Posted on: December 30, 2008
House of the Rising Sun 45
Caught an archived addition of On Point today. Fascinating. A discussion of the roots of an American classic, The House of the Rising Sun. Far more to it than I had previously ever thought about. And our old friend, Alan Lomax, plays a major part in the story. It wasn’t just The Animals involved. In fact, far from it. They just made the most famous version in 1964. But so many others covered the tune and it originated, most likely, in the Kentucky hills. Though it’s possible that it goes back even further, well into the 18th century. At least part of the song.
Sung by men and women, the song takes on completely different meaning. With the former, it sounds like a young man who has fallen into dissolution, and can’t escape from it. Perhaps he’s killed…
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Posted on: December 29, 2008
We have a new essay on Zamyatin, and new poetry on tap as well. Robert Mueller and Tony Jones return with more lyrical and creative writing.
* * * * *
Paul Henreid and Ingrid Bergman, in Casablanca.
My own writing and reading has slowed a bit as we move to the end of 2008. The holidays have seen me sinking into movies primarily. Nothing of stunning note, though I did enjoy watching the classic, Casablanca, again. My guess is, however, that my own thoughts would not add anything new to the libraries of critical assessments regarding that great story of Rick and Ilsa and the madness in Morocco.
On an entirely personal note, Ingrid Bergman always reminds me of a former girlfriend. Their faces and voices connect for me. Though my…
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Posted on: December 29, 2008
Blind Spot
The scam: the scene in Punch Drunk Love
where the heroine is bleeding and
Adam Sandler takes a tire iron to
the toughs that just wrecked his
car and his life.
What I find disturbing is the concept that
inevitably someone with issues like Sandler’s
must of necessity find true love. I am the age
of his character with neurological issues
of my own, and I haven’t seen its ananke.
A sweet film, but false advertising.
2.
Will the comet shearing a rut through
the heart of the sky, so beautiful
and seeming benificent now on the horizon,
destroy us or is that law of physics
going to be suspended as well?
My life went up in smoke, but the vapors
concretized and reassembled themselves into
a castle of limestone which is where I live
now,…
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Posted on: December 27, 2008
Scene by Scene
There is this furnace of the pounding,
and then there is this and more
and delicately the surrounding
of white flakes.
There is a brush-up in the waiting
where the birds paly greyed
in slanting pike charge, and lately
the crinkles clasp.
And then there is more, much more
than this, like heaps by the forest
meant to be lumbered o’er, hungered
as if a straight.
And as if the likelihoods of streams
relenting this, that and everywhere,
there is snow and its channels, its lockets,
its tricks and its light.
There is this measurement a-galing
of whole world and its wrongs
and right, swollen in the swales of snow
their very burden
tight and soundly bound, safely
and copiously unfoiled in polters
and in touchturns, the spilled
bathing bright cuff.
There is then the radiance…
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