"Sweet Bird of Youth" & "Summer and Smoke" make up a Tennessee Williams/Geraldine Page (she originated both roles on the stage) double bill on TCM starting at 500...

Local trees

from Robert Bolano's "Dictionary of Nazi Literature in the Americas"--The Many Masks of Max Mirebelais--

"MAX MIREBALAIS, alias MAX KASIMIR, MAX VON HAUPTMAN, MAX LE GUEULE, JACQUES ARTIBONITO

Port-au-Prince, 1941—Les Cayes, 1998

His real name was probably Max Mirebalais, although we will never know for sure. His first steps in literature remain mysterious: one day he turned up in a newspaper editor's office; the next, he was out on the streets, looking for stories, or more often running errands for the senior staff. In the course of his apprenticeship, he was subjected to all the miseries and servitudes of Haitian journalism. But thanks to his determination, after two years, he rose to the position of assistant social reporter for the Port-au-Prince Monitor, and in that capacity, awed and puzzled, he attended parties and soirées held in the capital's grandest houses. There can be no doubt that as soon as he glimpsed that world, he wanted to belong to it. He soon realized that there were only two ways to achieve his aim: through violence, which was out of the question, since he was peaceable and timorous by nature, appalled by the mere sight of blood; or through literature, which is a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to respectability, and can, in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the social climber's origins..."

TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES notes: on the 21st an evening of rare films by Charles Burnett, including "Killer of Sheep", the next night John Sayles picks Sam Fuller's film about his newspaper days "Park Row", which I've never seen...

“Blood and Ink”: Fuller and the Fourth Estate in Park Row

Combustible Celluloid film review - Killer of Sheep (1977)

nice to see in Jon Stewart's montage of male politicians weeping last night (re Hillary) a personal favorite in the manly-stoicism-cracking-at-last-genre YouTube - Bob Dole Cries At Nixon Funeral 1994, which choked me up at the time, I admit...

way to go Hillary!

"Clinton won tonight because in the last few days, the level of misogyny directed toward her had reached a fever pitch, and the women of New Hampshire decided that they’d had enough of it..."

The witch ain't dead, and Chris Matthews is a ding-dong

"Is it possible that for the first time in my life, my reaction to a political news cycle could have mirrored a larger national feeling? Could Matthews and his threatened brethren, who came damned close to putting this Hillary disbeliever on the path to feminist redemption (who knows how I'll vote; but I do know that I am happy that I'll now likely have the opportunity to cast a vote for the candidate of my choice and not of MSNBC's), actually have shaped what happened on Tuesday in New Hampshire in a similar fashion? Exit polling and analysis be damned, we'll likely never really know what electoral alchemy landed Hillary Clinton an unexpected victory. Finally, around 11:30, Matthews was forced to suck it up. Looking like he was chewing on a lemon, he said of his nemesis, "She stood there and took the heat under what looked to be a difficult time. I give her a lot of personal credit. I will never underestimate Hillary Clinton again..."

what's keeping Tim Raines out of the Hall of Fame?

Eli Miller's Seltzer Delivery Service

"In Ben Katchor’s graphic novel The Jew of New York, an 1830s seltzer aficionado named Francis Oriole concocts a business plan of tremendous, kooky grandeur: he dreams of carbonating Lake Erie and piping fresh soda water to New York City. Seltzer must have seemed like a miraculous remedy in 1830, and still a relatively novel one—Joseph Priestly, who is credited with stumbling on the happy accident of carbonated water, made his findings known in the 1770s. In Oriole’s plan, seltzer would run—or spritz, I suppose—from every tap, and no one would suffer from indigestion. (Many of the book’s characters appreciate a good burp, which Katchor refers to by its wonderfully onomatopoeic Yiddish name: greptz...)

Embedded

"A new Pentagon term came into use in the Bush era. With the invasion of Iraq, reporters were said to be "embedded" in U.S. military units. That term -- so close in sound to "in bed with" -- should have wider uses. You could, for instance, say that Americans have, since September 2001, been "embedded," largely willingly, in a new lockdown universe defined by a general acceptance of widespread acts of torture and abuse, as well as of the right to kidnap (known as "extraordinary rendition"), and the creation and expansion of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, all based on the principle that a human being is guilty unless proven (sometimes even if proven) innocent. What might originally have seemed like emergency measures in a moment of crisis is now an institutionalized way of life. Whether we like it or not, these methods increasingly define what it means to be an American. In this manner, despite the "freedom" rhetoric of the Bush administration, the phrase "the price of freedom" has been superseded by the price of what passes for "safety" and "security."

