Is the Apocalypse Nigh?

Keith Richard has gone on the wagon–and at 66. Bless him.

In related aging-rocker news, today’s All Things Considered featured a story titled “Iggy Pop: The Voice as Weapon.” A curious tidbit: the young Iggy’s inspiration came from Frank Sinatra.

Fitzgerald’s Crack Up

Lo! I have just discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous account of his decline online.  You can read piece, published in Esquire Magazine in 1936,  at Esquire.com: “The Crack-Up.”

Pioneer Girls

Like most American females, I grew up on Laura Ingalls Wilders’ Little House books. I battled my classmates over every one of the nine titles in our school library. Also, like many Americans, my family routinely watched the television series (every Monday night!). I never knew much about Wilder outside of that series, and I certainly had no inkling of the Little House books’ impact on American society in a wider sense. Therefore, I learned much this week reading Judith Thurman’s profile of Wilder and her daughter Rose in the The New Yorker. Thurman briefly reviews the women’s biographies, and she reveals their combined, and continuing (via Reagan-style Conservatism), influence on America’s political culture. Recommended.

Checking In

I’ve been away in  a sense.  A terribly busy month or so meant scarce (fine–no) time for the WordPress experiment. I’ll endeavour to be more attentive in future.

Solicitation

One of my fantastic colleagues will soon participate in a half-marathon to raise funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. She hopes “to raise $1,800 to combat leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma and myeloma.”

Times are tough right now, but if you’d like to contribute to her mission, please visit this page and contribute what you can to help to help advance the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s cause.

All contributions are, by the way, tax-deductible.

Thank you for doing what you can.

Elvis Calling

To celebrate England’s recent encounter with the white stuff, London-area artist and musician Alexander C. Morgan crafted a snowman a la Elvis.

Dante & Ego-Bashing

I’m not sure how it happened (I believe it was prompted by appreciation of  T. S. Eliot), but seventeen years ago I read John Ciardi’s translation of The Divine Comedy, and boy o boy, did I fall for Dante (as if you couldn’t tell by looking at my links list).

I’ve only ever read the work in translation, and I’ve read many translations, but I’ve always really wanted to read the Commedia as Dante wrote it (or, at least, as it as initially printed). That desire, along with my Italiophilia, led me to attempt learning Italian. I’m doing fine so far, but I’ve a long way to go.

While in the university library the other day, I snapped a copy of La Divina Commedia from a shelf and read Inferno’s opening stanza in Italian. My thrill at actually understanding the text was short lived, as I realized that I know the opening stanza via translations.
D’oh!

The stanza follows:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
***
Midway upon the road of our life
I found myself within a dark wood
for the right way had been missed.

(translation via Wikipedia. I’m unsure which edition they’ve used, but this translation is fairly standard).

By the way, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated the first American edition of The Divine Comedy. He wrote a number of sonnets while engaged in this task, and he published them in The Atlantic Monthly. You can find them here.

La Dolce Presuntuosità

(The Sweet Presumptiousness)

I’ve just begun learning Italian, which I’ve longed to do for years (it’s taken me so long to come ‘round to it for a number of reasons, and I’m thrilled to be doing it now). In a fit of bravado, I ordered La Dolce Vita from Netflix. I convinced myself that using one of my all-time favorite films as a tutorial aid was a good idea. Ha. It turned out to be quite a deflating experience. When it arrived I plugged it into the dvd player with all kinds of excitement. The film began—a helicopter, with a statue of Jesus Christ dangling from its undercarriage, flies over Rome. People in the street shade their eyes to look up at it; a gaggle of bikini-clad young women lounging on a rooftop react to the flying Jesus, thereby prompting the film’s first bit of dialogue:

I understand “che cose?” That’s it. Everything else was lost on me. I kept at it, but I only made it as far as Marcello and Maddalena roaring away from the prostitute’s flat nella macchina di Maddalena.

