a fool in the forest

Sparkling Distractions

A random collection of links and remarks that have been piling up in recent days, weeks, months:

• It seems like only yesterday that Cyd Charisse was dancing on these pages, and now comes word of her passing at age 87.  By way of tribute, Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News offers a comprehensive collection of YouTube exemplars of Ms. Charisse's terpsichorean artistry.  His choice of Brigadoon as all-time favorite would not be mine, but is entirely defensible.
  

• Sir William Hamilton is best known as the cuckolded husband in the romance of Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson, but he was also The Volcano Lover referenced in the title of Susan Sontag's (excellent) novel.  The Volcanism Blog has an appreciation of Sir William's thoroughgoing fascination with all things Vesuvian: 

• "Aesthetic geology - Sir William Hamilton’s ‘Campi Phlegraei’." 

(Via Alan Sullivan.)  Previously, of related interest, but not involving volcanos:

• When Emma Met George
• Susan Sontag Breaks Camp, Moves On Into Larger World

• I have been entirely willing to overlook it, given the beauty and charm of the site and the high fascination value of the objects in question, but Lee Rosenbaum is right: the theming and many (not all) of the supporting labels at the Getty Villa really ought to aspire to a higher lowest common denominator than they do.  (In the Getty's defense, the available audio commentary on much of the collection is generally better than the display labels.)

• Louis Menand in the New Yorker gives a good precis of what was right and wrong (and deeply dreadful) about Ezra Pound.  He also does a good job of capturing what still appeals to me about the High Modern moment at the start of the last century, before the 1914-1918 War distorted and disfigured it beyond recognition and the 1939-1945 War did it in altogether.

[Hugh] Kenner’s title was deliberately ironic: the point of 'The Pound Era' is that a Pound era never happened.  The hopes of the pre-war avant-garde, the artistic excitement of the years between 1908 and 1914, when the modernist movement spread throughout Europe, died in the trenches and the camps. 'Dreams clash and are shattered': two wars of annihilation destroyed the aspirations of poets and painters to be the authors of an earthly paradise

Via former Reasonite Tim Cavanaugh at Opinion L.A.  See also my previous mumblings on Kenner and Pound here.

• Also from the New Yorker: Jonathan Rosen thinks much more highly of Milton than Menand does of Pound.  With reason.

• If anyone cares, I am of a mind that the U.S. Supreme Court's recent Boumediene decision, acknowledging the potential habeas corpus rights of Guantanamo detainees, is pretty plainly correct.  This places me in the company of wild-eyed leftists the like of Barack Obama and ... George  Will.  (Link via Tim Lynch.) 

• The sad story of the Power of the State and Tom Stoppard's swimming pool.

Finally, speaking from personal and ongoing experience, this list by Matthew Baldwin is remarkably accurate:

• Typical Reaction to the Revelation That I Do Not Own a Cell Phone, By Year. 

(Via The Morning News.)

California will ban the use of hand-held cell phones while driving, effective July 1.  Not good enough: use of the pestilent contraptions should also be prohibited while walking. 

In fact, I would propose the wholesale reintroduction in this country of the fully-enclosed Telephone Booth, with this difference: instead of containing pay phones, the Booths would be empty.  The Booths would also be declared by law to be the only places, outside of one's home or private office, that cell phone use would be permitted.  There would be no Telephone Booths in public restrooms.

This is an idea whose time will surely come, and you will all thank me for it.

~~~

Illustrations:
Ezra Pound by R. B. Kitaj, via Second Evening Art. 
"Phone booth near Death Valley 431-5--Oct 1981" by Flickr! user km6xo, used under Creative Commons license.

A Miscellany's Good as a Mile

In Her Majesty's Royal Mail:
The new James Bond postage stamps -- that's right, James Bond postage stamps, issued on January 8 to coincide with the centennary of Ian Fleming's birth -- show the evolution of Bondian cover art as "[a] dumbed- down, sexed-up nose-dive from intriguing subtlety to crass commercialism." 

[via The Elegant Variation]

~~~

Romance 'neath the Autumn Stars:
Speaking of The Elegant Variation, earlier this week TEV proprietor and generally serious literary person Mark Sarvas -- to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for introducing me, by his obsessive online proselytizing, to the novels of John Banville, before the manifold excellences of which my powers of description cower for shame of their insufficiency -- revealed the buried childhood secret that he is a recovered Trekkie.  In the course of his confession, Mark recreates an exchange between his younger self and William Shatner during Shatner's long-ago university lecture tour:

SHATNER:  Well, is there anything at all you want to ask me?

ME: (thinking; only one shot here with the Captain.  Then it strikes):  Of all the women you ever kissed on Star Trek, which one did you like the best?

(The room, as you can imagine, erupts.  Thumbs up from my friends in the cheap seats.)

SHATNER:  (after it dies down; a slight leer)  I liked them all, Mark.  I liked them all.

Compare and contrast this exchange on similar subject matter from this morning's Los Angeles Times (60 Seconds With . . . William Shatner):

HOW MUCH FUN WAS IT TO BE JAMES T. KIRK, CAPTAIN OF THE ENTERPRISE AND UNIVERSAL LADIES' MAN?

It was so much fun I got a divorce . . . My body is ruined as a result.

Do not underestimate his recuperative powers.  William Shatner, after all ... is a shaman:

Usage Note: Although William Shatner portrayed Captain James T. Kirk and later, in the role of T.J. Hooker, played opposite Heather Locklear, he is not to be confused with the also-famous Wee Kirk o' the Heather.

~~~

á LA cart-ography
Which map of greater Los Angeles do you prefer: Raymond Chandler's or Tom Petty's?

~~~

For the "Now" Voyager

• Are you infected with the desire to circle the globe without further warming it? 
• Have you been bitten by the Environmentally Sound Travel bug
  [e. cotourismi]? 
• Do you desire to see the sea without seeing the CO2, too? 

Then consider booking passage on an Alternative Energy Cruise utilizing the amazing Glatfelder Atmospheric Convection Propulsion Engine.

~~~

"There's No Lang Like an Auld Lang," Says the Syne Post Up Ahead

a fool in the forest wishes, for all and sundry, a pleasant ever-present effervescence in 2008.

Regular posting resumes here by January 2.  Meanwhile, please visit this fool's alter ego, Declarations and Exclusions, for the latest in Pyramid Power news and particularly for Uncle Walt and little Shirley's announcement of our nominees for 2007 Blawg Review of the Year.

~~~

Photo Credit: "First New Year (2007)" by dmhergert, featuring the lovely and talented Flora Hergert, via Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

And Koala Good Night

Happy Christmas from this fool to you and yours.

Music, maestro!

• wisp - Candlegrove [MP3 link]

• wisp - Silent Night [MP3 link]

~~~

Wisp music from Xmas87 (2004), via The Wisp Archive out of Spoilt Victorian Child.  The origins of the candletree illustration are cloaked in Eastern mystery.

Dies Natalis Invicti Solis

With solstice here we'll celebrate
This sacred time and have much cheer
We will bring warmth and we'll bring light
Unto the darkest time of year

The mistletoe will be cut down
With sickle from the sacred tree
A kiss I'll give to you my love
A pledge of friendship made to thee

For greater than the will of man
Or want of that which can be done
It falls and shines on where we stand
Beneath the great unconquered sun

from "Unconquered Sun" (Steeleye Span/Ken Nicol)

I have long held a soft spot in my heart for the Winter Solstice.*  It is always close to Christmas without actually being Christmas, and it comes freighted with oodles of colorful pagan, druidical, Golden Bough-ish regalia.  Even better, it is in that rare class of events that occur simultaneously for the entire world.  Unlike man-made holidays and calendar-based observances such as the variously calculated New Years, which occur at different times or on different days depending upon your time zone or creed, the Winter Solstice occurs for all -- as do its cousins the Vernal and Autumnal Equinoxes and that other, less interesting Solstice -- at that moment when the entire planet occupies a precise spot on Kepler's ellipse.  It is there and gone in a flash, but it is the same flash no matter where you are.  Whoa.  Dude.

Unfortunately, because I scheduled this post to appear at the moment of this year's Solstice, the fact that you are reading this means you have already missed it.

The solstice being no more than a memory already, lets continue to dwell on the past.  Here are links to my two previous Winter Solstice posts.  Not sure where I went wrong in 2003 and 2005:

• 2006: A Southwest Solstice [w/ special guest, Howe Gelb]

• 2004: Trilithon for Size [w/ special guests John Constable and J.M.W. Turner]

Special solstice greetings to Cowtown Pattie, down around the Big Bend, in honor of her decidedly ribald suggestion of last year concerning appropriate celebratory rituals.

And extra special solstice greetings to each and all, out here lost in the stars.

~~~

UPDATE [122207]:  Because I originally pre-posted this, I was not able at first to link this year's contribution from that other congenital Solstice observer, David Giacalone at f/k/a.  There's haiku involved, naturally.  Also, a reminder that it's not too late to equip yourself for the coming year with the freely downloadable and printable 2008 Giacalone Haiga Calendar, combining David's poetry with his twin Arthur's photography. 

I've got mine.  Have you? 

