The Best American Poetry

"Black, Brown, and Beige": Happy birthday, Duke Ellington

1.
The horns say yes proceed
And the sea delivers
Nine waves of applause
Black, brown, and beige
Or red, white, and blue
At Carnegie Hall in World War II

2.
A couple of winds
Sing back and forth like birds
As the sky darkens and clouds
Release their energy
The horns have their say
And even the violins agree
So the answer is yes,
A cymbal crash,
Before the trumpet takes up
The wail and the season changes
From black to brown to orange
In the wah-wah woods

3. You could have one instrument
And the music would continue
Mute the horns
And the music will continue
The notes like masks on the subway
And the streets are empty
Except for the music
Take a walk with me on Broadway
And let the games resume 

4/ 29/ 20

Great Movie Music: Fifteen examples that avoid the usual suspects [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar

By David Lehman | April 28, 2020

Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot (1959). (TCM Mediaroom/Wikimedia Commons)

In an effort to be mildly unconventional, this list of songs, soundtracks, and musical moments from cinematic history omits all “best song” Oscar winners (“Over the Rainbow,” “Thanks for the Memory,” “Moon River”), old favorites (“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “As Time Goes By”), justly celebrated soundtracks (Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, Vertigo, 2001), and numbers performed by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland.

1. “Isn’t it Romantic” (music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart) in Love Me Tonight(1932). This great standard is sung in a musical relay race begun by Paris tailor Maurice Chevalier in his shop and continued by a customer in a top hat, a taxi driver, a composer, a troop of soldiers, and a gypsy band, before reaching princess Jeanette MacDonald in the casement of her palace boudoir. The glamorous melody is whistled, performed as a violin solo, and sung as a show tune, a march, and an aria. You hear the tune in a lot of movies but usually without the words that you get here.
   
   For the other fourteen, click here.

Squibs 412-415 [by Alan Ziegler]

412: In the early 60s, Jerry White has a folk music show on WJRZ, New Jersey. One stormy night in 1964, Jerry plays Another Side of Bob Dylan in its entirety before its release. I can barely make out the lyrics through static, but one line sings through: “For every hung-up person in the whole-wide universe.” On Sundays in the summer, Jerry White broadcasts live from the band shell in Palisades Amusement Park (home of the largest salt water swimming pool in the world). A bunch of us go as often as we can, cheering in the car whenever WJRZ runs the commercial for “Dennison’s, a men’s clothier, located near The Flagship, where money talks nobody walks, open 8 a.m. until 5 the next morning.” We keep swearing we’ll go some night at 3 a.m. but we never do.

    Many of the Palisades performers will go on to mainstream fame, such as Judy Collins, John Sebastian, Jose Feliciano (accompanied on stage at Palisades with his seeing-eye dog), and Jesse Colin Young (years later before a Youngbloods concert I will ask him about Jerry White and he will take a step backward with his mouth open and say “Wow”). Others will never transcend the folk scene, like Patrick Sky (whom Jerry White saw getting off the Crazy Mouse with Buffy St. Marie); Mel Lyman (who wailed a hypnotic “Amazing Grace” on his harmonica and went on to head the Lyman Family cult in Boston); and Peter LaFarge (whose “Ballad of Ira Hayes” would be covered by the likes of Johnny Cash and Kinky Friedman).

    On the radio, Jerry White sometimes plays Peter LaFarge’s protest song “Coyote,” sung chant-style with each line ascending into falsetto, which provokes us to end sentences in falsetto, resulting in contagious, spasmodic giggles. Driving to Palisades on a night Peter LaFarge is scheduled to appear, we consider not taking our usual front-and-center table, afraid we’ll start laughing if he sings “Coyote.” But we do take our regular seats, hoping either that LaFarge won’t sing “Coyote” or that we will be able to behave ourselves. He sings “Ira Hayes” and “As Long As the Grass Shall Grow” (which refers to the length of time the white man’s land treaty was supposed to be in effect), finishing to thunderous applause, much of it coming from our relieved table.

    Jerry White invites an encore and Peter asks for a request. Now, if one of us requested “Sing Coyote!” it could be explained as a deviant outburst, leading to peer repudiation. But we all yell “Coyote, Coyote.”

 

413: Unreasonable Facsimiles

 

414: The barber leans against the shoulder of his fifth customer on a Tuesday afternoon. He pretends the contact is a byproduct of maneuvering into the optimal snipping angle, but artistry is not the issue, he is snipping as much air as hair. He is bone weary. The barber promises never to cut another hair if he can somehow get through this day without crumbling to the floor or being berated by a customer looking through the hand-held rearview mirror. He imagines fleeing the shop to some distant shore where his soul could reincarnate. But the barber rallies off the shoulder, rhythm blessedly resumes, and he instinctively clips and snips in all the right places. At the end of the day, the barber sweeps the village of hair into one pile, which he scoops into his arms and carries to his room attached to his shop. He adds today’s harvest to the blanket of hair on his bed, hair that never gets grayer or thinner than the day it was shorn. He sleeps the sleep of a man at one with his life’s work.

 

415: Last minute, best minute.

Met Percent: Week Nineteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Couple Politics 

Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, Fra Filippo Lippi, ca. 1440, gallery 644; Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze), Jacques Louis David, French, 1788, not on view; Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, John Singer Sargent, 1897, gallery 771.

The Filippo Lippi caught my eye, even online, while simulating my Met visits. This inconvenience is certainly a petty annoyance compared to our viral trauma. Covid-19.  If history is a model, the plague that devastated medieval Europe did lay the foundations for humanism and the Renaissance. May we be half as lucky.

So . . . I go to the Met map . . . pick a gallery, find its title (e.g. 603, Filippo Lippi to Botticelli) . . . search by gallery number and title . . . hope to find the works in that room. Be wary . . . the search lists every 603, including, for example, the 19th century horse carriage drawing, Design for Coupé, no. 603 ("Medium Size Clarence on C Springs"). 

The Filippo Lippi is the earliest surviving double portrait. It demonstrates the Italian preference for the profile over the three-quarter view. Her sleeve is embroidered with letters spelling "lealta" (faithful). The scale and pose of the couple invite a lot of discussion in the blog world. . . . They are on separate planes. . . . His hand is on an ownership crest . . . his to share? his to gain? And of course the male’s shadow refers to Pliny’s origin of painting; “a lover traces the contours of the shadow cast by his beloved” (my italics). Does this mean she is the inventor of painting? Robert Burton in his 17th-century bestseller The Anatomy of Melancholy claims the action is by the woman, tracing her man’s shadow, to comfort her while he is off in the wars.

Lavoisier was a research chemist, analyzing gunpowder, oxygen, and the chemical composition of water. In 1789 he published a chemistry textbook illustrated by his wife. Because of his politics, Lavoisier’s portrait was withdrawn from the 1789 Paris Salon and not exhibited for a century. Madame Lavoisier sits unusually higher than her husband in the painting and is looking directly outwards . . . at David with whom she had studied. Lavoisier was guillotined, David died in exile, not allowed burial in France. And Marie Anne? She remarried “badly” and kept the portrait in her rooms for the rest of her life. 

Sargent decided to portray Edith Minturn Stokes in sporty daywear with a Great Dane at her side. Her husband had "a sudden inspiration," he later recalled, when the dog became unavailable, and "offered to assume the role of the Great Dane in the picture." - MetText

 

Blackboard My-Opia 

Left: Mrs. Welch’s class photo; Right: Monet’s Haystacks, Art Institute of Chicago.

Mrs. Welch, my 1st grade teacher, discovered I was myopic. The blackboard was interesting, but I was unaware of anything written on it. Or aware of maybe a pattern. A few marks. Impressionism was the first painting genre that - I remember feeling relieved when viewing the Haystacks at the Art Institute in Chicago. They made sense. 

Much later, I read Trevor-Roper’s The World through Blunted Sight. He argued that, compared to the general population, “most of the Impressionists” were myopic. And most refused to wear glasses while painting, if they wore them at all.

“Take those vulgar things away!” - Cezanne, when offered glasses.

“Bon Dieu, je vois comme Bouguereau.” - Monet, rejecting both glasses and the conservative painter.

Left: Study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1884, not on view; Right: Rapids on the Petite Creuse at Fresselines, Claude Monet, 1889, gallery 800.

I still prefer Seurat’s studies to his final paintings. I draw with my specs on - more so the view from each eye is similar - but I view art without them.

 

Speaking of Bouguereau

Left: Tobias Saying Good-Bye to his Father, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1860, Hermitage. 
Right: Tobias Curing His Father's Blindness, 1630–35, gallery 637; Healing of Tobit, 1630-40, Hermitage; Tobias curing his father's blindness, 1640, San Zaccaria, Venice; Bernardo Strozzi.

The Bouguereau is a lovely Pre-Raphaelite work and clearly illustrates Monet’s fear and loathing. 

The three Strozzi canvases all have vibrant brushwork. The apocryphal Book of Tobit is the subject: archangel Raphael directs Tobias to cure his father’s blindness with the gall of a fish. Bile, irritating as it is to the eye, was evidently a traditional trachoma remedy. It must have had some success, as it remained in use for two thousand years.

Tobit, father of Tobias, earned the cure by paying the debts of the unburied dead. Only then could they be legally buried. Strozzi painted this theme at least eight times. The theme also inspired Rembrandt, Jan Massys, de Vos, van Hemessen, Carracci, Carlone, Assereto, Feti, and Guardi. There is a lot of Tobit Art.

In Funk and Wagnalls’ Folklore Dictionary, the spirits of the rescued deceased - often in animal form (the attentive dog) - are known as The Grateful Dead. This entry did not go unnoticed by Jerry Garcia, who came upon it while playing a game of Fictionary.

There is something about paintings of the blind . . . It would have been interesting to see the myopics interpret the subject. 

 

Gallery 638: “The Most Perfect Style”

Left to right: Michelangelo, Attributed to Daniele da Volterra, gallery 638; Raphael self-portrait, Uffizi, Florence; Leonardo (assumed) self portrait, Uffizi, Florence; Titian self portrait, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

Frames left to right:  Pierced-Acanthus frame, not on view; 603 gallery frame; Reverse frame, 1640, gallery 958.

The Most Perfect Style: Finding out what is in Gallery 638 online is a challenge. Who’s in there is most clear: Masters and Influencers. “The sixteenth century in Rome, Florence, and Venice mark a high point in the history of art. Artists as different as Caravaggio and Ingres, Rubens and Reynolds, defined their achievement vis-à-vis the legacy of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian.” - MetText

Goethe recounts how, when in Rome in 1787, he and a companion “argued about the rival merits of Michelangelo and Raphael . . . and we ended up in joint praise of Leonardo da Vinci.”

Left to right: The Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist, Andrea del Sarto, 1528; Venus and the Lute Player, Titian, 1565–70; Mars and Venus United by Love, 1570s, Paulo Veronese. Gallery 638.

There are as many “top Renaissance master” rankings as there are rankers. The Met rank, noted above, is made “vis-à-vis” its superlative modifier of an absolute adjective:  “most perfect”.

Del Sarto has been in and out of the canon for five hundred years. Sometimes “out” because of character (an opinion of character, usually Vasari’s), or because of innovations (by, for example, Tintoretto) - adamantly painting religious subjects in contemporary dress. Then again one could be “in” by impact: “Veronese was the happiest of painters and produced the happiest pictures in the world." - Henry James

My father always cautioned me, “De gustibus!” - so often, that the “non es disputandem” was not needed. No need to be distracted by the taste of others . . . perfect, more perfect, or most perfect.

The Rule of Three: Film Studies C-3003 Final Exam

Why are there always three sailors or soldiers, never two or four, on shore leave or furlough?

(a) Because Gene Kelly favored the “rule of three”
(b) Because one can sing, one can dance, and one can provide comic relief
(c) Because human kind cannot bear very much reality
(d) Because, according to Freud, “three” is a magic number and a phallic symbol
(e) Because the sergeant tells the captain to lay off his daughter until the sailor marries Wilma.

Which movie illustrates the condition described by T. S. Eliot in the garden?
(a) All of them 
(b) All musicals except It's Always Fair Weather

(c) .Hitchcock's Hollywood films except Rear Window and Vertigo
(d) The Third Man but only if seen in Vienna on a Friday evening
(e) Casablanca

Who is "the third man" in The Third Man?

