“Nothing can come of nothing.” –King Lear
Culturewatch
Willie Mays R.I.P.
Shoutout to C. Liegh McInnis for steering his readers to this fine, felt rap on Willie Mays’ legacy.
Ode to Joy
Originally posted here seven years ago…
The other week, deep summer, we went to see David Johansen in his persona as Buster Poindexter. For many years now, Johansen, former New York Dolls lead singer and front flounce, has in his cabaret act been one of the great American songbook curators (Jonathan Schwartz wishes), lurking in the brilliant corners of U.S. pop. (Without Johansen I’d never have heard Katie Lee’s late-1950s pop-Freudian homage, Songs of Couch and Consultation, lead song “Shrinker Man.”) At the end of this particular set at City Winery, he called to the stage his wife Mara Hennessey, who announced that she had a particular favorite she’d like David to sing, whereupon she started to intone the line, “that summer feeling, that summer feeling, that summer feeling,” and Johansen took off into the lyrics. It was so haunting! I knew that song! What was it again? When I got home I looked it up and of course: Jonathan Richman’s “That Summer Feeling.” Astonishing song.
Wild Lies
Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness by Robert Aquinas McNally. University of Nebraska Press May 1, 2024
“Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infected’ with ‘wild animals’ and ‘savage’ people.” — Luther Standing Bear
Recent events in Gaza have animated current discussions about “genocide” and what it has meant and still does mean. Those who want to understand it might look back at the history of the frontier in America and on the life of John Muir who is so firmly lodged in California lore and legend that he seems as impregnable as El Capitan, the huge granite monolith in Yosemite National Park which Muir helped to create in 1890 and then aimed to protect with help from our jingoist big game hunter Theodore Roosevelt. Muir’s name is written all over the state of California: John Muir Wilderness, John Muir National Monument, John Muir National Monument, John Muir College, John Muir High School, and more.
American Prism (Campus Diary)
The morning after the night raid, I woke up and checked my phone to see University security service’s automated message sent at 7:02 A.M.: “Quad cleanup.” I cringed. I texted a friend who had been involved from the start with the Encampment and checked the school’s paper The Maroon. Their live updated coverage had been one way of keeping up with goings on at the Quad. Like most students, I went in, and out, of the Encampment: meeting friends; nodding to acquaintances; hearing about campers’ fears and strategy; attending a Palestine-activist professor’s teach-in (“genocide isn’t complicated”); taking in kids’ play and an inter-faith call to prayer. Only snippets, perhaps, compared to those who stayed for the week and kept up chanting all night against the university police raid, but it was enough to give me a sense of the moment, and place.
Every Picture Tells a Story
“The artist is someone who makes something called art.”
Marcel Duchamp[1]
Not too long ago, I delivered a Zoom talk in which I detailed how I came to find myself frequently writing about transgressive cartoonists. My friend Malcolm, a visual artist of impeccable credentials but sometimes stodgy mien, commented that he found himself enlightened as to my “fascination with the obscene, the perverse, and the tasteless,” adjectives I would not have come to on my own.
At this time, I was also preparing for a podcast on which I would be discussing the Air Pirates, a band of underground cartoonists who, in 1970, took it upon themselves to further the revolution by creating comic books in which Disney characters conducted themselves in an unDisney-like manner, and which, in the ensuing litigation, Disney’s lawyers termed “perverted,” “obscene,” “cancerous,” and “grotesque.” I was struck not only by the similarities of language between Malcolm and Disney’s counsel but how it seemed to say as much about the beholder as the beheld.
In my Zoom talk, I had mentioned a book which I had known about for 50-years but had never had an inclination to acquire. I decided to pick one up.
.
There was a time when pornography pushed as many buttons as uni-sex bathrooms do today.[2]
On the Road with R.H. Blyth (II)
“Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day…” Elizabeth Bowen’s apercu is worthy of the seasonal sense that suffuses haiku, though it didn’t really work for me this year. Winter went away yet I kept waiting on the soft evening with Change in the air. At least I didn’t miss this…
David Swan: A Fantasy
R.H. Blyth loved American Renaissance writers. Thoreau, in particular, but he also appreciated Emerson and Hawthorne…
This is the sabishisa of senryu, the loneliness of every human being, and the feeling of awe which we have, as Hawthorne says in “David Swan,” at the sight of any human being asleep.
Blyth’s lines steered your editor to Hawthorne’s story which is posted below.
The Humor of Senryu
The bulk of what follows comes from Chapter 18 of R.H. Blyth’s “Japanese Life and Character in Senryu,” though these excerpts may also be found in the posthumous best-of Blyth, “The Genius of Haiku.” (A book with a title that has a double-meaning.) The opening is from Blyth’s introduction to “Japanese Life.”
The fundamental thing in the Japanese character is a peculiar combination of poetry and humour, using both words in a wide and profound yet specific sense. ‘Poetry’ means the ability to see, to know by intuition what is interesting, what is really valuable in things and persons. More exactly, it is the creating of interest, of value. ‘Humour’ means joyful, unsentimental pathos that arises from the paradox inherent in the nature of things. Poetry and humour are thus very close; we may say that they are two different aspects of the same thing; Poetry is satori; it is seeing all things as good. Humour is laughing at all things; in Buddhist parlance, seeing that ‘all things are empty in their self-nature’, and rejoicing in this truth.
Goodbye, Bill Walton
I wrote plenty about Bill Walton when he was alive (alive as you and me) but, damn, even more so. I don’t want to let him go. Ever!
In our country’s battle to preserve what soul it had, there was no greater weapon and stronger voice than that of antic Bill Walton. He rarely dribbled, and never shut up. He truly mattered.
(Forever) Young Walton
An indelible passage from David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game:
It was funny, [Lionel] Hollins said, we were so young and so cocky. Not just the championship year, but even more the year after. We didn’t think there was anyone who could beat us, and we didn’t think it would ever end. We walked out on the court before every game and we couldn’t wait for it to start.
The Commons, the Castle, the Witch, and the Lynx
One day at Crottorf we eat mouthwatering strawberries and yogurt for our lunchtime sweet.
Crottorf is the name of a castle, or schloss, in Westphalia, Germany. Twenty one of us are assembled from around the world to discuss the commons. We come from India and Australia, Thailand and South Africa, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Austria, France, England, Greece, California and the Great Lakes. It is midsummer. Surrounded by green meadows and cool forests, the castle seems sprung from a German fairytale, a piece of paradise. Indeed the Italian plasterer said as much in 1661 carving onto the hallway ceiling the words,
Un pezzo del paradiso Caduto
de cielo in terra
For three days we sit in a circle, twenty-one of us, discussing, if not heaven on earth, then the commons.
“Rap is Clear, So Write Clear” (Redux)
Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi was sentenced to death on April 24 for lyrics that excoriated the Islamic Republic’s rulers and enablers. His uncle tweeted a message for the Iranian diaspora that should be heard by every believer in free speech…
The uncle of imprisoned Iranian rapper #ToomajSalehi has a message for Iran. pic.twitter.com/fi2XUrnAaO
— Chelsea Hart چلسی هارت (@chelseahartisme) April 26, 2024
xxx
The following First dispatch was originally posted in January, 2023…
Toomaj Salehi has been imprisoned and tortured by Iran’s regime scum who hate how his lucid rap exposes “the filth behind the clouds.” You can find out more about his music and the international campaign on his behalf here. Toomaj should be free as a bird, free as the Iranian woman he images, sans hijab, “…liberty’s mane blowing in the wind.”
Style Wars (& Keeping It Real Universal)
“Men have united to form the Avengers of Hating Drake; Drake, in response, has doubled down. If you are too busy to keep up with all the rap men happenings, I have collected the details for you.”
Playing the Long Game: A College Education
I. What Do I Know?
Just prior to college basketball’s conference tournament week (which I relish more than the giant carnival it relentlessly feeds, as rivers do the sea), I glanced briefly at an NBA game — just to check on the night’s outcomes — and caught a furtive glimpse at Lebron James going up for a jump shot. I noticed, with surprise, that James had drifted — egregiously — to his left.
“Uh oh,” I muttered to myself, watching the shot miss badly, reminiscent of the fate of many of The King’s early career jumpers, before he somehow corrected his awful habit of not going straight up, at long last making himself into a good shooter, not just a great scorer and everything else.
I took comfort in feeling that my ability to size up and divine what is happening, and what was about to happen — my cherished (if apocryphal) wisdom — remained intact; because, like many who count themselves fans of our beautiful game, I knew next to nothing about men’s college ball this year, outside the Big East: well, St. John’s and some of their conference rivals.
Driving in Circles
Songs can work like time capsules, shooting us through space to remember the sweet awkwardness of a first dance. Or sink us back into the free magic flowing through every vein at the party of our lives. Yet sometimes we get stuck inside that time capsule: Tracy Chapman speeds down the highway in her fast car, and Luke Combs turns out to be the little kid singing in the backseat the whole time, all grown up now.
PTSD & Seth Lorinczi’s Psychedelic memoir, “Death Trip”
I used drugs—marijuana, LSD and ecstasy—in the Sixties but I never thought of them as therapeutic. The author, Seth Lorinczi, and his new autobiographical book, Death Trip, A Post Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir, has opened my eyes as never before to the idea that psychedelics can help heal the trauma of the Holocaust. In Lorinczi’s telling of the story, psychedelics rescued him, psychological speaking, from the legacy of Fascism, World War II and the extermination of millions of Jews.
Two for the Road
Brothers in the Beloved Community: The Friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr. by Marc Andrus. Parallax Press (Berkeley, California). 207pps. $24.95
Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America by Helen Tworkov. St. Martin’s Essentials (New York). 325 pps.
Marc Andrus, an Episcopal bishop, and Helen Tworkov, the founder of Tricycle, the first Buddhist magazine in America, both begin their books with the same event. Andrus writes:
On June 12, 1963, many people around the world, including the president of the United States, opened their newspapers and looked with shock at a photograph of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, seated cross-legged in a posture called the lotus position, engulfed in flame. Thich Quang Duc is composed and upright. The revered monk, in his mid-sixties, had been soaked in gasoline by a younger monk and had then struck a match to set himself on fire.
Finding One’s Way to “Jane Eyre”
Dedicated to him, whom I regard “as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things.”
We have a great deal of critical writing on Victorian novels—the grand products of George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, et. al.—but not as many accounts of how readers come to read these novels. In 1979, an entire cohort, especially of women, would have pounced on Jane Eyre after reading Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s fetchingly titled feminist study The Madwoman in the Attic. At that time, I was otherwise absorbed (incidentally, like the heroine of Jane Eyre) in reading classical German literature. But now, nearly half a century later, I am with Jane, struck by its power and beauty.
Poetry is Everyday Life
This is a chapter from Blyth’s first book, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics.[1]
…
From Aristotle down to Arnold it was considered that a great subject was necessary to the poet. Arnold says that the plot is everything. It is useless for the poet to
imagine that he has everything in his own power; that he can make an intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent one by his treatment of it.
Wordsworth stands outside this tradition by instinct and by choice. He chooses the aged, the poor, the idiot, the vagrant, but does not endeavour to make them “delightful” at all.