See the Telegraph obituary of Jim Hall
and a post on Charlie Christian (and others).
The inclusion of D. H. Lawrence in that post
suggests a review of posts tagged Howl.
"The werewolves are here to save us."
— Simon in "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones."
"I have seen the worst minds
Of my generation
Advanced upwards
To become the most powerful influence."
— Duane Locke
An AI image created today by https://neural.love —
"Lily Collins Playing Chess" —
Perhaps some Dreaming Jewels have mated.
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From The Dreaming Jewels , by Theodore Sturgeon: "Oh. And the crystals make things — even complete things — like Tin Pan Alley makes songs." "Something like it." Zena smiled. It was the first smile in a long while. "Sit down, honey; I'll bring the toast. Now — this is my guess — when two crystals mate, something different happens. They make a whole thing. But they don't make it from just anything the way the single crystals do. First they seem to die together. For weeks they lie like that. After that they begin a together-dream. They find something near them that's alive, and they make it over. They replace it, cell by cell. You can't see the change going on in the thing they're replacing. It might be a dog; the dog will keep on eating and running around; it will howl at the moon and chase cats. But one day — I don't know how long it takes — it will be completely replaced, every bit of it." "Then what?" "Then it can change itself — if it ever thinks of changing itself. It can be almost anything if it wants to be." Bunny stopped chewing, thought, swallowed, and asked, "Change how?" "Oh, it could get bigger or smaller. Grow more limbs. Go into a funny shape — thin and flat, or round like a ball. If it's hurt it can grow new limbs. And it could do things with thought that we can't even imagine. Bunny, did you ever read about werewolves?" "Those nasty things that change from wolves to men and back again?" Zena sipped coffee. "Mmm. Well, those are mostly legends, but they could have started when someone saw a change like that." |
The previous post, and Wednesday's roommate, suggested the above title.
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From The Dreaming Jewels , by Theodore Sturgeon: "Oh. And the crystals make things — even complete things — like Tin Pan Alley makes songs." "Something like it." Zena smiled. It was the first smile in a long while. "Sit down, honey; I'll bring the toast. Now — this is my guess — when two crystals mate, something different happens. They make a whole thing. But they don't make it from just anything the way the single crystals do. First they seem to die together. For weeks they lie like that. After that they begin a together-dream. They find something near them that's alive, and they make it over. They replace it, cell by cell. You can't see the change going on in the thing they're replacing. It might be a dog; the dog will keep on eating and running around; it will howl at the moon and chase cats. But one day — I don't know how long it takes — it will be completely replaced, every bit of it." "Then what?" "Then it can change itself — if it ever thinks of changing itself. It can be almost anything if it wants to be." Bunny stopped chewing, thought, swallowed, and asked, "Change how?" "Oh, it could get bigger or smaller. Grow more limbs. Go into a funny shape — thin and flat, or round like a ball. If it's hurt it can grow new limbs. And it could do things with thought that we can't even imagine. Bunny, did you ever read about werewolves?" "Those nasty things that change from wolves to men and back again?" Zena sipped coffee. "Mmm. Well, those are mostly legends, but they could have started when someone saw a change like that." |
A Logo for Riri —
The above Nick Romano passage is from Knock on Any Door,
a 1947 novel by Willard Motley. Another Motley novel about
Chicago, from 1958 . . .