I confess, unless it’s spoken very slowly, I have difficulty understanding Italian, and I only speak it haltingly. I suppose aiming to comprehend La Dolce Vita undubbed and sans subtitles is overconfident at the very least.

Trivia: The term for celebrity-chasing photographers, “paparazzo,” came from La Dolce Vita. The character Marcello, a journalist, is often accompanied by a photographer named “Paparrazo.” So there you go.

(I acknowledge that writing about  ferrin films and all that really seems a tad pretentious, so expect a post celebrating All Things Jonas Brothers to kind of neutralize the jazz, beret, black-rimmed-specs theme. Okay, perhaps not the Jonas Brothers–maybe Nick Cave. Or Missy Elliott).

T. E. Hulme

Thomas Ernest Hulme

While reading about fin de siècle decadence today, I came across a suggestion that decadent writers presented “religion as spilt art,” an inversion of T. E. Hulme’s characterization of Romanticism:

You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god.  You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth.  In other words, you get romanticism.  The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience.  It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table.  Romanticism, then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion. (from “Romanticism and Classicism”)

I found the “spilt art”/“spilt religion” comparison intriguing–the Decadents did, after all, take Romanticism to an extreme. It seems a fair enough comparison, at least it does in Hulm-ian terms.

Anyway, the article on decadence reminded me that I haven’t looked at Hulme’s poetry in a while. I am fond of his (few) pieces,  and so, dear readers, I’m sharing a bit of T. E. Hulme:

“Autumn”

A touch of cold in the Autumn night –
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

“The Embankment”

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

(both poems published in 1909)

Fresh Hemingway for the U. S. A.

A cache of Ernest Hemingway material has arrived from Cuba and now rests at JFK Library. Well, actually a cache of replicas of Hemingway material has arrived from Cuba and now rests at JFK Library. You might think “well, geez—copies?” Indeed, Cuba retains the originals, but this is really a very big deal.

Briefly: Hemingway lived in Cuba for a time; he loved Cuba. He left the island in 1960, and he died shortly thereafter. In 1961, his widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, returned to Cuba to retrieve any items her husband had left behind, and she managed to return much Hemingway material to the U.S.A.; unfortunately, she had some difficulty getting everything out of the country. The JFK Library holds the items Mary Hemingway brought into the United States. However, several Hemingway scholars—including Dr. Sandra Spanier–wondered if Mrs. Hemingway could have possibly retrieved everything her husband left behind. Dr. Spanier’s questions were spot on.

In 2002, Rep. James McGovern (Mass.) contacted the Cuban government to ask about Hemingway’s home, Finca Vigia (now the Hemingway Museum). As a result, Cuba invited a group of Americans, including Dr. Spanier, to visit Finca Vigia (read a story on her visit here; guess which cigar-wielding Cuban showed up unannounced?). Cuba granted the Americans access to a boatload of material. Letters, tyepscripts, proofs—things that had never been seen by American Hemingway scholars. Thanks to an agreement worked out by Rep. McGovern and Cuban officials, the U. S. A. now has copies of:

more than 3,000 [. . .] documents from Hemingway’s time in Cuba, [which include] corrected proofs of “The Old Man and the Sea,” a movie script based on the novel, an alternate ending to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and thousands of letters, with correspondence from authors Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos and actress Ingrid Bergman. (AP)

Cuba scanned and digitized all of the materials to flesh out the U.S.A.’s Hemingway collection. The nation has given us a significant gift. As Rep. McGovern suggests, perhaps a tad optimistically, “[i]t’s a turning point toward a more rational, mature relationship between our two countries [. . . .] I think Hemingway can be the bridge to help move both sides to a point where we can have a good, solid relationship” (AP). Hemingway would most definitely be glad to hear this.

As an aside:   in one of my early academic experiences,  a female instructor notified me that, as a woman, I’d not “get” Hemingway. Or Melville (I’m sure she was trying to articulate something about then-current theories about differences between male and female ways of thinking). Sadly, I shied away from the great man’s works after that.  Happily, I later devoted a summer to reading–and “getting”–Hemingway.