Do You Like The Blues?

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(photo: Albert King, with smoke, perhaps from his guitar)
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Embarking on the great cleaning of the office, I exhumed The Best of Blues: The Essential CD Guide. Yes, I know, CDs belong on the scrap-heap of old technology, along with those massive 8-track contraptions. At least one may transfer the contents of a CD to one's Itunes (or whatever) "library," although a library is, by etymological definition, supposed to be composed of books.

At any rate, Roger St. Pierre put together this guide, which was published by Collins Publishers, San Francisco, in 1993. The nifty little book is postcard-size.

Not that you asked, but among my favorite blues artists, in no particular order, are Big Mama Thornton, Robert Johnson, Albert King, B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Bessie Smith, Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Ray Charles, Mac Rebennack (Dr. John), and Son House (I just love his "John the Revelator"). I know: it's a terribly traditional list. Studies have shown that Robert Cray (from Tacoma) and Eric Clapton apparently know something about playing blues-guitar, too.

A Great Baseball-Blog

...And speaking, that is to say writing, of baseball, I'll now pass on a link to a terrific baseball blog--with poetry; but baseball fans are not to worry: the blog is all baseball all the time (and from Chicago, where the Cubs will one day win it all again--in the same century when the S.F. Giants do, perhaps, and alas):


http://the-daily-something.blogspot.com/

Baseball Poetry

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Here comes (American) baseball's All-Star game, and here's a collection of baseball poetry:

Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, edited by Brooke Howath, Tim Wales, and Elinor Nauen.

It would be interesting (to me) to see poems about soccer (a.k.a. football), cricket, hockey, fencing, etc., from other cultures.

I thought I'd posted "Sestina: The Game of Baseball" before, but I guess not. I embarked on writing the poem because I thought the repetition and figurative circularity of the sestina-form might go well with baseball, a highly ritualized sport. Anyway, here it is:

Sestina: The Game of Baseball

The circle is the center of the game:
The trip from home to home; mound; ball.
And Baseball’s creed is O-penness: fields;
Gloves like birds’ mouths; past fences lies forever.
The game plays out in formulae of three.
Combinations interlock like rings.

Grave umpires speak in prophecy that rings
Out in the voice of Moses. Out, Strike, Ball
Mean really Shame, Yes, No! The game
Is subtle, though, like its faintly sloping fields.
And indefinite: A game can last forever
In theory, infinitely tied at 3 to 3.

Though rules say nine may play, it’s often three
Who improvise a play within the game.
(Tinkers, Evers, Chance) . Pitcher lends ball
To air. Potentiality of bat rings
With power in that instance. All fields
Beckon to innocence and hope forever.

One chance at a time drops from forever.
Player with a caged face grabs for ball.
But batter knocks ball back into the ring
Of readiness, at which point one of three
Things happen that can happen in the game:
Safe or Out or Ball-Beyond-All-Fields:

Home run. Inspire the ball past finite fields,
And you voyage honored on the sea that rings
The inner island. Sail home, touch three
White islands, Hero. Gamers since forever
Have tried to sail past limits of the game,
Shed physics’ laws, hold Knowledge like a ball.

To know this game you have to know the ball,
An atom when contrasted with green fields—
Less than orange, white with pinched rings
Of stitches ridged for grip. With ball come three
Essential tasks: throw, catch, bat. These are forever
Of the Circle in the Center of the Game.

Dropped in the fluid game, the solid ball
Starts widening rings of chance, concentric threes
That open out into the Field. Baseball. Forever.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Memo From November 6th Street

"November 6th Street" in Memphis connects to Monroe Avenue (among other streets and avenues)about a block from Main Street. The name of the street commemorates a day (in 1934?) when an arrangement was reached between the city of Memphis and the federal government whereby the Tennessee Valley Authority got funded.
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Memo From November 6th Street

They make it work somehow in Memphis,
bluff buttressed against an oceanic
river. Vines overwhelm scruffy trees,
weariness overtakes work, and Downtown
pines for its heyday. You know the story:
Handy, Rufus, B.B., Elvis, Booker T.
& them fused grooves like welders
building barges bound for big water.
They made it work somehow.

Sir, ma'am, if you want to, you can
sit in a black iron chair next to where
Johnny & June Cash and Ella wrote their
names in cee-ment. Pigeons and a goat
will stare down at you as you stare up
at a plastic palm tree & you'll drop money
into a yellow bucket, sit back down,
and listen to covers of Albert King,
Robert Johnson, Stevie Ray Vaughn,
Son House, and Otis Redding. Looks like
nothing's gonna change in Memphis.
Then it does. Then it doesn't. They
have to dredge the channel regularly.

Meanwhile I have to check out the Just
Like New consignment-store on November 6th
Street--Memphis, yes, sir: Memphis--caught
in a corner between Arkansas and Mississippi,
between St. Louis and New Orleans, mid-South.
They make it work somehow. Somehow they make it.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

How To Be A Cat: Illustrated

A while back, I posted a poem called "How To Be A Cat," and now a fine photographer whom I don't know has paired one of her photos with the poem. Personally, I don't have anything against the poem; in fact, it still has my full support (as presidents say of cabinet-officers they've already asked to resign), but I really like the photo, and here's a link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilarialuciani/2572078179/

I might add that the photo includes notes--in Italian. How fabulous is that? To read the notes, you just lightly drag the cursor across the photo, and the notes appear. It's the sort of thing that would fascinate a cat.