(a) Fred MacMurray 
(b) Claire Bloom's lover when they reach the Berlin Wall and begin to climb
(c) Harry Lime
(d) Hamlet
(e) Franz Kindler 

 When Carol Reed made The Fallen Idol,

(a) he understood that he could not be faithful to Graham Greene's story
(b) he asked Orson Welles for advice on casting the butler
(c) he cast his own butler as the butler 
(d) he was dating Carol Burnett
(e) he and she sang carols with Carroll O'Connor

The star of the movie was

(1) Arletty
(2) Ilse Lund
(3) Laurence Olivier as Hamlet
(4)The man who didn't shoot Liberty Valance

(5) Madeleine Elster's gray dress at Ernie's

Who is the “odd man out” in Carol Reed’s film with James Mason?

(a) Shell
(b) Lukey
©  Kathleen
(d) Johnny McQueen
(e) Father Tom

How did the British top brass get William Holden to volunteer for the dangerous mission to blow up the bridge in a Burmese jungle?

(a) Because they appealed to his sense of fair play.
(b) Because he was a queer bird, even for an American.
(c) Because he has done what Don Draper will do in Korea: he steals the identity of an officer killed in an action that he survives. But unlike Draper he is found out and hasn’t any choice.
(d) Because they reminded him that he had already been in a POW camp in Germany
(e) Because he is depicted shirtless at the POW camp reminding the viewer of Picnic with Kim Novak.

 

What made Barbara Stanwyck scream?

(a) She phoned the number her lover gave her and the voice on the other end said, "City Morgue."
(b) She said we're both rotten and he said only you're a little bit more rotten
(c) She beat Henry Fonda at poker
(d) She saw Addison De Witt commit a murder and try to pin it on her
(e) When she went to bed with Robert Taylor, he called her Ruby Catherine Stevens

What are the last words spoken in Double Indemnity?

(a) "Round up the usual suspects."
(b) "Straight down the line."
(c) "I love you, too."
(d) "How fast was I going, officer?"
(e) "Sorry, baby, I'm not buying."

In The Best Years of Our Lives, Hoagy Carmichaael

(a) orders a beer for the navy but lets army and air force get drunk as a skunk
(b) doesn't play "How Little We Know" on the piano for Lauren Bacall to sing 
(c) teaches Homer to play "Chopsticks" with his hooks while Al watches and Fred in the phone booth breaks things off with Peggy
(d) owns the bar where Dana Andrews meets Teresa Wright 
(e) invented the hoagy by shoving in a roll everything he could find in the icebox.

Harold Bloom on Jazz

Harold Bloom [photo by Sue Mingus]

. . . the whole jazz tradition from at least Amstrong on features what was called "cutting." And cutting is the pure instance – from the Greeks on, and it was revived by Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzche – of the agonistic spirit; the agon or the contest. The last cutting contest I heard was the rather unequal match between the extremely brave Branford Marsalis and Sonny Rollins – very brave of Branford. Of all living masters in jazz now, Rollins is surely the greatest extant…… Among poets it’’s always a competition. Mr. Stevens and Mr. Eliot existed at the same time. Mr. Eliot thought well of Wallace Stevens and published him in England by Faber & Faber. Stevens refused to say a word about Eliot in prose, though it entered into the letters occasionally and it was family tradition; that’’s how they told me he didn’t like Eliot or his poetry. Didn’t like the fact that Harmonium had been crowded out by The Waste Land in 1922……

Harold Bloom in conversation with Chris Lydon, at Bloom’s home in New Haven. http://www.radioopensource.org/at_home_with_harold_bloom_3_the_jazz_bridge/

first posted June 30, 2008

"Lucky You" (a collaborative ode to Woody Allen, with a Harry James soundtrack)

On August 9, 2016, for the “Next Line, Feature” that The American Scholar posts on its website, we were directed to write couplets that would extend and complete an ode to Woody Allen begun a month earlier. I chose couplets from three poets and added one of my own. Here are the couplets I selected:

Paul Michelsen

“You would’ve checked out, too, but you remembered this:
Strict Freudians charge you for the sessions you miss.”

Angela Ball

A cloud wears your mother’s face. She says, “Get a man”
“Or woman if you’d rather.” Something sweet and lowdown

Calls to you, suggests you borrow mighty Aphrodite’s
Magic, ask a stranger, “What’s new, Pussycat,” take a chance on life.

Charise Hoge

Ask Hannah and her sisters:
how hers is hers, she is his, and he is hers?

Magic of attraction has no trickery;
blame it on the moonlight, or heart’s thievery,

David Lehman

Or the marvelous piano soundtrack: Rodgers & Hart’s “Manhattan”
In Café Society, the men in tuxes, the ladies in red satin.

So here we are, a twenty-line poem, written collaboratively by six of us:

Lucky You

Watching The Purple Rose of Cairo on the Independent Film Channel,
You’re freed from all that’s tawdry, dull, and real by using your control panel.

You nosh on a slab of good-for-you chocolate, a victory for Woody,
And pour a snifter full of cognac, wearing your ex’s old hoodie.

Five foot five and vegetarian, like Woody, movies your lingua franca,
You covet the ivory dinner jacket Bogey wore in Casablanca.

Ask the clarinetist at the Carlyle: What is irony?
Is it success at running but failure to take the money?

Ask Hannah and her sisters:
how hers is hers, she is his, and he is hers?

You would’ve checked out, too, but you remembered this:
Strict Freudians charge you for the sessions you miss.

A cloud wears your mother’s face. She says, “Get a man”
“Or woman if you’d rather.” Something sweet and lowdown

Calls to you, suggests you borrow mighty Aphrodite’s
Magic, ask a stranger, “What’s new, Pussycat,” take a chance on life.

Magic of attraction has no trickery;
blame it on the moonlight, or heart’s thievery,

Or the marvelous piano soundtrack: Rodgers & Hart’s “Manhattan”
In Café Society, the men in tuxes, the ladies in red satin

Paul Michelsen provided the title and line one. Millicent Caliban wrote line two. The second stanza is half Angela Ball and half Christine Rhein. Angela wrote stanza three; I wrote stanza four.  

