Sherry Chandler

My inner ear hears Davis McCombs’s work as stately lamentation but this video tends to give that impression the lie.

I’ve heard McCombs read and I could swear he wasn’t this edgy. But circumstances were different and it was several years ago. He seems to be with his homeboys here.

At least he explains why that poem is called “Ninevah,” a thing that puzzled me. I thought I knew the story of Jonah, but I guess all my Sunday School teachers stopped after the whale vomited the penitent Jonah up on the shore near that wicked city. Having made the big point, I guess they didn’t sweat the details.

P.S. I love this reading.

Photo by Tom C. Williams, I’m pretty sure.

The Cat’s Song

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

…

— Marge Piercy (read the rest at the link)

Eugene Deb’s most famous saying is probably this one:

While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

So I found this portrait of him in Moundsville prison, from Democracy’s Prisoner, telling:

Prison offered certain mind-expanding experiences for Debs as well. For decades he had been preaching about the problem of crime. Criminals were not evil, he had argued, but were the victims of social conditions created by capitalism. Always a champion of the underdog, Debs now lived among some of society’s most disenfranchised men. “I belong in prison,” he told [the journalist] Karsner. “I belong where men are made to suffer for the wrongs committed against them by a brutalizing system.” Though Debs had promised the warden he would not talk socialism to other inmates, he spoke through the power of practical example. From across the country hundreds of well-wishers sent him presents—flowers, cakes, books, and boxes of fruit. Keeping little for himself, he spread these gifts among the other inmates, white and black, who were delighted to be “smoking high grade cigars and eating choice candy, the like of which they had never before tasted.” …Some of the most hardened convicts still suspected that Debs was some kind of “schemer and palaverer,” but most were won over by his kindness. Sitting on the hospital porch in the evenings, he was surrounded by men who wanted his advice and sympathy, or his help writing letters home. With growing admiration, the warden conceded that Debs was one of the few men he had ever known who “practiced absolutely what he preached.”

Debs was very well treated in Moundsville. Not only was the warden taken with him but he also knew that many of Debs’s supporters would be looking for cause to protest. Debs was given light duties in the prison hospital, to help out “when he felt like it.” And he did have a bad heart so there was some reason for this treatment. But he also had a room of his own that looked out over landscaped prison grounds and he was allowed to take his meals in his room. His bending of the rules about mail privileges was also winked at. Nevertheless, he was in prison and he considered himself one of the prisoners.

By the way, Moundsville prison features in Davis Grubb’s book Night of the Hunter as well as in the film of the same title. It is in Moundsville that the preacher meets the young bankrobber and learns about the hidden money.

Moundsville was decommissioned in 1995 and is now a tourist attraction with a haunted house theme.

And one more aside. Eugene Debs reportedly also said:

It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.

I guess you’ll need Liquid Virgin.

Pucker up, gals.

(Think alum.)

via

I have been wanting to see Persepolis since I saw a preview at Lexington’s Kentucky Theater earlier this year. Having finally got it through Netflix, however, I left it sitting on the table for several days, because I thought watching it would take concentration and mental energy. And I was right.

I am not a great appreciator of the graphic novel. I haven’t even read Maus, though it sits on our shelves and I appreciate Spiegelman’s New Yorker covers. I tend to think of graphic novels as sort of a guy thing, though I also know that that is rapidly becoming a dated attitude.

I was very taken by the graphic look and feel of Persepolis, however. The minimalist style, a look that might be characterized as the dark side of South Park (though, okay, South Park is not without its own dark side — maybe the tragic side), the use of silhouettes in black and white, was often very affecting. This is not the computer-animated cutesiness of Disney et al. The film is also a monument to the revolutionary power of pop culture. For one thing, it is the animated film of a graphic novel (comic book) so its very genesis is pop. But, as Frank Zappa was a force in solidarity-era Poland, so our heroine is inspired and consoled by black market tapes of Iron Maiden.

Because the story is a child’s story — I was amazed near the end of the movie when our heroine is about to get married to learn that she is only 21! she had already had experience enough for several lifetimes — the form allows Marjane Satrapi to convey the simplicity of the child’s vision while maximizing the terror that is a child’s experience of war, repression, prejudice.

Like Reading Lolita in Tehran, Persepolis gives one an idea what it’s like for a woman living under a repressive fundamentalist regime and also an idea why leaving the country isn’t all that satisfactory a solution. Nafisi’s vision is more analytical; Satrapi’s gives us raw emotion and some delightfully iconoclastic characters (the grandmother and uncle). There are moments of truly wicked humor in the film.

Satrapi also deals with the clumsiness or just plain evil Middle East involvement of the West, from the installation of the Shah to the arms dealing in the Iran/Iraq War. Her focus is not so strictly domestic. When one of the women says of the religious revolution, “It can’t be any worse than life under the Shah,” I couldn’t help but think of how much worse life is now for women in Iraq since we deposed Saddam Hussein and facilitated a fundamentalist takeover.

I was deeply moved and I think this is a movie that all of us should see, especially now when the Bush administration keeps beating the war drums and painting Iran as the greatest evil in the axis thereof. If you see the human face of your enemy, it is not so easy to hate her.

You will find a number of perceptive reviews and a plot synopsis at Rotten Tomatoes.

Persepolis, by the way, was the Greek name for the ancient capitol of the Persian empire.

What can I say about Black Orpheus, a film that upon its release in 1959 won the Oscar, the Palm D’or, and the Golden Globe and is credited with popularizing the bossa nova in the industrialized world.

Before the world heard Astrud Gilberto’s whispy voice, before they knew of Stan Getz’ velvety sax, they saw Black Orpheus. The film (in Portuguese, Orfeu Negro) put a face on a new style of samba that was fresh, romantic and very accessible to jazz hipsters.

Not much that hasn’t been said better already. Just that the film is eye and ear candy. The shots of the cliffs surrounding Rio, the scenes from Carnival, in spite of the tragic nature of the mythic framework, it all adds up to a celebration of life and sexuality that is especially refreshing after watching the dark melodrama of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution.

There is little approaching evil in this movie. Mira, Orfeo’s jilted fiancee, tries to murder Eurydice for stealing her man, but her anger is bright and out there and some would say she had cause. Anyway, as Wesley Morris writes in the Boston Globe:

One problem with the romantic tragedy, historically speaking, was that you couldn’t dance to it. In 1959, that changed. Marcel Camus delighted the world with “Black Orpheus,” which relocated the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro just in time for Carnival.

…

Indeed, the Orpheus of Greek myth tamed the masses with his lyre. For Camus’s purposes, he’s Orfeo, a streetcar driver (Breno Mello) who can seduce crowds with his guitar and the gentle rhythms of bossa nova. He’s also a wicked dancer, with moves that wouldn’t be out of place in the center forward position (Mello was a soccer star in his day). Orfeo is also something of a cad. Women swoon wherever he goes. But he’s engaged to Mira (Lourdes De Oliveira), a feisty whirlwind and sexpot who always seems to forget how angry she is when the opportunity to dance presents itself.

It should also be pointed out that Orfeo can play the sun out of bed with his guitar, or so the local children believe. Thus is set up his role as a force of rebirth, as part of the cyclical nature of life and death.

Death lurks around the edges, pursuing Eurydice, but Death is a natural fact not an evil force and this one moves so beautifully that he’s a joy to watch. Spider Man should have such moves.

Lawrence Russell, writing at Culture Court, says that Black Orpheus achieves what Orson Welles rather infamously tried when he went to Rio in 1942 and spent gobs of money trying to document Carnival on film.

It was around 1930 before the Brazilian authorities allowed samba music to be part of the Rio Carnival. Long outlawed as a dangerous expression of black slave culture, it eventually gained legitimacy as a community recreation in the form of Samba Schools, who competed for prizes at festivals.

Our Orfeo is “king” of one of these samba schools, the Babilonia School, and the whole film takes place in the context of preparation for the competition. Continuing with Russell:

The samba gained attention in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere with the highly popular 1934 Hollywood film Flying Down To Rio and later at the 1939 World Fair in New York, where the Brazilian Pavilion featured a samba orchestra and dancers. This in turn created a fad for the exciting 2/4 dance music on Broadway and inspired Orson Welles to visit Rio in 1942 and attempt a movie set in the Carnival. This movie was never completed, in part because Welles ran afoul the local authorities when he went into the surrounding hill communities in order to film a voodoo ceremony as part of the origin of the samba.

Without doubt, Black Orpheus achieves anything Welles was trying for and probably goes well beyond it. For a start, [the French director] Marcel Camus had a script to work from whereas Welles was trying to wing it on the spot. Also, by the late fifties the advances in camera and film technology allowed Camus a far easier mobility. The comparison is merely for historical purposes, however, as Welles was attempting a documentary (with certain fictional aspects) whereas Black Orpheus is pure drama.

So, in the end, the lovers die.

Eurydice is taken by Death. The underworld that Orfeo visits to reclaim her is the voodoo ceremony that Welles wasn’t allowed to film. Again, Lawrence Russell:

Here, under the direction of the witchdoctor (who is smoking a cigar), the samba is in its most elementary form, a raw cacophony of primitive drumming, clapping, chanting… and the droning cries of the dancers who stagger on the edge of the astral plane, seeking possession and reincarnation.

…

The orgiastic aspects of voodoo — sex and the torture of animals — are what relegate “the old religion” to the shadows of the occult. Yet as a source of the samba and the hypnogogic function of dance, the ancient rituals embrace both pagan and Christian cosmogonies and anticipate certain procedures in psychotherapy.

An old woman in the ceremony channels Eurydice but Orfeo fails at or rejects this method of reviving his love. He looks behind him and sees, not his beautiful Eurydice, but a plain old woman in a voodoo trance. He flees this underworld in grief.

The original Orpheus was ripped to death by Maenads for forsaking the love of women after Eurydice’s death. Our Orfeo, returning home carrying the dead Eurydice in his arms, is driven backwards over a cliff by a sort of mob of excited women led by the angry Mira. Life is always lived on the edge if you are poor in Rio. As Lawrence Russell says:

Beautifully photographed and edited, with a lot of the action on the cliffs, Rio is always an ethereal tableaux in the background, its beauty tempered by our visual anxiety of the precipice, the lurking vertigo, as if these frolicking sambistas are always just two or three wrong steps from disaster… like our involuntary falls into the chasms within our dreams.

So Orpheus and Eurydice die and our final view of them is lying in a beautiful sprawl in one another’s arms at the base of the cliff.

But it’s all no matter. There will always be another Orpheus and so another Eurydice. Some one must make the sun come up with their love song, a bossa nova played on the guitar. Here is the final scene of the film:

of the Great Flydini!

Hattip to Charlie Hughes.

It’s Saturday night. I have a glass of merlot. Time to unwind!

nothing is sacred

or

women do everything and men steal it

Here from the NYTimes:

Generations of recovering alcoholics, soldiers, weary parents, exploited workers and just about anybody feeling beaten down by life have found solace in a short prayer that begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

Now the Serenity Prayer is about to endure a controversy over its authorship that is likely to be anything but serene.

For more than 70 years, the composer of the prayer was thought to be the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of modern Christianity’s towering figures. Niebuhr, who died in 1971, said he was quite sure he had written it, and his wife, Ursula, also a prominent theologian, dated its composition to the early 1940s.

His daughter Elisabeth Sifton, a book editor and publisher, wrote a book about the prayer in 2003 in which she described her father first using it in 1943 in an “ordinary Sunday service” at a church in the bucolic Massachusetts town of Heath, where the Niebuhr family spent summers.

Now, a law librarian at Yale, using new databases of archival documents, has found newspaper clippings and a book from as far back as 1936 that quote close versions of the prayer. The quotations are from civic leaders all over the United States — a Y.W.C.A. leader in Syracuse, a public school counselor in Oklahoma City — and are always, interestingly, by women.

Not, mind you, that I’m accusing Reinhold Niebuhr of stealing. It’s all a little more complicated than that. Most things are.

Read the article.

Possum, who is stubborn (maybe because she only has about two brain cells) was sleeping in the corner of the cabinet top. This position is defensible, you see, from all the big males in the house, but we humans didn’t find it acceptable so we bribed her with a bed and now, for the moment, she sleeps on the dryer. Slight improvement but she doesn’t look any happier.

Another cat poem from Baudelaire:

Le Chat

I

Dans ma cervelle se promène,
Ainsi qu’en son appartement,
Un beau chat, fort, doux et charmant.
Quand il miaule, on l’entend à peine,

Tant son timbre est tendre et discret;
Mais que sa voix s’apaise ou gronde,
Elle est toujours riche et profonde.
C’est là son charme et son secret.

Cette voix, qui perle et qui filtre
Dans mon fonds le plus ténébreux,
Me remplit comme un vers nombreux
Et me réjouit comme un philtre.

Elle endort les plus cruels maux
Et contient toutes les extases;
Pour dire les plus longues phrases,
Elle n’a pas besoin de mots.

Non, il n’est pas d’archet qui morde
Sur mon coeur, parfait instrument,
Et fasse plus royalement
Chanter sa plus vibrante corde,

Que ta voix, chat mystérieux,
Chat séraphique, chat étrange,
En qui tout est, comme en un ange,
Aussi subtil qu’harmonieux!

II

De sa fourrure blonde et brune
Sort un parfum si doux, qu’un soir
J’en fus embaumé, pour l’avoir
Caressée une fois, rien qu’une.

C’est l’esprit familier du lieu;
Il juge, il préside, il inspire
Toutes choses dans son empire;
peut-être est-il fée, est-il dieu?

Quand mes yeux, vers ce chat que j’aime
Tirés comme par un aimant,
Se retournent docilement
Et que je regarde en moi-même,

Je vois avec étonnement
Le feu de ses prunelles pâles,
Clairs fanaux, vivantes opales
Qui me contemplent fixement.

— Charles Baudelaire

A translation:

The Cat

I

A fine strong gentle cat is prowling
As in his bedroom, in my brain;
So soft his voice, so smooth its strain,
That you can scarcely hear him miowling.

But should he venture to complain
Or scold, the voice is rich and deep:
And thus he manages to keep
The charm of his untroubled reign.

This voice, which seems to pearl and filter
Through my soul’s inmost shady nook,
Fills me with poems, like a book,
And fortifies me, like a philtre.

His voice can cure the direst pain
And it contains the rarest raptures.
The deepest meanings, which it captures,
It needs no language to explain.

There is no bow that can so sweep
That perfect instrument, my heart:
Or make more sumptuous music start
From its most vibrant cord and deep,

Than can the voice of this strange elf,
This cat, bewitching and seraphic,
Subtly harmonious in his traffic
With all things else, and with himself.

II

So sweet a perfume seems to swim
Out of his fur both brown and bright,
I nearly was embalmed one night
From (only once) caressing him.

Familiar Lar of where I stay,
He rules, presides, inspires and teaches
All things to which his empire reaches.
Perhaps he is a god, or fay.

When to a cherished cat my gaze
Is magnet-drawn and then returns
Back to itself, it there discerns,
With strange excitement and amaze,

Deep down in my own self, the rays
Of living opals, torch-like gleams
And pallid fire of eyes, it seems,
That fixedly return my gaze.

— translated by Roy Campbell in Flowers of Evil A Selection, ed Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (New Directions, 1955)

The Lar that Campbell refers to here is the singular of Lares, the domestic gods of the ancient Romans. There was a lar familiarie, which was the familiar of the house. Possum, lately, has been entirely too familiar with some places for my comfort. Peanut, on the other hand, has staked out the top of my desk and will not be moved. We tried a bed for him, thinking we could entice him away, but he sleeps beside it.

Hard to get much done around here.

For other translations, see Fleur du Mal

Speaking of the braiding of cultural threads, I’ll give you this version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in a tip of the hat to Lance’s open thread discussion of Bonnie and Clyde, which will take place tomorrow night, either at the New Critics site or over at Lance’s place.

I’m sure he’d be pleased to have you join the discussion. For me, I fear, the most memorable thing about Bonnie and Clyde was the Bluegrass soundtrack.

Meanwhile, you might enjoy Lance’s post on Bonnie and Clyde in Nixonland.