Thanks to the photographer.

Mosey v. Saunter

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(photo: trolley on Main Street, Memphis)
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There's an "orange" alert for smog and ozone in Memphis today, so it's a good day for moseying and sauntering, at best. Officials reduced the price of a trolley-ride on Main Street from one dollar to 25 cents; they're worried about older folks, as well as children with asthma, especially.

I sauntered up to a venerable lunch-room that was bustling with downtown business-folk, and I ate some turnip greens, tomatoes, and "corn sticks" (corn bread). Great basic food, eccentric servers: superb.

Two businessmen at the table next to mine had a long serious conversation about staffing. Then one of them said, "You ready to saunter back?" "Yes," the other one said, "let's mosey."

So of course I had to check the OED online with regard to these words. "Saunter" once meant "incantation" as a noun and, as a verb, "to muse," but that was long ago. By the 1780s, it referred to a "careless" walk or walking carelessly, so it appears as if sauntering may be a slower activity than moseying; that is, to saunter is to walk aimlessly, almost.

As a verb, "mosey" was (and remains?) an Americanism going back at least as far as 1829 in print. As a noun--for example, one may "take a saunter"--it goes back only to 1960, at least in the OED. I think I'm more accustomed to seeing nouns turned into verbs--as was famously done with "impact" in the 1980s, when it began to be used in place of "affect." "The report impacted city government," e.g. Before that, the only things I remember being "impacted" were wisdom-teeth.

On campus, I almost always leave for class very early and saunter there. At least one colleague I know is a bustler, and one day, as she bustled past, she asked, "Why do you walk so slowly?" I deflected the question by saying, "It's called sauntering."

I'm not sure what the real answer to her question is. I don't like to bustle because it usually symptomizes being late (speaking of turning a noun into a verb), and I like to look at creatures like bugs and birds when I walk. I also like to have time to nod to people I know and say hello. I always arrive in plenty of time.

I wish you good moseying and sauntering today.

Metaphorical Headline; Sonnet-Challenge

Before I forget, let me point out that "Minerva" has a sonnet-challenge going this week, in case you're in a 14-line mood:


http://minervadamama.blogspot.com/2009/07/poetry-challenge-5-sonnet.html

Now, on to a headline from The Commercial Appeal, a daily newspaper in Memphis:

"Mayoral Morass Sinks Deeper Into Confusion" (Wed. July 8, 2009, page one).

As with the governor of Alaska, the Mayor of Memphis, Willie Herenton, is a bit unsure not about resigning but about when he's resigning, and the confusion is causing all sorts of political and bureaucratic problems. --Also opportunities: The legendary wrestler (or "wrassler") Jerry Lawler (Andy Kaufman wrestled him--remember?) is going to run in the special election, when and if it takes place.

At any rate, the headline troubled me slightly, with regard to the metaphor. I suppose a morass--or "swampy tract," as the OED online defines it--can sink, insofar as all pieces of land, including soaked ones, have the potential to sink. But maybe the headline-writer (as opposed to the story's writers, Amos Maki and Alex Donlach) was thinking that the situation Herenton has created is sinking into a morass of confusion; or maybe that the mayor's office and the city council are sinking into a morass. But I don't think the morass is meant to be sinking.

Anyway, I enjoyed the story and the swamp of my thinking about this metaphor....I reckon "headline" itself is a metaphor--the top of a newspaper-story or -column (for example) being compared to the head, and thus the need for "capitalization." A capital idea!

Good luck with your sonnet.

Elvis Read Books, Had Excellent Taste in Movies

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(photo: Slim Pickens and Harvey Korman, in Blazing Saddles, with books in background)
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Well, if you're in Memphis, you pretty much have to visit Graceland. I'm in Memphis, so I visited Graceland.

A "modest mansion" is an oxymoron, but I think the phrase fits Elvis's home, which he decorated immodestly. Actually, the place is probably decorated just the way most young working-class men in the 1950s-through-early-1970s would have decorated a place if a) they suddenly obtained a great deal of cash, b) were under no one's guidance, and c) were egged on by a bunch of "pals"--or hangers-on.

My second impression concerns just how much cash the site generates. The scale of the operation is difficult to fathom. It is a massive cash-machine. I do wish a significant percentage of that money were dedicated to not-for-profit aims, particularly in Memphis, to address poverty, educational needs, and even basic infrastructure-problems. That would be a good thing, such channeling.