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Page 41 The city was a blue-black panther that slunk along beside them. The tall, skyscraper night-grass hemmed them in. The thousand neon animal eyes watched their going. Page 67 The blue-black panther of a city watched their going. The un- blinking neon animal eyes watched their going. Thousands of neon signs lit their way. In an alley behind West Madison Street half an Page 68 hour before, a bum, drunk, had frozen to death lying in the back doorway of a pawnshop. The blue-black panther crouched over him. Page 70 First the creak of ice as an automobile goes by. Then the frown into your room of the red brick building across the street, its windows frosted over like cold, unfriendly eyes. Then a bum stumbling along trying to keep warm. Now a drunk, unevenly. And the wind like the howling voice of the blue-black panther, hunting, finding. And the clanging of impersonal streetcars. And each bar of neon, cold, dead. No message. The clown takes his bow and it is Christmas Day. Page 79 The blue-black panther followed them, sniffing at their heels. Page 106 Above them the blue-black panther lay on the roof of a tenement house, its feline chin on the cornice, its yellow-green eyes staring down onto the black night street of Maxwell. Its tail, wagging slowly back and forth, was like a lasso, a noose, sending little shivers of pebbles rolling loosely across the roof. Page 154 Then he went down to the Shillelagh Club. Through the pane, in the crowded, noisy place, he saw her. She was sitting at a table near the back, alone. Her cigarette had fallen from her lips and rolled away from her on the table top. It had burned itself to a long gray ash. Her head hung loosely on her neck as if she was asleep. A half-empty glass of beer was in front of her. Please, Mother, please come out, he prayed to her. And he stood next door to the tavern, waiting, his small shoulders drawn in, his head down in shame. And often he walked to the window and stood on tiptoe. She was still there. In the same position. He waited. He would be late to school tomorrow. He waited, keeping the long vigil. He waited. Twelve years old. And the thousand neon-animal eyes stared at him savagely. He waited. The blue-black panther lashed out its tail, flicking its furry tip against his ankles. He waited. Page 250 Alongside the blue-black patrol wagon the blue-black panther walks majestically. Page 262 Outside the door the blue-black panther rubs its back like a house cat. Page 409 Nick held the cigarette listlessly. The smoke curled up his wrist and arm like a snake. The blue-black panther licked his hand. |
Review of "Criminal," a recent Tommy Lee Jones film:
"The only problem is that the procedure requires
a certain type of mind, the mind of a psychopath."
Skip Hollandsworth in Texas Monthly, Feb. 2006,
discussing an interview wtih Texas actor Jones, mentions …
"Jones’ strangely mesmerizing performance as
a vicious psychopath who hijacks a battleship."
A sample of that performance suitable for Manic Monday —
"You have to reconsider your entire philosophy."
— Tommy Lee Jones in "Under Siege"
The New York Times Book Review yesterday advertised
such a reconsideration, for sale by a Smith College Buddhist —
(Click image to enlarge.)
For your consideration —
"And there’s a lot of humor in the collision between Easter [sic ]
mysticism and Western scientific, sort of logical binary."
— Benedict Cumberbatch on his new film "Doctor Strange."
Lead-balloon humor:
"Funny, you don't look Buddhist."
For the title, see The New York Times and the oeuvre of Joseph Kosuth.
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From The Dreaming Jewels , by Theodore Sturgeon: "Oh. And the crystals make things — even complete things — like Tin Pan Alley makes songs." "Something like it." Zena smiled. It was the first smile in a long while. "Sit down, honey; I'll bring the toast. Now — this is my guess — when two crystals mate, something different happens. They make a whole thing. But they don't make it from just anything the way the single crystals do. First they seem to die together. For weeks they lie like that. After that they begin a together-dream. They find something near them that's alive, and they make it over. They replace it, cell by cell. You can't see the change going on in the thing they're replacing. It might be a dog; the dog will keep on eating and running around; it will howl at the moon and chase cats. But one day — I don't know how long it takes — it will be completely replaced, every bit of it." "Then what?" "Then it can change itself — if it ever thinks of changing itself. It can be almost anything if it wants to be." Bunny stopped chewing, thought, swallowed, and asked, "Change how?" "Oh, it could get bigger or smaller. Grow more limbs. Go into a funny shape — thin and flat, or round like a ball. If it's hurt it can grow new limbs. And it could do things with thought that we can't even imagine. Bunny, did you ever read about werewolves?" "Those nasty things that change from wolves to men and back again?" Zena sipped coffee. "Mmm. Well, those are mostly legends, but they could have started when someone saw a change like that." |
See as well The Dreaming Jewels
and "Steven Universe" in this journal.
You can't make this stuff up.
For the late Carolyn Cassady, once a wife of Neal Cassady
(Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac's classic novel On the Road ).
She reportedly died at 90 in England on Friday, September 20,
2013.
From a post in this journal on the night of September 20-21,
with waning Harvest Moon:
Click on "Aooo" for some related posts, tagged "Howl."
Mathematics:
A review of posts from earlier this month —
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
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Narrative:
Aooo.
Happy birthday to Stephen King.
(Continued from May 4, 2013)
"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain"
"It is well
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses,
Has broken her spell."
— D. H. Lawrence in a poem on a London blackout
during a bombing raid in 1917. See also today's previous
posts, Down Under and Howl.
Backstory— Recall, from history's nightmare on this date,
the Battle of Borodino and the second London Blitz.
Last evening's New York Lottery numbers were 123 and 5597.
The 123 suggests page 123 of DeLillo's Underworld .
(For some context, see searches in this journal for Los Muertos and for Pearly Gates of Cyberspace .)
The 5597 suggests the birth date of literary theorist Kenneth Burke— May 5, 1897.
These two topics—
are combined in Heaven's Gate, a post from April 11, 2003—
Babylon = Bab-ilu, “gate of God,” Hebrew: Babel or Bavel.”
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Modern rendition |
Kenneth |
The above observations on lottery hermeneutics, on a ridiculously bad translation, and on Latin rhythms did not seem worth recording until…
The New York Times Book Review for Sunday, October 30, arrived this morning.
From page 22, an extract from the opening paragraph of a review titled…
Making Sense of It
David Bellos offers a new approach to translation.
The theory of translation is very rarely— how to put this?— comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment…. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language…. And this elegiac argument has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world's multiplicity of languages is seen as mankind's punishment— condemned to the howlers, the faux amis , the foreign menu apps. Whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost universal language of Eden.
See also Saturday's Edenville.
The Great Bartender
by Peter Viereck (1948)
Being absurd as well as beautiful,
Magic– like art– is hoax redeemed by awe.
(Not priest but clown,
the shuddering sorcerer
Is more astounded than
his rapt applauders:
“Then all those props and Easters
of my stage
Came true? But I was joking all the time!”)
Art, being bartender, is never drunk;
And magic that believes itself, must die.
My star was rocket of my unbelief,
Launched heavenward as
all doubt’s longings are;
It burst when, drunk with self-belief,
I tried to be its priest and shouted upward:
“Answers at last! If you’ll but hint
the answers
For which earth aches, that famous
Whence and Whither;
Assuage our howling Why? with final fact.”
— As quoted in The Practical Cogitator,
or The Thinker’s Anthology,
Selected and Edited by
Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and
Ferris Greenslet,
Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged,
With a new Introduction by
John H. Finley, Jr.,
Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston, 1962
The dates of Viereck’s birth and death are according to this morning’s New York Times.
Five Log24 entries
ending May 13,
the date of Viereck’s death.
Mozart, 2006
Mozart, 1935
Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.
That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.
Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.
Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.
We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.
— Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1936)
From the center:
“‘Mozart, 1935’ immediately discloses a will to counter complaints of pure poetry, to refute that charge heard regularly from Stevens’s critics, to find ‘his particular celebration out of tune today’ on his own if necessary; and, in short, to meet the communist [poet and critic Willard] Maas’s ‘respect for his magnificent rhetoric’ at least halfway across from right to left.”
— Alan Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 211
From the left:
Norman Lebrecht on this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth (January 27, 1756):
“… Mozart, it is safe to say, failed to take music one step forward….
… Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience. He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak….
… He lacked the rage of justice that pushed Beethoven into isolation, or any urge to change the world. Mozart wrote a little night music for the ancien regime. He was not so much reactionary as regressive….
… Little in such a mediocre life gives cause for celebration….
… The bandwaggon of Mozart commemorations was invented by the Nazis in 1941….
… In this orgy of simple-mindedness, the concurrent centenary of Dmitri Shostakovich– a composer of true courage and historical significance– is being shunted to the sidelines, celebrated by the few.
Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the Leningrad Symphony. Listen to music that matters.”
The left seems little changed since 1935.
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