Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last!

Last Friday's bridge was excruciating.  Shortly after lunch (a nasty, perfunctory cheeseburger), I had occasion to say to my left hand opponent, "You are rude.  Never open your fucking face to me again."  Not long after which, my partner, Mildred, having opened the bidding with one heart, I responded one spade, which she raised to four spades.  When the dummy was laid out, there were but two tiny spot cards in the spades column.  Loudly I said, "Mildred, when you open a heart, and I respond a spade, how many spades have I got?"  

"Five?"

"Four!"

Tuesday, the day after Memorial Day, I called Mildred:  "Hi, Mildred. How are you?"

"I'm fine.  When are we going to get together again?"

"We're not.  I'm going to be busy."

"Oh, all right.  Bye then."

"Bye."

And so endeth oh so many (three? five?) years of onerous complicity in the pretense that nonagenarian widows who know nothing about bridge, and don't want to learn, can play bridge.  

Mais alors, mes chers hétérosexuels, il faut avouer que j'avais tort en vous condamnant tous, puisque j'oubliais, par exemple,

                           

                                      Las Flores del Romero, Doña Isabel,

                                      Hoy son Flores azules, mañana serán miel.

As well as,

                     Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, á la chandelle,

                    Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,

                    Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant:

                    Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j'étais belle.

The one so gaily, irresistibly sweet and jocund, the other so bitterly, unfairly exploitative and cruel--and both so very beautiful--I confess, I do see something glittering, like the glare of a Gorgons' eye, at the bottom of the cup full of gall and venom of heterosexual passion, which draws me to it, helplessly entranced.

No, Seriously, I (as a naïf gay person and consciously, therefore, and willingly, and perhaps a trifle archly, something of an outsider to the endless pothering that normal-heterosexual people fall into on the subject of women), am amazed to discover

how absurdly much of the standard literary criticism of 'La Maison du Berger' that I am only now belatedly reading through is concerned with (the apparently endless fascinating subject of) just which ladies, friends and actresses, the poet was fucking.  I am reminded of a pack of dogs running through the streets of an ancient and venerable city, assiduously and with visible delight sniffing every turd and splash of piss they encounter, and quite oblivious to the storied towers and monuments of an immemorial and glorious civilization that they're trespassing on.  A lot of heterosexual-normativity actually reminds me of this.

Well, that was harsh...but maybe only just harsh enough, because now I have some really unkind things to say about the world-view of this silly-ass, lickspittle toady of the comte d'Artois*.  But first the kindness:  Our poet's understanding of the significance of the irresistible Cyclopean directionality and speed of the railroad is sibylline and utterly persuasive.  Likewise, his view of the corruption of poetry by satire is dead-on accurate.  But his evocation of Nature is half-assed, superficial, heteronormative twaddle.   Sorry.


*My bad.  I meant of course the comte de Provence.

So, having read 'La mort du Loup' and liked it a lot, and reading that Proust (none other) had said that de Vigny's 'La Maison du Berger' was

"The greatest poem of the 19th century," I started reading it about an hour a ago--and, as the French say, Quelle Déception!  Call me gay, but it always puts my back up when a poem (by a man) starts out being addressed to a woman.  Particularly when it's somehow suggested that he has fucked her, might fuck her, or, if things turn out right, will fuck her.  Adieu therefore all possibility of honesty, plain dealing, or objective speech.  Men who have fucked, or are thinking of fucking, a woman, don't mean anything they say, and ordinarily never say anything worth listening to: Nothing in this world is less edifying than the utterance of a man with fucking on his mind, no matter how he puts it, or says it isn't what he's thinking about; though I'll grant that,

               ...La couleur du corail et celles de tes joues

                  Teignent le char nocturne et ses muets essieux.

                   Le seuil est parfumé, l'alcove [ahem] est large et sombre,

                   Et lá, parmi les fleurs, nous trouverons dans l'ombre,

                   Pour nos cheveux unis, un lit [!] silencieux.

says it about it as melodiously and matter-of-factly as the thing can be said:  The nos cheveux unis implies, sweetly and economically, that they're both gonna get naked and let their hair get all tangled together; such that, frankly, I find the words alcove and lit, in context, indelicate and needlessly insistent. Though I still don't get what exactly a "Maison du Berger" is.  I would assume it's a large (four wheeled) hay wain,  or yurt, but that doesn't tell us why it would have "mute axles." Anyway it's nice to know that shepherds have a quiet, commodious place whiere they can go indoors and fuck.

