The Invention of the Saxophone: take two

Blogger's note. God knows how many years ago, I was standing around in a book store leafing through a book of poems by Billy Collins. I found this amazing poem about saxophones, almost forgot it, then tried years later to find it on the net. No sign of it. As so often happens, I had to go back years later to find it, and by then I had done the unthinkable: written my own poem, which likely has unconscious echoes of the Collins poem. Unconscious, not because I was unconscious when I wrote it, but because I only read the Collins poem once in haste before the store clerk glared me out of the place. Do I need to tell you that the Collins' poem makes me want to stop writing forever?

The Invention of the Saxophone by Billy Collins

          It was Adolph Sax, remember,

          not Saxo Grammaticus, who gets the ovation.

          And by the time he had brought all the components

          together-- the serpentine shape, the single reed,

          the fit of the fingers,

          the upward tilt of the golden bell--

          it was already 1842, and one gets the feeling

          it was also very late at night.

          There is something nocturnal about the sound,

          something literally horny,

          as some may have noticed on that historic date

          when the first odd notes wobbled out of his studio

          into the small, darkened town,

          summoning the insomniacs (who were up

          waiting for the invention of jazz) to their windows,

          but leaving the sleepers undisturbed,

          even deepening and warming the waters of their dreams.

          For this is not the valved instrument of waking,

          more the smoky voice of longing and loss,

          the porpoise cry of the subconscious.

          No one would ever think of blowing reveille

          on a tenor without irony.

          The men would only lie in their metal bunks,

          fingers twined behind their heads,

          afloat on pools of memory and desire.

          And when the time has come to rouse the dead,

          you will not see Gabriel clipping an alto

          around his numinous neck.

          An angel playing the world's last song

          on a glistening saxophone might be enough

          to lift them back into the light of earth,

          but really no farther.

          Once resurrected, they would only lie down

          in the long cemetary grass

          or lean alone against a lugubrious yew

          and let the music do the ascending--

          curling snakes charmed from their baskets--

          while they wait for the shrill trumpet solo,

          that will blow them all to kingdom come

AFTER SEARCHING FRUITLESSLY FOR A POEM BY BILLY COLLINS CALLED THE INVENTION OF THE SAXOPHONE, THE AUTHOR TAKES IT UPON HERSELF TO WRITE ONE OF HER OWN

i don’t know who invented this

reflexive question mark of an instrument

but i think it was a good thing

for it’s great to look at,

with fat keys like frog eyes

and a big bell like royal jelly

you could keep flowers in there if you wanted to,

extra socks

or even a clock

Snakes kink too

and this sound is snakey

purply mauve as the deepest bruise

and raunchy

as a man in love

smoked as some cat of the night

disappearing over a fence

it makes leaps

(but only because it has to)

There is no

morning saxophone

this is a sound that

pulls the shades down

a hangover

howl

fading to twilight

or the blackmost

navel

of the night

Few can wrap their lips around

this gooseneck

without some harm coming to them

for this is an instrument

with a long history of

hollowing out

all but the most hardy

Bird flew into a pane

of glass and was

smashed

we don’t know why it does this to people

(maybe it was mad at him

for taking it all to such extremes)

but how could you blow this thing

halfway

i ask you

how could you rear back

in some great pained whiplash of the spine

without a sense of

terrible commitment

i never much cared for

saxophones myself

until i heard one blown correctly at last

jazz is a genre i will never understand

but perhaps that’s good

for like the priesthood, one must enter into it

without question

reservation

or doubt

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Shake, shake, shake: the Telus Hippo!

Coolest Telus ad EVER: and it makes great gifs!


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Amazing -

Sheldon Cooper's worst nightmare

This has been a Gorn sort of week. Oh, it started out OK. Next week will be better, I promise myself.

When things like this show up, your only hope is that a stunt double will take the fall for you. But that seldom happens outside of science fiction.

Sometimes, things just come atcha. And you can't do nothin' but wait for the commercial.

The Gorn roars loudly, and carries a very big stick. Run, Kirk. . . RUN!!

"No. . . no Gorn!" Poor Sheldon Cooper finds the Gorn almost as terrifying as Goofy. Worse, though, the Gorn is taking up sacred space. "That's where I sit!"

But wait, there's more! If you take advantage of this special TV offer, 

we'll send you TWO monsters for the price of one!

