Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Finale

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.

On Gregory Corso. "He's dealt with truth,  god, love, hate, hope, beauty, so it's actually very interesting. He's taken what he would call the biggies, the big themes, and dealt with them in one or two lines each. Appreciation, but nonattachment, not getting addicted." (p. 341)

William Blake. "The Eye Altering Alters All" [circa 1803.] (p. 347)

William Carlos Williams, 1953: "For man and poet must keep pace with his world." (p. [359])

Ginsberg: "I was high on grass and so it was triply awesome or doubly awesome, the realization that the mind could be spaced out and then come back and focus. . . an aspect of the notion of a gap or jump from one phase of consciousness to another, one unconscious daydreaming to a real place, a focus on the external phenomenal world." (pp. 364-365)

". . . I started looking . . . to ordinary-mind observations for visionary perceptions." (p. 366)

William Carlos Williams: "'. . . make a coordinate point where others can see, compare their perceptions with your perceptions.'" (p. 367)

Ginsberg: "We'd burn all night on the jackpine peak, seen from Denver in the summer dark . . ." (p. 372)

"Old love and remembrance -- I resign
All cities, all jazz, all echoes of Time . . ." p. 381)

"As in movies, the poignancy or charge or visionary aspect or satori or sunyata or mental electric comes from setting up one pole of thought form or word or picture and then setting up another pole. Then the mind has to fill in the space between by connecting them. . . like an electric charge between the two poles . . . One minute it's somebody talking, the next minute it's a tombstone." (pp. 388-389) 

"Naturally there's going to be a little brain pop." (pp. [390]-391)

". . . the constant awareness of setting something down which other people will read." (p. 393)

"Howl." "The precursors to this were things like Apollinaire's poem "Zone." The parallel texts . . . in addition to . . . "Zone . . . were Christopher Smart's "Rejoice in the Lamb," which has the same construction."  (p. 395)

Surrealistic method. "Hop up your image with some totally opposite zonk. You zonk the image with something so weird that people will ask, 'How'd you get to that?'" (p. 396)

Can you dig? 

Today's Rune: Possessions.

Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Part III

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.

Early 1950s. "Kerouac was really a solitary genius, innovating and going forward into as yet unrecognized and unmapped areas of composition all by himself, with the courage necessary to do it . . . He had no support, not only from 'society' but also from his friends, his wife, his mother, or anyone." (p. 225) 

"It was my impression that very few people had a grasp of the phantom, or samsaric, or elusory nature of existence. They didn't have any idea of alternative modes of consciousness . . ." (p. 238)

"Jazz was a kind of speech that went round the world and influenced every country. The only art form, the only cultural push, that came out of America that transformed the political structure of the world through the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and rock'n'roll and . . . youth culture." (p. 243)

"[Walt] Whitman thought . . . that unless the nation were made up of comrades democracy couldn't work." (p. 246)

"Kerouac saw new jazz as a clarion of a new consciousness. It wasn't only bepop, it was the whole notion of American blues and black music." (p. 247)

"Nobody had looked on jazz musicians with that kind of insight, except other jazz musicians." (p. 249) 

". . . archetypal recollections were the very angelic bricks of their own lives, the foundation of their lives. Their early childhood thrills and symbols were the basis of all adult judgment and opinions and trips to the moon. . . a whole hidden memory life . . ." (p. 252)

"Jack's in there writing all by himself, for himself, for his own ear or for some universal consciousness, just for pure art." (p. 259)

Herman Melville poetry. (p. [260])

Sketching: "'like a painter but with words . . .'" (p. [264]) 

Little notebooks: "sketching to total mind's eye." (p. 266)

Gregory Corso. "Tailoring" poems, writing. (p. 278)

Corso: jazz, poetry. Charlie Bird Parker and Miles Davis and "Don't Shoot the Warthog." (p. 294)

From "Hello:"

"Do I wear the cloth of a man who has failed?
Am I the looney man?
In the great serenade of things,
     am I the most cancelled passage?" (p. 299). 

Today's Rune: Joy. 

Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Part II

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. "The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov were our favorite books then . . . (p. 101).

Visions of Cody. "I had the idea that Kerouac was influenced by Neal [Cassady] reading [Marcel] Proust aloud. In 1947 when Cassady was in town we had a copy of Scott Moncrieff's translation of Proust and Neal would read that aloud when we were high on grass. He read Proust very beautifully and . . . enjoyed the long organic sentences that were inclusive of many varieties of thought forms and associations that rose during the composition of the sentence. . . . as in [John] Milton, Proust used long sentences to include everything in his mind."  (pp. 105-106)

"When you hear yourself echoed in somebody else's indulgent, tender, sympathetic consciousness, you begin to appreciate yourself." (p. 115)

William S. Burroughs. "Burroughs ascribes Kerouac's enthusiasm and encouragement as the greatest single force in making him write, finally . . . Kerouac and I saw Burroughs as very shy, tender, and sweet, with good manners. Quiet with a sense of humor cutting through."  (p. 116)

Kerouac imagined writing an American Civil War book, with Burroughs as a "morphine-addicted . . . general." (pp. 120-121) 

Herman Melville and "American loneliness. The central image of that for Kerouac was everybody looking for 'the center of Saturday night in America' . . . in the back alley, under a redbrick building, under a neon sign, with nobody looking at him . . . which is where everybody wound up, unsatisfied." (pp. 121-122

"Visions of Cody is the most serious text we'll run into . . . Kerouac . . . undergoes a transfiguration and becomes his art, he ceases to be a guy writing at his art and becomes interchangeable with the art . . . His writing and his personality become identical and becomes a superprofessional in the sense that he's a saint of writing. (pp. 128-129)

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. For Burroughs, writing "was not so much . . . redemption, but . . . a communicative activity which linked him with me and other people, with the rest of humanity, with friends." He found writing to be more practical than "a romantic thing." (p. 153)

Burroughs "sees right through everything immediately with no illusions." (p. 164)

"Trace back along the word vine to find the source of control. Who started the whole maya, the illusion, and to what extent does language dictate to our sense of what we see, hear, smell." (p. 169)

Burroughs on New Orleans: "'The drivers orient themselves largely by the use of their horns, like bats. The residents are surly. The transient population is conglomerate and unrelated, so that you never know what sort of behavior to expect from anybody.'" (p. 171) 

Burroughs as visual writer. (pp. 179-180)

"The Waste Land is not much different from Burroughs . . . collage method . . . Apollinaire . . . I think that the thing Burroughs and Eliot have most in common is 'music down a windy street,' . . . spare, nostalgic, pungent images that will haunt you with an echo of time past." See also Saint-John Perse, Anabasis. (p. 188)

"His unconscious life and his every day life are merged. With Burroughs writing becomes a probe into consciousness, or a probe into depth." (p. 191)

". . . the entire fabric of appearance and phenomenon." (p. 199) 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Allen Ginsberg: 'The Best Minds of My Generation' (2017). Part I

Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, edited by Bill Morgan. New York: Grove Press, 2017. Foreword by Anne Waldman. 

Anne Waldman: "Denver, the place of all possible crossroads." (p. x)  "The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. (p. xi)

Each core member of the Beats "literarily had had some form of break in the ordinary nature of consciousness . . . as the central preoccupation, concern with the very nature of consciousness and with what you would call visions or visionary  experience." (P. 26)

"The element of aggression, of ideological insistency, was considered unhip and by unhip I mean lacking in awareness." (p. 29)

"I'm thinking of 'salt peanuts, salt peanuts,' or some squiggle of rhythm in [Jack] Kerouac's head that follows that off accenting, the irregular accenting, the noniambic accenting of [Dizzy] Gillespie." (p. 35)

With the death of his father, Kerouac "got interested in becoming the recording angel of the dream scene, and began recording his dreams, literally, as well as the dream of life itself." (p. 44) 

"The world hanging in space, the skyscrapers hanging in space . . . you'd realize you were not standing in New York City but you were standing in the middle of the universe, the vast open sky . . . It was the first discovery [by the main Beats, in the 1940s] of a crack in consciousness, that we were made of the same suchness, that we were ghosts. ' ' There's this early hint in On the Road of mind which is already Buddhist-oriented. Appreciating the phantom nature of things, of ourselves, an awareness of the mortal . . ." (p. 52)   

On meeting Jack: "Kerouac was a very mellow, shrewd, observant, tolerant person, so there was mutual curiosity." (p. 55)

Kerouac later "used to stand in the backyards at night when everybody was eating supper and realized that everybody was a ghost eating ghost food. Or that he was a ghost watching living people." (p. 56)

On meeting William S. Burroughs: "When we all went to see Burroughs, it was for that laconic, mellowed-out, cooled-out experience." (p. 86) 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline as a major influence. "I think it's one of the great moments of Western literature, when the hero wakes up in the middle of the battle and realizes that everyone around him is crazy and figures he better get out of there. I would say that is hipness, that attitude . . ." (p. 88)  

". . . little puppets of eternity, clawing each other in their vanity, with great clouds brewing overhead in the empty sky." (p. 96)

". . . panoramic consciousness or time consciousness . . ." (p. 98)

Kerouac: ". . . the flitting ghost-ends of a brood who will grow . . ." (p. 99)

Today's Rune: Wholeness. 

Kim Thúy: 'Ru' (2009, 2012), Take I

Kim Thúy, Ru. New York: Translated from the French by Sheila Fischman. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012; originally published in French in 2009.

This is a lovely short novel, organized as a series of interconnected (but mostly capable of standing alone) short chapters that look on the page like prose poems or flash pieces. 