The Choice of Life...Toni Pugh's Rooming House and Floating Opera Company

An Instructive and Nostalgically Rewarding Day

I got up yesterday in a pleasant fog of recollections of the summer of 1964, when I was one and twenty, making a very indifferent pretense of going to college, and, in fact, hanging out in (our mystic hippie den mother's) Toni Pugh's rooming house, smoking pot, eating peyote, listening to Bossa Nova and Mozart piano concertos, and endlessly gassing with (Joseph) Patrick McClelland--who was not only the same age as me, and a Virgo, but who shared, exactly, my sense of humor and honor and justice, and who could--and did, on several occasions, with amazing accuracy--"read" my mind.  Patrick, actually, was going to school, though not taking very many credit hours because he was also working part-time at the student dining hall;  he was taking, as I recall, modern American literature, and French romantic poetry.  Patrick very much liked John Steinbeck, particularly Cannery Row, and most especially the 'Palace Hotel' in it, which he said "Madame's" (as we, between us, called Toni)'s establishment closely resembled.  But I was never then or later much interested in Steinbeck--what cemented Patrick's and my friendship was the French romantic poetry, which never failed to dissolve us into hysterical hilarity.  How many times did we recite the 'Nuit de Mai' and 'Nuit d'Octobre' to one another, till we had virtually memorized it?  And always and always when we got to the lines,

       Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,

       Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots,

we'd be rolling on the floor with tears in our eyes of incredulous sarcastic glee.  And so, as I woke yesterday, I was reciting, with suitably over-the-top lugubriousness,

       Lorsque le Pélicane lassé d'un long voyage

       Dans les brouillards du soir retourne a ses Roseaux....

full of the haunting beauty and preposterous silliness of the poetry of my youth, I turned on my computer as always when I'm in a reflective mood, thinking to wallow a bit in the bye-goneness of it all; but, by accident or misclick, evoked the other French romantic poetic Alfred--de Vigny--instead of de Musset, and the title of a poem which I had never read before:  'La Mort du Loup' which, then and therewith reading, I discovered to be one of the greatest goddamned poems I have ever read.  Ever.  As poem.  As philosophy.  As art.  As fuckin' Religion.  Not even Goethe or Virgil cuts this close to my metaphysical bone.

So, after perusal, and re-reading, and reflection, and laying aside in my PC Reading List, I turned to the Paradiso, and found this:

          Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia

          nostro intelletto, se 'l ver non lo illustra

          di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia;

          posasi in esso, come fera in lustra

          tosto che giunto l'ha; e giugner puollo:

          se non, ciascun disio sarebbe frustra.

Which is all and everything I mean to assert about the Inner Voice and Conscience of Inarguable Truth which I posit, and which posits me, as an American Transcendentalist.

And putting Dante aside, I then turned to Netflix and watched two movies in a row:  Up at the Villa, which I had seen last fourteen years ago and thought wonderful, with its aristocratic, clockwork-like Somerset Maugham plot and evocation of Italian fascism, and with its wonderful farewell performance by Ann Bancroft, and not farewell but still wondrous workmanlike performances by Sean Penn and Derek Jacobi, playing characters utterly unlike (I think) their own. And secondly I watched It's a girl, less a movie than a clever documentary about the male-skewed gender imbalance in India and China; which basically said that the reason having more men than women in a society is wrong is that this means women are valued less than men.  So?  

I didn't know so while she lived, but P.L. Travers (1899 -- 1996) and I were soul mates.

At the age of, I think, ten, I read the Dr. Dolittle and Mary Poppins books--feeling that there was deep meaning in them that was an empyrean above the heads of most of my contemporaries; but I was hardly surprised to hear that Walt Disney was turning those odd, metaphysical literary treasures into animated trash, with a full complement of dreadful Hollywood show tunes, and I just did my best pointedly to ignore the young women of my own age who belted out  lustily 'Supercallifragilistic-expee-allidocious!'  Which in Mrs. Travers' opinion, and in mine, was quite, appallingly, "stupid," and  (with however affected a smart-ass little simper) entirely the plodding, half-wit contrary of "precocious."

I have never of course sat through a showing of Disney's Mary Poppins, although one can scarcely avoid the excerpts from it that are thrust upon one (for all one's cold dislike of Dick Van Dyke) at every turn.  And, much as I love Emma Thompson, and thoroughly approve and admire her characterization of P.L. Travers ("A witch" said one of the young composers [now grown old, in interview] then delegated to blandish, mollify and win her over), I can't bring myself to watch the latest movie about Travers and Disney--unless there really is a scene where a vengefully furious P.L. Travers actually does throw the score of 'Supercallifragilistc' out of an upper-story window, in front of the fainting, pleading tachycardiac young composers.  That would indeed be worth watching. Come to think of it, I'm going to have to check it out, see if I can't find it on Hulu or Netflix.   

Spinosi: "La notte", Vivaldi; 2000

Spinosi: "La notte", Vivaldi; 2000

Antoine Dauvergne (1713-1797) premier mvt du 4 eme concert.instrumental

Antoine Dauvergne (1713-1797) Concert N°1 3 eme mvt.wmv

Antoine Dauvergne - Chaconne

Privilege--while it sounds as if it should be roughly the opposite of whatever being an average woman is--really has very little to do with just being a man.

MCMLIII

Ah, the Golden, almost perfectly Mindless 1950's!  Of which this clip of Jane Russell cavorting with an Olympic men's swim team in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) will serve admirably to illustrate both the God's Plenty and the imbecilic unthinking Gratuity of it all:  What I saw as an eleven-year-old--and still see three score years later, in this quintessentially vulgar, unfunny, heterosexist-dipshit movie--is right up inside the gaping left leg of the swim suit of the muscular and well hung young man doing a sort of back flip in front of the heifer-like and blankly clueless Ms. Russell. And that's either a jockstrap or the base of the young man's testicles.  I saw it then and I see it now; but nobody else did, least of all the morons, heifers, and Jewish moguls who made this absolutely stupid and quite inadvertently titillating movie.  

FRANCO FAGIOLI

You hear that "dueling banjos" business between Fagioli and the trumpet?!  Sweet fucking Jesus!  A long time ago--46 years ago--I sat in the Spokane public library and read through a similar contest between the divinely gifted and inspired "Caffarelli" (born to fortune, he had himself castrated at the age of 10) and a trumpet of equal range and agility, which, it was universally acknowledged, Caffarelli won hands down, on all counts, including absolute loudness.

So anyway, my other Diva Assoluta, Cecilia Bartoli, still in possession of her voice and all her faculties (including the most spectacular, and most profound baroque/bel canto scholarship of this age or any other), has taken Sr. Fagioli and several other great artists, both instrumentalists and singers, unto her ample bosom, and produced the 'Stabat Mater' of Steffanni (arguably, the greatest composer who ever lived).  Imagine.  I have never heard it.  Ma non vedo l'ora.

Franco Fagioli Orfeo "Che faró senza Euridice",C.W.Gluck- Palacio Versai...

Franco Fagioli, Haendel Lascia Ch'io Pianga

I weep like a baby when I hear this.  But does our seraphic counter-tenor not slightly mispronounce "ch'io"?  Otherwise, like I say, it fair rips my heart out.  

Open Letter to Jean Waggoner, anent Beatrice, Laura, Molly Bloom and Lolita:

Jean,

Back from the library,  reading the Paradiso, and suddenly I hear this moist, sploogey popping sound, and a cracked, trollish voice (mine) keening in the wind, "Why do I have to give a shit about Beatrice?  She's ugly, smug, stupid, laden with cooties, and I hate her.   Ditto for Laura--much as I love, love, love Petrarch's lovely sonnets to her, the actual, blood and flesh sentient being you get a whiff of every so often is an utter dipshit, and not very sanitary.  And Molly Bloom?--How'd you like to sleep with your nose up that ass (like Leopold does)?  What's funny about Lolita is Humberto Humberto's attributing (with no justification whatever) all those evidences of personal character to a featureless, witless child.  Which, by the way, is what most heterosexual males do to the featureless, witless children they marry.  And that frankly is how things look to this curmudgeonly gay (not queer!) person,

Douglas.

Poor Jean--as I will hasten to explain to her--I'm only dumping this bilious, misogynist (anti-heterosexist) bad shit on her because she's an English teacher and I don't know anybody else who'd understand me.  Still, I am bemused and amused to find in the Italian Facebook some corroboration:  C'é l'uno, da prima, che scrive, "Noi che, al posto di Beatrice, preferiamo Virgilio."

How my mind works, sort of...

Up betimes, with a moderate case of the squirts, and nothing to do for it but to imbibe vast bowls of good Darjeeling tea with lots of milk and sugar, along with capsules of potassium chloride, and sweet/sour, candylicious "apple" bananas, and sit me down in front of my 27" ultra high definition monitor, and ask the Universal Net, via my Apple computer, questions about things that, by chance or disposition, interest me.  This morning's hot inquiry was: Why are Sodium and Potassium so similar?  Forming salts in a like manner with chlorine (and perhaps other Halogens?) and stable, non-toxic (except to powdery mildew) bicarbonates?  This led, of course, to a summoning up of the Periodic Table of Elements (which I've thought every so often about, but not looked at for at least a couple of decades, but) which this time examining, I noticed, right at the beginning of what I think are Rare Earths, Sc for Scandium, which I had never noticed before; but, which Googling, I find is mostly important as a (strengthening, weight reducing) alloy of Aluminum, the third most abundant element (after Oxygen and Silicon) on our amazing planet.  

Moi, privilégié?

No--Well, maybe the first couple of decades of my existence--but even then, and ever since, the word, le mot juste, is "lucky" (with modifications, and only sometimes), and scarcely ever "privileged."  Which is why I have chosen the image of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (whom personally, and as a philosopher, I loathe; but whom I must admit, in character and generally, in the divers vicissitudes of our several lives, that I resemble) to represent me--and not, say, the genial, divinely chatty, sublimely erudite Dr. Charles Burney whom I love with all my heart.   Besides, well, the fact is I actually look more like Rousseau (or used to--and may again if I spend more time at the beach) than I do the lovable (but somewhat toadly) Musicae Doctor.

Up too early, or maybe just unrested from sitting up reading...

I've been nodding off like a narcoleptic in front of my computer, dreaming by fits a ghastly complete, horrifyingly detailed, continuing story of a dream:  It's night, early morning, somewhere in Middle Europe (Ukraine?) the agents provocateurs--snipers from U.S. CIA and NATO special forces--are out killing people, women, kids; breaking into their houses and shooting them in their sleep.  I'm passing guns to the pro-Russian separatists who are being shot at by both sides (the Provisional Governement  forces and the pro EU guerrillas)...It's a bloodbath like Sarajevo 20 years ago.  God damn the United States of America and its NATO stooges!  Oh, and Happy Mothers' Day.

Made an insanely unwise (mean-spirited and ungenerous) contribution to the comments on an NPR story about a hot-air balloon which came afoul of a high-tension wire yesterday, somewhere in Virginia, killing the young male pilot (Who knew?--that these things had pilots?) and three "female athletes"--a swimmer and two basketball players, one of them an assistant coach--from the University of Richmond:  "There's something funny here.  Or maybe I'm just hysterical with grief.  Yes, that's it."  Thinking of Title IX of course, I just had to say it.  Though of course I shouldn't have.  

Mid-morning,

Drinking a big, big "bowl" of Café du Monde au Lait, listening to the last, splendid "Jewish" (Stern, Zuckerman, Rose) version of K. 563--balm to my careworn soul:  a rough day at bridge yesterday, following on to a grueling, far too early, morning re-applying for welfare.  What makes bridge rough is incompetence in one's partners--So many mistakes were made, that at several points I nearly walked out.  But I stuck it grimly through, and when I left, Mildred  loaned me a book--a work of modern fiction, much esteemed these days, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by [one] Mark Haddon, which is narrated in the person of an idiot-savant (evidently autistic) fifteen year old boy.  What strikes me, and sickens me, are two not unrelated aspects of existence among the English lower middle classes:  (1) its awful, barren, vulgar, soul-destroying brutality (or brutal vulgarity), (2) the casual, overweening disrespect of children by everybody who is not a child--always with a threat of violence.  It's  valuable background reading for those piquant observations of "indifferent, mannerless and undisciplined" American children by the much-exasperated Fannie Trollope in Domestic Manners of the Americans.  

Finished reading

Kapitoil yesterday--reading being protracted on account of much watching of movies on Netflix.  I pronounce it a good, necessary and clever book, and an invaluable window into the souls of [for want of a better word] Millennials.  Poor things.  Poor in that their patrimony has been wasted in the obscene fascist military adventurism of their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Poor in that their education, which is focused entirely on chimeras of merely the most recent of pragmatic values, leaves them stupefyingly, colossally, ignorant of history and civilization, of the universe and of themselves.  Poor in that they have no philosophy or art or music or literature--doubly poor in that they imagine that they do.  Poor in that they must always, both gay and straight, put on a condom before engaging in penetrative sex--because, alas, casual, sociable, "unprotected" sex just for the fun (and the joy and the art and skill) of it is unthinkable.  Poor kids.  It breaks my heart.

Slouching to Philistia...

But in all fairness, Lucy, I gotta say that I do not like--do not get--the art of Paul Cézanne.  At all.  What I see in one of Cézanne's so labored/laborious paintings is an indifferent, dull/drab

color sense and piss-poor draughtsmanship.  I mean, the man couldn't draw for sour apples.  I realize of course that no one's on my side in this, and that people like Monet and Renoir would have said that my opinion of Cézanne is vulgar and ignorant--although during his lifetime the opinion that  he was an inept draughtsman was fairly common, and it was often said that the reason he did so few nudes was that he simply didn't, or couldn't, draw the human form very well.

And yet further, I must say that the most favorable and sympathetic criticism of Cézanne's art (including the kind remarks of Monet and Renoir) has a distinctly hollow, suspiciously empty sound.  Like the faint, distant, heart-stopping rattle from the bottom of a funerary urn, or the suggestive hint or whiff of something unmentionable which ought long ago to have been voided:

"You could say that good art speaks in a language we know: we get the message, then move on.  Great art seems to speak in a foreign language we imagine we'll get with long enough immersion.  And then there's Cézanne, who is like the sound of water dripping or the clank of a train.  It's just there to be known, full of meaning and pleasure, somehow, but without a hope of translation...

"There are other great artists who will puzzle us forever--James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Arnold Schoenberg--but that puzzlement seems to come from their willful complexity.  Whereas it seems as though Cézanne wants to keep things simple, and then can't.  Tapping his head [Cézanne] once said, 'Painting..it's inside here.'  The glory of his art is that, no matter how hard we try, we can never quite see in."  ----Blake Gopnik (in Newsweek)

Funny thing,

on my way out of the library this afternoon, I grabbed a copy of [one young] Teddy Wayne's prize-winning first novel Kapitoil.  And it's been a fun, easy read so far; with, of all things--and right there in the first chapter--a disquisition on the random variables of the "paintings" of Jackson Pollock: which are systemized  and preserved from mere barbarous randomness (in our young author's mind), not by any quality, virtue or character of their own, but by autobiographical statements of the artist's intention; which our young author reads and finds adequately indicative of real (i.e., artistic) order among apparent chaos.  Such statements (or defiant declarations) by the now long defunct artist as "I don't use the accident--'cause I deny the accident."  Precious silly stuff, we may say, but it enables our young author to enjoy--nay, to find meaning--in Jackson Pollock's "paintings."  O tempora, o mores!  Poor, earnest, sweet, fatuous, play-pretend, rôle-playing Millennials!  It would never occur to these callow, shallow, too-candid children that "art," that you have to be argued by the "artist" into an appreciation of, is, by definition, fraudulence and imposture.  

I actually like Jackson Pollock's 'Blue Poles'--the only canvas by this utterly talentless and skill-less paint-dribbler, so far, that I do like; but painter, in the sense of Tintoretto, Rubens, Monet, of course, he was not, and could never be.  His early, more realistic work shows just how inept a draughtsman and crude a colorist he was, as well as his fatal lack of a sense of composition.  But, by a miracle of perseverance, persisting doggedly in his peculiar, random, slop and splot method of getting paint onto canvas, he became the artist he could never otherwise have been; and, at least in 'Blue Poles,' he even attains to that art-beyond-art that I call, variously, a 'pretty canvas' or a 'belle toile'--of the sort whereof the first exemplars are, so far as I know, the paintings of Tintoretto.  His achievement is somewhat that of one among the fabled million monkeys pounding indefatigably away at a million typewriters, who, every so often, somehow (and without knowing a word of Greek),  produce a long-lost play of Sophocles.   Another lucky monkey (though a blind, rather than merely a totally incompetent, painter) was Claude Monet, whose least water lily is worth all the "Abstract Expressionism" in the world.

So much Bullshit, so little Time...

(1) There is, in fact, racism in the world--horrific examples of which may be found in Sri Lanka, in central Africa, in Indonesia, and in the autonomous republics of what used to be the Soviet Union--but there is hardly any racism at all in the United States of America; none worth mentioning at least, in the sense of unwarranted, automatic, prejudicial bad opinions, on the part of civil and educational authorities, or among white people generally,  about negroes:  Bad, or disparaging, opinions, about the inherited low intelligence, and the inherent violence and criminality of negroes, contrarily, are, for the most part, quite well warranted and appallingly well substantiated by the statistics of academic and intelligence test scores (Thank you, Dr. Arthur R. Jensen) and by police arrest records.  So-called "systemic racism," "institutional racism" or "laissez-faire racism" simply, on the evidence--and upon close reading of the texts which purport to define them--don't exist.

(2) The same may be said for the "pretty notion" (as Voltaire said, in English, about the "Soul") of "Ontology," if it is considered to be anything other than the apparent, mutative, scientific and analytical, several and discrete aspects of Phenomenology. "Ontology," in any other sense  merely  serves to reiterate the tired fallacy that Existence is a predicate (which, of course, it ain't).