A Letter from the Front

I WAS out early to-day, spying about
From the top of a haystack—such a lovely morning—
And when I mounted again to canter back
I saw across a field in the broad sunlight
A young Gunner Subaltern, stalking along
With a rook-rifle held at the ready, and—would you believe it?—
A domestic cat, soberly marching beside him.  

So I laughed, and felt quite well disposed to the youngster,
And shouted out “the top of the morning” to him,
And wished him “Good sport!”—and then I remembered
My rank, and his, and what I ought to be doing:
And I rode nearer, and added, “I can only suppose
You have not seen the Commander-in-Chief’s order
Forbidding English officers to annoy their Allies
By hunting and shooting.”
        But he stood and saluted
And said earnestly, “I beg your pardon, Sir,
I was only going out to shoot a sparrow
To feed my cat with.”
        So there was the whole picture,
The lovely early morning, the occasional shell
Screeching and scattering past us, the empty landscape,—
Empty, except for the young Gunner saluting,
And the cat, anxiously watching his every movement.  

I may be wrong, and I may have told it badly,
But it struck me as being extremely ludicrous. 

—Henry Newbolt, Clarke, George Herbert, ed. A Treasury of War Poetry,
First Series. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917; New York:
Bartleby.com, 2002. 

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Social Justice Crusader, also known as a rights activist. You believe in equality, fairness, and preventing neo-Confederate conservative troglodytes from rolling back fifty years of civil rights gains.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

I find this quiz result amusing in that I’ve long said mercy trumps justice. Justice has a tendency to get all mixed up with revenge.

But perhaps I don’t know myself after all. Surely an internet quiz can’t be wrong??

And I am a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Which, I should mention, has now established The Blog of Rights, where today the lead post is written by Nikki Anthony of Breckinridge County, Kentucky:

My name is Nikki Anthony and I just finished eighth grade at Breckinridge County Middle School in Kentucky. The ACLU is representing me, my younger sister, and five other students in a case against our school district and the U.S. Department of Education because our rights are being violated by my school segregating students by sex. I was raised in a house where rights are very important, and I was told, “if you don’t stand up for your rights then they will be taken away.” People in the United States don’t tolerate segregation by sex in everyday life, and yet they want us to tolerate it in our school system when we are supposed to be learning what being free really is.

Justice dictates that I tell you I found this quiz in the sidebar at Suburban Guerrilla. Susie is a Working Class Warrior.

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d’agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s’enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.

— Charles Baudelaire

__________
And the translation:

The Cat

Come, superb cat, to my amorous heart;
Hold back the talons of your paws,
Let me gaze into your beautiful eyes
Of metal and agate.

When my fingers leisurely caress you,
Your head and your elastic back,
And when my hand tingles with the pleasure
Of feeling your electric body,

In spirit I see my woman. Her gaze
Like your own, amiable beast,
Profound and cold, cuts and cleaves like a dart,

And, from her head down to her feet,
A subtle air, a dangerous perfume
Floats about her dusky body.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

I do have a “selected” Fleurs du Mal that I am reading but I found this particular poem at the online edition here.

Photographs taken by my son in support of my tweet of yesterday, to wit:

Orchard grass shoulder high, heads purple with seed. Bluegrass to the waist, red clover to the knee. The sun is shining, time to make hay.

Update: A correspondent has written to ask if I worry about haymaking harming small critters like box turtles, birds, and rabbits. And the fact is that any kind of mowing is dangerous to small creatures. My husband said he scared up a big turkey just mowing the farm road the way you see here. I’ve mowed up rabbits nests and snakes cutting the grass in our side yard with a push mower.

I think, though, even more dangerous than the mowing is the destruction of habitat. The very thing that makes the Bluegrass Region so picturesque, the lovely clean fencerows (some maintained with herbicides), make the place less friendly to small creatures who need shelter to nest and feed. As these photos illustrate, our place is comfortably shabby and our wildlife seems to be abundant. I was even wrong about the meadowlarks. I’ve seen several this year. I just wasn’t in the right place.

Here’s a bonus picture. I put up a photo of this tree earlier when it was bare and the red-winged blackbird was perched high up in it.

(I chose this shot because, if you look closely, you can see the locust blossoms surrounding Bertie’s head and reflected in the car.)

How a Cat Was Annoyed and a Poet Was Booted

A POET had a cat.
There is nothing odd in that—
  (I might make a little pun about the Mews!)
But what is really more
Remarkable, she wore
  A pair of pointed patent-leather shoes.
      And I doubt me greatly whether
          E'er you heard the like of that:
      Pointed shoes of patent-leather
              On a cat!	 

His time he used to pass
Writing sonnets, on the grass—
  (I might say something good on pen and sward!)
While the cat sat near at hand,
Trying hard to understand
  The poems he occasionally roared.
      (I myself possess a feline,
          But when poetry I roar
      He is sure to make a bee-line
              For the door.)	 

The poet, cent by cent,
All his patrimony spent—
  (I might tell how he went from verse to werse!)
Till the cat was sure she could,
By advising, do him good.
  So addressed him in a manner that was terse:
      "We are bound toward the scuppers,
          And the time has come to act,
      Or we'll both be on our uppers
              For a fact!"	  

On her boot she fixed her eye,
But the boot made no reply—
  (I might say: "Couldn't speak to save its sole!")
And the foolish bard, instead
Of responding, only read
  A verse that wasn't bad upon the whole.
      And it pleased the cat so greatly,
          Though she knew not what it meant,
      That I'll quote approximately
              How it went:—	  

"If I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree"—
  (I might put in: "I think I'd just as leaf!")
"Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough"—
  Well, he'd plagiarized it bodily, in brief!
      But that cat of simple breeding
          Couldn't read the lines between,
      So she took it to a leading
              Magazine.	  

She was jarred and very sore
When they showed her to the door.
  (I might hit off the door that was a jar!)
To the spot she swift returned
Where the poet sighed and yearned,
  And she told him that he'd gone a little far.
      "Your performance with this rhyme has
          Made me absolutely sick,"
      She remarked. "I think the time has
              Come to kick!"	 

I could fill up half the page
With descriptions of her rage—
  (I might say that she went a bit too fur!)
When he smiled and murmured: "Shoo!"
"There is one thing I can do!"
  She answered with a wrathful kind of purr.
      "You may shoo me, and it suit you,
          But I feel my conscience bid
      Me, as tit for tat, to boot you!"
              (Which she did.)	  

The Moral of the plot
(Though I say it, as should not!)
  Is: An editor is difficult to suit.
But again there're other times
When the man who fashions rhymes
  Is a rascal, and a bully one to boot!	 

— Guy Wetmore Carryl, from Untermeyer, Louis. Modern American Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999.

The lake is receding, the rain has stopped, though skies remain gray. And the gray stray stands its ground, much to the chagrin of our Black Bert. Bertie, who spent a winter under the house with Ursula the raccoon before he convinced us he was our cat, isn’t about to welcome another waif. I can’t get a good look at the other guy, but Bert has spent the winter nursing abscessed face wounds. He’s bleeding again this morning. Alas, his forays to protect the homestead aren’t moving the big tabby who likes the easy food at the raccoon feeding station.

Spring is official but no one has told the farm. More floods. Stoner got to 18.6 feet yesterday morning. Eighteen feet is flood stage. We’ve had 4.65 inches of rain this month, twice the average. Walking on the farm is more like wading, so much standing water. The grass is greening, but nothing is putting out leaves except the bush honeysuckle and the fence roses. Nothing much was stirring yesterday except our redwing blackbird, staking out his territory. He likes to pose dramatically in the very tippy top of the tree, but prefers you to admire him from a distance.

I give you the red-winged blackbird I saw in top of a tree on Wednesday evening.

For more on the species, I recommend All About Birds. This guy might be the envy of Eliot Spitzer (or perhaps not):

The Red-winged Blackbird is a highly polygynous species, with one male having up to 15 different females making nests in his territory. In some populations 90% of territorial males have more than one female. But, from one quarter to up to half of the young in “his” nests do not belong to the territorial male. Instead they have been sired by neighboring males.

Watch at YouTube.

The first time I saw a cartoon of of George Herriman’s was in my High School American Lit. text. It had a few of his illustrations from the 1927-40 Don Marquis book collections of Archie and Mehitabel. The one I recall best was Mehitabel floating in the Nile in half a watermelon rind, bragging “I was Cleopatra once,” trying to show Archie up for his claim to have been a vers libre poet in an earlier incarnation. She looked a lot like Krazy Kat, which is fitting since the Kat was of indeterminate sex, changing at his/her creator’s whim. It was decades later before I could find reprints of Herriman’s greatest creation. The entire set of his Sunday pages has now been collected in a series of books, first in the early 90s by Eclipse Comics for 1916-24 strips and recently by Fantagraphics for 1925-1944 when the strip was cancelled after the death of the creator. W.R. Hearst decided that no one could equal Herriman’s genius so the strip did not continue with a ghostwriter, a first for a syndicated cartoon. Fantagraphics will go back and re-issue the earlier volumes in coming years.

* * * * * * *

Krazy Kat was never a popular success and owed its survival to the undying admiration of William Randolf Hurst. It spent a large part of its run on the Art and Theatre pages of his papers so the bulk of its Sunday pages are in black and white. It takes a lot of effort to read many of the strips since Herriman loved funny spellings, puns, Latinate inflated diction, Spanish, French, and even a bit of Greek, not to mention Yat, the argot of his native New Orleans. It was set in Kokonino Co. Arizona and featured a lot of Navaho-influenced rug and pottery designs and local topography flitting about the background. It is very like an Ode on an American Urn. It is sometimes even harder to interpret what the strips might “mean”. He was often at his best when he let the action of the strip tell the story–he spent a lot of time watching his L.A. friends make silent comedies. But he could wax lyrical and mock-epical without missing a beat.

* * * * * * *

In a typical stript Ignatz plans to throw a brick at the Kat’s head–whether he is annoyed by his optimism/joy in nature/music/ or if he saw a perceived threat/or for revenge or just because the mouse felt “evil”. Krazy Kat always experiences the coup as an act of love–a billet-doux, a transport of ecstasy, a mind-altering moment (a brick of hashish? mara huana?-she is a wistful widow resident of Kokonino Co.) or an epiphany of religious intensity. Staid Offisa Bullpup, with his billy-club, strives to prevent the assault and often locks Ignatz in jail whether or not any unlawful transaction has transpired. Much of the genius of the strip lies in endlessly clever variations of this plot. In an early strip Ignatz believes he has finally succeeded in drowning the Kat and he begins to grieve inconsolably, bawling his eyes out while he sits on a stone; but Krazy Katfish [in his debut performance] and Ignatz’ muskrat cousin have saved the Kat and shown him how to get back to dry land, so when Krazy pops out of the hollow tree behind him, Ignatz picks up his “cushion” and….

* * * * * * *

What gives the strip its enduring value is the unflinching view it gives of the contradictory nature of human relationships. Love and hate are inextricably bound in all friendships, marriages, families. It is Krazy who first notices that the Mouse family has been visited by Joe Stork and he sets out to get a stroller; he barrels it into Ignatz standing on a brick and Ignatz continues rolling along to his house where his long-suffering wife is charmed by hhe hubby’s “thoughtfulness”. I. takes the three babies to Kelly’s brickyard to start their “education” immediately.

Catullus in one short lyric marvels that he loves and hates all at once even though he can’t explain why. Kat and Mouse are asleep in an early daily strip, heads propped on a log. After Krazy wakes and chastely kisses a snoozing Ignatz on his forehead, the Mouse dreams of cupids and angels. There’s nary a brickbat in sight.