar rooms never killed,
    The natural power behind our acts and verses
    Murdered by triviality.   

    -- James K. Baxter

James K. Baxter is a New Zealand poet. This poem was adjudged the most "phallic and phallogocentric" of one hundred finalists by our trucking-mama troika of major truth-fucking mammals on balconies above angels behind archways between alleys in the blazing afternoon.

Some Kind of Sublime: Late August in New Orleans [by Kathleen Heil]

Some Kind of Sublime: a Madri Gras Indian Summer
-- a domestic dispatch from our Madrid correspondent Kathleen Heil

It's noon on a Thursday, two days before the fourth anniversary of the day the levees broke here in New Orleans, and the weather is all kinds of lovely -- only 84 degrees and 50 percent humidity, springtime of a certain kind for August in Louisiana. It means I can sit outside as I type, enjoy the breeze, tolerate the mosquitoes, and wish I had a sno-ball in my hands. [Photo credit: Corinne Keller].

Last night Leah Chase handed me the best bowl of gumbo z'herbs I'd ever tasted, best because it was dirty with spices, when so many gumbo z'herbs (like certain men?) are pretty but bland.  The bowl is part of a six-pot gumbo-for-all and book signing to kickoff the One Book, One New Orleans 2009 selection: Gumbo Tales by Sara Roahen. I wait in a long line for her to sign my book, then realize I am standing in the wrong line, these people are waiting to buy alcohol. Iin New Orleans the first order of business is always booze, even in Latter Library, but I already have my drink, so I go for the gumbo, which runs out quickly, and then the book signing; books being books, they never run out).  I get in the shorter line, which is still long enough that it snakes around the room.  As I wait I drink wine and eat cake and chat with New Orleans ladies who talk that lovely way New Orleans ladies do, loud and loose, like they got lost somewhere between Long Island and Boston had a drink and came home.  I ask the author annoying questions. Is being selected for One Book better than being singled out by Oprah? Does she have a favorite NOLA food? (Answers: a laugh and gumbo.)  I explain that although I am from here I can't seem to find my way home. I have to go back to Madrid. She smiles and signs my book lucky gal.

Later that night I walk by a Lucky Dog cart and into the Royal Sonesta Hotel for a benefit organized by Irvin Mayfield featuring the Afro-Cuban rhythms of Los Hombres Calientes. (Though some of Mayfield's session musicians are here, the other Hot Boy, Bill Summers, is not). Irvin sings and plays the trumpet and shekere with his whole body; he is joined by Ron Markham on the piano, Leon "Kid Chocolate" Brown on trumpet, tambourine, clave, and shekere, David Kalfus on bass, Michael Watson on slide trombone, Jamal Batiste on drums, and Luis Quintero playing the congas and cowbell with devotion-inspiring fierceness. Perhaps that's why there is a priest sitting in the VIP section -- the very priest that kicks my mother and me out of the VIP section, which doesn't seem very Christian of him.

These hombres start out playing some traditional Cuban rhythms, slide into a cool riff of Summertime and then back into the Latin jazz, closing the set with some traditional Mardi Gras Indian music. New Orleans is a city built upon so many contradictions they sometimes contain, koan like, their own (kind of) solution. I am transported by these rhythms but also saddened by the sublimity of the music, because I know I cannot suspend the moment any longer than the moment allows: this jazz set, like all jazz sets, must end.

So I raised my mojito high, I sang along when Irvin asked us to, I danced the funky butt to Iko Iko and flew my napkin flag, I prayed for my city the only way I knew how.

(Note: Irvin Mayfield's Love Sessions run through Sunday, August 29 and each night all ticket proceeds benefit a different charity.  Click here for more information and and a downloadable podcast of the August 26 set; here for information on One Book, One New Orleans and here for more about Gumbo Tales author Sara Roahen.)

Available Surfaces V: Can Teaching be Written? [T.R. Hummer]

“I hear and sometimes share some fundamental objections. Creative-writing programs and workshops are a commodification of the art. They attempt to express or enact something that is finally and importantly solitary. They water down our sensibilities, as they corrupt the notion of individual style. You simply can’t teach vision, so you can’t teach creative writing.

Well, can you?

What happens in a creative writing classroom?”

 --David Baker, http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/in_defense_of_teaching/

I stand before a new class, Introduction to Poetry Writing. There are, believe it or not, 55 students present. Where I teach, the introductory courses are big, with breakout sections led by TAs. My responsibility is, theoretically, to orient and inform the students about matters of craft, and to begin to give them a road map to the wilderness that is the past and present—not to mention the future—of poetry. I also am responsible for supervising and mentoring the TAs, who, while still doing time in the salt mines of teaching composition, are about to take the wheel of their first writing workshop.

 

If the workshop model for teaching creative writing is often questioned and even reviled, what about this approach? I am lecturing about creative writing. What possible good can that do?

 

For years I resisted this kind of pedagogy, not only in the teaching of writing but also in literary studies. Small must be better, always, I thought. And I still think small group study is absolutely essential, in creative writing and elsewhere. But my recent experiences with large group study convinces me that there is a place in the curriculum for this approach as well. Call me old fashioned (all together now. . .), but the suspicion has grown increasingly strong in me that undergraduates suffer from a lack of broad survey literary courses: not that such courses must be taught as lecture courses, but they generally used to be taught that way, and their disappearance coincides with the decline in lecture-style teaching. Student knowledge has deepened in certain areas, but is spotty: they don’t have an aerial view, or a good topographical map of the territory. In creative writing as in other fields, such a vision can be indispensible.

Two Ghosts of a Chance

Tom Clark's "Ghost of a Chance" (after Mallarme)

Lee Wiley, "Ghost of a Chance"

"I need your love so badly, I love you oh so madly, but I don't stand a ghost of a chance with you. . ."

We invite readers to write a brief inventive essay (one hundred words or less) speculating on possible connections between the ghosts of Mallarme and Lee Wiley.

"The Flesh: A Deposition" [by Tom Disch]

The Flesh: a Deposition

A traitor am I? Then you're another.
All those nights of steady inconspicuous
Consumption, the days inert--
Weren't they a treason on a par with mine?
Did you do nothing to deserve
The clogged pipes, the clotted ducts,
The fatty deposits, the blackouts when
You became visibly imbecile? Don't blame
The body you used like some dumb donkey
To lug the great sack of your self
From one trough to the next.
In another day and age, you know, I'd be
The one in charge -- you would go to a temple
To adore me, respendent, cast in bronze
With emerald eyes and ivory robes
And that archaic smirk that gods
And movie stars have in common. You think --
And that makes you something special?
You are nothing but the sum of all
Your expectorations. You make me sick.

-- Tom Disch (1939-2008)
February 12, 2008

Remembering Ted Kennedy [by Tom Healy]

Ed note:  I've been corresponding lately with poet Tom Healy because around here we're excited about his new book of poems What the Right Hand Knows and we're working out the particulars of his November guest blogging week. Tom had the good fortune to know Senator Kennedy and sent this message, which he agreed to let me post below: 

If today had been my blog day, I would obviously have celebrated Ted Kennedy. He gave Fred and me giant bear hugs, laughs and a kiss whenever he saw us. It was the inimitable embrace he gave all of America -- an intensity of respect and love and belief in everything we could imagine for ourselves, as well as a little good-hearted elbow in the ribs always to keep it real.

And I might have done a post on the kind of sonorous, big heart, tear-in-the-eye poetry Ted Kennedy liked and frequently quoted from memory at dinner parties and on public occasions.  It was often famous work -- Frost, Yeats, Hardy, Blake -- that edged toward uplift, sacrifice and self-effacement: the kind of poems that make you go quiet while ice cubes clink in the glass. (After all, niece Caroline anthologized many of these "family" poems into bestsellers!)

But what was strange on the few times I heard Kennedy quote poetry was how the meanings of individual poems often blurred and what lingered was a warm feeling that probably has its own long word in German meaning "how the great man quoting poems makes you feel more fleetingly ennobled than had the poet herself actually spoken."  Well, sure, Kennedy comes out of that not so subtly clan and class-affirming Victorian aesthetic tradition of aristocrats in public service, where kitsch glides against humor on the lubrication of drink and Marx stands in the corner of the room glowering at the whole sentimental mess.

Fine, call me sentimental.  I'm Irish.  I like to drink.  I loved Ted Kennedy.  And I loved that he loved poetry, even if it didn't always quite seem to matter what poetry he loved at the time he was loving it.

Thank you, Tom

-- sdh

The Great Baseball Song (by Larry Epstein)

It's the roaring wave of noise, the crack of the bat, the dazzling flow of the grass across the field, the throat-killing cheers and boos, the willing suspension of disbelief that this is just a game. This is baseball. And what would baseball be without its anthem?

It was in 1908 that the songwriter and performer Jack Norworth was on the subway. There in front of him was a sign that read "Baseball Today--Polo Grounds." Norworth wished he could be there, but, unlike the untold numbers of people who had the same longing but who were without a way to express it, he could at least write a song. Norworth found an envelope and wrote the lyrics to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." (That piece of paper is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame.)

It should be noted that while Norworth loved the Giants, he had never attended a baseball game in his life and wouldn't for another 32 years. (He must not have been happy later that year; the Cubs beat the Giants in the league championship and went on to win the World Series. It was the last time the Cubs won a World Series. Maybe it's because of the unrecognized Norworth Curse).

Norworth took the lyrics to Albert Von Tilzer, the younger brother of Harry Von Tilzer, a popular songwriter and publisher on Tin Pan Alley. The original family name was Gumbinsky (or some variant). Aaron Gumbinsky changed his name first to Harry Gumm and then to Harry Von Tilzer--Tilzer being his mother's maiden name and Von literally meaning "from" because it was a sign of German nobility. However odd a choice that might have been for Jewish songwriters, Albert adopted it as well. (If the name "Gumm" sounds familiar, it was Judy Garland's birth name.)

Albert was no more a visitor to ball parks than Jack Norworth. It took Albert two more decades before he attended a game. But Albert liked the lyrics, wrote the music, and on May 2, 1908 the pair sent two copies to the Copyright Office. One of America's favorite songs was born. Nora Bayes, a popular vaudeville star and Norworth's wife, introduced the song and helped make it popular.

While all baseball fans join in the rendition of the song during the seventh-inning stretch, they really are only singing the song's chorus. The complete song is about Katie Casey (or, as the 1927 re-working of the song has it, Nelly Kelly). Katie tells her boyfriend she prefers a ball game to a show. This romantic element, crucial to its vaudeville success, has been completely removed leaving the baseball game as some kind of utopia for fans who never want to leave. That is, the brilliance of the song (beyond its being both rousing and easy to sing) is that it isn't really about baseball but about a feeling of being away from the troubles of the world, happy, and in a community with thousands of temporary friends. This joyful mental place releases people from worries and responsibilities, from concerns about diets and debts. People eat and spend with abandon at games because of that feeling.

Indeed, the song's (that is Katie's) plea to buy Cracker Jacks caused sales of the product to soar. It had been introduced at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago by a popcorn company and first offered in ballparks in 1907.

The song continued to grow in popularity. The newly-emerging nickelodeons used the song during intermissions. The lyrics were reproduced on painted-up lantern slides so the audience could sing it. Today crowds no longer need any lyric prompts. Everyone knows the words, and everyone knows the tune. Not bad for two all-but-forgotten songwriters.

Available Surfaces IV: Earth Angel [T. R. Hummer]

. . . .for beauty is God's handwriting." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first time I flew to England, I woke up from a troubled airplane sleep and looked out the plane’s porthole. We were over Ireland, the pilot announced, still pretty high but beginning to descend. I was struck immediately by the clarity of definition of the fields below. I don’t mean that they were in some way better focused then what I was accustomed to seeing from the air in the USA; I mean that their edges were sharp and definite. Ireland—and England too, once we reached it—was a mosaic, or an opaque green stained glass window, its leading starkly apparent from the air. I realized that what I could see was a long history of ownership, of human occupancy. The outlines of a narrative were deeply incised, and long maintained, on this earth. Later, when I walked there, I could see the details of it, but not the underlying form, the skeleton. All of it was symptomatic of a social and a physical history, one that had been written and rewritten time out of mind, so many times it would be an archeologist’s lifework to resurrect even a fragment of the rough drafts.

