Tenderly her blue eyes glistened. . .

Until a few minutes ago, I would not listen to anyone's interpretation of this melancholy little gem except William Warfield's. I still love his version, but this was a real find. 

I blush to admit I'm not very familiar with Thomas Allen (in fact, it's also the name of a publisher I've been trying to ding for years!). Now I do a little probing, and find he's one of the world's finest baritones: and no wonder! His restraint in this piece is amazing, his tone lucid and full of rippling, iridescent overtones. 

I do hear hints of Warfield in his interpretation, but that's not a bad thing, is it? The accompaniment is ravishing and seems to be in love with the music. I wish I had more info on this video. (Originally I was looking for My Soul is a Witness sung by Paul Robeson, couldn't find it, found several other spirituals, then stumbled on to this. The Robeson search came from, strangely enough, the Hound of Heaven quote: "I shook the pillaring hours/And pulled my life upon me", which got me thinking about Samson (presumably, the source of the poetic image), which got me thinking about my favorite verse from Witness:

You read in the Bible and you understand
Samson was the strongest man
Samson went out at-a one time
And he killed about a thousand of the Philistine
Delilah fooled Samson, this-a we know
For the Holy Bible tells us so
She shaved off his head just as clean as your hand
And his strength became the same as any natural man

O, Samson was a witness for my Lord
Samson was a witness for my Lord
Samson was a witness for my Lord
Samson was a witness for my Lord

(Oh yeahhhhhhhh!)

Hounded

And a dog stood over him. He was that sort of person. Hounded. So when the 19th-century English poet Francis Thompson wrote his most famous poem, The Hound of Heaven, it had (and still has) the power to make your neck-hairs rise with a disturbingly accurate portrayal of human anguish and despair.

Given when it was written, it's no surprise the language is overly plummy and sometimes almost impossible to decipher. "Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue." (Wist??) Ordinary words are turned on their ear: "skiey" (which I kind of like), "silvern", "dunged" (but I'd rather not go there), and, in the final line, when God finally catches up with the poor fellow, "dravest":

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.

I think that word puts me off the most, since when you finally get past all the poet's agony and are about to witness his dramatic salvation, you don't know what the hell he's talking about.

The whole reason I'm posting this is that there's a line, one out of the 184 or whatever it is (and it takes Richard Burton almost nine minutes to recite this on YouTube), that periodically repeats and repeats in my ear:

The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?

It's an example, amid the overly-florid language and sometimes offputting emotional excesses of the work, of startling clarity and brilliant economy of expression. He shoves that rind in our faces and makes us taste, and it is bitter fruit indeed.

I would never torture you with a transcription of the whole thing, because its twists and turns can be exhausting (and besides, it's just plain too long). Attention spans were much longer then, people were much more attuned to the written word (especially when recited), and almost everyone adhered to conventional Christianity in some form. So his image of God as this lumbering lout with pounding feet chasing after him was probably less oppressive than it seems today.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Oh yes. The imagery splashes pictures onto the blank canvas of the mind: running away from something, here described as "Him", but something that could be infinitely more mysterious and powerful than any conventional Christian God.

It's hard to pluck out single lines here, as the poet's thoughts tumble out with manic urgency, line blurring into line: but there are a few, yes, there are a few. . .

Across the margent of the world I fled,

And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,

Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars:

Really, it's the middle line that draws me, those gold gateways: but it's that word "troubled" that is so odd and affecting. Maybe he was just looking for the right number of syllables, I don't know. How can anyone have the power to "trouble" the stars? Either he's expressing delusions of grandeur, or the word means something entirely different to him.

I said to Dawn: Be sudden - to Eve: Be soon;

With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over

From this tremendous Lover -

Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!

Well, this is nearly a peep-show, isn't it? Quick, God is coming - put your pants back on! Dawn and Eve could be his girl friends, or wanton women at least, cleverly couched in coded language. "Dawn" and "eve" represent each end of the day, but Eve is also the "first woman", and therefore infinitely desirable. And oh those skiey blossoms, big fat plumphy cumulous heaps to roll around in (with Eve - or Dawn - whose turn is it, anyway?). And what about "this tremendous Lover"? That's nearly homoerotic, when you think about it.

To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;

Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.

I don't need to explain this one, its visual imagery startlingly cinematic. Simply brilliant. 

As I said, it's hard to pull lines out of this without dragging up a root-ball of context, but I'll try (coz I'm already getting tired, aren't you? This ain't English 101.) He speaks of "quaffing"

From a chalice

Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring.

OK. What does the poem mean? What the hell is he getting at? "Chalice" (he doesn't frequent Starbuck's, obviously) could be the Holy Grail, or the cup of communion. Lucent-weeping, well, what's that? Lucent means either translucent, permitting light, or a source of light. The poet is weeping crystalline tears, perhaps: and as far as I know, Dayspring is a reference to Christ.

This fellow does have delusions of unusual influence:

Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist

I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist

Or does this express his disdain or even contempt toward the world? If the world is but a trinket, a charm on his tinkling little bracelet, what does that make him: a cipher, perhaps? Or could it be this way: the world somehow swings around him, an egocentric sun eclipsed by his own transgressions.

But perhaps the most powerful passage, which I can't pull apart but must present whole, is this description of his self-created hell:

I shook the pillaring hours

And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,

I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years -

My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.

Oh my goodness, this fellow is not just in trouble, he's (in his own estimation) already dead, and in dire need of resurrection. In some sort of awful anti-heroic Herculean or perhaps Samsonian gesture, he has pulled the entire structure of his life down on his head. But the next two lines are tasty enough to keep you wading forward in the hip-deep mire:

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,

Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.

If hell can be this heavenly, why fear the hound?

Everything I touch turns to. . .

Yes. Every once in a while, everything turns brown.

I sort-of figured out why I can't attach links or embed videos. I have it more-or-less under control, though the videos are small.

Then another problem, so bizarre I don't know if I can even describe it. I lost the title to my blog, which used to appear below the photo of the little girls. It just wasn't there any more, though it was saved correctly under Design and should have been displayed.

I can't have a no-name blog. I'm not Anonymous. My name is on it for a reason. It's a kind of ad for my work. So I got to work fixing it, and came up with: white lettering against the background of the photo (at the top). It looked OK and was saved and everything.

And it shows up fine, until. Until you go to Older Posts, or an individual post, or a brand-new post, or anything except the home page. Then it shows up. . . brown.

Brown, as in I can't see who the hell wrote this. BROWN, as in, sorry, you didn't fix the problem at all, you stupid bitch, phhhbbblblblblbphhhbllblblblblbllblblbllbtt!

To make it even more screwy, the "blog description" (the line below the title) still shows up in white. I have gone over this again and again, and the setup is perfect. Then I get this intermittent (not even consistent!) problem with display.

I will not go on one of those help sites. They make me ill and never tell me what I need. I need to email a real person who knows what to do. Even my son the techie wizard is stumped.

Nevertheless. I somehow figured out the other problem, or most of it at least. Enough to avoid a nervous breakdown in the near future.

But this.

Let's not let a little suicide spoil our fun!

 

Commentary: Bravo should have cancelled Real Housewives

By Mary McNamara, September 6, 2011

 

 

The only meaningful statement Bravo could have made after the suicide last month of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" spouse Russell Armstrong would have been to cancel Season 2, which depicts, among other things, the collapse of the Armstrong marriage.

There's nothing that a little cosmetic surgery can't fix, including, apparently, suicide.
The only meaningful statement Bravo could have made after the suicide last month of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" spouse Russell Armstrong would have been to cancel Season 2, which depicts, among other things, the collapse of the Armstrong marriage.

That, of course, was not going to happen — any hint of responsibility would have been taken as an admission that being on television has become an attractive nuisance, like an unfenced swimming pool. Instead, after offering their heartfelt condolences, the producers simply re-edited the season premiere a bit and added a preface, filmed Aug. 29, in which the cast directly addressed the tragedy.

Which meant, for five minutes or so, all the housewives except Armstrong's wife Taylor — in full hair, makeup and Jackie O. sunglasses — converged on Adrienne Maloof's over-kitschy manse to reassure themselves that they had nothing to feel guilty about.

Looking serious and dabbing occasionally at their eyes, they each professed their shock and sorrow ("I never saw any sign of it," "I don't think any of us saw any sign of it") just as if they had actually been friends with Armstrong and not simply participants in a franchise built around the drama of discord, including and especially marital problems.

In other words, they reacted to his death in character, maintaining the fiction that their show was more or less a documentary rather than a manipulated if not outright scripted drama in which certain participants were encouraged to play certain roles. Even for a spouse, Armstrong was rarely seen in Season 1, and when he appeared it was simply to illustrate the complaints Taylor had about him — he was distant, he was cold, he worked too much, he did not want her "to have fun" (which appeared, even last year, to be code for "he doesn't really want to be on this show").

When the issue of "casting" was raised in the preface, when Kim Richards suggested that perhaps the friends (i.e. the show) concentrated too much on Taylor's unhappiness at the expense of Armstrong's, the rest of the cast quickly disagreed — "I don't think even Taylor knew," said Lisa Vanderpump. "We were all told the same thing," said Camille Grammer. "We were all acting on what we were told."

Blinking away their tears, they all agreed they would not have done anything different, and then Kyle Richards stepped up to the narrative plate: "A lot of us have guilt about not seeing this coming," she said. "You can't feel responsible for that. It was his choice, it was his choice," she added, and it was not clear whether she referred to Armstrong's suicide or his decision to do the show. But her final declaration was clear enough — "It's hard for me to move forward, it was such a tragic situation. But as difficult as this is, life goes on."

Cue music and the vacuous nonsense that passes for life in the "Real Housewives" universe, in which with Season 2 nothing, and everything, has changed. The Vanderpump daughter may be getting engaged; Camille will survive her divorce from Kelsey Grammer; Kyle and Kim cope with their leftover sister issues; Adrienne pits her tiny dog Jackpot against the Vanderpumps' tiny dog Giggy.

A bit about Taylor shopping for naughty underwear to spice up her marriage was, tastefully, excised, but it is impossible to edit real life from reality. A dinner party at Adrienne's house quickly proved why Bravo should have gone with "cancel Season 2."
A fight between Adrienne and her husband, Paul Nassif, obviously manufactured to make everyone "uncomfortable," led Paul to ask how Taylor was doing (Russell Armstrong was not in attendance).

The discussion turned to the fact that Taylor and Armstrong were in therapy. This gave Ken Vanderpump the chance to play the Neanderthal and say, among other things, that if he had to go into therapy he "would feel weak."

Cue ridiculous silence from guests as camera pans the table and everyone puts on their "shocked and uncomfortable" faces. Taylor storms out, Kyle quickly behind her. Tearful conversation in bathroom ensues, interrupted by Lisa, looking witchy and saying in voice-over, "Taylor's very manipulative; now she's drawing Kyle into her drama."

It is impossible for even an impartial observer to not parse a scene like that for indications of what we all now know is to come, which not only turns the show into a creepy necro-party game, it shatters the suspension of disbelief required for these shows to succeed.

The allure of the "Real Housewives" shows has been, in part, their celebration of the unreality of life — all those dinner party conversations that were just as manufactured and misguidedly narcissistic as the surgically altered faces, the carefully arranged decolletage, the anorexic arms that wreathed the table. But now we know that as these tableaux were constructed, as these little scenes were nursed into being, the petty tensions fed, the catty diatribes coddled, offstage a man was slowly moving toward self-destruction.

How can we now watch and think of anything else?

The Vancouver Sun

Whose blog IS this?. . . Anyway?

I fight with technology all the time. It's a useful tool, but I don't "speak" it and never will. My son is a techie who speaks about 47 languages at light speed, and I can't even catch on to the English version. So near, and yet so far.

I've lost the title to this blog. It used to say margaret gunning's house of dreams, all nicely set up in title-sized font, then below that, in smaller font, Step into my dream. Now it's not there, except for some weenie thing in flyspeck type, in the wrong place. This was the best I could do to restore any title at all.

When I try to use the design feature, it all shows the correct headings in the right places. I assume something is checked or unchecked to not display the title, which is just about the stupidest thing going. Who wouldn't want to display the title of their blog?????

I've been tinkering with changes, mainly because I could no longer do the things I wanted to do. I hate change, especially this kind of change, because it makes me feel stupid and inadequate, and slow. No one wants to feel this way.

When I solve one problem, ten more pop up, even more obscure and hard to solve. I just don't have a head for it. I did fine for a whole year, now it's all screwed up. I want my blog back! Vindictive leprechauns are nibbling my toes. Help.

Quite possibly the weirdest video ever

 

This beast of a machine is giving me trouble today, so I don't know if this is even gonna work. But I'll give it a shot.

Every so often I go on a Melies kick. Y'know, Melies. Weird guy from the early 20th century, actually the late 19th, a cinematic innovator who started out filming magic tricks on a stage in one shot, and went on to phantasmagorical fantasies with a lot of men dressed as wizards running around with telescopes. 

His most famous film is A Trip to the Moon, a bizarre take on a Jules Verne classic (with lots of men in wizard costumes running around with - ). The moon is depicted as a big gooey cream-pie sort of thing with an actual face on it, and the space craft, a big bullet, hits it in the eye. The story is disjointed: I never did get how they (the scientists) got back to earth. But at that time, "pictures" were new and innovation was free and open. No matter what a filmmaker did, some audience, somewhere would be enthralled. 

Eventually Melies' work went out of style, perhaps being just too weird for later audiences (and those quivering cardboard flats in the background didn't help much). When you look at Melies, you see where Terry Gilliam got most of his ideas. Bodies fly through the air, particularly semi-nude women's bodies in mermaid-like poses. Big puppetlike heads appear for no reason and open and close their mouths. Things drop out of sight in a puff of smoke, then pop back up out of thin air. It's a kind of fever dream mixed with an acid trip. 

Sadly, once Melies' work went out of style around 1912, he went bankrupt and had to resort to selling toys in a Paris train station. The films were confiscated during World War I, the celluloid melted down to make boot heels for soldiers: so they were literally walking all over poor Georges. But a few fragments survive. 

I don't understand this passage at all (an excerpt from a picture called The Eclipse), and it appears it might be cut off on the right-hand side. It's pretty gay, to be sure, but I'm not sure why. And I don't know why they're licking their lips like that. It's all too squirmingly sexual. Why not have a seductive woman as the moon, and a nicer-looking man as the sun who didn't look so much like freaking Satan? Never mind, I am somehow drawn to Melies and his strangeness and sat through the Turner Classics compilation for the second time last night. I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it. But I did.

Caitlin sings "I Love You Like a Love Song" by Selena Gomez

toujours gai toujours gai

the song of mehitabel

By Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel," 1927

this is the song of mehitabel
of mehitabel the alley cat
as i wrote you before boss
mehitabel is a believer
in the pythagorean
theory of the transmigration
of the soul and she claims
that formerly her spirit
was incarnated in the body
of cleopatra

that was a long time ago
and one must not be
surprised if mehitabel
has forgotten some of her
more regal manners

i have had my ups and downs
but wotthehell wotthehell
yesterday sceptres and crowns
fried oysters and velvet gowns
and today i herd with bums
but wotthehell wotthehell 

i wake the world from sleep
as i caper and sing and leap
when i sing my wild free tune
wotthehell wotthehell
under the blear eyed moon
i am pelted with cast off shoon
but wotthehell wotthehell

do you think that i would change
my present freedom to range
for a castle or moated grange
wotthehell wotthehell
cage me and i d go frantic
my life is so romantic
capricious and corybantic
and i m toujours gai toujours gai

i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

i once was an innocent kit

wotthehell wotthehell

with a ribbon my neck to fit

and bells tied onto it

o wotthehell wotthehell

but a maltese cat came by

with a come hither look in his eye

and a song that soared to the sky

and wotthehell wotthehell

and i followed adown the street

the pad of his rhythmical feet

o permit me again to repeat

wotthehell wotthehell

my youth i shall never forget
but there s nothing i really regret
wotthehell wotthehell
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

the things that i had not ought to
i do because i ve gotto
wotthehell wotthehell
and i end with my favorite motto
toujours gai toujours gai

boss sometimes i think
that our friend mehitabel
is a trifle too gay

Sometimes. . . it's just too easy to be negative

Sometimes. . .

I just hafta delete something that maybe tells too much truth about me.

Sometimes. . . it's a whole post.

Sometimes. . .

I have to accept the fact that things aren't

going to go the way I want them to

Sometimes. . .

I just have to hang in

or hang on

Sometimes. . .

I just have to remind myself to Never Weaken

and ask myself WWHD

it's better than eating a whole large bag of kettle corn

before dinner every day, I guess

cuz that doesn't get you a contract, does it

but it can take your mind off the obsession

for as long as it takes you to chew

(Disadvantage: extreme fatness

bearing down on you

bombing through the Truth Tunnel

like an approaching train)

but as Mehitabel once put it

wottehell wottehell

and I am

if not happy,

then

at the least

toujours gai