A century after Swinburne

If Swinburne’s two abiding memories of Eton were Greek prosody and the flogging block, is it surprising that he should have become both a masochist and a master-metrician?

review of  ‘The Age of Wonder’ by Richard Holmes

Much of the book is also devoted to Humphry Davy, whose reputation is multifaceted. He wrote poetry; he had lively friendships with some of the best-known writers of his day; he invented a lamp that would prevent methane gas from exploding and save the lives of countless miners. Best immortalized here, though, are Davy’s experiments with nitrous oxide, tests in which he eagerly served as guinea pig. Inhaling that substance gave him “a thrilling all over me most exquisitely pleasurable,” he recorded. “I said to myself I was born to benefit the world by my great talents...”

(cont.)

Orcadian fiddle music survives
in the high arctic

the last latticed leaf
of the HBC's

imperial tree, after
& century & a half the

viking stream
reduced to a trickle

& the rigid tripartite
of the reels stretched like ragas

the better to suit
the long dances

of mid-summer,
loosening by tallow light

messages
in knotted leather.

 




nice introduction to the life & music of Jimmie Rodgers

information about a new edition of Basil Bunting's Briggflatts
which has a CD & a DVD enclosed; they've posted a big bit of the DVD as well...

Local trees & c.

from "Joy", collages by Alison Yip

YouTube - Northern Soul - This England

Drummer Billy Hart on the day

Lee Morgan died...

an evening of Anthony Mann films on TCM tonight, including a couple I haven't seen--

The Last Frontier (1955)

The emotionally jittery and sublimely scenic The Last Frontier (1955) is the old west picture I speak of here, but what is it exactly? A Cold War commentary of military belligerence? A post-war noir confronting
the emotional disorder of returning soldiers seen through the front of a rugged mountainous setting? It is all of the above, with the added effect of what appears to be handheld camera movements, and demented if
not animalistic character plots and behavior—particularly from the movie's lead actor, Victor Mature, as the highly conflicted Jed Cooper....
"He's all id," my movie mate blurted out mid-show, a keen statement about a man unshaped by manners, motivated by drink, and prone to
irrational outbursts—childlike tantrums really—by the provocations of men in authority who contradict or disapprove of his ways...

Cimarron (1960)

Mann wasn't the obvious choice to shoot an epic film in 1960, and the suits at MGM, rightfully or not, would eventually be sorry they hired him...

A Letter from Hammertown to Robert Dunsmuir

Screw you
Scrooge McDuck,
Born near Kilmarnock,
You built Craigdarroch
but preferred a Hammock...

...how else


given the militarization of one's home space
but to reply in kind &

tactically, to return
smug valuation with superiority

& punch for punch,
till over each great crime is grown

a grove of alder
till over each great crime

grows a shade-spreading lime
that on a brown bench curled

I can sleep beneath until
two years after 2012 when it'll have been

a century since the bunch of us
last addressed our masters thus

in tones of such insolent rue
that their empire bled black & blue &

was forced to re-colonize
in forms a voortrekker

would recognize:
towns until then

bereft of a copper's tread
now patrolled by one of meathead

Bowser's "specials"
dredged up & barged over from Vancouver

pointed Maxim Guns to & fro
(to derision & innuendo)

but when you're in that corner trapped,
squared by someone else's map & no one

downhill to pass it along to anymore
& beyond that only Pasta, Saskatcha.

or Chimera, Alaska
that string of smoking islands

where Vico's giants
have dug condos into the sandstone

or a street in Honolulu
named for a nurse

from where Dick the mines inspector
& Farquhar his deep-pocketed admiral

return richer via Surrey's
crosswords & curries, their ship-in-a-bottle

aesthetic still operative
among the locals today

subject to arbitrary poking,
driving hummingbirds into the house

of your head, driving out
religion & solidarity

picnics on Shell Beach
on the islands off Shell Beach.