An aerial view of a typical landscape in the USA—no matter how complex the natural features may be—has softer margins; parts of the midwest and south appear almost Impressionistic when seen from the sky. This is partly because we, the fence-building Anglos, have occupied these surfaces for a far shorter time than our ancestors across the pond have lived on theirs. We have fought plenty of battles over ownership, but have had less time to build stark monuments to what we have won, or stolen, and held onto. Stone fences may or may not make good neighbors, but in any case we employ them less than our counterparts in the UK. Our technologies of demarcation are more fluid than theirs; we expect, I suppose, to live on our land for a shorter time, generationally speaking. A barbed wire fence is effective, but impermanent, as any rancher will testify. And a barbed wire fence is almost invisible from the air.

Nevertheless, we have written, and are writing, our story on the landscape too. The perception that our story is newer than England’s or Ireland’s is an illusion precisely to the extent that it is an extension of theirs, a continuation of it, and so it continues to occlude and deny other narratives that American earth has recorded from millennia of the stories of societies, technologies, demarcations that were here long before us. But the story that we read from the air is undeniable: field, rangeland, circular track of a wheeled irrigation system, yes; but also mounded earth of another people’s epos.

In the agricultural region where I grew up, there were farms whose fields had of necessity to accommodate remnants of so-called “Mound Builder” culture: mysterious hillocks on flat floodplains where no such hillocks should be. From the air, these mounds appear as nodes around which the poem of the plow divides itself. The effort to bulldoze them away would be great, but I never heard anyone even speculate about that possibility. Though the mounds were not burial barrows, they were monuments to the dead. We were capable of razing monuments to the dead: our history is full of such razing. But why go out of your way to do it? Better to plow around it. The history that is written in the earth belongs more to the dead than it belongs to us.

Happy Birthday Prez! Jamie Katz's tribute in Smithsonian

The great jazz saxophonist Lester Young (left, with Billie Holiday) would have turned 100 this August 27th and our friend Jamie Katz has a moving tribute to "the Prez" over at Smithsonian.  One of the first albums I ever bought for myself was The Big Three with tracks featuring Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, and Lester Young. Listening to the Young selections was a revelation.  I wonder if Jamie would recommend a recording. . .

-- sdh

More Murder, Hollywood Style, or The Magnate Did It (by Laura Orem)

Last week, I wrote about the unsolved 1922 murder of director William Desmond Taylor. This week, I thought it would be fun to continue by  writing about another mysterious Hollywood death of the silent era, that of Thomas Ince.

Thomas Ince (below) was a film actor, director, and producer, sometimes called the "father of the Western." Born in 1882 to a family of stage actors, he began working in the infant film industry in New York in 1911. Ince is credited with inventing the concept of the "shooting script" and of planning out all aspects of production before shooting - at the time, movies were essentially made up as they were shot - and of redefining the producer's role as the overseer of production from start to finish, rather than just the financier of the film. In 1915, he moved to Santa Ynez Canyon, not far from Hollywood, and founded his own studio, Inceville, where his organized and carefully thought-out system of film-making produced some of the finest Westerns of the silent era. One of his greatest stars was the cowboy hero, William S. Hart. He also had a reputation for discovering and grooming new talent.

The mystery surrounding his death begins in November 1924, when Ince and his wife Nell were invited for a weekend cruise aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht, the Oneida, to celebrate Ince's 43rd birthday. Besides Hearst and the Inces, also on board for the festivities were Hearst's mistress, the actress Marion Davies (right, with balloons, on board the Oneida); Charlie Chaplin, with whom Davies was rumored to be having an affair; the then-unknown columnist, Louella Parsons; the author Elinor Glyn; and assorted other hangers-on and wannabes who had somehow cadged a coveted invitation to hang out with Hollywood's high and mighty.

The boat left San Pedro on Saturday, November 15. Thomas and Nell Ince joined the cruise in San Diego on Sunday for Ince's birthday celebration. By early Monday morning - or maybe Tuesday - Ince was dead.

What happened? Well, that depended on whom you asked.