Policing up the area

You may or may not care that today they’re burying Margaret Thatcher, who died earlier this month, aged 87.

I’m interested because she was a piece of work and I sometimes wonder what the UK would be like if she hadn’t had a death-grip on its society for 11 years.

But I’m also interested because the Brits know how to throw a funeral and there’s been a tremendous fracas over the details of Thatcher’s. The party in power—the Tories—has basically planned for a state funeral in everything but name; everyone else is bitching about both the intent and the cost.

(They’re also silencing the bells in Big Ben and the Great Clock at Westminster for the duration of the proceedings; but since that’s free there’s only a continuo of grumbling. Something to the effect that not even the Luftwaffe silenced Big Ben. But, of course, there are those who hold that the Iron Lady could have whupped Hermann Goering’s ass with just her handbag.)

So the planners are tut-tutting that it’s not going to cost all that much, really. But what’s interesting is that they’re, ah, fudging the figures—pulling out the costs of the military and police participating. Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (and I swear I’m not making that up) announced on BBC Radio 4 that, you can’t count those salaries of “people doing their ordinary jobs”. These are “costs which are being borne in any event. We have not hired more soldiers, we haven't hired more police. There is no one who has been hired who would not be doing their ordinary jobs which they would not be doing in any event. We are not hiring more police.”

(By way of reference, the last state funeral was for the Queen Mother, in 2002, and about half the £8M price-tag was for police.)

Well, no—not hiring more police; but if all the coppers are performing crowd-control duties or mounting an anti-terrorism watch for half the day, then they aren’t out actually, you know, policing. This would be a prime time to knock over a liquor store or take out that annoying neighbor of yours, because the cops aren’t doing their ordinary jobs.

You know—the ones they’re actually paid to do.

The cruelest month, Tasting desire

Tomorrow is Poem in Your Pocket Day—choose a poem you love; memorize it or print it out and carry it with you to share with friends, family, colleagues, people on the bus…

Last year my pocket poem was e.e. cummings’ “plato told”. You kind of have to print that out to show people, because of the literal structure.

My poem this year is one I’ve had imprinted on my mind since high school. It’s always been something that gives you food for thought.

I’m only looking it up to make sure I’ve got the punctuation right; but if you were to ring me and say, “Bas Bleu—that Robert Frost one”, I’d give it you without hesitation.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

What poem will you share with the world tomorrow?

The cruelest month: Whatever is fickle

Today’s National Poetry Month poem is one of my all-time favorites. I can’t even say the opening line without my spirits lifting. It’s Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty”.

It makes me think of tabby cats, speckled carp, English sparrows and playgrounds full of redheaded pale-skinned Irish lads and lasses.

And--seriously, is there a better entry into a poem than “Glory be to God for dappled things”? Where would that be? This poem practically sings itself.

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

At the moment (April being indeed the cruelest month), my spirits are in dire need of lifting. I’m holding on to this one.

But I’m sharing, too.

The good in the evil

I don’t have anything to say about the people who set off explosives at the finish line of the Boston Marathon yesterday. But photos of the aftermath reminded me of something I posted around the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

God bless the first responders. The cops, the firefighters, the paramedics; the doctors, the nurses; the bomb squad, the blood-donors; the comforters, the blanket-wrappers, the water-givers; the marathon staffers, the spectators—every last one of them who ran into the carnage to help, both immediately and in the aftermath.

Seriously—I cannot imagine speeding towards an explosion, or towards people who are badly injured, bleeding, in shock. But it gives me hope to know that they are out there, and they were in Boston yesterday.

Manhattan memories

A friend of mine is of a mind to post pictures of his after-work cocktails, & one of last week’s was of a Manhattan. 

That shot a blast from the past across the bow of my memory.

The summer between junior & senior year of high school I was on a student tour of Mexico. We were on a bus, stopping at hotels in different cities. We’d have dinner & breakfast at the hotel’s diningroom, & staff would pack us bag lunches for the journey.

(BTW—every freaking day it was invariably ham & processed cheese sandwiches on white bread. We even wrote songs about them.)

At dinner we could choose from the fixed menu, usually a starter, a main course & a dessert; nothing exotic. We spent two nights at Acapulco—or maybe it was Mazatlán; somewhere tropical. On the first night the choice for the first course was a shrimp cocktail & a Bacardi cocktail.

Well, in Mexico there was no minimum drinking age. A few of the kids on the tour got daring & ordered the Bacardi (basically a daiquiri with Grenadine syrup) & most of the others—including my two 15-year-old roommates—saw a lost opportunity.

So, the next night, when the choice was between shrimp cocktail & a Manhattan, my two roomies went for the latter.

Well, a Manhattan is basically booze diluted by booze, & back in those days kids not yet eligible for a learner’s permit didn’t regularly score beer & recreational drugs. So this was a big freaking deal for them.

The three of us spent the night without sleep, since they were loopier than a hooked rug & I was run off my feet trying to keep them from spilling over into the hallways. (Okay, I was a bit of a pill.) I recall some hoo-hah about one of them wanting bottled water to wash her hair in, & I was the one elected to fetch it from the dispenser down the hall.

The next morning they (& half the bus) were not feeling on top form, but at least the blonde had clean hair.

Ever since then, whenever someone mentions the drink, that’s what I think of. Perhaps I should try drinking one?

The cruelest month: toujours gai

Okay, I’ve given you some high-flown stuff for National Poetry Month. Looking back on it, a lot of it has dealt with heavy-duty subjects. Tennyson and Thomas, on reaching the end of one’s life; Arnold, on the loss of joy, love, light, certitude, peace and  help for pain; Yeats, on the shattering of pretty much the same.

It’s time for a bit of a break, for an entirely different perspective on things. Like from a vers libre poet reincarnated as a cockroach, writing on an old newsroom manual typewriter. Which he does as described thus by his “literary agent”, Don Marquis:

”He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operating the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started. We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before. After about an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of the poems which are always there in profusion.”

Now, when I started in the newsroom at the Pasadena Star News, we used those old manual typewriters, which is why—to this day—I smack the hell out of any keyboard I use, because you had to apply a lot of force to the keys to get the letters to strike the page. So give it up for archy, who loves an alley cat named mehitabel (a female feline who gives new meaning to the phrase, “she’s been around”) so much that every night he pours his heart (and pulps his head) out to her glory.

(I must have been in high school when I first came across archy and mehitabel. But what I remember is mentioning the poems to my mother, who had known them from when they’d been syndicated in the newspapers she read as a young woman. At the time I’m sure I thought it more bizarre that Mom had read poems than that a cockroach would write them.)

Do not be deceived by his present appearance, however; archy is definitely tackling the Big Things—transmigration, descent into hell, beer. There are plenty of allusions splattered through the poems; I had to look up Gambrinus.) You have to set yourself down one evening in a darkened room, with just one lamp on (with maybe a glass of whisky), and take up with archy and mehitabel.

archy’s writing style—no caps, no punctuation—has been revived in today’s texting/IMing world. The difference is, he knows what he’s doing, and he's making a point in the process.

Anyhow, by way of introduction, I give you “the song of mehitabel”:

this is the song of mehitabel

of mehitabel the alley cat

as i wrote you before boss

mehitabel is a believer

in the pythagorean

theory of the transmigration

of the soul and she claims

that formerly her spirit

was incarnated in the body

of cleopatra

that was a long time ago

and one must not be

surprised if mehitabel

has forgotten some of her

more regal manners

i have had my ups and downs

but wotthehell wotthehell

yesterday sceptres and crowns

fried oysters and velvet gowns

and today i herd with bums

but wotthehell wotthehell

i wake the world from sleep

as i caper and sing and leap

when i sing my wild free tune

wotthehell wotthehell

under the blear eyed moon

i am pelted with cast off shoon

but wotthehell wotthehell

do you think that i would change

my present freedom to range

for a castle or moated grange

wotthehell wotthehell

cage me and i d go frantic

my life is so romantic

capricious and corybantic

and i m toujours gai toujours gai

i know that i am bound

for a journey down the sound

in the midst of a refuse mound

but wotthehell wotthehell

oh i should worry and fret

death and i will coquette

there s a dance in the old dame yet

toujours gai toujours gai

i once was an innocent kit

wotthehell wotthehell

with a ribbon my neck to fit

and bells tied onto it

o wotthehell wotthehell

but a maltese cat came by

with a come hither look in his eye

and a song that soared to the sky

and wotthehell wotthehell

and i followed adown the street

the pad of his rhythmical feet

o permit me again to repeat

wotthehell wotthehell

my youth i shall never forget

but there s nothing i really regret

wotthehell wotthehell

there s a dance in the old dame yet

toujours gai toujours gai

the things that i had not ought to

i do because i ve gotto

wotthehell wotthehell

and i end with my favorite motto

toujours gai toujours gai

boss sometimes i think

that our friend mehitabel

is a trifle too gay

You can find more of a sampling here.

The cruelest month: The blood-dimmed tide

When it comes to my featured National Poetry Month poet for today, I’m back to my Shakespeare problem: the poet is William Butler Yeats, And which of his poems do I pick?

The one that introduced me to him was “Lake Isle of Innisfree”. That was in high school. And the poem that sparked the argu—I mean, discussion about poetic meaning versus sounds with my French professor was “Host of the Air”. And then there's "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death"; see what I mean?

(And, MSWord, are you kidding me? You’re not recognizing Innisfree?)

You can get lost in Yeats, or in any of his poems. I have done, many, many times. It’s hard to pick up anything he’s written and not become completely enmeshed in his imagery, in the world he builds. I was walking around the Sligo countryside (okay—this is just beyond the beyond: MSWord doesn’t like Sligo) a good 20 years on from high school and completely thought, “peace comes dropping slow”—that’s how much Yeats gets into your blood.

So, I don’t know what to give you.

Well—I’ll start with “Easter, 1916”. The historical event—one of the periodic attempts by the Irish to drive out the English; this one was supposed to be funded and supplied by the Germans, who reckoned that they could benefit from Britain facing a two-front war, so to speak. The old Irish motto has always been, “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity”, but in this instance, there was confusion, lack of coordination and an unexpected reaction from the English involving heavy artillery and vicious executions of the leadership.

(Why, exactly, that came as a surprise I’m not clear. But that whole Anglo-Irish situation isn’t going to be solved or even explained in a single post, so we’ll just carry on, okay?)

It was a whole thing. And I’ve made my own pilgrimage to the General Post Office, where you could still see the bullet holes (like you can at Chapultepec). Yeats was an Irish nationalist, but not a revolutionary. He decried the use of violence, as, indeed, did a large number of the Irish—until the Brits started the summary executions. And--like the man said—a terrible beauty was born.

(Yeats was so revolted by the executions that he was even willing to count John MacBride as a hero/martyr—whom he loathed as the drunken, vain-glorious lout who married the woman Yeats loved hopelessly his whole life.)

Easter, 1916

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent

In ignorant good will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school

And rode our winged horse.

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vain-glorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter, seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute change.

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim;

And a horse plashes within it

Where long-legged moor-hens dive

And hens to moor-cocks call.

Minute by minute they live:

The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is heaven's part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death.

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead.

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse –

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

But I couldn’t let you go without “The Second Coming”. This one, written in 1919, is just so powerful. “Easter, 1916” is specific; “Second Coming” is universal.

We’re still working to understand what rough beast has emerged from that widening gyre.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The cruelest month: Lasciate ogne speranza

Like so many of the poems I’m sharing for NationalPoetry Month, I was first introduced to Inferno in high school. It happened because I was taking both a lit class and honors English, And both courses (taught by Mr. Sheinkopf) were reading Macbeth (at different times). So Mr. Sheinkopf had Griff Owens and me read Dante instead of Shakespeare twice over.

Maybe he was planning on giving the same tests & didn’t want us coasting.

At any rate, it was the translation by John Ciardi, which I carried around with me for years and years, finally replacing it a while ago with one recommended to me by a colleague (a software developer, as it happens) when he heard me mooching around muttering about needing to refresh my vision of Hell. This one is by two Princetonians, Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander.

I really like this edition because it has the Italian and English on facing pages, just inviting you to make the connection, and luring you into speaking the Italian out loud. Jeez, it’s luscious.

I’m giving you the opening tercets to Cantos I and III, in Italian and the Hollanders’ translation: I is where Dante wakes up to find himself on the cusp of Hell; III is the sign telling us that we’ve officially arrived at Hell.

I

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte;

ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai,

dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.

***

Midway in the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood,

For the straight way was lost

Ah, how hard it is to tell

The nature of that wood, savage, dense & harsh—

The very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.

But to set forth the good I found

I will recount the other things I saw.

III

"Per me si va ne la città dolente,

per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,

per me si va tra la perduta gente.

"Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;

fecemi la divina podestate,

la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore.

"Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create

se non etterne, e io etterno duro.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate."

***

“Through me the way to the city of woe,

Through me the way to eternal pain,

Through me the way among the Lost.

“Justice moved my maker on high.

Divine power made me,

Wisdom supreme, & primal love.

“Before me nothing was but things eternal,

& I endure eternally.

Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”

You may recall that Dante’s guide through both Inferno and Purgatorio is our friend Vergil—considered by the Church to be essentially a righteous pagan—the kind of guy who would have been a Christian except that he predated Christ (70 BCE – 19 BCE). Once they make it through Purgatory, Vergil hands off to Beatrice, Dante’s love, who becomes his guide through Paradiso.

I’d have given you someone reading this in Italian, but I can’t find anything. Damn.

There was an episode of the TV show Northern Exposure that I caught once (not being a regular viewer) that captured my fancy: Ruth-Anne, the aging store-keeper, wants to learn Italian so she can read Dante. Only it seems that she just doesn’t have the gift for languages. But Shelly, the ditzy blonde waitress, turns out to be fluent in it, and the episode closes with Shelly reading it to a rapt Ruth-Anne.

I absolutely know how she felt. It’s enchanting.

I'm not a rabbit!

Oh, let’s close out the week with a report from the Division of the Blindingly Obvious in the CDC: they’ve done a study, & it turns out women are more tired than men.

No kidding.

So, I’ll leave you with also the blindingly obvious: Madeline Kahn as Lili Von Shtupp singing “I’m Tired”. From Blazing Saddles.

Oh, I just crack me up.

The cruelest month: The cliffs of England stand

Another Victorian for today’s National Poetry Month: Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”.

I love this poem; no—I mean I love it. You can smell the brine in the air and feel the spray on your face and hair. The shingle crunches under your feet and the moon silvers it all.

But it’s the injunction at the end that really gets to me. After the melancholy, long withdrawing roar of faith, the concept of two beings holding true to one another.

Damn.

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.