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-snifter-and-a-hoodie/#.XqNeIv9KiM8
https://theamericanscholar.org/play-it-sam/#
https://theamericanscholar.org/ode-to-woody-allen/#

 

"Pepys in the Time of Plague" (part III of III) [by Thomas Moody]

“…do lament the condition we are in, by a negligent Prince and a mad Parliament.” — Samuel Pepys

Reading these entries with the benefit of nearly four centuries of hindsight, we know that London recovers, and that Pepys’ worst fears are not warranted. He survives with his wife and family relatively unaffected, and by November of that year the number of deaths in London are beginning to fall at a rate significant enough to provide him with the hope of the worst having passed. Pepys’ thoughts then turn to speculating on the future. “It is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to periwiggs,” Pepys writes, “for nobody will dare to buy any haire, for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.” As trivial as this thought might first appear, it is deceivingly perceptive; what Pepys is really asking is “what will London look like after the crisis has passed?” His is a very literal interpretation of the question, regarding the fashion. But at the same time it is strikingly, if unintentionally, insightful: a periwig identified one as a member of a particular class, moneyed enough to afford the latest styles. After the periwig, how will class—that is, one’s identity—now be made visibly known? More generally, Pepys touches upon the rewriting of our shared cultural vocabulary the crisis has forced upon society, enquiring into the signs and symbols to be used to navigate this new, post-plague world. What Pepys is asking, in other words, is what will be valued?

This is a question many of us are beginning to ask ourselves, with some hoping that our current crisis will engender a revolution in personal values, national politics, international relations, even a kind of shift in global morality away from consumer driven capitalism. It is a noble thought to help palliate the torrent of catastrophic news. And so how did the world look to Pepys after the Great Plague and the Great Fire? Well, much the same as it did prior. The King and his aristocracy are debauched, the poor suffer, and the country is the worse for it. “The kingdom is an ill state through poverty; a fleete going out and no money to maintain it, or set it out; seamen yet unpaid and mutinous when pressed to go out again. So we are all poorer, and in pieces—God help us! while the peace is like to go on between Spain and France; and then the French may be apprehended able to attack us. So God help us!” Yet Pepys is still Pepys, in all his flawed brilliance. His taste for life  and love undulled, as hopefully ours will be, no matter how long we are forced to be served this horrific, TV-dinner version of the world.

For part I of Thomas Moody's report, click here. For part II, here.

Geoffrey O'Brien's "Phantom Empire" [by David Lehman]

Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire (1993) is one of the all-time great odes to Hollywood. In gorgeous prose O'Brien adopts the associative logic of a Hollywood dream to address the subject of movies in general and specific movies that illustrate a point or document a lifelong love of the screen. The insights are imaginative and spring off the page. Examples:

"The decades were not successive but simultaneous. . . . Certain individuals developed specialized tastes for particular years: there were self-created 1929 people, 1957 people. 'I've been in the forties for months.' History was the rack from which they picked hats and gloves, witticisms and courtships."

"You could end up adopting a whole life. Young people chose to become dead actors, walking around in borrowed accents and clothes. James Dean went everywhere. . . . It could get out of hand; there was such a thing as caring too much. Some found it necessary to follow Jimmy into his death car, to share Marilyn's pills."

Watching Rene Clair's A Nous liberté (1931) forty or more years after it was made, knowing what happened in the interim, "was like watching, in slow motion, the prelude to a car crash." 

"John Ford constructed a scale model containing all he wished to preserve of civilization -- a portable world in which John Wayne and Ward Bond could swap drinks and war stories until the end of time. . . ."

"You wore [the director's] eyes like a pair of trick glasses  turning everything you looked at into a military parade (John Ford), a masked ball (Max Ophuls), a series of medieval tableaux (Sergei Eisenstein), a blank-verse melodrama enacted by shadows (Orson Welles), or a fever dream in which you giggled as you watched your worst fears materialize (Luis Bunuel)."

"What you knew of history came off the screens. Periodically you had your memory jogged by a rapid montage of history's greatest hits: clips of the most memorable earthquakes, plane crashes, invasions, assassinations. Each event had its clip, and finally became its clip."

"President Reagan was just another Clint Eastwood fan. Eventually the ceremony would roll around and the awards would be handed out for best century, best war, best achievement in political manipulation."

To anyone who loves (or is just curious about) Dead of Night and The Fallen Idol, The Woman in the Window and The Dark Mirror, The Blue Angel and Stray Dog, La Chienne and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, I joyously recommend The Phantom Empire -- DL

"Pepys in the Time of Plague" (part II of III) [by Thomas Moody]

“In the evening home to supper; and there, to my great trouble, hear that the plague is come into the City; but where should it begin but in my good friend and neighbours’, Dr. Burnett, in Fanchurch Street: which in both points trouble me mightily.” — Samuel Pepys

When the plague does appear in London, it is again recorded by Pepys as rumor, uncertain and ominous. On April 30th, 1665, he notes that there are “great fears of the sickness here in the city, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up.” But by the start of summer, the plague unequivocally materializes: “The towne grows very sickly” he writes on June 15th, “and people to be afeard of it; there dying this last week of plague 112, from 43 the week before.”

The previous night Pepys has spent lying awake, resolving to put his estate in order “in case it should please God to call me away.” Plague houses—marked red and with the words “Lord Have Mercy Upon Us” scrawled across their doors—noticeably increase; Churches and businesses close up; Pepys witnesses “all the towne almost going out of towne”, the wealthy escaping the city for their country retreats; and by July 18th, the city is running out of space in which to bury its dead. But still, daily life persists, Pepys continues to tend to his affairs (both romantic and business), travelling to work each morning while taking the added precaution to finish before sundown, so as not to mistakenly run into the sickness, “it is much to be feared how a man can escape having a share with others in it” he writes, on July 3rd with heightened anxiety. By August 11th, a curfew had been called. “The people die so” Pepys writes, “that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by day-light, the nights not sufficient to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at nine at night all, as they say, that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.”

Specious treatments (“remedies against it; some one thing, some another”), stories of the sick coughing in the faces of the well (a recent report in Sydney similarly told of a man wanted by police for intentionally coughing in the face of a grocery store clerk), and a swelling fear and anxiety amongst the population in general, sit beside the diurnal scenes of work and home life. The plague, in one way or another, infects every entry of Pepys’ diary during this time. He sleeps poorly because of it, worrying at one point that with “the town growing so unhealthy… a man cannot depend upon living two days to an end”; breaks his lengthy sobriety as a means to self-medicate after the death of his doctor; rushes forward the wedding of his patron’s daughter upon hearing that the chaplain has been taken by plague; and begins religiously to check The Bill, the weekly mortality statistics of London, which cost about a penny and were published in large print runs. At the height of the outbreak in August, Pepys does not leave his house for days on end. When he does, his entry is chilling in its description of London’s streets: “But Lord! How everybody’s looks, and discourse in the street is of death, and nothing else, and few people going up and down that the towne is like a place distressed and forsaken.”

