some place off the coast of Massachusetts

message from the Kinks (ca 1967)

Tea in the morning, tea in the evening, tea at supper time,
You get tea when it's raining, tea when it's snowing.
Tea when the weather's fine

"We are the drowned ones ...

... let the waters come."

ونحنُ الغرقى ياسيّـدتي
نحن الغرقى
فلْـيأتِ الماء …


أمريكا,أمريكا

سعدي يوسف

America, America
Saadi Youssef
Damascus, 20 August 1995

________________________


"When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls"

Here comes the flood
Peter Gabriel
1976

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

______________________________

"... Swift came the Loba ... Was there such flesh made ever and unmade !"

Ezra Pound
Pierre Vidal Old
1926

... a botched civilization ...

"When will this system lie down in its grave?"

Alf's Fifth Bit (1935)
in Personæ

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
Hailey, Idaho, États-Unis, 30 octobre 1885 – 1 novembre 1972 à Venise

"This cruel country has driven me down ..."

Withered and Died
Richard Thompson
1974

Portland, Maine
home 1983 and 1984

joyeuses fêtes de fin d'année

"Aber plötzlich, schräg und ungeübt ...

"... hält sie doch ein Sternbild unsrer Stimme in den Himmel ..."

Rainer Maria Rilke

Die Sonette an Orpheus
Erster Teil, VIII

Château de Muzot im Februar 1922

amuses bouches

looking for an angry fix ...

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked"

Howl
Allen Ginsberg
1956

Arthur Stanley Jefferson (1890 - 1965)

book dream

Everybody knows ...

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
...
Everybody knows it's coming apart
...
Everybody knows
That's how it goes


(Leonard Cohen's ode to wikileaks?)

Le jour se lève (1939, dir Marcel Carné)

____________________

Vous êtes nerveux parce que vous êtes inquiet… et vous êtes inquiet parce qu’il y a des choses qui vous échappent, c’est compliqué, hein!

Marcel Pagnol - La Trilogie marseillaise

Marius (1931)

Fanny (1932)

César (1936)

_____________________________

"it's only the river ..."

The U.S. refuses to learn from HUAC --- refuses to learn, in general

"The universities are hotbeds of heresy. At least they usually are; it is characteristic for them to be; they should be. They should be teeming with intellectual doctrines some of which the majority find useless or even false, and with moral doctrines some of which the majority find unattractive or even evil. And the diverse parties should dwell side by side, not with the tolerance of indifference, but embattled and cherishing each other: each should know that in its quest the contest with those who disagree will bring faster progress than would an unobstructed route."

Chandler Davis
From an Exile
1960

_______________________________________

Divisiones vero gratiarum sunt, idem autem Spiritus

διαιρέσεις δὲ χαρισμάτων εἰσίν, τὸ δὲ αὐτὸ πνεῦμα·

Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.

[1 Corinthians 12:4]

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht und Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer

von Die Schluss-Strophen der Moritat


Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
und die andern sind im Licht
und man siehet die im Lichte
die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.

Dreigroschenoper (1928)

____________________________________

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht
10. Februar 1898 (Augsburg) bis 14. August 1956 (Ost-Berlin)
____________________________________



Lotte Lenya
(geb. als Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer)
18. Oktober 1898 (Wien) bis 27. November 1981 (New York City)
____________________________________

post-election-itis

“No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

-H.L. Mencken.

getting out the vote

in November 2008, US voter turnout was 56.8% (the highest since 1968)

[in November 2008, Minnesota voter turnout was 78.5%]

"Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets ..."

A White Heron
Sarah Orne Jewett
1886

Carmen (Carlos Saura, 1983)

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia."


"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

George Orwell
from Politics and the English Language
1946

The Draughtsman's Contract (dir Greenaway, 1982)

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Imitation of Horace
John Dryden
1685

______________________________

... ille potens sui
laetusque deget, cui licet in diem
dixisse 'vixi: cras vel atra
nube poleum pater occupato

vel sole puro; non tamen irritum,
quodcumque retro est, efficiet, neque
diffinget infectumque reddet,
quod fugiens semel hora vexit.'

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Carminum Liber Tertius. xxix)

"Some say it's like a beautiful flower.

Some say it is a terrible power."

-Helium.
"Pat's Trick" (1995)

[still from "Honeycomb"]

Sarah de St Prix Wyman Whitman (1842–1904)

"... a community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled newspaper."

-Sarah Orne Jewett

The Country of the Pointed Furs

1896

"I put a spell on you ..."

Stranger Than Paradise

(dir. Jarmusch, 1984)

A Night at the Opera (1935)

"Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons and necking in the parlor."
-Otis B. Driftwood.

... soul within the soul ...

"The present Poem, like the Vita Nuova of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates and to a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible, from a defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it treats. Not but that gran vergogna sarebbe a colui, che rimasse cosa sotto veste di figura, o di colore rettorico: e domandato non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotal veste, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento."

-Percy Bysshe Shelley.
from the Advertisement
of Epipsychidion (1829)

"Bliss is the plaything of the child— ..."

-Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"La propriété c'est le vol."

Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement (1840)

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

(né le 15 janvier 1809 à Besançon dans le Doubs, mort le 19 janvier 1865 à Passy, en France)

_____________________

"Alors qu'êtes-vous?"

"Un anarchiste."

— Et la lampe s'étant résignée à mourir,
Comme le foyer seul illuminait la chambre
Chaque fois qu'il poussait un flamboyant soupir,
Il inondait de sang cette peau couleur d'ambre!

Les Bijoux
Charles Baudelaire (1857)

The talking-type wireless ... with leather speaking trumpet ...

Orchestra:
['Who Were You With Last Night' very fast, 'Razza Ma Tazz']

Secombe:
Ah, what a composer that Richnah Wagner was. Now, tonight, the Goons, with the aid of a calibrated Turkish boot lathe and a portable volcano net, will re-enact a drama of crime. Mr. Greenslade?

Greenslade:
Yes, sir?

Secombe:
Tell the eager masses what we have in store for them.

Greenslade:
Rubbish.

Secombe:
Thank you. Yes, it's rubbish - but to make it more interesting we call it...


The Goon Show
Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers (27 May 1951)

Le Métro de Paris

1. Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
.
.
.

7. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, Wilhelm Ostwald (ed.), Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 14 (1921)

-Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein.