Here’s the note from the YouTube. There is some inside baseball of which I hadn’t a clue:
_________________________
Here is a fantastic video filmed for Canadian television, with the young Suzanne Farrell, Marnee Morris, and Conrad Ludlow. In the corps is a “who’s who” of dancers that later became soloists and principals.
_________________________
Furthermore, apparently it is George Balanchine’s choreography! And John Clifford (the YouTuber neo has linked) also provides a PBS doco on Balanchine.
It’s two hours long, but I’ve been meaning to touch base on Balanchine for years.
Hudson Institute panel discussion on “The Iran-Russia Alliance”, with Peter Rough, Can Kasapoglu, Luke Coffey and Mike Doran: https://youtu.be/5ToUaSZaoWo
“A Tanzanian fashion designer recently took to Twitter and accused Biden’s former deputy nuclear waste official Sam Brinton of taking and wearing her clothes.
Fashion designer Asyakhamsin who hails from Tanzania but is now based in Houston, Texas tweeted “I lost my bag 2018 in DCA recently I heard the news on Fox News about Sam Brinton luggage issue surprisingly I found his images wore my custom made outfits which was in the lost bag on 2018.””
Lovely photo of Sammy in African designer dress over at Gateway Pundit.
Is this the third, or the fourth woman who has unknowingly donated luggage to Ms. Brinton?
Interestingly, no men’s suitcases have been reported stolen.
Same agents who searched Melania’s bedroom scheduled to toss Sam’s closet?
Oh boy,
recently released Jan 6 video. Kinda goes against the Dem propaganda
InvestigateJ6
@InvestigateJ6
·
Feb 20
On January 6th at 2:18pm, DC police Sgt. Edwards admits to his Commander that their munitions are hitting innocent people. Officer Thau admits that they are inciting ten protestors for every person they hit.
full moon @ 12:36, the Twitter thread is really something. It’s consistent with what I remember reading at the time from people who were in the crowd.
Re: J6 footage
If there are ~41,000 hours of J6 video, it would take one person ~20 years of 40 hr/wks to view all the footage.
So increase that to 100 viewers and the time goes down to ~2.5 months.
I wonder how Tucker/Fox are coping.
Fullmoon said of Sam Brinton, “Interestingly, no men’s suitcases have been reported stolen.”
It’s only a matter of time until the circus comes to town and Sam-I-Am pilfers a clown costume.
Hard times for cats and dogs:
1) Household pets in East Palestine reported sick from exposure to the chemical brew from the derailed train; the director of the county humane society “added that the humane society has received reports about sick animals who live seven miles outside of the evacuation zone.”
Now that Bootygag finally showed up to visit the accident site, the locals should send him the vet bills for their pets as well as their own medical bills.
2) Two California lawmakers have introduced a bill in the state assembly “to end a deeply racialized traumatic and harmful practice by prohibiting the use of police canines . . . . Police canines remain a gross misuse of force, victimizing black and brown people.” According to Legal Insurrection, “More reasonable Californians hate the proposed measure.”
3) A gray Sphynx cat (the breed is naturally hairless) was rescued from a Mexican prison where the inmates had tattooed both sides of its abdomen with gang tats. (Most states in the U.S. consider pet tattoos or piercings to be animal abuse.) Luckily, the kitty is friendly, is otherwise in good condition, and is in foster care prior to adoption. Photos of the cat at the link:
From our short poetry exchange a few days ago, I thought to recommend my favorite W.S. Merwin poem, as one you might appreciate, from that group of poets born in the mid1920s.
It’s in the form of a psalm, only here Merwin prays to his muse, apparently a wolf. I was transfixed by Merwin’s imagery and earnestness. It’s a long poem. These are the first two verses.
I’m not sure if this Lemuel relates to King Lemuel in Proverbs 31.
___________________________
Lemuel’s Blessing
“Let Lemuel bless with the wolf,
which is a doe without a master,
but the Lord hears his cries and
feeds him in the desert. ”
–Christopher, “Jubilate Agno”
You that know the way,
Spirit,
I bless your ears which are like cypruses on a mountain
With their roots in wisdom. Let me approach.
I bless your paws and their twenty nails which tell their own prayer
And are like dice in command of their own combinations.
Let me not be lost.
I bless your eyes for which I know no comparison.
Run with me like the horizon, for without you
I am nothing but a dog lost and hungry,
Ill-natured, untrustworthy, useless.
My bones together bless you like an orchestra of flutes.
Divert the weapons of the settlements and lead their dogs a dance.
Where a dog is shameless and wears servility
In his tail like a banner,
Let me wear the opprobrium of possessed and possessors
As a thick tail properly used
To warm my worst and my best parts. My tail and my laugh bless you.
Lead me past the error at the fork of hesitation.
Deliver me
Merwin published 50 books and won a heap of awards and prizes. I heard him read in 1975 and got his autograph. From wiki I see that he died in 2019 at the age of 91.He had a good run.
Re: “Grey Area” — sexual harassment term
I never heard back from UNM LoboRESPECT as to why their mandatory, required, compulsory course on sexual harassment was titled “Grey Area” (British spelling) rather than “Gray Area” (American). Not that I was surprised.
Checking around the web, I see “Grey Area” on other American websites, occasionally accompanied by reference to “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the mega-bestseller about female sexual submission. Which became a lucrative movie blockbuster — $570 mil box office on a $40 mil budget.
So I believe the American use of “Grey Area” is a reference to “Fifty Shades of Grey,” whether those using the term realize it or not. I be wouldn’t be surprises if Woke college admins don’t.
@ huxley – I did see your poets list early this morning on the Novels thread (what a marathon!).
I recognized a couple of names, but they were neither old enough nor modern enough for any of my school assignments, and I took a very long hiatus from poetry after graduation and didn’t read much except for individual poems randomly encountered, until I got enamoured of Robert Graves some decades later.
The Wolf makes an interesting metaphor for the subject of Merwin’s poem —
Your comment had “doe without a master” which had me stumped for symbolism, but when I clicked the link to the full text, it appears to be a typo for “dog” — which makes much more sense in the context.
Let Lemuel bless the wolf, which is a dog without a master, but the Lord hears his cries and feeds him in the desert.
From “Jubilate Agno” by Christopher Smart
The excerpt is not quite long enough; only the entire piece builds a complete vision.
You have to get from “I am no more than a dog lost and hungry” to “And sustain me for my time in the desert” at the end to see why the Smart stanza is the prologue.
I suspect there are lots of allusions and metaphors that I am not seeing, although I did catch some of them.
“But lead me at times beside still waters” is pretty hard to miss.
“Lead me past the error at the fork of hesitation / Deliver me” also has a feeling of “lead us not into temptation” but that might be me, not Merwin.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone use “ruth” in a sentence (although ruthless is very common); interesting that Merwin capitalizes it (perhaps playing on the compassion of Ruth for Naomi?) — but it could also be a transcription typo, because it’s not capitalized the final time.
So of course I looked up Jubilate Agno, and confirmed my only recollection of Smart’s work: his homage to his cat, which is just about all that is excerpted in the anthologies.
“For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his Way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer
And so on, for about 64 lines.
Wikipedia’s article on Smart notes that the entire poem pairs Biblical figures with animals, hence Lemuel and the wolf. Wikipedia says Merwin wrote many poems featuring animals, and, looking at his career, he would probably be familiar with Smart’s poem. He clearly based his analogy on Smart’s, and was more interested in the wolf than in Lemuel.
For many of the pairs there is a logical or symbolic consistency.[20] Figures, such as Abraham, Balaam, and Daniel are paired with animals mentioned directly in relationship with each other in their Biblical accounts, while others, like Isaac, are slightly more obscure and paired with animals that were involved in an important aspect of their life.[20] Biblical priests follow the Patriarchs, and their animal companions are the unclean animals from Deuteronomy.[20]
The pairing slowly breaks down when later figures, such as political leaders, enter into the poem.
The line about Lemuel is in the “breaking down” section.
Rejoice in God, O ye Tongues; give the glory to the Lord, and the Lamb.
Nations, and languages, and every Creature, in which is the breath of Life.
Let man and beast appear before him, and magnify his name together.
Let Noah and his company approach the throne of Grace, and do homage to the Ark of their Salvation.
Let Abraham present a Ram, and worship the God of his Redemption.
Let Isaac, the Bridegroom, kneel with his Camels, and bless the hope of his pilgrimage.
Let Jacob, and his speckled Drove adore the good Shepherd of Israel.
Let Esau offer a scape Goat for his seed, and rejoice in the blessing of God his father.
Let Nimrod, the mighty hunter, bind a Leopard to the altar, and consecrate his spear to the Lord.
Let Ishmael dedicate a Tyger, and give praise for the liberty, in which the Lord has let him at large.
Let Balaam appear with an Ass, and bless the Lord his people and his creatures for a reward eternal.
Let Anah, the son of Zibion, lead a Mule to the temple, and bless God, who amerces the consolation of the creature for the service of Man.
Let Daniel come forth with a Lion, and praise God with all his might through faith in Christ Jesus.
…..
Let Lemuel bless with the Wolf, which is a dog without a master, but the Lord hears his cries and feeds him in the desert.
There is no association of Lemuel and wolves in the Bible, and apparently no one is really sure who he is, as he only appears in that one Proverb. However, you might stretch some of his mother’s advice to align with parts of Merwin’s poem, because lit-crit can do anything.
For example, “like dice in command of their own combinations” (an intriguing simile which I really liked) could be paired with the warning “Give not thy strength unto women, nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings.” because of the element of self-control, but that’s about the only one I can see.
Trust Britten to glom onto Smart for lyrics, not long after the poem was published — (per Wikipedia)
The text of Jubilate Agno is the source for Rejoice in the Lamb, a festival cantata composed by Benjamin Britten in 1943 for four soloists, a soprano, alto, tenor and bass choir, and organ. The cantata was commissioned by the Reverend Canon Walter Hussey for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the consecration of St Matthew’s Church, Northampton.
I’m not sure if there is any significance in this or not:
Jubilate Agno (Latin: “Rejoice in the Lamb”) is a religious poem by Christopher Smart, and was written between 1759 and 1763, during Smart’s confinement for insanity in St. Luke’s Hospital, Bethnal Green, London. The poem was first published in 1939, under the title Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam, edited by W. F. Stead from Smart’s manuscript, which Stead had discovered in a private library.
And finally, because these two lines were contiguous, and one good poetic device leads to another:
Let Susanna bless with the Butterfly — beauty hath wings, but chastity is the Cherub.
Let Sampson bless with the Bee, to whom the Lord hath given strength to annoy the assailant and wisdom to his strength.
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
@ Fullmoon > “A Tanzanian fashion designer recently took to Twitter and accused Biden’s former deputy nuclear waste official Sam Brinton of taking and wearing her clothes.”
I saw some of the pictures yesterday, and more today.
Yeah, he took them.
And was stupid enough to wear them in public.
Good point:
Mindy Robinson ?? @iheartmindy
Replying to @asyakhamsin1
“Was he stalking you for your stuff? I find it hard to believe he just accidentally ended up stealing the suit case of a clothing designer.”
Other speculations on Britten’s fetish for other people’s bags and clothes follow.
What’s very clear is that his “oopsie my bad it was an accident” claim about the first case for which he was arrested is a thread-bare excuse.
@ miguel in re the Norfolk Southern train wreck: Schachtel brings the receipt to show that the company, like so many others, was more interested in checking the DEI boxes than hiring people to do the necessary safety work.
A commenter extended the familiar maxim:
The Green Hornet
“Get woke, go broke, poison the folk.”
@ huxley > “So increase that to 100 viewers and the time goes down to ~2.5 months.”
Which should have been started by the end of January 2021, and finished long ago.
However, the viewers can be selective and begin with the videos that are most likely to show events that contradict the Democrat narrative, like the ones in the Tweet thread that Fullmoon linked – it’s devastating.
Some commenters there remarked that portions of the videos that actually had been posted to social media earlier were taken down immediately. Since some of them could probably have been used in defense of the J6 political prisoners, then Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al are guilty of obstructing justice.
Just like the Democrats refusing to release exculpatory videos to the defense attorneys, and the judges that let them get away with it.
I haven’t seen Tucker’s commentary yet – has he got anything out, or is he waiting to get a handle on more of the events first?
Update on the East Palestine train derailment: The NTSB released its preliminary report on the disaster earlier today (2/23). There is a very good analysis of the report by Juan Browne, an airline pilot who usually covers aviation incidents and accidents on his Blancolirio YouTube channel, but occasionally discusses other types of transportation disasters. The video is about 18 minutes long, but worth the time. Browne knows his stuff and explains what happened in a way that anyone can understand even if they aren’t professional railroad engineers. He also doesn’t politicize the accidents he discusses– a rare virtue these days, and one that his commenters (who know their stuff too!) very much respect.
We see this constantly. Analysis of Covid data, election returns, polling, global warming, finance, economics — all start with the assumption that the data is honestly compiled and accurate. And every time we look under the hood we find it’s all crap.
We live in the Information Age. “Smart” people have tools for slicing and dicing the data into ever more brilliant and complex ‘tranches’. And just as Wall Street tried to slice crap mortgages into tranches of gold, our information tranches aren’t nearly as valuable as we fool ourselves into believing.
There’s never enough math to turn crap into gold. Not even Rumpelstiltskin would try to manage that.
AesopFan takes off her jacket, finds a phone booth (which also requires superpowers), and emerges as SuperScholar!
Awesome job.
If only I had looked up the Christopher Smart…
@ huxley > It’s what I do for fun.
One of the reasons I really like Neo’s blog – always something interesting to research, not always political.
And it is getting hard to find a proper phone booth these days….
AesopFan:
“Lemuel’s Blessing” is from Merwin’s early collection, “The Moving Target,” in which he was struggling to find his own voice and how to write poetry. The book title is a clue.
Merwin had already published four books of poetry in that rather dense, allusive, formal style of the 50s (which I generally don’t care for). He was well-regarded as an up-and-coming young poet.
In “The Moving Target” Merwin broke with his past and launched himself into a more open, accessible, yet experimental style influenced by his wide readings in international poetry particularly surrealism.
One might say “The Moving Target” was Merwin’s “Revolver” album. Exciting stuff for aficionados.
Merwin never looked back. He produced a unique and rich body of work. He walked his own path between academic poetry and the various other movements percolating in his time.
If you liked “Lemuel’s Blessing,” try “The Moving Target.”
“Air” is a well-known poem from Merwin’s “The Moving Target.” I believe it is largely about Merwin finding his own way in poetry. I was rather excited when I realized that on my own.
_________________________________
Air
Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.
This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.
I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.
Young as I am, old as I am,
I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.
This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.
Which gets the part right about Merwin walking between the past and the future, but the rest strikes me as overwrought critical bull.
Other American poets born in the 1920s:
Howard Nemerov 1920
Richard Wilbur 1921
James Dickey 1923
Anthony Hecht 1923
Louis Simpson 1923
Edgar Bowers 1924
Donald Justice 1925
W. D. Snodgrass 1926
Galway Kinnell 1927
James Wright 1927
My taste differs from Huxley’s. He likes the Beatnik, West Coast, and Black Mountain School poets. I prefer the formalists. Wilbur, Hecht, Bowers, and Simpson were G.I. poets and WWII combat veterans. Nemerov served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Dickey served in the USAAF in the Pacific. Snodgrass served in the Navy. I heard Hecht speak about his war experiences a few months before he died in 2004. He had no use for talk about “the Good War” and “the Greatest Generation”.
Honorable mention to Joseph Langland (1917-2007), another WWII combat veteran poet and my old English prof at UMass.
@ stan > “Analysis of Covid data, election returns, polling, global warming, finance, economics — all start with the assumption that the data is honestly compiled and accurate. And every time we look under the hood we find it’s all crap.”
Sarah Hoyt wrote a post on this very thing, looking at population “data” as reported by most countries, all of which have an agenda that incentivizes cooking the books.
Dang. Forgot James Dickey! (Also author of “Deliverance.) I recall his review of “The Moving Target” which reinforced my impression above:
_________________________
What matters most, though, is that these poems [of “The Moving Target”] are so incomparably the author’s best as to make the reader inadvertently believe that Mr. Merwin’s previous books were by somebody else.
There is a feeling of imaginative daring here, a sense of pushing-out, of going-beyond, of linguistic adventurousness that was the main missing ingredient in the author’s other poems.
I bought a book, which collected the first four books of Merwin’s poetry, and Dickey was quite right. Those books seemed to have been written by someone else.
Dickey was a force of his own. His poems were more formal than I liked but he could make a poem happen. The first line of “Deliverance” is practically a poem unto itself:
__________________________
It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose.
__________________________
Dickey is describing the map to the river our adventurers plan to tour by canoe.
BTW, did you know Nemerov was brother to Diane Arbus, the photographer?
I could have mentioned Henri Coulette (1927-1988) in my list. He was well-regarded by his peers but he only published two books and today few know him. Some years after his death, his friends, Donald Justice and Robert Mezey, succeeded in their push for “The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette” to be published.
He was also my father’s best childhood friend, while growing up in Santa Fe. Coulette wrote this poem after my father’s death:
_______________________________
On the Horizon
for John Trainor
It is just what he had imagined,
A blue-chalk line
Such as girls use, summers,
For hop-scotch.
He crosses over it,
The left slipper first,
For luck, and then,
The right forever.
If he were to look back–
But he won’t,
He’s beyond that–
He would see, the light being right,
Everything
As it always intended itself.
–Henri Coulette, “The Family Goldschmitt” (1971)
_______________________________
When I moved to California in 1982, I met Henri in a Beverly Hills coffee shop, which was halfway between where he lived in Pomona and I was staying in Thousand Oaks.
He was a kind, generous man who loved my father and even encouraged me as a young poet. I feel so fortunate to have met him.
Huxley: yes, I knew that Nemerov was Diane Arbus’ brother (I also used to be into classic-camera black-and-white photography). Interesting family. Like out of a J. D. Salinger short story.
I think I have the same collection of Merwin’s first four books of poetry that you have. Published by Atheneum in the mid-1970s on fine paper. Nice book, but Merwin’s poetry never quite clicked with me. That said, I found his work to be more accessible–and more enjoyable–than John Ashbery’s neo-absurdist stuff. I half-suspected Ashbery was a very clever literary con man.
One of James Dickey’s poems has a line that would serve as a pretty good gravestone epitaph for anybody:
“Having done all things in this life that he could.”
About a fellow USAAF aviator who was shot down in the Pacific and executed–beheaded–by the Japanese.
I think it was you who made the point in a previous poetry-heavy thread that poets seem to be disproportionately susceptible to mental illness and substance abuse (alcoholism) and to lead disproportionately messy lives. Many fit that pattern. Dickey partly did: he was an alcoholic and (I gather) a bad husband. But he also had a fairly successful business career (Coca-Cola), at least for a while. Other businessman-poets are T. S. Eliot (banking), Wallace Stevens (insurance), and Dana Gioia (food industry). Richard Wilbur–perhaps the best American formalist poet of the 20th century–was formidably sane. He was also deeply religious. Not coincidental, I’ll bet.
Huxley: thanks for the reminder about Henri Coulette, and for that poem in memory of your father. Very nice. You were fortunate to have him as a mentor.
Joseph Langland–another forgotten poet–kindly critiqued my teenage juvenilia when I had him as a professor at UMass. Way too kindly, looking back on it. I sent some of my later work to Dana Gioia after running into and recognizing him at an airport in Connecticut. He liked it and encouraged me to publish. I didn’t have the guts to back then. Still don’t. Anyway, as Richard Wilbur said about some other activity (running, if I recall correctly): the god of that has left me.
Re: Henri Coulette / “On the Horizon”
Hubert:
You’re welcome!
Geez, I just realized that more than likely in the poem for my father Coulette was thinking of those photos of the Whole Earth which NASA had recently made available.
Gives the poem a whole new feeling.