For Part I of Thomas Moody's report, click here.

"STOP Window" [by Susan Gunter]

 

Susan E. Gunter is a professor, Henry James scholar, poet, and watercolor artist. She began painting eight years ago, working from her own photographs and using just three colors: Windsor blue, alizarin crimson,  and cadmium yellow. The paintings attempt to capture vanishing moments and preserve them. She has studied photography and art at Allegheny College, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with Allis Teagarten. Her website:

www.susanegunter.com

This month we are showing some of her watercolors. For a view of "Goat Rock Beach," click here.  DL

Squibs 409-411 [by Alan Ziegler]

409: Most Sundays of my father’s final year, I take the 4:05 train to Lynbrook. For a couple of weeks in the spring and fall, the landscape glows, a suburban Hopper, and darkness settles as I go down the station stairway to my father’s car. Often, he is dozing off the effects of his chemotherapy, but today he is outside, leaning against the car door. Teenagers skateboard in and out of the parking area under the tracks, jumping curbs, dodging people. The youngest kid buzzes by my father, who yells, “Be careful!” The kid gives my father the finger. “Let’s get him,” my father commands, and runs after the kid with pre-cancer speed. I hustle behind him, furious at this punk kid. I cut around a railroad pillar and the kid screeches to a halt a few feet from me. My father catches up, winded but pleased. The kid smirks, “What are you going to do?” I grab the kid’s arm and hold on. First he’s scared, then defiant. “You can’t hit me. I’m a kid.” “You watch what I can do if you ever come near my father again.” I let go with a modest shove, and my father and I walk toward the car. I resist looking back, but tune my ears to listen for the sounds of pursuit. I ask my father if he is all right. He starts laughing, “Al, I didn’t really mean to go get him. I just wanted to scare him.” “Well, you might want to be more specific next time,” I respond, savoring the energy and camaraderie in my father’s face. When we get back to the car, the oldest one is waiting for us, cradling his board. He has scraggly blond hair and I read in his face that he is the punk kid’s older brother. Suddenly I am nervous that he will file a complaint with the police and I can kiss my teaching career goodbye. “Sir,” he says to my father, “I want to apologize for my brother. He was out of line. We mean no disrespect.” As he walks off, he gives me a respectful nod with his skateboard.

 

410: Inevitable meet-for-coffee with my ex, at the place we used to linger. The waitress greets “Oh, hi” and I order black. My ex asks for sparkling water and shrugs apologetically at my disappointment. When my cup is almost empty, the waitress extends the pot, raises her eyebrows, and I nod. As she pours, coffee aroma mingles with skin scent. “Are you ready for a coffee now?” she asks my ex. “No, I’ll pass.” After the waitress steps away, I blurt out, “When you meet an ex-lover for coffee, you really should have coffee!” “I can’t. I’m nursing.” Soon my ex will leave. The waitress will finish her shift. And I will wait until closing for one of them to return and refill my life.

 

411: The photograph came in the mail. It shows me walking away from my apartment, taken  from my bedroom window. I have just stepped into the late-afternoon shadow cast by the tall building on the corner. I didn’t know the picture was being taken, but I remember turning briefly to watch the flame dip toward the Hudson and thinking that the sun isn’t leaving us—it is we who are spinning away from the sun. She might have pressed the shutter button a bit too hard, for the photograph is slightly blurry. That’s when she decided to leave. I do not have a photo of her on the same street, but I can imagine her hunched under her backpack, which she’d unpacked two days before. I ache for her that heavy finger on the button, those minutes alone, deciding to leave because I just wasn’t being the way I was when we were together in another city; packing in the dark room, leaving the note “sorry” (that should’ve been my last word), before following my path, now lit by streetlights, crowded with people returning home from the world into which I have disappeared.

 

"Pepys in the Time of Plague” (part I of III) [by Thomas Moody]

“But Lord! What a sad time it is to see no boats upon the River; and grass grows all up and down White Hall court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets!”  -- Samuel Pepys

(I)

Here in Australia, the current pandemic can be seen as the continuation of a sort of run-on couplet of crises, having arrived less than a month after the dousing of the “Red Summer” bushfires, the worst natural disaster in our nation’s history. The couplet, which includes the uncanny slant end-rhyme of coronavirus with bushfires, brought to mind another pair of disasters, if only in inverted order: London’s Great Plague of 1665 and Great Fire of 1666, and the man who chronicled them both in his diary, the indefatigable Samuel Pepys. Pepys, who had a voracious appetite for all restoration London could afford him—for society, business, fashion, theatre, billiards, poetry, public executions, music, marriage and adultery—, survived both catastrophes without fleeing his beloved city, and, perhaps more significantly, with his appetites intact.

Pepys’ diary (available in its entirety online here), particularly his documenting of The Great Plague, which is estimated to have killed up to a quarter of London’s population in less than 18 months, shows us in quotidian detail that our times, though extraordinary, are not entirely unprecedented. Pepys’ tracks the plague from rumor to devastating certitude, measures self-isolation and social distancing with the human urge to congregate and the necessity of commerce, and illustrates that one of the most devastating features of a pandemic is the sustained anxiety it causes. The manner in which both institutions and people react to the plague read eerily familiar across almost four centuries.

Much in the way the coronavirus began as a news story happening “over there” in Wuhan, China, Pepys’ first mention of the impending crisis is of the plague having “got to Amsterdam, brought by a ship from Argier…”, on October 16th, 1663, a full two years before it arrives in London. There is immediate talk of the closing of borders, with the king proposing to forbid any Dutch ship from coming up the Thames. Just over a month later, a quarantine is in fact ordered for ships coming from Amsterdam, Hamburg, “or any other infected places”, with those ships wanting to enter the capital now required to moor at Hole Haven, on Canvey Island, for a period of 30 days. The quarantine was extended to 40 days just six months later.

The plague shadows each of Pepys’ diary entries henceforth. Gossip of its progress is seemingly unavoidable. In July of 1664, at a coffee house he frequents “all the talk is of the plague being very hot still, and increases among the Dutch.” Amsterdam, which was at once London’s great trading partner and naval rival (the second Anglo-Dutch war was fought between 1665 and 1667), looms in the eyes of the English as the epicentre of the outbreak. Pepys includes in his notes a gruesome rumor of a Dutch ship of 3 or 400 tons “where all the men are dead of plague, and the ship cast ashore at Gottenburgh”,—a ghost-ship which might find its contemporary counterpart in the Diamond Princess cruise-liner.

NB: Photos of Australian bushfires; Pepys's Diary at Magdalene College, Cambridge; Pepys and plague-ravaged London, 1665.

Click here for part II of Thomas Moody's tripartite Pepys post.

Molly's Dream #2 [by Molly Arden]

Molly Arden dreamt that she was living in a city she didn't recognize, it was either Morgentown in West Virginia, or Reno, Nevada. A fast, cold river ran through it. From a stone bridge she saw men in yellow rain slickers working on a dam. The Spanish poets she was staying with were a lively bunch led by someone like his friend Victor Cruz, but not Victor. They were looking forward to performing an oratorio for two voices that she had written about the river. The Victor who was not Victor had already arranged for a young poet to perform one voice, while Molly performed the other. They were going to stand up to their waist in the river and perform for the men on the dam and the audience on the bridge. The day before, a friend of hers had flown in from San Francisco. She was a well-known poet and a powerful performer who wanted to do the part. She spent a great deal of her time since arriving to town on her cell phone, while studying the river, the men, and talking about her troubled life in San Francisco. Molly was conflicted: she had promised the part to Victor's friend, and now she had someone else for the part. The cell phone saved her. "I have to go back to San Francisco tomorrow," her poet friend said, "but I would like to go for a swim in the river." Despite Molly's warnings, the poet went in below the bridge and swam against the roaring water. She came out wet and happy and Molly drove her to the airport. The oratorio was going to be performed as originally intended, all that remained was writing it. She woke up to do just that.

Three Book Recommendations for National Poetry Month, 2020

The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai
Ha Jin
Pantheon Books, 2019

Ha Jin’s biography of Li Bai (formerly known as Li Po and Rihaku in the west) provides a vivid survey of the great poet’s life. Bai (701-762 A.D), a legendary figure in Chinese poetry, is said to have drowned while drunkenly chasing the reflection of the moon in a river. The Banished Immortal, although constantly taking account of the myths clustered around Li Bai, focuses more intensely on the verifiable aspects of the poet’s life and work. Ha Jin’s compelling prose not only renders a highly readable overview of Bai’s life, but also provides an interesting gloss of Tang dynasty bureaucracy. Bai’s wanderlust, his political aspirations, his poetic skill (often employed in service to his political ambitions), his setbacks, his literary friendships, his Daoist spirituality, his naivete when negotiating court intrigues, and his gregarious heart make this biography read like a novel. Ha Jin brings Li Bai alive in his writing; he also conjures a world where poetry held a central place by providing interesting digression about Tang poetry devotees like Ge Qing, a street policeman in Jing Prefecture who was “so devoted to the poet Bai Juyi that he tattooed more than thirty of Juyi’s poems on his body, as well as drawings inspired by his verses” and was called “Bai Juyi’s Walking Poems and Pictures.”  The world that Li Bai moved through bears little in common with our own, but American poets might find inspiration in the naked ambition of this itinerant immortal.

Playlist
David Lehman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

In a 1996 Paris Review interview with A.R. Ammons, David Lehman said that Ammons’ long poems: “seem in some ways deliberately imperfect—casual, expansive, all-inclusive, loose.” The same could be said for Playlist, which is a direct homage to Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year. Like many of Ammons’ long poems, Playlist unfolds in increments, held in place by the calendar and given momentum by the playlists on Sirius radio and by the enthusiasms of the poet—jazz, poetry, cinema, the great American songbook, and crooners like Sinatra. There’s a cosmopolitan sprezzatura to Lehman’s long-poem, a spritely dailiness, surprisingly intimate and lush, as open to chance as a turn of the stereo’s dial, efflorescing in descriptive passages such as:

    after I step out of the car
    and onto my favorite perch
    above Cayuga’s waters, the porch
    where majestic trees devoid of leaves
    stand like scarecrows
    the sky a deeper hue an orange
    and blue blaze dipping
    below the horizon

In Playlist, Lehman has succeeded in doing something that hasn’t been done much since the passing of Ammons, viz., he’s written a book-length poem that is propulsive in its readability. Playlist is a testament to a literary friendship of the highest caliber, and an artifact from a life lived in a studied circadian dialogue with art, literature, and music. Anyone who lives poetry, and loves it, should read this book.

Helping the Village Idiot Feed the Chickens (or the Brutal Procedures of Procuring Dinner)
Joe Weil
Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, 2020

The title of Joe Weil’s newest collection might leave some readers nonplussed and might initiate others into the mysteries of another uniquely variegated collection by one of the most underrated poets in America. This is a book contingent upon what Weil himself might call an aesthetic of the motley, a book that contains multitudes—ranging from a Petrarchan sonnet to a poem about the Staten Island Ferry that begins: “a boy vomits over the stern.” Weil’s is a leaping poetry that moves from gazelle to silver maple, from the memory of a mother looping his belt in grade school to a line from Rae Armantrout.  Helping the Village Idiot evokes the imagistic intensity, the technical mastery, and the assured iconoclasm of mid to late career James Wright. As Weil notes in “Ars Poetica (or the failure to be jade),” alluding to Robert Lowell’s famous notion: “I am all raw in my very cooked way.” Indeed, Weil’s poetry combines vigor with technique and a canny knowledge of multiple poetic traditions. However, Weil’s autobiographical lyric poems shine brightest, such as “Poem for Emily Ten Years In,” a gorgeous love poem for the poet’s wife, a wily ars poetica, and a poem about raising children with Autism. The collection ends with a poem, “Compline,” that recalls Seamus Heaney’s dictum that poetry is earned communion:

    Come: touch this wind.
    Out of a vagrant longing
    that stands through the night in the house of the dawn,
    lift up your chalice with worn mumbled prayers
    and sing to ghosts.
    May the hour genuflect praise
    and deepen the dark river’s gaze
    that holds the trees and houses accountable
    to whatever they Shelter.
    It is this residue in things,
    this now, that abides with us,
    that gives us bread
    to break.

If you want to have your heart broken and your faith in humanity reaffirmed at the same time, buy this book.

---

Note: I read these three books over the past few weeks and they provided me great solace and inspiration during these trying times. I highly recommend all three books, and, indeed, any books written by Ha Jin, David Lehman, and Joe Weil. ~Dante Di Stefano 

Fashion and Beauty with Poetess Vinny: Virtual Event VIP [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Is it just me, or is everyone getting invited to dozens of events via Zoom?

