[Hi there Emma Jean]
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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Stop living in my head! I just watched Pulp Fiction for the first time, then opened AD and here ya go.
I still have not seen it but wish I had. Maybe I will someday. I find it almost impossible to sit still for 2 hours. In the rare times my wife and I watch a movie at home (the last one, maybe a month ago, was the old Grapes of Wrath) we break it into 2 parts (viewed during 2 suppers) cause I just can’t stand being stationary any longer than that.
Living in your head is Gerard’s day job.
Travolta’s solo dance routine from “Saturday Night Fever” has my vote.
My curmudgeonly comment for this Saturday is;
I have never understood the appeal of that movie. Can not stand the Scientology dope, Travolta….as well as most of the idiots that are involved with the Hollywood set.
I am not a big ballet aficionado, though I did work for the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Seattle Opera Company and the Seattle Symphony. That goofy shit they are doing in the flick ain’t ballet.
Agreed. Not a fan of Tarantino’s films: vulgar, ultra violent and disturbing. He himself knows he has “issues”.
I liked that “Saturday Night Fever” solo because I copied it to perform for my dance class in college at Portland Community College in 1978. I did it to impress the dance instructor. It worked. She was a good girl.
I found Dusk to Dawn tolerable, especially the part where Selma Hayek did her thing. Dawgeez…
I had heard of Selma Hayek, but had never seen a picture of her. Signed into YouTube to see that dance, and…damn. Ok then.
Watched only a few seconds of the actual dance. But still…
Sure, Travolta can dance. He’s proved it on a few occasions but the guy is a Scientology homo and no amount of dancing can polish the tarnish off of that burnished image. He’s violent too but that’s another thing.
Thurman, I’ve never connect with her nor would I desire to. She’s just too fvckin’ weird.
Is there anyone connected to Tarantino who is not weird and disturbing? As in really, really weird and disturbing?
I remember seeing “Reservoir Dogs” many moons ago. The first five minutes were the oddest, most vulgar and crudest thing I had ever seen. Still are.
Ha! I made it about 7 minutes into that dog of a movie.
Extreme violence and gore for the sake of gore. Vulgarity & obscenity in excess. ….and this is coming from someone (me) that is a regular dropper of F-bombs. Generally depraved story line and bad acting. How do these films draw such an audience?
Wait! I think I have got it.
Because the culture is on the skids. People are lost and not even searching anymore. Just plain lost and thinking everything is fine. It’s intergenerational stupidity.
Dear Kevin in PA:
You ask, “How do these films draw such an audience?” They draw an audience for the same reason that rotting flesh draws flies. Our “culture” is pure Weimar, not even suitable for the most rabid of beasts. Consider: Our “culture” cannot even tell the difference between a man and a woman. Such a nation that believes such things simply begs destruction. Amen.
Out “culture” is not at war with normies, it is at war with God. With Logic. With the Sacred.
I know where I’m putting my money.
“Thurman, I’ve never connect with her nor would I desire to. She’s just too fvckin’ weird.”
The phrase in Liverpool is;
I wouldn’t touch her with yours.
But I’d taste her with your mouth.
Watch it without sound. It is hilarious. Two self-absorbed characters who have zero chemistry on the dance floor, trying to look as if they have a clue about the Twist, and looking completely uncomfortable. It was like seeing Schumer and Colbert gyrating in Central Park. Funny yet disturbing. I’ve never understood the hype over Tarantino’s films. He’s a gross, disturbed man and his films reflect his soul.
Hah! I did the same thing. Very odd and uncomfortable.
“His films reflect his soul.” Well said.
Yada Yada Yada, Chuck Berry is the bomb, got that one on my phone as well.
Chuck Berry? The master. In his real life he was a sexual degenerate and ego maniac, but…Johnny B. Goode!