I’ve been fascinated with Dana Gioia ever since I read his controversial essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” He was looking square at the decline of poetry outside its own bubble. Not pretty.
Re: Dickey / “The Performance”
Hubert:
Yes, when I think of Dickey the poet, I think of “The Performance” and his Twilight-Zone-ish chiller, “The Sheep Child.”
Quite lovely! Bach and ballet.
Here’s the note from the YouTube. There is some inside baseball of which I hadn’t a clue:
_________________________
Here is a fantastic video filmed for Canadian television, with the young Suzanne Farrell, Marnee Morris, and Conrad Ludlow. In the corps is a “who’s who” of dancers that later became soloists and principals.
_________________________
Furthermore, apparently it is George Balanchine’s choreography! And John Clifford (the YouTuber neo has linked) also provides a PBS doco on Balanchine.
–“Balanchine PBS Documentary”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppICC_6yMXo&t=7s
It’s two hours long, but I’ve been meaning to touch base on Balanchine for years.
Hudson Institute panel discussion on “The Iran-Russia Alliance”, with Peter Rough, Can Kasapoglu, Luke Coffey and Mike Doran:
https://youtu.be/5ToUaSZaoWo
“A Tanzanian fashion designer recently took to Twitter and accused Biden’s former deputy nuclear waste official Sam Brinton of taking and wearing her clothes.
Fashion designer Asyakhamsin who hails from Tanzania but is now based in Houston, Texas tweeted “I lost my bag 2018 in DCA recently I heard the news on Fox News about Sam Brinton luggage issue surprisingly I found his images wore my custom made outfits which was in the lost bag on 2018.””
Lovely photo of Sammy in African designer dress over at Gateway Pundit.
Is this the third, or the fourth woman who has unknowingly donated luggage to Ms. Brinton?
Interestingly, no men’s suitcases have been reported stolen.
Same agents who searched Melania’s bedroom scheduled to toss Sam’s closet?
Oh boy,
recently released Jan 6 video. Kinda goes against the Dem propaganda
https://twitter.com/InvestigateJ6/status/1627767715363422210
The sublime the beautiful not these sordid and sfupid things
https://dossier.substack.com/p/did-norfolk-southern-neglect-safety
InvestigateJ6
@InvestigateJ6
·
Feb 20
On January 6th at 2:18pm, DC police Sgt. Edwards admits to his Commander that their munitions are hitting innocent people. Officer Thau admits that they are inciting ten protestors for every person they hit.
Con Coughlin, Gatestone Institute — “Rehabilitating a War Criminal like Assad is Not an Option”: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19429/rehabilitating-war-criminal-assad
As opposed to hts and other qatari backed militia
full moon @ 12:36, the Twitter thread is really something. It’s consistent with what I remember reading at the time from people who were in the crowd.
Re: J6 footage
If there are ~41,000 hours of J6 video, it would take one person ~20 years of 40 hr/wks to view all the footage.
So increase that to 100 viewers and the time goes down to ~2.5 months.
I wonder how Tucker/Fox are coping.
Fullmoon said of Sam Brinton, “Interestingly, no men’s suitcases have been reported stolen.”
It’s only a matter of time until the circus comes to town and Sam-I-Am pilfers a clown costume.
Hard times for cats and dogs:
1) Household pets in East Palestine reported sick from exposure to the chemical brew from the derailed train; the director of the county humane society “added that the humane society has received reports about sick animals who live seven miles outside of the evacuation zone.”
https://www.thewildest.com/pet-health/east-palestine-crisis-pets
Now that Bootygag finally showed up to visit the accident site, the locals should send him the vet bills for their pets as well as their own medical bills.
2) Two California lawmakers have introduced a bill in the state assembly “to end a deeply racialized traumatic and harmful practice by prohibiting the use of police canines . . . . Police canines remain a gross misuse of force, victimizing black and brown people.” According to Legal Insurrection, “More reasonable Californians hate the proposed measure.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/02/california-lawmakers-introduce-bill-to-ban-deeply-racialized-and-harmful-practice-of-police-dogs/
3) A gray Sphynx cat (the breed is naturally hairless) was rescued from a Mexican prison where the inmates had tattooed both sides of its abdomen with gang tats. (Most states in the U.S. consider pet tattoos or piercings to be animal abuse.) Luckily, the kitty is friendly, is otherwise in good condition, and is in foster care prior to adoption. Photos of the cat at the link:
https://nypost.com/2023/02/23/tattooed-cat-rescued-from-mexican-prison/
Gray Cat Lives Matter!
AesopFan:
From our short poetry exchange a few days ago, I thought to recommend my favorite W.S. Merwin poem, as one you might appreciate, from that group of poets born in the mid1920s.
It’s in the form of a psalm, only here Merwin prays to his muse, apparently a wolf. I was transfixed by Merwin’s imagery and earnestness. It’s a long poem. These are the first two verses.
I’m not sure if this Lemuel relates to King Lemuel in Proverbs 31.
___________________________
Lemuel’s Blessing
“Let Lemuel bless with the wolf,
which is a doe without a master,
but the Lord hears his cries and
feeds him in the desert. ”
–Christopher, “Jubilate Agno”
You that know the way,
Spirit,
I bless your ears which are like cypruses on a mountain
With their roots in wisdom. Let me approach.