One of the most popular platforms for class and work meetings, Zoom has also taken off in the world of literary events, including virtual readings, interviews, and panels, just to name a few. It’s an amazing opportunity for writers to be active in their communities and to stay connected with others, and the fact that we don’t have to be in the same place in the world to do that, is opening doors like never before.

But whether you are the performer or the attendee, you are now also the director, the camera guy, the tech guy, and the guy in charge of lighting, which is a whole lot to handle on top of getting ready to be social during a quarantine, right? Last Friday, I attended a reading hosted by writer and public speaking educator Alex Vara. The reading was a hit! The transitions were smooth, the readers were excellent, there was applause, and as I watched the host and the readers shifting between full screen, I couldn't help but notice that all of the readers looked really good.

Let’s talk about the frame.

We are basically all actors and models now. We are considering angles and lighting, testing microphones, and staring at ourselves in a little square at the top of the screen--needless to say, we are mostly all trying something new. But what we are going for here is a medium close-up, from slightly below your shoulders to a bit above your head. (Note: You can be slightly further away, but just remember that that affects the mic, and therefore the sound quality, so make sure you test this out before committing to it.)

Natural Lighting, Medium Close-Up, darker colors for clothing

1. The best way to set up your frame is to make sure the camera on your computer is in front of and slightly above you. For most desktops, that is already done. If you are using a laptop, you can try stacking it on top of some books and adjusting the angle of the screen.

2. Sitting up straight is a bigger deal here than in other scenarios, because if you start to slouch, it creates shadows under your chin and juts your head forward, making it almost globular, and way too close to the mic.

Let’s talk about the lighting.

Any good photographer will tell you that lighting is everything, and virtual events are no different. When I am teaching my classes in the morning, I get to use full, natural lighting, which makes the skin look radiant. The challenge comes when you are handling artificial or dim lighting.

Artificial Lighting, lighter colors of clothing

1. If you can help it, consider rearranging your desk or the place you intend to sit for these events, so that the overhead light of the lamp light falls directly on your face, and not from behind you as you see here. When the lighting is bad, your picture becomes grainy and harder to see, which might be fine for those of us who still wish to drink alone in the corner at poetry readings, but maybe not so much for someone who is performing.

2. I find that dark colors come up well in natural lighting, but not so much in dim lighting, and that light and bright colors look better in artificial lighting.

Let’s talk about your look.

One of the benefits to using a virtual platform is that the audience only sees you from the torso up, and through a less-than-crystal-clear picture, meaning, we have a little more freedom when it comes to the ancient debate over choosing between fashion or comfort.

1. I’m not saying that you should run the risk of getting caught in your pajama pants, but I am saying that leggings, slacks, any non-restrictive pants with a flexible waistband, will serve you better than jeans or formal pants, which no one will see, anyway.

2. Personally I’ve only added a touch of mascara and lip color, but I’ve seen some people playing with beautiful, bright eye shadows (for you fashionistas, try a bronze-y orange or cerulean) or rocking their usual looks (everything from the cat eye to the suspenders and bowtie). The most important thing, just like  before quarantine, is to make sure your face is clean and there’s nothing in your teeth.

Being social from home is hard, but trust me when I say that it is totally worth it, and in some ways, really unique and innovative. You just need the right settings to see it. If you need help getting inspired to work from home, check out my Freelance Fashion tips.

See more from this writer on Vinny the Snail, The Good Men Project, and LIT Magazine.

Financial Market Report [by Lori Basra]

 

From time to time we get a financial market report from one of our friends on the Street. Lori Basra, whom I got to know back in the day when she broke in with Babson's and I covered the market for a newsweekly, has always been a savvy guide for the retail investor. Last year the veteran analyst was honored by the North American Securities Association as one of thirty leading women in finance. I asked Lori whether she thinks this is a good time for risk-averse retirees to dip their toes in the pool. I also wondered what her favorite stock is. Here's what she said. -- DL

<<<
The market took a terrific hit but rebounded in record time. The economy will take a long time to recover, and so you'd have to say that the market has gotten a little ahead of itself. But you aren't getting any interest on your cash and money-market accounts, and you might want to harvest your losses -- sell shares where you have a loss to lower your AGI on next year's 1040. With the cash thus generated, you might want to buy some blue-chip stocks at a discount: American Express, Merck, Coca Cola, J. P. Morgan are all well off their highs and excellent long term investments. Fidelity Select Health is also a winner.

For the nervous, the purchase of Berkshire Hathaway B shares is possibly the safest, most conservative stock investment you can make. Warren Buffett has a lot of cash and there will be companies in distress that he, Charlie Munger, Todd Combs, and Ted Weschler can rescue -- or slay with his fabled "elephant gun." These guys are the ultimate value investors, and value investing has been out of favor for a decade, but it will come back, it always does. Nobody ever lost money betting on Warren Buffett.

For the long term I favor technology, the big names (Microsoft. Apple, Alphabet) and the start-ups. A good ETF like Vanguard's Information Technology (VGT) or Invesco's QQQ are ways to own the sector. I guess Amazon is my favorite stock.

Never give in to panic.  Better to do nothing than to sell on the day of a market crash. Now that trades are free, you can nibble -- buying 5 or 10 shares at a time -- which gives you the pleasure of a casino player at little risk: dollar coast averaging on a daily basis. >>>

Thank you, Lori. -- DL

Note: "AGI" is adjusted gross income and "1040" refers to the tax return due usually on the fifteenth of April. (Not this year; the deadline for returns and estimated tax payments has been postponed to July 15.) "Dollar-cost averaging" refers to the statistical advantage of buying shares in regular increments rather than all at once. The subject is examined in Carey and Morrison's Eight Wonders (1991), which takes its title from Einstein's observation that compound interest was the "eighth wonder of the world." 

Contact Tracing circa late-1970s [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Two boys view a demolished block for construction of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, NY

Shortly after I moved to Albany, NY as a college sophomore, I volunteered nights at the Washington Park Free Clinic, a walk-in facility run by Albany Medical School students under the supervision of licensed doctors. The clinic was in a ramshackle brownstone in a run down part of town, a couple of blocks away from the not-yet-finished Empire State Plaza (aka Rocky’s last erection, in honor of governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had conceived of the project.).

All services were free. My job was to answer the phone, staff the front desk, and conduct minimal intake. Clients came in, gave me their names and described their condition. I passed the information on to one of the med students, who took over from there.

One night a young woman came in who was in her final weeks of pregnancy. She was huge and this was her first visit to a doctor. She was led into an exam room and soon after the supervising doctor could be heard throughout the building scolding her apprentices. Who did they think they were crowding around this young women as if she were exhibit A? And how stupid could they be to have her on her back, her feet in stirrups at that late stage in her pregnancy? Did they want her to go into labor right there? One by one the doctors in training left the room, chastened.

On another occasion, five young women, housemates, were each diagnosed with a venereal disease. They had to disclose the names of all of their sexual partners so the carriers could be tracked down, treated, and prevented from infecting more women.

They all named the same young man.

A few days later, he arrived at the clinic, looking smug and relaxed.

His test was negative.

-- sdl

"Leaf" [by Susan Gunter]

Susan E. Gunter is a professor, Henry James scholar, poet, and watercolor artist. She began painting eight years ago, working from her own photographs and using just three colors: Windsor blue, alizarin crimson,  and cadmium yellow. The paintings attempt to capture vanishing moments and preserve them. She has studied photography and art at Allegheny College, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with Allis Teagarten. Her website:

www.susanegunter.com

This week we are showing five of her watercolors. For a view of "Goat Rock Beach," click here. -- DL

Notes from confinement: on silence and altering states [by Tracy Danison]

C'mon, c'mon let's merry go, merry go, merry go round! (Boop boop boop)
Merry go, merry go, merry go round! (Boop boop boop)
Merry go, merry go, merry go round!
I say let's merry go, merry go, merry go round!
I say let's merry go, merry go, merry go round!

Merry-Go-Round (1968), Wild Man Fischer 

There were said to be too many new joggers, so at some point they forbid us to go outside between 10 am and 7 pm, except for shopping.

At 8 pm sharp, my neighbors are at their windows and on their balconies, clapping, calling and pounding pots and pans. Monsieur le Président de la République, Emmanuel Macron, begins a pretty fair speech at 8.02 pm. He thanks everyone for their tenacious civic solidarity and the police for its vigilance. Macron says we can look forward to phased liberation from confinement beginning 11 May. If all goes well.

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier performs her 1917th one-minute dance. She began the project in January 2015 as “poetic resistance” to barbarity in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper massacre. She’s put together a site, Danses de confinement, which has so far put more than 500 minute-dance contributions on line.

Today a year ago, I walked out of the Châtelet Métro station, looked up to see Notre Dame burning. I had no idea stone could burn and so fiercely too. It turns out the place was a thousand-year-old pile seasoned oak.

Valentine Nagata-Ramos, is a dancer and starting-up choreographer whose Cie Uzumaki dance troupe brings together manga culture – Uzumaki, “Spiral”, is a horror series written and drawn by Junji Ito  – hip-hop, feminism and her own unique background and presence.

Valentine has been putting her social media house in order lately and seems as cheerful as usual. If dates for Fall 2020 hold up, it looks like she has good prospects for her BE-girl dance project, which was rolling along sweetly before they banned live performance.

These are gorgeous lingering evenings upon gorgeous lengthening days, pretty warm and dry for April.

Karine tells me she just met Marek walking with his handicapped boy. They live just behind her little house. Marek’s a child dentist. Father like son is enjoying confinement. It’s very positive, they say. It makes everybody realize everything is connecting. Connected? O! Sorry. We’re all the earth, we mean.

At some point in the fuzzy-tough week before Macron’s speech – that would be toward the fourth week of confinement, Holy Week, Pessach, what have you – the WhatsApp streams of funny videos, neighborly sentiment and ironies suddenly dried up.

Somehow or another in there, Silence just fell over all our little worlds.

I think the Aspidistra crash landed – remember Orwell’s image for the “everyday determination of everyday people” that keeps a body going in face of petty cruelties, hard work and dog shit on the sidewalk? I think it experienced a mechanical failure; Men in Black have discretely wheeled the partially burned carcass into a secure revetment.

I got two messages before Silence fell.

The first was a short video from Sina Saberi, my choreographer friend currently stuck in his home country.

Like most performing artists, Sina’s been trying to distract himself from the fact of severely unpaid hours imposed by the world-wide public health emergency. To fill in the moments between renewed anxieties, he’s been learning how to use a video editing app to help him develop a project he’s been seriously toying with for a while. He wanted to show me the fruits of this labor.

The second message was from Ludovine, lioness apostle of the solitary walk and the breathless run, whom I loved upon hearing her whiskey voice, who moved to a new and charming country village a day or two before mandatory confinement began.

Ludovine had heaved a sigh of relief that 15 March when she got her key and shut her new front door against all comers – Ooouuff! What joy to be rid of people, especially the nearer ones, she messaged then.

Ludovine now confesses that the sparkle of diaphanous aloneness has dulled to featureless loneliness. I understand now, she texts, that I must hold whom I love in my arms – without it, no space, no horizons, no nothing.

Sina’s short video shows an uncertain dervish small on a distanced stage flailing and staggering into twirling swirling twirling swirling. He writes that the dervish is part of Basis for being,  a choreography project that looks at dance as an alternate state of being, part of a “biography of being”. Basis aspires to be a mirror that enables experience and desire as being.

Watching the dervish find his whirl swirl on the tiny screen, I recall a chance meeting with the Venerable Nyanadharo, the chief of some Buddhist forest monks living in a homely monastery at Tournon-sur-Rhône, in the Ardêche. Don’t ask.

Vénérable told me that turning, staying awake and fasting, among other ordinary human practices, constraints and habits, are sufficient ways out of standard consciousness – other consciousness is as common as skin, he said. Like for yoga, what matters is intention. Vénérable insisted on that.

It’s not necessary to dine with a notable forest monk to get this point, however. Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s daily one-minute of dance, Valentine Nagato-Ramos’ BE-girls, too, take the conscious-altering power of dance for granted … Come to think of it, Isadora Duncan didn’t invent modern dance, she rescued dance so that Sina and Nadia and Valentine and Ruth Childs and Amy Swanson and … you and I, could continue to use it.

That’s why Silence fell, then, why the Aspidistra crashed to earth. Confinement is a sufficient way out of standard consciousness. 

Silence marked a paradigm shift: sometime between Ash Wednesday and Easter Monday, even my lioness friend Ludovine realized that we already are connected. What we see as we press our noses to the windows is really what our desire enables. Experience should enable us to change it.

What now?