Media coverage of such subjects reflects this. The cases above, all reported in December, barely scratch the surface of this universe. Just a glance at other December stories -- some barely attended to, or dealt with by minor outlets or in humdrum ways, but many well covered in major papers and still causing little consternation -- indicates just how normalized all this has become..."

via mefi a list of Cliopatra Awards for a very interesting passel of history blogs...

"Medium" back tonight at 10...

Isola di Rifiuti reads reads Scroggins, Zukofsky & Einstein--

"What has been overlooked . . . is the irrational, the inconsistent, the droll, even the insane, which nature, inexhaustible operative, implants in an individual, seemingly for her own amusement. But these things are singled out only in the crucible of one’s own mind. This is as it should be. For, otherwise how could the isolation of distance be approximated?"

the new onedit has complete books by Miles Champion, Elieni Sikelianos, Khaled Hakim and (above) Stephen Rodefer & (click on image!) Harry Gilonis/Erica van Horn...

Vinyl Sleeve Heads

via

Nonist has a bunch of interesting bookbinding=related links up...

from Stravinsky/Auden's
"Rake's Progress" here's the great Dawn Upshaw singing "No Word From Tom"...

nice set of gently supernatural movies on TCM tonight derived from the writings of Thorne Smith including Constance Bennett & Cary Grant in both "Topper" films & Veronica Lake in Rene Clair's "I Married a Witch"...

(US TCM only for some reason alas)

good review of the new Robert Creeley Selected--

"Dante's verses took for granted a practical knowledge of falconry; Sidney's a practical knowledge of dressage. Creeley's work, in turn, involves a fundamental experience of modernity--more often than not, someone else is driving the machine in which we're riding. He is the poet laureate of the back seat, that place of erotic encounter and unacknowledged legislation..."

YouTube - The Passenger - Iggy Pop and The Stooges 70's

a mess of great links here--Festival of the Trees, #19

Local trees

Anthony Stewart Culley

Dec 31st 1925-Dec 19th 1992

Telegraph obituary of Hugh Massingberd, who made the Daily Telegraph obit page the best anywhere...

Charles Lamb - New Year's Eve


"-- In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now, shall I confess a truth ? -- I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser's farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away "like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity: and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. -- Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me.

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself -- these things go out with life?


Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here, -- the recognisable face -- the "sweet assurance of a look" -- ?"

via James Wolcott--Huckabee tickles my inner Lenin

"For it is self evident that any popular movement that would ever hope to change the status of the poor in United States would have to begin by uniting the resentment of both poor whites and poor blacks and that could probably only be possible around the figure of Jesus Christ, as he is painted by southern Christianity both black and white... and, as any South American will tell you, once the poor begin to march, Jesus is more easily a figure of the left than of the right..."

lively Terry Castle on Claude & Marcel & Janet & Alice & Gertrude & the Babe...

new book of Leveller texts--

‘We are now engaged for our freedom. That’s the end of parliaments: not to constitute what is already established, but to act according to the just rules of government. Every person in England has as clear a right to elect his representative as the greatest person in England. I conceive that’s the undeniable maxim of government: that all government is in the free consent of the people.’

The Agreement Of The People. The Levellers' Manifesto from May 1649

:That it shall not be in their power to continue or make any Law, to deprive any person, in case of Tryals for Life, Limb, Liberty, or Estate, from the benefit of witnesses, on his, or their behalf; nor deprive any person of those priviledges, and liberties, contained in the Petition of Right, made in the third yeer of the late King Charls..."

my favorite seasonal song--Good King Wenceslas, that "deep and crisp and even" line was the first line of poetry I ever remember really responding too, the way the syllables fall like feet in the snow--

Good King Wenceslas looked out
on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about
deep and crisp and even;

Brightly shone the moon that night,
tho' the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight,
gath'ring winter fuel.

"Hither, page, and stand by me,
if thou knows it, telling,
Yonder peasant, who is he?
Where and what his dwelling?"

"Sire, he lives a good league hence,
underneath the mountain;
Right against the forest fence
by Saint Agnes' fountain."

"Bring me flesh
and bring me wine,
bring me pine logs hither:
Thou and I will see him dine,
when we bear them thither."

Page and monarch,
forth they went,
forth they went together;
Through the rude wind's wild lament
and the winter weather....

via me-fi Dylan Thomas reads A Child's Christmas in Wales

(photo from the great Denholm Elliott version, which I haven't found on the schedule this year...)