I bless your paws and their twenty nails which tell their own prayer
And are like dice in command of their own combinations.
Let me not be lost.
I bless your eyes for which I know no comparison.
Run with me like the horizon, for without you
I am nothing but a dog lost and hungry,
Ill-natured, untrustworthy, useless.
My bones together bless you like an orchestra of flutes.
Divert the weapons of the settlements and lead their dogs a dance.
Where a dog is shameless and wears servility
In his tail like a banner,
Let me wear the opprobrium of possessed and possessors
As a thick tail properly used
To warm my worst and my best parts. My tail and my laugh bless you.
Lead me past the error at the fork of hesitation.
Deliver me
–W.S. Merwin, “The Moving Target” (1963)
https://allpoetry.com/poem/14502269-Lemuel-s-Blessing-by-Ipmpitc5
___________________________
Merwin published 50 books and won a heap of awards and prizes. I heard him read in 1975 and got his autograph. From wiki I see that he died in 2019 at the age of 91.He had a good run.
Re: “Grey Area” — sexual harassment term
I never heard back from UNM LoboRESPECT as to why their mandatory, required, compulsory course on sexual harassment was titled “Grey Area” (British spelling) rather than “Gray Area” (American). Not that I was surprised.
Checking around the web, I see “Grey Area” on other American websites, occasionally accompanied by reference to “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the mega-bestseller about female sexual submission. Which became a lucrative movie blockbuster — $570 mil box office on a $40 mil budget.
So I believe the American use of “Grey Area” is a reference to “Fifty Shades of Grey,” whether those using the term realize it or not. I be wouldn’t be surprises if Woke college admins don’t.
@ huxley – I did see your poets list early this morning on the Novels thread (what a marathon!).
I recognized a couple of names, but they were neither old enough nor modern enough for any of my school assignments, and I took a very long hiatus from poetry after graduation and didn’t read much except for individual poems randomly encountered, until I got enamoured of Robert Graves some decades later.
The Wolf makes an interesting metaphor for the subject of Merwin’s poem —
Your comment had “doe without a master” which had me stumped for symbolism, but when I clicked the link to the full text, it appears to be a typo for “dog” — which makes much more sense in the context.
The excerpt is not quite long enough; only the entire piece builds a complete vision.
You have to get from “I am no more than a dog lost and hungry” to “And sustain me for my time in the desert” at the end to see why the Smart stanza is the prologue.
I suspect there are lots of allusions and metaphors that I am not seeing, although I did catch some of them.
“But lead me at times beside still waters” is pretty hard to miss.
“Lead me past the error at the fork of hesitation / Deliver me” also has a feeling of “lead us not into temptation” but that might be me, not Merwin.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone use “ruth” in a sentence (although ruthless is very common); interesting that Merwin capitalizes it (perhaps playing on the compassion of Ruth for Naomi?) — but it could also be a transcription typo, because it’s not capitalized the final time.
So of course I looked up Jubilate Agno, and confirmed my only recollection of Smart’s work: his homage to his cat, which is just about all that is excerpted in the anthologies.
And so on, for about 64 lines.
Wikipedia’s article on Smart notes that the entire poem pairs Biblical figures with animals, hence Lemuel and the wolf. Wikipedia says Merwin wrote many poems featuring animals, and, looking at his career, he would probably be familiar with Smart’s poem. He clearly based his analogy on Smart’s, and was more interested in the wolf than in Lemuel.
The line about Lemuel is in the “breaking down” section.
http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/jubilate/agno-a.html
There is no association of Lemuel and wolves in the Bible, and apparently no one is really sure who he is, as he only appears in that one Proverb. However, you might stretch some of his mother’s advice to align with parts of Merwin’s poem, because lit-crit can do anything.
For example, “like dice in command of their own combinations” (an intriguing simile which I really liked) could be paired with the warning “Give not thy strength unto women, nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings.” because of the element of self-control, but that’s about the only one I can see.
Trust Britten to glom onto Smart for lyrics, not long after the poem was published — (per Wikipedia)
I’m not sure if there is any significance in this or not:
An appreciation of Smart and his oeuvre:
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/christopher-smarts-jubilate-agno
And finally, because these two lines were contiguous, and one good poetic device leads to another:
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
@ Fullmoon > “A Tanzanian fashion designer recently took to Twitter and accused Biden’s former deputy nuclear waste official Sam Brinton of taking and wearing her clothes.”
I saw some of the pictures yesterday, and more today.
Yeah, he took them.
And was stupid enough to wear them in public.
https://twitter.com/asyakhamsin1/status/1628706676420247552
asyakhamsin @asyakhamsin1
“Even this jewellery was in my lost bag dah”
Good point:
Mindy Robinson ?? @iheartmindy
Replying to @asyakhamsin1
“Was he stalking you for your stuff? I find it hard to believe he just accidentally ended up stealing the suit case of a clothing designer.”
Other speculations on Britten’s fetish for other people’s bags and clothes follow.