(What's that?  You've got mine, too?  Get your own, why don'cha?)

~~~

* The Wikipedia article on seasons tells me I should call the Winter Solstice the "December Solstice" because "it is no longer considered appropriate to use the old northern-seasonal designations for the astronomical quarter days" lest one be thought a loathsome southernhemispherophobe.  (Antipodophobe?)  This comes as news to me, and I am not certain I actually believe it.

~~~

Photo: "Solstice Garden" by strollerdos via Flickr under Creative Commons license.

"Unconquered Sun" appears on Steeleye Span's 2004 Christmas album, Winter, available most affordably via
  .

"The Hora! The Hora!"

Hanukkah will begin at sunset today.  It is not my own holiday season, but it is a holiday season for many -- most, really -- of my longest lasting and most cherished friends.  So, for them in particular, let me offer this excerpt from a 1989 Chabad telethon broadcast, featuring the festive song stylings of Mr. P. Himmelman, Mr. H. D. Stanton, and, looking very relaxed on the mouth organ, Mr. B. Zimmerman-Dylan.  L'Chaim indeed:

Those same friends of mine will appreciate that I could not resist this when it turned up in a search for appropriate imagery.  I detect the influence of Marc Chagall in this fine Menorah of the North:

 

~~~

Chabad video via Some Velvet Blog.

Moose Menorah photo by Kathy Willens (AP) via Ventura County Star.  Simply have to have one?  Try New Orleans' Dashka Roth contemporary jewelry and judaica.

Stuff, Meet Nonsense

I have a backlog of miscellaneous items, many months in the making, saved away to be pointed to in an appropriate post.  Since many of those posts seem destined never to arrive, here is an attic-cleaning catch-all of items whose only common feature is that they caught this Fool's interest:

• Søren Kierkegaard, Denmark's gift to philosophy and one of the best writers ever to apply himself to that trade, has been turning up with some frequency in my weblog reading.  Here, for instance is ArtsJournal music blogger Kyle Gann, en route to Copenhagen, thinking at length about SK's place in his personal canon:

Of course, I was a musician too, and while the 'Or' of Either/Or held a certain academic interest, it was the 'Either' that I devoured with page-flipping relish.  Kierkegaard's pseudonymous division of his authorship into 'aesthetic' versus 'ethical' or religious personas may have been ironic in intent, with a finger on the religious side of the scale, but his detailed psychology of the total aesthete was, as he knew, the more seductive.  His argument about Don Giovanni - that since the seducer is the personality most trapped in time, and music is the art that deals with time, seduction is the perfect musical subject, therefore Don Giovanni is the most perfect possible piece of music - wasn't very convincing then or now, despite the persuasive fanaticism with which it is developed.  But he captured and conveyed, in startlingly vivid terms, the manic subjectivism of a mental life turned away from the quotidian world and devoted to the absolute in art.  To read that was a heady loss of innocence, a recognition that someone else had heard the same siren song I did - and followed it.

Via Sounds & Fury.  I have LA Opera's Don Giovanni to look forward to in a few weeks, which is as good an excuse as any to revisit the unconvincing but enjoyable musical portions of Either/Or.  [Kierkegaard fanciers may derive a small chuckle from the Amazon.com page reachable by that link, which straightfacedly lists "Victor Eremita," one of Kierkegaard's numerous pseudonyms, as "editor" of that Penguin edition.  Others will wonder what we are chuckling about.]

SK also turned up unexpectedly on Tom Wark's daily wine blog, Fermentation, in a post entitled "Kierkegaard & Self Medicating with Wine."  Tom's subject is the dangerous illusions that may lie concealed behind "appreciation" of the noble grape and its works:

Even more depressing than finding one's self embracing Kierkegaard's aesthetic life of jumping from transitory experience to transitory experience in an attempt to stave off a life of boredom, is the somewhat similar strategy of dealing with the boredom of life by pretending that self-medication with wine is actually the act of connoisseurship.

• Combining two of my favorite things -- original series Star Trek and the late great Edward Gorey -- Shaenon Garrity imagines Edward Gorey's "The Trouble With Tribbles". 

What does it mean?  I derive from it this Foolish aphorism:

Pastiche is a cracking form of flattery, and crackers are a flatter form of pastry! 

Tired of imitations?  For real Goreyana, repair to the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts.

• Writers on Writing #1:  Back in April, Mike Snider connected the dots between poetry and improvisational comedy.

• Writers on Writing #2:  M. John Harrison, a very fine writer mysteriously underappreciated in this country, offers valuable safety tips for writers of fantasy.

Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a 'fully worked out' world.  I’m not interested in 'self consistency'.  I don’t care what kind of underpants Iberian troops wore in 1812, or if I do I can find out about it for myself.  I don’t want the facts about the Silk Road or the collapse of the Greenland Colony, sugared up & presented in three-volumes as an imaginary world.  I don’t want to be talked through your enthusiasm for costume.  I don’t want be talked through anything.

• Writers on Writing #3:  Novelist John Crowley reports:

I was describing to tomsdisch the things I'd been finding via Google in service of my new book (some described herein) -- things I didn't know could be known --  and he said 'ah yes, Google has put an end to the art of wondering.'

Which to me attains very nearly to the status of an immortal apercu.

To which category might also be added Disch's recent two-line poem, "Correction."

• Fluffy-Tailed American Imperialism:  Dispatches from the trenches in The English Civil War of the Squirrels:

'Unless something radical and imaginative is done . . . Squirrel Nutkin and his friends and relations are going to be toast.'

The fox and badger lobbies are also heard from. 

Via 3quarksdaily. 

[Nutkin buttons photo (click to enlarge) by jasmined via Flickr, under Creative Commons license.]

• Lives of the Connoisseurs: TIME Magazine' Richard Lacayo on Peggy Guggenheim, reminding us that the early 20th Century was a pretty good time to be well-off and blessed with discerning taste:
  

She found a house with the largest private garden in Venice and had the last private gondola in the city for her daily long rides.  She entertained frequently, though not lavishly.  She was notorious for her scanty food and cheap wine.  From her biographers you get the sense of a full life — the guest book carried names like Giacometti, Paul Bowles, Cocteau, Chagall, Saul Steinberg, Cecil Beaton, Stravinsky, Tennessee Wiliams, Paul Newman and Truman Capote — but not always a happy one. She lavished fast cars on one of her younger lovers.  He died in one.

• "O brave new world that hath such produce in't!"

Whole Foods has opened a new 2-story greengrocer's establishment here in Pasadena, its largest store west of the Rockies.  Callie Miller of LAist dotes, posts many photos and declares that it "seem[s]...excessive, in the most eco-friendly way possible."

Unfortunately not shown in those photos: the site was formerly occupied by auto repair facilities and a tire store, all in a brick garage building that I would guess dated back to the mid 1920's.  In a nice bit of adaptive reuse, Whole Foods left two of the brick walls standing and incorporated them into the ground floor of the new store.  For a city sitting slambang in the thick of earthquake country, old Pasadena has a remarkable quantity of brick construction.

• Poetry Mashups!  T.S. Eliot meets Portishead in the room where the women be coming and going and talking up papal painters, whilst down at the bar Charles Bukowski goes a few rounds with Led Zeppelin.

[escapegrace pointed the way.]

The Civil Rights Era is, It Seems, Officially Over

Got MLK?

The surly eagle-eyes at Wonkette discover a delicious spoonerism* in the Wastington Posh.

In a Situation Like This, How Do You Call 9-1-1?

I have a deep seated dislike for cellphones.  In fact, there are days when I am prepared to curse Alexander Graham Bell for inventing telephony in the first place, before moving on to execrate those who have made it so portable and ubiquitous/inescapable.  So, while I feel for the unfortunate victim, this Insurance Journal story serves up comfort food for my anti-cellular prejudices:

Man's Cell Phone Ignites in Pocket, Causing Serious Burns

A cell phone apparently ignited in a Vallejo, Calif., man's pocket and started a fire that burned his hotel room and caused severe burns over half his body, fire department officials said.

    * * *

Firefighters arrived at the residential hotel Saturday night to find [Luis] Picaso lying on the bathroom floor after a malfunctioning cell phone in his pants pocket set fire to his nylon and polyester clothes, Henke said.

The flames spread to a plastic chair, setting off a sprinkler that held the fire in check, he said.

Authorities declined to name the phone's manufacturer and model.

Another dubious institution?  Google advertising, which can be counted on to find the most inappropriate accompaniment for almost any story, as illustrated in this screen capture:

(Image edited for emphasis.  Click image to enlarge.)

Year End Clearance

In no particular order, a long string of links to items that have caught my interest over the past several months and that I have found no other excuse to post here sooner:

• Red squirrels are prudent and intelligent family planners, says Scientific American. [Via 3quarksdaily.]

• In the Boston Review, Charles Johnson [the novelist, not the little green footballs guy] appreciates his former teacher the late John Gardner's once hugely well-regarded now largely neglected post-Grendel novel, The Sunlight Dialogues. [Also via 3quarksdaily.]

• A terrible, terrible, terrrrible pun that I have been saving for you since September, found on the Law & Humanities Blog.  [This link is dedicated to my pal Rick at Futurballa for reasons that will be immediately obvious, to him.]

