10 micron six-string guitar
13.4.03
To Roosevelt
It is with the voice of the Bible, or the verse of Walt Whitman
that I advance upon you now, Hunter!
Primitive and modern, sensible and complicated,
with something of Washington and a dash of Nimrod.
You are the United States,
you are the future invader
of all that’s innocent in America and its Indian blood,
blood that still says Jesus Christ and speaks in Spanish.
You are a superb and strapping specimen of your people;
you are cultured and capable; you oppose Tolstoy.
You are a horse-whisperer, an assassinator of tigers,
you are Alexander-Nebuchadnezzer.
(You are a Professor of Energy
as the whackjobs among us now say.)
You think that life is a fire,
that progress is eruption
and into whatever bones you shoot,
you hit the future.
No.
The United States is powerful and huge.
And when it shakes itself a deep temblor
runs down the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If it yells, its voice is like the ripping boom of the lion.
It is just as Hugo said to Grant: “The stars are yours.”
(Glinting wanly, it raises itself, the Argentine sun,
and the star of Chile rises too...) You are rich --
you join the cult of Hercules with the cult of Mammon;
and illuminating the way of easy conquest,
“Freedom” has found its torch in New York.
But our America, which has had poets
from the ancient times of Netzahualcoyotl,
which has kept walking in the footprints of the great Bacchus
(who had learned the Panic alphabet at one glance);
which has consulted the stars, which has known Atlantis,
(whose name comes down drumming to us in Plato),
which has lived since the old times on the very light of this world,
on the life of its fire, its perfume, its love,
the America of the great Moctezuma, of the Inca,
our America smelling of Christopher Columbus,
our Catholic America, our Spanish America,
the America in which the noble Cuauhtemoc said:
“I am in no bed of roses”: that same America
which tumbles in the hurricanes and lives for Love,
it lives, you men of Saxon eyes and Barbarian souls.
And it dreams. And it loves, and it vibrates; and she is the daughter
of the Sun.
Be very careful. Long live this Spanish America!
The Spanish Lion has loosed a thousand cubs today: they are at large,
Roosevelt,
and if you are to snag us, outlunged and awed,
in your claws of iron, you must become God himself,
the alarming Rifleman and the hardened Hunter.
And though you count on everything, you lack the one thing needed:
God.
________________
Ruben Dario (Félix Rubén García Sarmiento) 1904, translated by Gabriel Gudding in Poetry Daily's newsletter 4/11/03 (subscribe) for National Poetry Month
This poem, “Á Roosevelt,” was
written in response to US President Theodore Roosevelt’s invasion of
Panama in 1903 after Roosevelt fomented a coup in Panama City so that
he could annex the Panamanian isthmus for the purposes of building
the canal.
12.4.03
...One afternoon shortly after Christmas break, however, Mr. Lefkowitz was waiting for us in the locker room. He told us not to change because we were going to the auditorium instead. Everyone was seated in the first rows of seats, and the place was semi-dark accept for the stage. One of the seniors who assisted Lefkowitz "manned" the spotlights. Another put a chair on the side of the stage. Lefkowitz told me to sit with all my books on that chair. He announced to the class: "Today we're going to teach Jackson how to walk and act like a man." I was ordered to walk across the stage, carrying my books. Whenever he or one of the class decided my walk or way of holding the books was too effeminate (every time for about ten times) one {of} the senior assistants leapt to the stage and knocked all the books out of my hands. I had to scoop them up, and start all over again.
Finally Lefkowitz directed me to pull the chair to stage center and sit on it. The assistant turned a pin spot on me. There were whispered instructions to the oldest of the senior assistants, muffled laughter, and then a momentary silence....
from Oxydol Poisoning, Chapter Seven, by Earl Jackson Jr.
link through the irascible bellona times . . .2003-04-09
11.4.03
Prophecy
At the end of the year the stars go out
the air stops breathing and the Sibyl sings
first she sings of the darkness she can see
she sings on until she comes to the age
without time and the dark she cannot see
no one hears then as she goes on singing
of all the white days that were brought to us one by one
that turned to colors around us
a light coming from far out in the eye
where it begins before she can see it
burns through the words that no one has believed
__________________
see also:W. S. Merwin
from The Pupil
The Creation of The Moon
Original text by Anonymous Caxinua Amazon, translated by W. S. Merwin
here's the Ateneum Art Museum at the Finnish National Gallery
and here's the Rijksmuseum
how to, and, on the other hand, how not to
"Excuse me, General Powell?"
KIDS' GUERNICA PEACE MURALS
there is a woman in this painting
Cows in a birch woods
Victor Westerholm at the Turun Taidemuseo/Turku Art Museum
Hugo Simberg at the Finnish National Gallery
Post-Festum
10.4.03
Dolly Parton described her childhood home in Tennessee as "three rooms and a path."
LMBoyd
9.4.03
Dorothy Gambrell, art goddess
Cat and Girl
Japanese Women Artists Chronology (born 16th-19th c.)
adapted from "Japanese Women Artists" by Patricia Fister
(Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1988)
with links to Illustrations & Online Sources
Hasui Evening Snow at Edo River
also Hasui Kumamoto Castle
at Ukiyoe-Gallery
Charles Bartlett Udaipur
Yoshida Mt. Fuji from Miho
Katsuyuki Nishijima at Yoseido Gallery
Rakuzan at Japaneseprints.net
Hasui Autumn Rainbow at Hatta, Kaga
Hasui Evening in Itako at Shogun Gallery
one of the last works of Kawase Hasui, Konjikido in Hiraizumi, completed in 1957, the year of his death.
Hasui Bright Moon at Matsuyama Castle (watercolor)
from Robin Devereaux's Hasui Watercolors and Prints - Some Comparisons
...as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't...
W.S.Merwin Berryman at Off The Wall Anthology
Thank goodness, however, that Alcott did not live in the Age of the Memoir, that she spared us the unburdening of her deepest feelings and ambivalences, leaving nothing to our imaginations. She lives fully in us precisely because she left out so much in her fiction. It is by working through her sketches, her novels, a biography, her letters, trying to find the real person, the true spirit beyond the sentiment and moralizing, that the reader is able to claim Alcott as his own. Perhaps this is what a reader wants for himself: a handful of best characters to people his heart and mind, someone who is created fully human and given away, a character with strength and wisdom and sufferings like our own, but a little larger than our own selves. Louisa May Alcott is her own great character -- her best gift to us.
Jane Hamilton on the creator of Little Women, in Salon
6.4.03
beginning search on the Black 97th Regiment and the Alaska-Canada Highway reveals this:
http://www.sandiego.edu/~kalenius/images/alaska28.jpg
and this page, yes! at The Ebony Society of Philatelic Events and Reflections
and as it turns out the 93rd, the 95th, and the 97th were all involved, while the 388th Engineer Battalion was up in Yukon Territory building the Canol Trail to provide oil for the WW2 machine.
living in Tok!
a photo history of the Black 97th!Unlike the armed forces, the Merchant Marine was integrated from the start of WWII.
A full-size replica of the Wheel stands in Yokahama, Japan. The only stoppage in the history of the WONDER WHEEL was on July 13, 1977 during the Great NYC Blackout - when the entire northeast lost electrical power. Riders on the WONDER WHEEL were brought down safely because the owners handcranked the Wheel to turn it.
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