What’s very clear is that his “oopsie my bad it was an accident” claim about the first case for which he was arrested is a thread-bare excuse.
@ miguel in re the Norfolk Southern train wreck: Schachtel brings the receipt to show that the company, like so many others, was more interested in checking the DEI boxes than hiring people to do the necessary safety work.
A commenter extended the familiar maxim:
The Green Hornet
“Get woke, go broke, poison the folk.”
One of the stories about how they have cut back inspectors along the tracks.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/norfolk-southern-eliminated-key-maintenance-role-derailment-region-union-says
@ huxley > “So increase that to 100 viewers and the time goes down to ~2.5 months.”
Which should have been started by the end of January 2021, and finished long ago.
However, the viewers can be selective and begin with the videos that are most likely to show events that contradict the Democrat narrative, like the ones in the Tweet thread that Fullmoon linked – it’s devastating.
Some commenters there remarked that portions of the videos that actually had been posted to social media earlier were taken down immediately. Since some of them could probably have been used in defense of the J6 political prisoners, then Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al are guilty of obstructing justice.
Just like the Democrats refusing to release exculpatory videos to the defense attorneys, and the judges that let them get away with it.
I haven’t seen Tucker’s commentary yet – has he got anything out, or is he waiting to get a handle on more of the events first?
Update on the East Palestine train derailment: The NTSB released its preliminary report on the disaster earlier today (2/23). There is a very good analysis of the report by Juan Browne, an airline pilot who usually covers aviation incidents and accidents on his Blancolirio YouTube channel, but occasionally discusses other types of transportation disasters. The video is about 18 minutes long, but worth the time. Browne knows his stuff and explains what happened in a way that anyone can understand even if they aren’t professional railroad engineers. He also doesn’t politicize the accidents he discusses– a rare virtue these days, and one that his commenters (who know their stuff too!) very much respect.
Browne’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5D2LA-Llyc&ab_channel=blancolirio
Link to the NTSB Preliminary Report (available for download in PDF format): https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/RRD23MR005.aspx
The foolishness of relying on government data.
https://open.substack.com/pub/boriquagato/p/perhaps-the-state-should-not-collect?r=pnf3m&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
We see this constantly. Analysis of Covid data, election returns, polling, global warming, finance, economics — all start with the assumption that the data is honestly compiled and accurate. And every time we look under the hood we find it’s all crap.
We live in the Information Age. “Smart” people have tools for slicing and dicing the data into ever more brilliant and complex ‘tranches’. And just as Wall Street tried to slice crap mortgages into tranches of gold, our information tranches aren’t nearly as valuable as we fool ourselves into believing.
There’s never enough math to turn crap into gold. Not even Rumpelstiltskin would try to manage that.
AesopFan takes off her jacket, finds a phone booth (which also requires superpowers), and emerges as SuperScholar!
Awesome job.
If only I had looked up the Christopher Smart…
@ huxley > It’s what I do for fun.
One of the reasons I really like Neo’s blog – always something interesting to research, not always political.
And it is getting hard to find a proper phone booth these days….
AesopFan:
“Lemuel’s Blessing” is from Merwin’s early collection, “The Moving Target,” in which he was struggling to find his own voice and how to write poetry. The book title is a clue.
Merwin had already published four books of poetry in that rather dense, allusive, formal style of the 50s (which I generally don’t care for). He was well-regarded as an up-and-coming young poet.
In “The Moving Target” Merwin broke with his past and launched himself into a more open, accessible, yet experimental style influenced by his wide readings in international poetry particularly surrealism.
One might say “The Moving Target” was Merwin’s “Revolver” album. Exciting stuff for aficionados.
Merwin never looked back. He produced a unique and rich body of work. He walked his own path between academic poetry and the various other movements percolating in his time.
If you liked “Lemuel’s Blessing,” try “The Moving Target.”
“Air” is a well-known poem from Merwin’s “The Moving Target.” I believe it is largely about Merwin finding his own way in poetry. I was rather excited when I realized that on my own.
_________________________________
Air
Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.
This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.
I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.
Young as I am, old as I am,
I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.
This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.
–W.S. Merwin
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/w__s__merwin/poems/19920
_________________________________
However, there are other views such as:
https://poemanalysis.com/w-s-merwin/air/
Which gets the part right about Merwin walking between the past and the future, but the rest strikes me as overwrought critical bull.
Other American poets born in the 1920s:
Howard Nemerov 1920
Richard Wilbur 1921
James Dickey 1923
Anthony Hecht 1923
Louis Simpson 1923
Edgar Bowers 1924
Donald Justice 1925
W. D. Snodgrass 1926
Galway Kinnell 1927
James Wright 1927
My taste differs from Huxley’s. He likes the Beatnik, West Coast, and Black Mountain School poets. I prefer the formalists. Wilbur, Hecht, Bowers, and Simpson were G.I. poets and WWII combat veterans. Nemerov served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Dickey served in the USAAF in the Pacific. Snodgrass served in the Navy. I heard Hecht speak about his war experiences a few months before he died in 2004. He had no use for talk about “the Good War” and “the Greatest Generation”.
