Recent viewings
The Bicycle Thief. Atmospheric, low-key black & white European film, ostensibly about an impoverished man who needs his bicycle to earn a living. When the bicycle is stolen, he spends the rest of the day doggedly pursuing the thief through the streets, alleys, churches and bordellos of the city, accompanied by his young son.
Of course, to me the much more interesting story is not the pursuit of the bicycle, but the relationship between father and son. What child, at the age of five or six, does not adore his parents and believe that they are omnipotent beings who can accomplish anything? And what father wants to have his son closely observe him as he struggles and falls short of being the man, the father, the provider that he wants to be?
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Being politically incorrect
This morning's NYT includes a well-intentioned but clueless editorial equating wariness about Islamism with homophobia. The Times, bastion of free speech that it is, has so far declined to accept the comment that Your Humble Correspondent submitted in response to that editorial. So here it is. (I've corrected a couple of typing errors that slipped in during a rather hurried composition.) Edit, 10/28: comment was in fact published later in the day.
This morning's NYT includes a well-intentioned but clueless editorial equating wariness about Islamism with homophobia. The Times, bastion of free speech that it is, has so far declined to accept the comment that Your Humble Correspondent submitted in response to that editorial. So here it is. (I've corrected a couple of typing errors that slipped in during a rather hurried composition.) Edit, 10/28: comment was in fact published later in the day.
Muslim communities display zero tolerance for women who have the misfortune to be born to Muslim families and who wish to exercise any freedom in their own lives. The Muslim "honor" murders of Aqsa Parvez in Toronto and Amina and Sarah Said in Texas are only the best-known examples of thousands of young women in north America who are brutalized, threatened, and/or intimidated into unwanted arranged marriages by their Muslim families and the insular, self-referential Muslim community.
Homosexuals and those who wish to leave the Islamic religion fare no better when subjected to the dictates of a religion which prescribes murder as the "remedy" for both.
I am a strong proponent of the first amendment and all associated freedoms. But I cannot read an article like this without noting that there's a big difference between homosexuals, who mostly just want to be left alone and have the same rights as everyone else, and a totalitarian religion that openly seeks world domination with absolutely no tolerance granted for the rights of women, homosexuals, or, eventually, nonMuslims.
Yes, the freedom of religion and the freedom to assemble must be respected. But the brutal totalitarianism of Islam, which is deeply ingrained in both its historic culture and its scripture, cannot be permitted to take root and exercise power over the lives of people who do not want to be subject to it, any more than any other abusive religious cult should be permitted to do so. This is the dilemma: how to respect individual religious beliefs, while preventing an insular, totalitarian religion from abusing individuals within its community of followers; how to refrain from exercising state power over religious belief, while preventing an aggressive and brutally domineering religion from gaining the political power to abuse others.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
A new growth industry
Niagara County, New York has figured out how to rejuvenate its economy during an economic recession: Charge people $15.00 to apply for a job.
Niagara County, New York has figured out how to rejuvenate its economy during an economic recession: Charge people $15.00 to apply for a job.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Recent viewings
Citizen Kane. Welles’ epic tale of the rise, fall, and lonely decline of newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane is of course a classic, and one described elsewhere with much more critical insight than Your Humble Correspondent can muster even on his best days. I enjoyed it anyway. There are elements to the film that are still visually startling and unsettling even though I’ve seen it before: Welles’ use of extreme contrasts of dark and light, most obvious in scenes where central characters are literally lost in shadows or reduced to featureless silhouettes for dramatic effect. Those long, soaring, moving crane shots, whether zooming in through the scaffolding of a sign and then plunging through a skylight, or slowly panning across the enormous, jumbled heaps of treasures piled up in Kane’s cavernous mansion without a single human being in sight. The claustrophobic low ceilings and cramped spaces of the newspaper offices which Kane utterly fills up and dominates in the most powerful phase of his career, and how they contrast with the towering edifices of his own construction which utterly dwarf him in later scenes. The way that the movie on at least one occasion shows the same sequence of events twice, once from one character’s perspective, then again from another character’s perspective with an entirely different emotional effect.
The scene I have in mind in that last sentence is Susan’s singing debut at the opera house that the wealthy, powerful, successful Kane has had built specifically for that purpose. From the audience perspective, the moments before her debut appear chaotic but “normal”. When seen a few minutes later from her point of view on the stage, it’s frightening, and rapidly gets worse. Kane has decided to rescue her from her previous life by making her a great singer. Unfortunately he neglected to find out whether she was suited for that role, or whether she actually wanted it. Such hamhanded displays of egotism rarely end well.
The movie’s final shot is of course well known, although I won’t commit any spoilers for the sake of the two or three people who don’t already know. Welles reportedly denounced it as a “cheap Freudian trick” in an interview conducted years later, but I still can’t help but see it as an effective metaphor. Sometimes the most fundamentally defining secrets of a person’s life are locked up in the past: moments, events, people so irretrievably lost to them in later life that no one to whom they can talk would know how to understand it even if they were told.
Citizen Kane. Welles’ epic tale of the rise, fall, and lonely decline of newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane is of course a classic, and one described elsewhere with much more critical insight than Your Humble Correspondent can muster even on his best days. I enjoyed it anyway. There are elements to the film that are still visually startling and unsettling even though I’ve seen it before: Welles’ use of extreme contrasts of dark and light, most obvious in scenes where central characters are literally lost in shadows or reduced to featureless silhouettes for dramatic effect. Those long, soaring, moving crane shots, whether zooming in through the scaffolding of a sign and then plunging through a skylight, or slowly panning across the enormous, jumbled heaps of treasures piled up in Kane’s cavernous mansion without a single human being in sight. The claustrophobic low ceilings and cramped spaces of the newspaper offices which Kane utterly fills up and dominates in the most powerful phase of his career, and how they contrast with the towering edifices of his own construction which utterly dwarf him in later scenes. The way that the movie on at least one occasion shows the same sequence of events twice, once from one character’s perspective, then again from another character’s perspective with an entirely different emotional effect.
The scene I have in mind in that last sentence is Susan’s singing debut at the opera house that the wealthy, powerful, successful Kane has had built specifically for that purpose. From the audience perspective, the moments before her debut appear chaotic but “normal”. When seen a few minutes later from her point of view on the stage, it’s frightening, and rapidly gets worse. Kane has decided to rescue her from her previous life by making her a great singer. Unfortunately he neglected to find out whether she was suited for that role, or whether she actually wanted it. Such hamhanded displays of egotism rarely end well.
The movie’s final shot is of course well known, although I won’t commit any spoilers for the sake of the two or three people who don’t already know. Welles reportedly denounced it as a “cheap Freudian trick” in an interview conducted years later, but I still can’t help but see it as an effective metaphor. Sometimes the most fundamentally defining secrets of a person’s life are locked up in the past: moments, events, people so irretrievably lost to them in later life that no one to whom they can talk would know how to understand it even if they were told.
Fagbug! A colorful visitor to campus. Turns out the cheerful looking critter has a story.
After her car was vandalized with the word "fag" in crude spray paint, Erin Davies turned the insult around by leaving the graffiti on her car and taking it on an epic road trip as a kind of rolling display piece. After someone scraped off the original graffitti, she had the car decorated more professionally along the same lines. Take that, bigots.
Fortunately, the "fagbug" seems to have met with a more affectionate response here than it did in some other places.
Tropespotting
The "hot/sexy librarian" trope makes an appearance in the oddest of places, a Maureen Dowd column comparing Marilyn Monroe to Sarah Palin. (Ms. Candle-in-the-Wind comes out on top, for at least being interested in books and making a creditable attempt to look smart despite her own self-doubt.)
The "hot/sexy librarian" trope makes an appearance in the oddest of places, a Maureen Dowd column comparing Marilyn Monroe to Sarah Palin. (Ms. Candle-in-the-Wind comes out on top, for at least being interested in books and making a creditable attempt to look smart despite her own self-doubt.)
Monday, October 18, 2010
Become a magazine publisher for just $1.00
Douglas Cohen, editor of Realms of Fantasy, reports sad news:
So. Any optimistic would-be magazine moguls out there?
Douglas Cohen, editor of Realms of Fantasy, reports sad news:
I invested more than $50,000.00 of my own money into reviving this magazine. I tried every traditional method I could think of to increase the circulation, but nothing worked. I also spent a great deal of money trying nontraditional methods....
...Ultimately, I believe Realms failed because of a terrible economic climate. When I purchased the magazine I did not believe that the worst economy since the Great Depression would actually get worse; that was a mistake.
Should there be any interest in purchasing the magazine I will gladly sell Realms to a responsible party for $1.00 and give them the finished files for the December issue....
So. Any optimistic would-be magazine moguls out there?
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Fortunate find
Orwell first edition turns up in donation pile
I applaud, without necessarily sharing, the selflessness of the volunteer who alerted the agency to which the book was donated, rather than purchasing it for himself.
Orwell first edition turns up in donation pile
I applaud, without necessarily sharing, the selflessness of the volunteer who alerted the agency to which the book was donated, rather than purchasing it for himself.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
The gleanings of the morning
A couple of interesting articles on the treatment of mind-altering drugs in science fiction, one from eminence-grise Robert Silverberg, ca. 1974, and one from Robert Marcus, the head of a drug-policy lobbying group called Drugscope.
http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED112299.pdf
http://ansible.co.uk/DreamDust.pdf (could use some copyediting....)
And with that, off to a meeting in which I'm supposed to help sit in judgement on a prospective university administrator. I doubt that I'll have much opportunity to singlehandedly preserve academic freedom or job security, though.
A couple of interesting articles on the treatment of mind-altering drugs in science fiction, one from eminence-grise Robert Silverberg, ca. 1974, and one from Robert Marcus, the head of a drug-policy lobbying group called Drugscope.
http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED112299.pdf
http://ansible.co.uk/DreamDust.pdf (could use some copyediting....)
And with that, off to a meeting in which I'm supposed to help sit in judgement on a prospective university administrator. I doubt that I'll have much opportunity to singlehandedly preserve academic freedom or job security, though.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Airship pirates, now with added aetheritude!
An interesting crew of folks made landfall at RealmsCon 2010.
An interesting crew of folks made landfall at RealmsCon 2010.
Friday, October 08, 2010
Recent viewings
Taking a brief break from fantasy-baseball ramblings:
The Sandbaggers, season 1, episodes 1 and 2. Late-1970s British spy drama about a cadre of "special operatives" working for the British government during the Cold War. Interesting for focusing more on the domestic bureaucratic difficulties faced by the "sandbaggers", and their sometimes dicey relationships with their NATO allies, than on their Soviet foes. In the first two episodes, there's very little action, but no shortage of tension as cold-eyed British spymaster Neil Burnside attempts to pull the right political strings to get his operatives permission to do their jobs as he thinks they should be done, while attempting (not always successfully) to keep them from being sent on suicidally stupid missions. The science-fantasy gadgets, improbable feats, and one-sided cheerleading of the James Bond movies are nowhere to be seen. In the first episode, a furious but icily calm Burnside explicitly states to someone who has placed his agents in unnecessary danger: "If you want James Bond, go to the library." The moral hypocrisy of politicians is highlighted in the second episode, where we find that for the Sandbaggers, that much-vaunted "licence to kill" depends more on the political convenience of current officeholders than on moral principle. For once, the typical British television low-budget production adds to the realism rather than detracting from it, as the shabby, crowded offices, clunky 1970s telephones and intercoms, and rusty little cars used by the operatives are all too believable for "overworked and underpaid" public servants taken for granted by the politicians they serve.
Grave of the Fireflies. As usual with Japanese animation, the scenery is gorgeous, although the foreground characters are sometimes a bit too much like caricatures for my taste. As is also frequently the case with Japanese animation, it addresses a story much, much grimmer than Western animation usually tackles. Those who see this movie expecting a lighthearted, Disneyesque "family film" are in for a surprise. Within the first fifteen minutes of the film, our oh-so-cute protagonists, a young boy and his even younger sister, are subjected to a brutal incendiary American air raid, driven from their idyllicly-portrayed home, and made homeless refugees. And then it gets worse. Much worse. The same movie that portrays its 1940s Japenese villages and countryside in lovingly detailed, shimmering, nostalgic watercolors, also forthrightly portrays the aftermath of aerial incendiary warfare against civilian populations. This includes stacks of charred bodies, and in particular the visibly horribly marred body of a major character. Later, we see the corpse of said major character visibly crawling with maggots. This is not to say that every scene is a horrific shocker. There are, in fact, plenty of scenes in which we, the viewers, get to watch while the protagonist tries valiantly to create an idyllic, sheltered life for his little sister despite the horrors that surround them, and for a time, we get to witness some of those glorious moments in which children discover, for the first time, beauty that adults have long since learned to ignore. The back-and-forth pendulum-swing between the two cannot be supported forever, and by the end, not one Disneyesque cliche or plot device is left standing. Family values? The goodness and generosity of the human race? The belief that fate, or God, intervenes to protect the cute? The "noble savage" dream of living off the land? No, no, no, and no. I found a certain montage of scenes near the end rather cloying, but no doubt it's not that different from what was going through the protagonist's mind. I've had the experience of being haunted by similar imagined images. I can't say I enjoyed this movie, but I respect the makers for telling a story so radically different from what audiences of animated films expect (at least in the Western world), and for rigorously avoiding an easy cop-out Hollywood ending.
Taking a brief break from fantasy-baseball ramblings:
The Sandbaggers, season 1, episodes 1 and 2. Late-1970s British spy drama about a cadre of "special operatives" working for the British government during the Cold War. Interesting for focusing more on the domestic bureaucratic difficulties faced by the "sandbaggers", and their sometimes dicey relationships with their NATO allies, than on their Soviet foes. In the first two episodes, there's very little action, but no shortage of tension as cold-eyed British spymaster Neil Burnside attempts to pull the right political strings to get his operatives permission to do their jobs as he thinks they should be done, while attempting (not always successfully) to keep them from being sent on suicidally stupid missions. The science-fantasy gadgets, improbable feats, and one-sided cheerleading of the James Bond movies are nowhere to be seen. In the first episode, a furious but icily calm Burnside explicitly states to someone who has placed his agents in unnecessary danger: "If you want James Bond, go to the library." The moral hypocrisy of politicians is highlighted in the second episode, where we find that for the Sandbaggers, that much-vaunted "licence to kill" depends more on the political convenience of current officeholders than on moral principle. For once, the typical British television low-budget production adds to the realism rather than detracting from it, as the shabby, crowded offices, clunky 1970s telephones and intercoms, and rusty little cars used by the operatives are all too believable for "overworked and underpaid" public servants taken for granted by the politicians they serve.
Grave of the Fireflies. As usual with Japanese animation, the scenery is gorgeous, although the foreground characters are sometimes a bit too much like caricatures for my taste. As is also frequently the case with Japanese animation, it addresses a story much, much grimmer than Western animation usually tackles. Those who see this movie expecting a lighthearted, Disneyesque "family film" are in for a surprise. Within the first fifteen minutes of the film, our oh-so-cute protagonists, a young boy and his even younger sister, are subjected to a brutal incendiary American air raid, driven from their idyllicly-portrayed home, and made homeless refugees. And then it gets worse. Much worse. The same movie that portrays its 1940s Japenese villages and countryside in lovingly detailed, shimmering, nostalgic watercolors, also forthrightly portrays the aftermath of aerial incendiary warfare against civilian populations. This includes stacks of charred bodies, and in particular the visibly horribly marred body of a major character. Later, we see the corpse of said major character visibly crawling with maggots. This is not to say that every scene is a horrific shocker. There are, in fact, plenty of scenes in which we, the viewers, get to watch while the protagonist tries valiantly to create an idyllic, sheltered life for his little sister despite the horrors that surround them, and for a time, we get to witness some of those glorious moments in which children discover, for the first time, beauty that adults have long since learned to ignore. The back-and-forth pendulum-swing between the two cannot be supported forever, and by the end, not one Disneyesque cliche or plot device is left standing. Family values? The goodness and generosity of the human race? The belief that fate, or God, intervenes to protect the cute? The "noble savage" dream of living off the land? No, no, no, and no. I found a certain montage of scenes near the end rather cloying, but no doubt it's not that different from what was going through the protagonist's mind. I've had the experience of being haunted by similar imagined images. I can't say I enjoyed this movie, but I respect the makers for telling a story so radically different from what audiences of animated films expect (at least in the Western world), and for rigorously avoiding an easy cop-out Hollywood ending.
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Battlin' Boomers season in review : part 1
To start with, here are the final season standings for the Southwest Sluggos, organized by Commissioner "SteveJ". The Boomers' second place finish, while respectable enough for a rookie manager, leaves room for improvement. It's obvious that I was one of the most activist managers in the league, with more than double the number of "moves" (adds/drops of players from the team roster) of any other manager. There was a reason for this, as will become clear in a future discussion.
.....
Now let's look at the overall points won by each team in the league. For those unfamiliar with rotisserie-league fantasy baseball, here's how it works. In each statistical category, teams are ranked from 1 (worst) to 12 (best). The ranks are then added up into a total score. Theoretically, a team that was tops in every statistic in a 12-team, 10-category league could get a maximum score of 120. As you can see, "C55E" came pretty close to doing this. At least I lost to a very strong competitor. The Boomers' rankings are strong across the board, with my weakest stats being Home Runs, Stolen Bases, (Batting) Avg., and ERA (Earned Run Average). The next chart will help cast more light on this. It is worth noting that throughout the season, I tried to manage to my weaknesses; that is, I consciously made an effort to be no worse than average in any category, and sought out players who would improve my team's weakest areas. Some fantasy-baseball commentators argue that one should concede one or two categories in order to excel elsewhere. I disagree. In my (admittedly limited) experience, it's easier to rise from awful to mediocre than to rise from mediocre to the top of the rankings, especially when one or two teams are accumulating massive "overkill" stats in particular categories. And the ranks from 1 to 6 count just as much, in the final total, as the ones from 7 to 12.
.....
This chart shows the Boomers' ranking in each stat relative to the other teams in the league. Brown "tabs" indicate where they were tied with another team. Measured in terms of raw totals, rather than rankings, everything looks pretty good except for HRs, SBs, and AVG, which look awful. And yet I'm not terribly dissatisfied with the HR and SB rankings. Rankings, not raw totals, are what counts in rotisserie baseball, and despite the towering leads that the category leaders in HRs and SBs accumulated, the Boomers still came out above average in rankings. In achieving massive "overkill" totals in one statistic, about half the teams that ranked very high in one of these categories had below-average results in the other, suggesting that they relied too much on one dimensional players, "sluggers" or "speedsters", and did not achieve a good balance between the two. (See second chart.) The exceptions: C55E and the Kiwis, both of whom are notable for having drafted several multi-dimensional players with both exceptional power and exceptional speed. (C55E, evidently, was more selective than the Kiwis in terms of batting average.) The Boomers, sadly, had only one season-long player, the Phillies' Jayson Werth, who put up notably above-average results in both HRs and SBs and also had a better-than-average batting average. The other guys in my lineup tended to excel in one or two categories, being either powerhitters, or speedsters, or contact hitters whose high batting averages allowed them to rack up a lot of runs or RBIs, but did not excel in all three of those categories. By very actively swapping them out from one day to the next, I kept a good balance in overall production, but could not match the productivity of teams that had rosters full of players doing all three at the same time.
For the past six months or so, at the behest of old college chum "SteveJ", I've been managing a Yahoo fantasy baseball team called, for no particular reason, the Battlin' Boomers. The season is over, and it's time to review strategies that did and didn't work.
To start with, here are the final season standings for the Southwest Sluggos, organized by Commissioner "SteveJ". The Boomers' second place finish, while respectable enough for a rookie manager, leaves room for improvement. It's obvious that I was one of the most activist managers in the league, with more than double the number of "moves" (adds/drops of players from the team roster) of any other manager. There was a reason for this, as will become clear in a future discussion......
Now let's look at the overall points won by each team in the league. For those unfamiliar with rotisserie-league fantasy baseball, here's how it works. In each statistical category, teams are ranked from 1 (worst) to 12 (best). The ranks are then added up into a total score. Theoretically, a team that was tops in every statistic in a 12-team, 10-category league could get a maximum score of 120. As you can see, "C55E" came pretty close to doing this. At least I lost to a very strong competitor. The Boomers' rankings are strong across the board, with my weakest stats being Home Runs, Stolen Bases, (Batting) Avg., and ERA (Earned Run Average). The next chart will help cast more light on this. It is worth noting that throughout the season, I tried to manage to my weaknesses; that is, I consciously made an effort to be no worse than average in any category, and sought out players who would improve my team's weakest areas. Some fantasy-baseball commentators argue that one should concede one or two categories in order to excel elsewhere. I disagree. In my (admittedly limited) experience, it's easier to rise from awful to mediocre than to rise from mediocre to the top of the rankings, especially when one or two teams are accumulating massive "overkill" stats in particular categories. And the ranks from 1 to 6 count just as much, in the final total, as the ones from 7 to 12......
This chart shows the Boomers' ranking in each stat relative to the other teams in the league. Brown "tabs" indicate where they were tied with another team. Measured in terms of raw totals, rather than rankings, everything looks pretty good except for HRs, SBs, and AVG, which look awful. And yet I'm not terribly dissatisfied with the HR and SB rankings. Rankings, not raw totals, are what counts in rotisserie baseball, and despite the towering leads that the category leaders in HRs and SBs accumulated, the Boomers still came out above average in rankings. In achieving massive "overkill" totals in one statistic, about half the teams that ranked very high in one of these categories had below-average results in the other, suggesting that they relied too much on one dimensional players, "sluggers" or "speedsters", and did not achieve a good balance between the two. (See second chart.) The exceptions: C55E and the Kiwis, both of whom are notable for having drafted several multi-dimensional players with both exceptional power and exceptional speed. (C55E, evidently, was more selective than the Kiwis in terms of batting average.) The Boomers, sadly, had only one season-long player, the Phillies' Jayson Werth, who put up notably above-average results in both HRs and SBs and also had a better-than-average batting average. The other guys in my lineup tended to excel in one or two categories, being either powerhitters, or speedsters, or contact hitters whose high batting averages allowed them to rack up a lot of runs or RBIs, but did not excel in all three of those categories. By very actively swapping them out from one day to the next, I kept a good balance in overall production, but could not match the productivity of teams that had rosters full of players doing all three at the same time......
Next up: Draft strategy (or lack thereof), and its consequences.
Friday, October 01, 2010
Poetry Friday
Kit Marlowe to Cabell
By Joseph T. Shipley
Published in The Double Dealer, Feb. 1923.
Pastels are diffident. Play a carmine, bold
Across the sheets. Blood, man; pour blood!
Have you any in you?
Life's not a questing for will-o'-the-wisps,
Delicate, flitting a lure;
Life is a lust, a fever;
Life burns at both ends.
..... You speak of a veil with twenty-seven slits;
Life tears veils aside.
..... Have you ever waited, on a stormy night of spring,
Fallen foul of a maid, and bundled her,
A delicious squirming squealing petticoat,
To a cosy bed,
Tousled and tussling, only half afraid,
But able now to cry she was unwilling --
Have you ever fought all comers for a maid?
..... When were you drunk last, James?
Have you ever reeled, rollicking, damning the state,
Spun a corner -- into the arms of the law?
You and a pal or two, and for a lark
Muzzled the watch and borne their lanterns off
And stopped all honest citizens on their way
And bunked them in a stable for the night?
List me your pranks; I'll match them double-time,
Or hang my tail upon the tavern-port
For gulls to twit.
..... Man's love of woman is the least of life --
Like food, perhaps, but no more imminent;
Man builds his world on lust of gold or power.
Fashion a harem where a king may loll,
Anthony, Heliogabalus.
And the people writes -- but let the king grow wroth,
Let him sweep conquering over continents,
Alexander, Caesar, or our own great king,
And patriots run to die to clear his way.
..... You pick me (thanks, friend), out of a many more
And say I am the true economist.
How Moll would laugh, if she caught the praise,
Dangling my empty purse from her finger-tip
And pouting for silk hose to match her garters!
My life, you say, was spent wisely. Did I wear
A cloak whose pattern was my choosing? Wish
The way I went? I burned across my years
Like any guzzler on the Mermaid bench
Who drank and fought and whored to kill King Time.
..... There is a fellow here; love's labors' lost
Indeed ('twas a play he wrote) trying to fuddle him.
We mock him when he sips his sober glass
And holds back from out boisterous company --
What a world of fun he misses -- yet I know
That had I held myself like him, the flame
That flares in me might be a steady glow
Through decades --
..... Did you see the wench that passed
The window, turned her eye this way -- just now?
Rare-fashioned for these parts, icod! is my
Feather flaunting? I'll be after her;
It's April since I've kissed as fair a face.
Don't smile, you humbug; but I saw her first,
You have no claim. One word before I go:
Match me a Tamerlane with Kennaston,
Pit Jurgen to my Faustus; strike the flint;
Stir in their bowels the search man never ends,
And I have lusty life where you have -- love.
Damme! I'll lose her 'less I hurry off.
Smear carmine on your pages, James. Farewell.
Kit Marlowe to Cabell
By Joseph T. Shipley
Published in The Double Dealer, Feb. 1923.
Pastels are diffident. Play a carmine, bold
Across the sheets. Blood, man; pour blood!
Have you any in you?
Life's not a questing for will-o'-the-wisps,
Delicate, flitting a lure;
Life is a lust, a fever;
Life burns at both ends.
..... You speak of a veil with twenty-seven slits;
Life tears veils aside.
..... Have you ever waited, on a stormy night of spring,
Fallen foul of a maid, and bundled her,
A delicious squirming squealing petticoat,
To a cosy bed,
Tousled and tussling, only half afraid,
But able now to cry she was unwilling --
Have you ever fought all comers for a maid?
..... When were you drunk last, James?
Have you ever reeled, rollicking, damning the state,
Spun a corner -- into the arms of the law?
You and a pal or two, and for a lark
Muzzled the watch and borne their lanterns off
And stopped all honest citizens on their way
And bunked them in a stable for the night?
List me your pranks; I'll match them double-time,
Or hang my tail upon the tavern-port
For gulls to twit.
..... Man's love of woman is the least of life --
Like food, perhaps, but no more imminent;
Man builds his world on lust of gold or power.
Fashion a harem where a king may loll,
Anthony, Heliogabalus.
And the people writes -- but let the king grow wroth,
Let him sweep conquering over continents,
Alexander, Caesar, or our own great king,
And patriots run to die to clear his way.
..... You pick me (thanks, friend), out of a many more
And say I am the true economist.
How Moll would laugh, if she caught the praise,
Dangling my empty purse from her finger-tip
And pouting for silk hose to match her garters!
My life, you say, was spent wisely. Did I wear
A cloak whose pattern was my choosing? Wish
The way I went? I burned across my years
Like any guzzler on the Mermaid bench
Who drank and fought and whored to kill King Time.
..... There is a fellow here; love's labors' lost
Indeed ('twas a play he wrote) trying to fuddle him.
We mock him when he sips his sober glass
And holds back from out boisterous company --
What a world of fun he misses -- yet I know
That had I held myself like him, the flame
That flares in me might be a steady glow
Through decades --
..... Did you see the wench that passed
The window, turned her eye this way -- just now?
Rare-fashioned for these parts, icod! is my
Feather flaunting? I'll be after her;
It's April since I've kissed as fair a face.
Don't smile, you humbug; but I saw her first,
You have no claim. One word before I go:
Match me a Tamerlane with Kennaston,
Pit Jurgen to my Faustus; strike the flint;
Stir in their bowels the search man never ends,
And I have lusty life where you have -- love.
Damme! I'll lose her 'less I hurry off.
Smear carmine on your pages, James. Farewell.
Creating Chaos
From Historynet.com by way of Arts & Letters Daily : a useful and entertaining account of T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt of 1916 which succinctly explains much of the political chaos and anti-western suspicion that has characterized the Middle East ever since.
From Historynet.com by way of Arts & Letters Daily : a useful and entertaining account of T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt of 1916 which succinctly explains much of the political chaos and anti-western suspicion that has characterized the Middle East ever since.
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