Yes! This is the amazing MUGATU, who jumps out of the bushes and harasses Captain Kirk for no reason! The Mugatu, who only looks like a man in an albino gorilla suit adapted with dinosaur spikes and a rhino horn! The Mugatu, who seems to have taken lessons from Ernie Kovacs' Nairobi Trio! The Mugatu, who. . . but let's cut Desilu some slack here. Desi Arnaz probably used up all the budget screwing expensive hookers.

It's gratifying to see McCoy blast this guy with the zipper in his back. It's one of the better special effects of early Trek. But who knows when the Mugatu will return?

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Don't give your heart (an aria)

You must know this: it's not too goddamn smart

To give your heart.

To let some boy just trifle, a-la-carte

It's not too smart.

If you want to go there, go there,

And if you want to stay here, stay here,

And if you want to just pop la balloon

With la railroad-spike -

Do what you like.

Stupid to throw so much of yourself away

Stupid to realize it's past that day

(Way past that day!)

But haven't we always been the railroad type?

Love is a gutting kind of a thing

Doesn't make bells and banjos ring

and in the end, who's gonna sing? 

Who's gonna dance?

When it almost works, it's such a shame,

And shame can feel much worse than  pain - 

L'angoisse!

When it almost works, the shock is deep

When it almost works, it shatters sleep

And pride and other things

The dream is stolen in the night
But you left it in the open, that wasn't too bright!
Not too bright.

When magic misfires too many times

and when all this stuff no longer rhymes

Quelle horreur!

But it can't be worse than misfired art

And it can't be worse than knowing

You made this whole mess start -

You gave your heart.

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Some day, when I'm awfully low

"Never Gonna Dance" music by Jerome Kern and words by Dorothy Fields

Though I'm left without a penny,
The wolf was discreet.
He left me my feet.
And so, I put them down on anything
But the la belle,
La perfectly swell romance.








Never gonna dance.
Never gonna dance.
Only gonna love.
Never gonna dance.





Have I a heart that acts like a heart,
Or is it a crazy drum,
Beating the weird tattoos
Of the St. Louis Blues?





Have I two eyes to see your two eyes
Or see myself on my toes
Dancing to radios
Or Major Edward Bowes?





Though I'm left without a penny,
The wolf was discreet.
He left me my feet.
And so, I put them down on anything
But the la belle,
La perfectly swell romance.





Never gonna dance.
Never gonna dance.
Only gonna love.
Never gonna dance.





I'll put my shoes on beautiful trees.
I'll give my rhythm back to the breeze.
My dinner clothes may dine where they please,
For all I really want is you.





And to Groucho Marx I give my cravat.
To Harpo goes my shiny silk hat.
And to heaven, I give a vow
To adore you. I'm starting now
To be much more positive.
That....

Though I'm left without my Penny,
The wolf was not smart.
He left me my heart.
And so, I cannot go for anything
But the la belle,
La perfectly swell romance.





Never gonna dance.
Never gonna dance.
Only gonna love you.
Never gonna dance.

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Khachaturian - Masquerade Suite (Waltz)

No! No! This ISN'T the same piece I posted a few days ago! This is just the waltz from Masquerade, not the whole suite. But it's much better, with a dark and slightly sleazy circus atmosphere that is like the worn velvet on Viennese trousers, worn because its wearer has been furiously engaged in an activity both illicit and sublime.

In the burrows of the nightmare: or why I liked English class

I have a horrible confession to make. I liked English class. I liked it so much I had to hide it. I never said anything, never contributed a single comment to any discussion, though my mind was teeming with ideas about everything we studied.


It was decades later, when I was an adult and went back to school, that I found the courage to say the things I felt and saw. By this time my perceptions had shifted, of course. Even the most familiar poem wasn't the same; someone had gone in there and changed it, in every textbook in all the world.

I guess Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening is my favorite poem because it makes me want to scream that I ever dared to write poetry and try to get it published. I DID get a dozen or so of my poems published in small literary mags, but maybe seven people bothered to read them, mostly the contributors. Sometimes I wondered if the editor had bothered to read them at all.


Example. I wrote a poem called Lightning - God must've been punishing me for writing a poem called Lightning, because in the final printed version it came out Lightening.

"Well, it's only one letter different," squawked the 19-year-old assistant editor who had neatly inserted an error where there was none before. She must have thought I had made a spelling mistake.

So now my poem, which HAD been about childhood sexual abuse and doing hard time in a mental institution, was suddenly about a much more powerful subject: Coffee Mate "lightener", guaranteed to replace cream with a metallic-tasting petroleum-based powder which would never go sour.

So much for MY adventures. In my last post I decided to illustrate that favorite poem from high school (written by that dry, craggy desert of a man, W. H. Auden), and in doing so, some of that English class stuff came back to me.

My teacher in high school, Mr. Griffin  (probably dead by now, I realize with a shock) read this one out loud one day, and I was riveted. Maybe it was the way he read it.
The class called this teacher Griffy Baby (though not to his face), and he was given to telling tales out of school, recommending we watch a literary-based movie called Carry On Up the Jungle. Sometimes when he was tired of teaching he told funny stories about his kids, one of whom resembled a baby Dylan Thomas. Then there was the day he showed us a home movie of a tawdry drama he had filmed with his drunken friends.

Griffy Baby was partial to giving me As, but was curious as to why I never said anything in class. My soul was so crushed with social isolation and constant, relentless bullying that I didn't dare open my mouth. But I was grateful for that magnificent poem, and I never forgot it.


So to make up for my silence in class, I want to do a blow-by-blow analysis here and now, which is maybe appropriate given Auden's legendary sexual orientation. (He also wrote an infamous poem called The Platonic Blow which I don't think I will post here, but I do encourage you, even urge you to look it up. It'll make your literary hair stand on end, or something else if you're gay. Short of out-and-out porn, it's the most sexually-explicit writing I have ever seen.)

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.


When the poem opens, the scene is just so. . . normal. The poet is out for a nice little stroll. Just walking down the street. Then he sees crowds upon the pavement. . . not other people strolling along, but crowds. Assembled for what? And these crowds, which sound about as friendly as the spectators at a Roman coliseum, are fields of harvest wheat. I mean, they don't look like wheat or sound like wheat or smell like wheat or taste like wheat. This is no synonym, folks, it is that deadliest of things: a metaphor! And speaking of deadly, isn't it just a little obvious that these wheaten folk seem all ready for the scythe of the Grim Reaper? "Harvest" wheat, indeed.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.


Arch of the railway. This is why I included in my last post's illustrations quite a few images from a superb movie called Notes on a Scandal, with Cate Blanchett playing a 40-year-old teacher having an affair with a 15-year-old student. Having to meet in such a drippy place smells of the illicit, or at least of the damned uncomfortable. And that brimming river: hey, that's assonance, folks! He does it three times, too, which makes it magical. The river could be Lethe, the river of oblivion, which would surely match the dire tone of the rest of this thing. And brimming, like tears, like a cup about to run over. But that nasty cup appears later on.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,


'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

Here he seems to be introducing silly mythical images which would be highly inappropriate if it weren't for the sing-songy, nursery-rhyme-esque form of the poem, with its strict rhyme and meter. Personally I wonder why he spends so much time on these innocent-sounding pronouncements, when I always thought the dank, furtive image of the arch of the railway implied meeting up with a prostitute, male or female.

Idealism, maybe? Or is this guy or girl, or guys or girls, just incredibly stupid, given to ludicrous hyperbole? In any case, all these blatherings seem sum-up-able in one word: "Forever." I will love you, dear, I'll love you. . . for all eternity.


'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

The years run like rabbits, as if to say, my, how time flies when you're having fun! Or is it something else? They may be running away, but it has nothing to do with us chasing after them. Some day, such as NOW, we may fervently wish those rabbits would slow down.  Rabbits also imply a sort of dumb, embarrassing fertility, not to mention the rabbit being pulled out of a hat ("Nothing up my sleeve!") and Alice's white rabbit, who is somehow always running "late". (And note the double meaning of late!)

And just what does "rabbiting on" mean? That you talk too much?

And that "first love of the world" cannot be anyone but Eve, the first woman. Hmmm, I wonder what she charges?

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.


I like this. I love this. I love the "device" of Time speaking to us, of all the clocks in the city starting to protest the bullshit of the lovers writhing under the arch. The audacity, too, of allowing Time to address us, as if God Himself decided to step up to the plate (which He does, all the time, in the Old Testament).

And already we have our warning: my teacher read this in a slightly smug tone. "You cannot conquer time."

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.


This is one of those ravishing verses of poetry that you don't want to touch because it's just so fucking magnificent. I wanted to write that on my term paper - "fucking magnificent" - but I didn't, and still got an A.

But he's doing the same thing here, capitolizing and I suppose personifying the Nightmare, Justice, etc. Justice being not blind, but naked. Pull down the blinds, please. And how about that little cough, ahem. Excuse me. Do you know who's in charge here?

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.


Nobody wants to read this because it makes them groan inwardly, especially those first two lines. It's so bloody true, even in the most goal-directed, achievement-stuffed life. And Time, that wonderful personified Wizard of eternity, will have his "fancy", much as a rich man might pick out a particularly tasty prostitute from the lineup. Fancy is a silly, ephemeral, frou-frou sort of thing, the opposite of plain: fancy this, fancy that. And it also means fantasy. The "tomorrow or today" is sort of like setting up a delivery time for a parcel: "oh, I'll be here tomorrow, I think, you can bring it round then. Or, wait a minute, I'll be home today."

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.


I had a little trouble with this until I stole an interpretation from someone else. Green valleys are very British, of course - how green is my valley, and all that -  but why is the snow (grey hair, old age) so "appalling"? It casts a pall over the valley, even obscures it completely so that the green life beneath it does not show. It might as well not be there at all. The next two lines are all shivery and liquidescent. I don't know what a threaded dance is, but I think the diver is Cupid. Once more, eroticism is shattered by that dirty old man, Mortality.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

This is among Auden's most famous lines, for some reason almost always misquoted (like Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle) as "stare, stare in the mirror". The mirror does come, but a few verses later, and in a much more disturbing manner. This one is effective, I think, because of understatement. Or: is the subject just washing his hands of the whole thing? (Didn't Pilate do the same thing? And Lady Macbeth? Oh, I'm going overboard here.)

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.


Probably my favorite verse, because it makes me want to scream and never write again. Glacier, desert, crack in the tea-cup, land of the dead, where we all end up, unless you believe in Heaven, which Auden obviously does not. The safe comfort of the everyday and the brutal fact of mortality are so closely juxtaposed that we no longer take any notice. It's as close as the skin on your face.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.


This is a weird one, and I suppose it echoes the nursery-rhyme quality of some of these verses. The Giant must be a reference to Jack and the Beanstalk, but what does it mean that he's "enchanting to"? I hope not what I think. Most Americans won't know this, but the Lily-white Boy (also a strange image) is a character in an English folk song called Green Grow the Rushes-o. Jill goes down on her back, well. . . innocence begins to prostitute itself. This is the Land of the Dead, which is beginning to resemble Hieronymus Bosch's vision of hell.

'O look, look in the mirror
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

Yes. THIS is the verse with the mirror in it, and it has that "o look, look -", that sense of shock, almost of horror at the inevitable, strenuously-denied passage of time. I don't want to look, but I must look! And those ironic lines - life remains a blessing, but we're about to die so why is a blessing even relevant? And the stinging self-contempt of "YOU cannot bless", as if you have somehow, and mysteriously, lost all your power.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'


There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile. . . and the whole human condition is drawn in slanted lines.

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.


And thus, the soft, gentle benediction, as we lie howling and writhing in the face of eternal Hell.

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I just want to make a point

I don't know, maybe I don't even need to post any text here. The pictures say it all. The fabled Mary Tyler Moore Show reunion on Hot in Cleveland has shocked a few people, not so much by the age of the performers (some in their 80s now) but by their appearance.

I'm afraid Mary has gone the Joan Rivers/mausoleum route beloved of too many glamorous stars of yore. The cheek implants are ready to explode out of her face, the eyes have disappeared into her head, and her neck has that celery-stalk look of ruthlessly pulled-back skin. Compare and contrast to Betty White - who doesn't love Betty White? She was on TV before I was born! - who at well over 90 has decided to keep her own face. Granted, she has good skin and great cheekbones, and the ability to light up in front of a camera as few people can. She has a great smile and a great voice and even good hair, without all the obvious styled wispiness Mary uses to cover whatever her forehead looks like. Like William Shatner, she just doesn't seem to age like all the rest of us. 

But she is proof of one thing. Old age isn't hideous. It's old age. And if you can still smile like that, it must be a pretty good thing.

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The Wrong Note Rag performed by Pot-Pourri

Not written in the '20s, not even for a show set in the '20s, but rather the Swing era of the 1940s. Yet it's full of all that '20s jazz, when jazz was still exciting and new. I think this was Leonard Bernstein's first musical, Wonderful Town. And you'll never get this one out of your brain, out of your brain, out of your brain. . .