On the tour of the larger airplane, I learned that Elvis liked to read and traveled with boxes of books. What exactly he read is unclear, but one site on the web points to some of his spiritual reading: http://www.bodhitree.com/booklists/elvis.presley.html

However, in the mansion, at least on the ground floor, there appears to have been no space for books. The scholar and bibliographer in me would love to acquire lists of books Elvis read. What was in those boxes he toted to Las Vegas? As a reader, he probably had the same habits, if not the same classical education (Humes High School v. Pembroke College, Oxford, so it goes) as Samuel Johnson, including impatience. Johnson famously tossed books across the room when he became bored with them, and one imagines the nervous, pharmaceutically sped-up Elvis reading voraciously but getting bored fast. Cat on a hot tin roof, so to speak. Go, cat, go.

I also learned that among Elvis's favorite movies to watch on the plane were Blazing Saddles and the Monty Python films. This confirms that Elvis had great taste in cinema, at least in the comedy column. Of course, as with the home-decoration, the taste in comedies also betrays a bit of male adolescent bias. As clever as Brooks and the Monty Python team are, they're also mischievous in an adolescent way.

Most of Elvis's own movies are (as you know) bad, sometimes so bad they're campy and good, but that was Hollywood's and the Colonel's fault. Elvis was actually a good instinctive actor, as Walter Matthau once observed. He worked with Elvis in King Creole, and he said that after a scene, the director told him (Matthau) to stop trying so hard, and Matthau was aware of the extent to which Elvis wasn't trying hard but had a good sense of timing. One imagines all the good, surprising, interesting movies Elvis might have made. Too bad he didn't collaborate with the Monty Python troupe early on. Too bad Samuel Johnson never got to visit Graceland.

Skin's Stars

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Skin's Stars

Freckles and moles and other colorations
constellate skin’s sky. Imagine connective
lines, then conjure epidermal legends:
huntress of the thigh, magic beetles near
the feet, miraculous bird on the back of
a hand. Or not. Go with the logistical reading,
points on a dermatological map suggesting
deeper strata of DNA, a digital code of
ancient migratory patterns--ah, but also
of collusions with sunlight. Glory be to God

wrote Hopkins (G.), for dappled things,
and skin certainly qualifies: dot-commissioned
by blots and bits of pigment, uncoalesced
pointillist portrait painted on your body’s
parchment, a realistic abstract rendering.
Scars appear like halted asteroids on this
sky, or they try to get a message through
using ghostly notation—something about
the time you fell down on creek-slate or
tried to break up a dogfight with one hand.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Memphis Monologue

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photo: Peabody Hotel, Memphis
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Memphis Monologue

No, sir, I'm not from
Memphis. I'm from New
Orleans, but I came
to Memphis after the
Hurricane. There was
nothing left for me
down there. Been here
ever since, but it's
tough. I haven't been
able to find much work--
the economy; and all.
If you like barbecue,
you might try the
Rendezvous. You have
a good evening, sir.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

July 4th in Memphis

Well, all right, I made it to Memphis on July 4th, and what a party they're having--down by the Mississippi (fireworks), on Beale Street (one big outdoor party), and on the roof of the Peabody Hotel (a radio-station-concert/party of some kind, audible from everywhere--perhaps you can hear it through this post, even).

Until I visit the South yet again, I always forget how much I like the pace of things down here. As long as you're not in a rush, everything's cool. Once you get past, oh, Kansas, and into Oklahoma, things start to slow down. I think the plane even slowed down mid-way through the flight. ;-)

In honor of Memphis and Elvis and Emily (not to mention Aretha), I'll post a link to Joe La Sac's short film, in case you haven't seen it yet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naa3oK4zWxQ


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naa3oK4zWxQ
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True Patriot

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the photo is of Susan B. Anthony
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Here's a wee book appropriate, arguably, for July 4th festivities, conviviality, and reflection:

The True Patriot: A Pamphlet, edited by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer.

It starts with a couple chestnuts--the D of I and Mr. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Then it moves on to George Washinton's Farewell Address, Jefferson's first inaugural address, Webster's (Daniel) dedication of a monument at Bunker Hill, and (one of) FDR's state-of-the-union address. In addition to some other more or less familiar texts, the book includes an address by Judge Learned Hand, one by Susan B. Anthony, one by Jane Addams, and a poem, "Let American Be America Again," by Langston Hughes. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, speech at the March on Washington is also included, as is one by Robert Kennedy.

The slim, nifty little book was first published by Sasquatch Books [nice name, eh?] in Seattle (2007) and printed in Canada.

What Was That Thing?

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Song: What Was That Thing?

What was that thing
I tried to forget?
If I could recall,
I'd be glad to regret.

What was that thing
I always desired?
Seems I forgot
What I required.

What was that grudge
I used to hold?
Seems that slow smolder
went quickly cold.

Things move on down to
where flood meets sea,
a delta-land
of used-to-be.

A delta-land
of used-to-be
frees you from you
and me from me.

What was that hate
that drove me blind?
How did that love
turn me so kind?

What were those plans
I once held dear?
Hey, life came by,
changed There to Here.

Who was that I
Who once was me?
He tried too hard,
now lets it be.

Time flows through space
like silt to sea--
a delta-land,
believe you me:

a delta-land
of used-to-be
frees you from you
and me from me.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom