Saturday Night's Alright for Poetry

Last night I was feeling snacky before heading back to my home in the outlying regions of Toronto (thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, I can now proudly declare myself an “outlier” [editor’s note: I think Malcolm Gladwell is a disgraceful mountebank]). Anyways, while I was at the Timmy’s by my office, I had the pleasure of hearing a young woman, surrounded by three friends, recite poetry. She had an extraordinary rich, black voice and spoke with the cadence of an experienced orator. If I were savvy enough to include audio clips on this site I would hire this wonderful woman to read poems aloud.

I didn’t have the courage to either compliment her on her amazing skills or ask her why on earth she was reciting a poem about a “hero” in a Tim Horton’s on a Saturday night. But it did strike me as kind of great that such a thing was going on.

Poems about heroes are not the usual sort we associate with Saturday nights. Such nights are usually about “drunk dialing,” or its ancient equivalent, the paraklausithyron.

Paraklausithyron is just an ancient Greek word for a poem recited beside (para) a locked (claus) door (thyron). They usually involved young male lovers, returning home from symposia, who stop at their at a girl’s house to beg to be let it. Notable examples are Tibullus 1.2, Propertius 1.16, and Ovid Amores 1.6 and 2.19. I’m not generally a fan of translations so I’m not going to include any here. You may also recall a somewhat similar situation in a Mia Michaels dance routine from last year’s So You Think You Can Dance with Katee and Twitch (love you, Mia! Photo above).

Our friends the troubadours also wrote such poems. The genre generally fell out of favour in the modern era, however. Drunken begging doesn’t seem to have fit in well with the aesthetics of either classicists or romantics. I’m of the opinion, however, that the paraklausithyron made a roaring come back in one of my favourite genres of music.

Thanks to the invention of the telephone, lovers no longer need to embarrass themselves by prostrating in front of a door. They can now do so metaphorically with a mere seven (or ten) digits.

One of my favourite paraclausithyronic country songs is Jim Reeves’ 1959 hit “He’ll Have to Go.” While there’s no door, the phone substitutes for what I think sounds like a far more intimate medium.

Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone.
Let's pretend that we're together, all alone.
I'll tell the man to turn the juke box way down low,
And you can tell your friend there with you he'll have to go.

A song I’ve recently fallen in love with also fits the topos of a paraklausithyron. It’s Tony Rice’s 1986 song “Hard Love.” I have to thank Alison Krauss for this recommendation, via Nightline (see YouTube video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WxpPXGVCHQ). It tells the story of a broken man recalling that the only love he knew growing up was “hard love / when Christmas to my birthday was a million years away.” As the song goes on, you realize that he’s confessing this to a woman he’s alienated from a distance:

Now I’m standing in this phone booth with a dollar and a dime,
Wondering what to say to you to ease your troubled mind.
For the Lord’s cross might redeem us but our own just wastes our time.
And to tell the two apart is always hard love.

So I’ll tell you that I love you even though I’m far away.
I’ll tell you how you’ve changed me as I live from day to day.
How you’ve helped me to accept myself and I won’t forget to say,
Love is never wasted even if it’s hard love.

Well it’s hard love but it’s love all the same.
Not the stuff of fantasy but more than just a game.
And the only kind of miracle that’s worthy of the name
For the love that heals our lives is mostly hard love.

It’s a bit heavier than the froth of the drunken antique paraklausithyron. But it’s still the kind of situation many of us find ourselves in on any given Saturday night.

Crayola, Crayola Rocks!

This week students in Ontario completed their school year. Some graduated onto bigger things (like high school), others moved up another rung in the grade ladder, but most were likely just glad to finally be rid of pencils, books, and “teacher’s dirty looks.”

While I was always glad to see the end of school, endings for me always have a ring of sadness to them in a way that beginnings don’t. So while I loved summer, I loved the first day of school. New jeans, a sharp haircut—possibility. But one of the greatest pleasures of the first day of school was a new box of Crayola pencil crayons. A box of eighteen, twenty-four, or if Zellers had a sale, thirty-six magical hues with snappy and chic names—“vermillion,” “cerulean,” “indigo”—was just the greatest thing. My favourite colour was “ultramarine.”

Ultramarine was one of the most expensive—and therefore admired colours—in the world until 1828, when the French Government awarded a prize to Christian Gmelin for successfully synthesizing an alternative. Until then, ultramarine was derived from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone mined in Afghanistan. Its Latin name denotes its provenance: it had to be shipped in from “beyond the sea.”

Unlike most pigments derived from stone, one couldn’t simply grind lapis into the lustrous colour one wanted. Powdered lapis was dull and grey so alchemists developed a lengthy and intensive regimen of purifying the powder to make the desired pigment.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ultramarine was considered the greater than gold—“most perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would not still surpass”—according to Cennini (15th c.). For this reason, it was reserved for only deserving subjects, like the Virgin Mary. She was often shown in sumptuous ultramarine gowns, like this famous painting by Van Eyck (1434, above). Art historian Daniel Thompson suggests that “the costliness, the permanent intrinsic value of the blue from lapis put it in a class with gems, to be worn proudly or offered humbly as a worthy gift.”

In the premiere production of R. Murray Schafer’s The Children’s Crusade a couple of weeks ago, the Virgin Mary makes an appearance. She appropriately wears a beautiful ultramarine cloak. I’m sure the dye to make it was pretty cheap. But it still looked rich as could be.

Toronto's Quisquilious Mess

Toronto's garbage strike is only in its third day and already the whiff of refuse is in the air downtown. As I tried to put a name to the particular stench that was wafting down Bay Street, I was reminded of Ammon Shea's book from last summer, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. He introduced me to the word "quisquilious." It means either "to be concerned with worthless things," or "of the nature of refuse." Its root is the Latin word for garbage: "quisquiliae."

Shea rhetorically asked why we have ugly words for some beautiful things and beautiful words for some ugly things. Today I feel I'm closer to learning why. Because when your world literally stinks, sometimes a sonorous word makes it just a bit more bearable.

So next time you have to plug your nose when you go outside, don't fret about the "trash," the "swill," and the "slop." Monosyllables are for real problems (like "death"). One needn't concern oneself with something so quisquilious.

Stay

Last month I was painting my new apartment, which for me was a great time to catch up on my top 40 radio. A song I heard endlessly and loved was Kelly Rowland’s “Unity.” The melodic hook for the chorus is just great even if the lyrics are pretty standard:

Stay with me
Two hearts forever
You were the spark that lit the flame
Only if you'd

Stay with me
This love's forever
And in my heart you will remain
Until we meet again

I’m a bit confused about why her lover is away. He seems to have left her because she’s “picking up the pieces of a life [she] once knew.” However, the pre-chorus has this interesting tidbit: “I got your message yesterday.” What did he send her?

This conundrum, I think, makes the song kind of excellent. But it got me thinking about other “Stay” songs. The classic is of course Lorraine Ellison’s 1966 song “Stay With Me,” the song Bette Midler memorably died onstage to in The Rose. There are a million variations on this theme, but I thought I’d concentrate on the subgenre of the poetic aubade.

An aubade is a song sung at sunrise as two lovers must part (and a French lingerie company, as you can see above). The earliest examples come from those medieval tunesmiths, the troubadours. Such a song was called an “alba,” which of course is old Occitan for “cartoonishly attractive actor/eco-vandal” “sunrise.”

But the best examples of the genre come from the metaphysical poets. John Donne wrote a number of aubades. They usually begin innocently enough:

Stay, O sweet and do not rise.
The light that shines comes from thine eyes.
The day breaks not, it is my heart,
Because that you and I must part.

The best thing about Donne’s poems, though, is how he’s always scolding the sun. Sometimes he’s canny and incisive: “light hath no tongue, it is all eye.” Other times he’s just cruel: “Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide / Late school-boys and sour prentices.” Them’s fightin’ words.

We all learned about this tradition when we studied Romeo and Juliet in high school. One strangely irritating scene (Act III, scene 5) finds Romeo debating with Juliet about whether “day / Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.” He of course has to high tail it out of there before he gets caught. I’ll summarize:

Juliet: Come back to bed, it’s still night.
Romeo: Nope, I’m pretty sure the sun’s about to come up. Look.
Juliet: I know daylight when I see it. That isn’t it. Come back to bed.
Romeo: Yes, dear.
Juliet: Wait...no, you’re right. Get the hell out before my Mom sees!

Just imagine elegant metaphors about candles and meteors and such.

Last November I had the good fortune to see Billy Currington perform his new song at the Grand Ole Opry, “Don’t.” It has a catchy retro-soul kind of groove. Its lyrical conceit is likewise a throwback to our now familiar scenario:

Don't you just hate hearing that clock on the wall chiming
Saying it's time and
Don't you just wish we could stay here together all day long,
You know it wouldn't be a crime if we
Crawled back in the bed got as close as we could get
Try to figure out where this thing is going

The clever part of the lyric is the internal rhymes (wall/all; time/crime) and assonance (bed/get), which are stressed with long notes in the musical phrase. The actual line ends don’t rhyme at all.

But the modern aubade par excellence has to be Sugarland’s “Stay” (2007), which they performed at the Grammy’s this past year. The song, like Currington’s, features a “clock on the wall”—a sign of the times. Humans are no longer slave to the sun, answering Donne’s question: “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?”

No, but they still run to phone calls from the wife. Sugarland’s song, unlike any other, isn’t addressed to the either the sun or a lover. It’s an internal dialogue of a woman who imagines begging her lover not to leave when his wife (or girlfriend—the song isn’t specific) calls.

But after an impassioned bridge in which she summons her courage to leave the bastard, the chorus repeats with almost the same lyrics, but this time imagines the wife begging her cheating husband not to leave. This sets up the triumphant repetition of the hook as the former lover suggests: “why don’t you stay.”

Video: Sugarland, "Stay." (YouTube): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIyxkZod2cM

The video is superb. Check it out, and if you can, check out Sugarland in Toronto next month!

Dolly Parton, Poetry, and Wacky Wednesday

One of my favourite books when I was a kid was Dr. Suess's classic Wacky Wednesday (1974). In it, a kid wakes up to find everything backwards and out of place. Wednesday is drawing to a close, but I thought it might be a good time to talk about two poems and a great song that use mixed up images as their main conceit.

The first is Nikki Giovanni’s 1983 poem, “I wrote a good omelet.” There are no words for my inexhaustible love of Ms. Giovanni (she has a new collection out this year: buy it!) And this poem is undoubtedly one of her wittiest. The first line gets the premise across easily: “I wrote a good omelet...and ate a hot poem...after loving you.” A Wacky Wednesday-esque list of backwards activities follows—written in Giovanni’s brilliant fleet style. At the last, her day ends as it began:

I rolled my bed...turned down my hair...slightly
confused but...I don't care...
Laid out my teeth...and gargled my gown...then I stood
...and laid me down...
to sleep...
after loving you

Elizabeth Bishop’s poems roll off the tongue with equal ease, but no one would describe her works as witty. I love how so many of her poems end with devastating lines that jolt you hard. In the following poem, “Insomnia,” Bishop imagines the world backwards as seen through her dresser mirror in the middle of the night. Three last words make this slight and somewhat precious poem punch you in the gut:

[...] that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows
are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are
shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

Dolly Parton’s 1999 bluegrass album “The Grass is Blue” is brilliant for many reasons (Alison Krauss and Rhonda Vincent as collaborators!), but foremost is the title track. With the exception of the flora in Kentucky, “blue grass” is a bit of an oxymoron. As is everything in the song, in which Dolly imagines a world backwards in much the same way Bishop did:

There's snow in the tropics
There's ice on the sun
It's hot in the artic
And crying is fun
And I'm happy now and I'm glad we're through
And the sky is green
And the grass is blue

Another genius gem by Dolly. Happy Wednesday!

On Taking the Greyhound

Noreen Malone's recent article in Slate on discount bus lines got me thinking about the innumerable times I've taken the Greyhound. Before I'm about to line up to take the bus from the sooted shed of the Dundas Street terminal, I always get a little feeling of pride at the thought of riding the "proletariat chariot." "The mover of the working people," I think to myself. "Here I'm among kin."

But my Whitmanesque sentiments evaporate very quickly when I peek around at the comrades I'll be spending the next twelve hours with. There's a sadness about everyone one the bus. Allen Ginsberg got it right when he wrote that Greyhound passengers are all:

looking for a bus to ride us back home to Eternity
where the heart was left and farewell tears
began.

(from, "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound," 1956, published posth.)

Josh Wingrove wrote a beautiful article for the Globe & Mail last August after the tragedy that occurred on the TransCanada route (mine). "Terminal Choice" (Aug. 9) details the lives of some passengers aboard that route. Most commute for jobs, some for friends, all because it's the only thing they can afford. Many are like this girl from my hometown:

Angelia Jurich, 17, and her two-year-old toddler, Renee, are heading to Northern Ontario from Fort McMurray, Alta., where they live with her parents. She is riding back to where she would rather be full-time, in their old home of Sault Ste. Marie, where she will see friends and other family and get a new tattoo. It's "the money" that keeps her out west - the cash her parents are earning in the oil boom.

The terminal in the Soo is a thing to behold. It's little more than a door next to the maintenance garage for the local cab company. Malone nails when she writes that greyhound terminals have "an air of poetic despair." Or, as Sandra Hepditch, a traveler on Wingrove’s bus comments, “[t]he stations are like their own weird, bad coffee-table book.” Times have changed since the days they put them on postcards, like the beauty from Dayton, Ohio (above).

If only we had a Whitman alive today to write an encomium to the Greyhound bus. Maybe then I could feel renewed enthusiasm for the experience of being among the multitudes. The best we get is Ginsberg, who ends elegiacally:

“Farewell ye Greyhound, where I suffered so much”

Fun With Intertexts: Inaugural Lulu Edition

Now that Frank Wedekind's scandalous 1906 play Frühlings Erwachen is a crummy piece of Rock theatre schtick Tony award-winning Broadway musical, it's easy to overlook what was once his most popular creation: the sexually voracious bisexual murderess Lulu. He wrote two plays detailing her ascent from poverty and multiple marriages (Erdegeist, 1895) and subsequent descent into prostitution (Die Büchse der Pandora, 1904).

The two plays were reworked into a film in 1929 by the Austrian filmmaker Georg Wilhelm Pabst entitled Pandora's Box. The film starred Louise Brooks (pictured above). It's stunning. Check it out.

A year later, Josef von Sternberg directed Der blaue Engel, starring Marlene Dietrich. While the film is based on a novel by Heinrich Mann, it's hard not to see a bit of Lulu in Lola Lola, Dietrich's sexually alluring cabaret singer (above). And Emmanuel Rath's downfall and eventual death look an awful lot like Schön's in Lulu. The movie is much less a critique of a fossilized educational system (as was Mann's book), so much as it is a showcase for Dietrich's alluring nightclub act.

That brings us to Lili von Shtupp, the saloon singer from Mel Brook's 1974 movie, Blazing Saddles. She's played by the greatest commedienne of the years BC (before Chenoweth), the divine Madeline Kahn (pictured). In it she performs "I'm tired," a parody of Dietrich's number from The Blue Angel, "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss." I love this verse:

I've been with 1000's of men

Again and again

They sing the same tune

They start with Byron and Shelly

And jump on your belly

And bust your ballon

Aye!

But before the German femme fatale became a source of parody, she was the star of an opera by perhaps the greatest composer of the interwar years, Alban Berg. His Lulu, left unfinished at his death in 1935, was a conglomeration of Wedekind's two plays (though more faithful to them than Pabst's film version). The role of Lulu has become a staple of soprano Christine Schäfer's repertory. In the 1995 Glyndebourne production (now available on DVD), the portrait painted by Lulu's second husband is almost identical to a picture of Louise Brooks that the gay pimp gives to the Turkish John that he tries to sell Lulu to.

And there you have it. From German theatrical history to Mel Brooks and back, this has been our inaugural edition of "Fun With Intertexts!"

Feeling Dowdy About Dowd

Two days after Maureen Dowd plagiarized Josh Marshall's blog at Talking Points Memo, she took a (forced?) vacation from her biweekly column. Every Wednesday and Sunday were my Maureen days. She's back this week, but I think I'm going to bid farewell to my Irish vixen. So, if I may (ever-so-slightly) paraphrase John Betjemen's "Irish Unionist's Farewell":

[Iron] haired and [iron] hearted
I would ever have you be,
As you were when last we parted
Smiling slow and sad at me.
Oh! the fighting down of passion!
Oh! the century-seeming pain-
Parting in this off-hand fashion
In Dungarvan in the rain.

Autoerotic Asphyxiation's Musicological Connection

Who would have guessed that David Carradine's sad end would lead me to Stanley Sadie's venerable New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians! Thanks to Christopher Beam's recent article in Slate, I now know that the first person to die from AEA, as those-in-the-know say, was none other than the Czech composer Frantisek Koczwara. Ronald R. Kidd's New Grove entry describes his death thus:

He was reputed to have had unusual vices, and was accidentally hanged while conducting an experiment in a house of ill repute. Susan Hill, his accomplice in the experiment, was tried for murder at the Old Bailey on 16 September 1791 and was acquitted.

That same year, a pamphlet detailing the act was circulated entitled "Modern Propensities; or, an essay on the art of strangling." Dude looks so happy to go that way. While it's always nice to see obscure eighteenth-century composers get mentioned in the popular press, I can't help but wonder if this should give us insight into the artistic temperment, or remind us of humanity's perverse fascination with the sexual habits of others?