• A remarkably comprehensive survey of comic book images appropriated by Roy Lichtenstein for his classic Pop paintings.  [Via The Art Law Blog .]

• A terrific and lovely photograph of high technology in action, found in the unexpected confines of the Re Risk reinsurance weblog.

• Some Velvet Blog notes the upcoming release of what seems on the page to be a very fine Joni Mitchell tribute album.  These sorts of collections can be dicey, but the selection of performers and material here looks very very promising.  Extra points are earned by including three songs from the underappreciated Hissing of Summer Lawns (see this 2003 mention) and one from the oft-dismissed Don Juan's Reckless Daughter.  But what's this?  Nothing from Hejira?  What a missed opportunity.

• Idolator posts a selection of recent and classic animated music videos, including all eleven and a half minutes of Kraftwerk's Autobahn.

• no notes is a weblog devoted generally to New Orleans and most specifically to tracking down the seemingly infinite variants on "St. James Infirmary Blues."  I can't recall how I was pointed there, but the same pointer led to Max Fleischer's ghoulishly surreal Betty Boop version of Snow White, featuring a performance of "St. James Infirmary" by no less than Cab Calloway:

• I recommend adding Ron Silliman's weblog to your RSS feed.  He has been in the habit recently of interrupting his usual considerations of contemporary poetry with lists/collections of extremely interesting links to elsewhere.  Recent examples here and here.

• To the first of those Silliman links I owe the discovery that (1) "The supermarket in California where Allen Ginsberg once saw Walt Whitman & penned 'A Supermarket in California' will become the site of a supermarket once again," and (2) no city but Berkeley would make it this hard to build a Trader Joe's.

• To the same source, I am grateful for being led to Brooke McEldowney's thrice-weekly online comic, Pibgorn.  My guilty comics page secret is that I am devoted to McEldowney's 9 Chickweed Lane -- for which I see he has just won the 2006 National Cartoonist Society’s Award for Best Newspaper Comic Strip.  I have borne a grudge against the Los Angeles Times for several years now since they stopped running Chickweed on Sundays.

• Aaron Haspel, who pointed it out back in October, suspects that he is the only person other than its author who might be interested in a weblog devoted to Yvor Winters.  Once again, Aaron is wrong.

• Two items of particular note on the Yvor Winters blog:

• A long and thoughtful critique of a surprisingly sentimentality-driven piece by Adrienne Rich on What Poetry Can Do:

Though Rich seems to have meant well, to be brave in showing the world that poetry can help us deal with such massive tribulations as genocide, she fails to make a sound case for poetry’s importance and offers not a single poem that could conceivably make any difference to genocide or to any currently serious, important, and collective issue in politics, society, or philosophy.

• Another long and thoughtful post, on Winters and Baudelaire.  This one hold sparticular interest for me because I have been flirting with the idea of trying my hand at a bit of translation in 2007, with Baudelaire as my intended subject/victim.

• Another example of the bonds of thought and affection between libertarians and Harry Potter.

• Erin O'Connor wonders: What constitutes a "serious" English major today?  It apparently does not involve Milton, Shakespeare, Joyce or Spenser.

• From the New Statesman, Philip Pullman and Patti Smith, among others, on William Blake, whose 250th birthday approaches.  [Via, inevitably, 3quarksdaily.]

• Chef Gordon Ramsay [Hell's Kitchen] has published his autobiography.  In the UK, it appeared under the title Humble Pie; what looks to be the same book has also been published in the US as Roasting in Hell's Kitchen: Temper Tantrums, F Words, and the Pursuit of Perfection.  At the Social Affairs Unit weblog, UK journalist Harry Phibbs reviews and enthusiastically approves it:

He is a heroic figure. His contempt for pretentiousness working in a field where there is such an abundance of it is commendable as is the importance he places on honesty and the fairness with which he treats his staff. But most of all it is his determination to achieve excellence and loathing for mediocrity which is a spirit we could do with emulating - and not just in the kitchen. I'd like to see a reality TV series with a Gordon Ramsay equivalent sent in to turn around a failing school.

Ramsay spent Christmas whipping up a turkey dinner for 800 British troops in Afghanistan, where he also met Dennis, the bomb sniffing dog.  His first U.S. restaurant, recently opened in New York, certainly sounds tasty.  He will reportedly be opening a restaurant in Los Angeles in 2007.

Many, many thanks to those few of you who arrive at and read this weblog on purpose.  And however you arrived here, reader, best wishes to you for a healthy, thriving, brimming and buzzing 2007.