Honorable mention to Joseph Langland (1917-2007), another WWII combat veteran poet and my old English prof at UMass.
@ stan > “Analysis of Covid data, election returns, polling, global warming, finance, economics — all start with the assumption that the data is honestly compiled and accurate. And every time we look under the hood we find it’s all crap.”
Sarah Hoyt wrote a post on this very thing, looking at population “data” as reported by most countries, all of which have an agenda that incentivizes cooking the books.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2023/02/20/the-power-of-lies/
Hubert:
Dang. Forgot James Dickey! (Also author of “Deliverance.) I recall his review of “The Moving Target” which reinforced my impression above:
_________________________
What matters most, though, is that these poems [of “The Moving Target”] are so incomparably the author’s best as to make the reader inadvertently believe that Mr. Merwin’s previous books were by somebody else.
There is a feeling of imaginative daring here, a sense of pushing-out, of going-beyond, of linguistic adventurousness that was the main missing ingredient in the author’s other poems.
–James Dickey, “The Many Ways of Speaking in Verse” (1963)
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/04/specials/merwin-moving.html
_________________________
I bought a book, which collected the first four books of Merwin’s poetry, and Dickey was quite right. Those books seemed to have been written by someone else.
Dickey was a force of his own. His poems were more formal than I liked but he could make a poem happen. The first line of “Deliverance” is practically a poem unto itself:
__________________________
It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose.
__________________________
Dickey is describing the map to the river our adventurers plan to tour by canoe.
BTW, did you know Nemerov was brother to Diane Arbus, the photographer?
I could have mentioned Henri Coulette (1927-1988) in my list. He was well-regarded by his peers but he only published two books and today few know him. Some years after his death, his friends, Donald Justice and Robert Mezey, succeeded in their push for “The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette” to be published.
He was also my father’s best childhood friend, while growing up in Santa Fe. Coulette wrote this poem after my father’s death:
_______________________________
On the Horizon
for John Trainor
It is just what he had imagined,
A blue-chalk line
Such as girls use, summers,
For hop-scotch.
He crosses over it,
The left slipper first,
For luck, and then,
The right forever.
If he were to look back–
But he won’t,
He’s beyond that–
He would see, the light being right,
Everything
As it always intended itself.
–Henri Coulette, “The Family Goldschmitt” (1971)
_______________________________
When I moved to California in 1982, I met Henri in a Beverly Hills coffee shop, which was halfway between where he lived in Pomona and I was staying in Thousand Oaks.
He was a kind, generous man who loved my father and even encouraged me as a young poet. I feel so fortunate to have met him.
Huxley: yes, I knew that Nemerov was Diane Arbus’ brother (I also used to be into classic-camera black-and-white photography). Interesting family. Like out of a J. D. Salinger short story.
I think I have the same collection of Merwin’s first four books of poetry that you have. Published by Atheneum in the mid-1970s on fine paper. Nice book, but Merwin’s poetry never quite clicked with me. That said, I found his work to be more accessible–and more enjoyable–than John Ashbery’s neo-absurdist stuff. I half-suspected Ashbery was a very clever literary con man.
One of James Dickey’s poems has a line that would serve as a pretty good gravestone epitaph for anybody:
“Having done all things in this life that he could.”
From “The Performance”:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28057/the-performance
About a fellow USAAF aviator who was shot down in the Pacific and executed–beheaded–by the Japanese.
I think it was you who made the point in a previous poetry-heavy thread that poets seem to be disproportionately susceptible to mental illness and substance abuse (alcoholism) and to lead disproportionately messy lives. Many fit that pattern. Dickey partly did: he was an alcoholic and (I gather) a bad husband. But he also had a fairly successful business career (Coca-Cola), at least for a while. Other businessman-poets are T. S. Eliot (banking), Wallace Stevens (insurance), and Dana Gioia (food industry). Richard Wilbur–perhaps the best American formalist poet of the 20th century–was formidably sane. He was also deeply religious. Not coincidental, I’ll bet.
Huxley: thanks for the reminder about Henri Coulette, and for that poem in memory of your father. Very nice. You were fortunate to have him as a mentor.
Joseph Langland–another forgotten poet–kindly critiqued my teenage juvenilia when I had him as a professor at UMass. Way too kindly, looking back on it. I sent some of my later work to Dana Gioia after running into and recognizing him at an airport in Connecticut. He liked it and encouraged me to publish. I didn’t have the guts to back then. Still don’t. Anyway, as Richard Wilbur said about some other activity (running, if I recall correctly): the god of that has left me.
Re: Henri Coulette / “On the Horizon”
Hubert:
You’re welcome!
Geez, I just realized that more than likely in the poem for my father Coulette was thinking of those photos of the Whole Earth which NASA had recently made available.
Gives the poem a whole new feeling.
I’ve been fascinated with Dana Gioia ever since I read his controversial essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” He was looking square at the decline of poetry outside its own bubble. Not pretty.
Re: Dickey / “The Performance”
Hubert:
Yes, when I think of Dickey the poet, I think of “The Performance” and his Twilight-Zone-ish chiller, “The Sheep Child.”
Only for the brave:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42713/the-sheep-child