Ru has the gravitas of a personal nonfiction account. I found it completely absorbing on a first read and can imagine combing through it again soon to see what I missed.  

"I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of machine guns." (page 1) 

An Tinh Nguyen, the main protagonist, is born in Saigon. French and Vietnamese culture are strong in her childhood years, even after the American War when the country is unified. Eventually, she escapes with members of her family to Malaysia, until they are taken in by Canadians and relocated to Quebec. 

I appreciate the fact that Ru is mostly neutral on the opposing sides of the war and its aftermath, allowing the reader to focus instead on what it's like to be a war child and refugee. 

Throughout Ru, we are taken as if by the hand to see conditions in Vietnam during and after the American War, in boats and refugee camps, and in a new, unfamiliar land -- Canada. We see the family of An Tinh Nguyen and come to understand something of its structure (Aunt Seven, Step-Uncle Six, Cousin Sao Mai, etcetera), and see what it's like to become accustomed to a new country, while still yearning for the old. 

Deft and memorable. 

Today's Rune: Initiation.  

Michelle Tea's 'Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms' (2018)

Michelle Tea, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2018. 

An eclectic collection of essays and memoir, or anti-memoir. The CONTENTS may give some idea of its scope.

"ART & MUSIC
On Valerie Solanas; Andy Warhol's Self-Portrait; Times Square; On Erin Markey; On Chelsea Girls; Gene Loves Jezebel; Purple Rain; Minor Threat; Sonic Youth's Magic.

LOVE & QUEERNESS
Transmissions from Camp Trans [and the Michigan Womyn's Music Fest]; How Not to Be a Queer Douchebag; Polishness; Hard Times; HAGS in Your Face; How to Refer to My Husband-Wife.

WRITING & LIFE
The City to a Young Girl; Pigeon Manifesto; Summer of Lost Jobs; Telling Your Friends You're Sober; Sister Spit Feminism; I Had a Miscarriage; Baba; Dire Straits; Against Memoir."

In the first section, Tea, though she's younger than I am, covers music, movies and books with which I'm mostly familiar. At some point in my early twenties I even picked up a copy of the soundtrack to Times Square, from a cutout bin for maybe a dollar or two, though to this day I haven't seen the movie yet. 

From "Times Square:" "We queers, artists, activists, intellectuals, misfits, know with the instinct of any migrating animal that we must go to the city to find ourselves, our lives, and our people. Times Square shows beautifully what is lost to us when we lose our cities, our scruffy, scuzzy, cheap, and accessible cities; our inspiring, cultured, miraculous, dangerous, spontaneous, surprising cities."  (pages 37-38).

In the second section, I found two pieces particularly interesting, "Transmissions" and "HAGS in Your Face." 

From "HAGS in Your Face:" "'We always wanted to be next to each other.'" (page 180). A nice turn of phrase.

In the final section, all are absorbing to varying degrees. "Pigeon Manifesto" is just plain sweet. 

From "The City to a Young Girl:" "I'm feeling it, the purpose and point of our political writings, our personal struggles. It's not to change the world that can't or won't be changed. It's to leave traces of ourselves for others to hold on to, a lifeline of solidarity that spans time, that passes on strength like a baton from person to person, generation to generation." (page 234). Amen to that. 

From "Sister Spit Feminism:" "The thing about being a poet, a writer, an artist, is, you can't be good. You shouldn't have to be good. You should, for the sake of your art, your soul, and your life, go through significant periods of time where you are defying many notions of goodness. As female artists, we required the same opportunities to fuck up and get fucked up as dudes have always had and been forgiven for; we needed access to the same hard road of trial and error our male peers and literary inspirations stumbled down . . ." (page 268). 

Can you dig? 

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

'Genius: Picasso' (2018)

Genius: Picasso (National Geographic), 2018.  An impressively epic ten-part mini-series, Picasso provides a good introduction and overview, with crafty historical context. Its ensemble approach works, though it took me a while to acclimate to the chronological jumping back and forth. Very worthwhile. 

Picasso actors include: Alex Rich and Antonio Banderas as Picasso (younger and older, respectively); Samantha Colley (Dora Maar); Clémence Poésy (Françoise Gilot);  Sofia Doniantes (Olga Stepanovna Khokhlova); Aisling Franciosi (Fernande Olivier); Poppy Delevingne (Marie-Thérèse Walter); Valentina Bellè (Jacqueline Roque); Tracee Chimo (Getrude Stein), Simon Buret (Jean Coctaue); Andrew Buchan (Henri Matisse); Kerr Logan (Georges Braque); T.R. Knight (Max Jacob); Seth Gabel (Guillaume Apollinaire). 

Picasso is clearly based at least in part on various memoirs. Françoise Gilot's observations jump out in particular. At the time of this post she's still alive -- and ninety-six years old.   

Dora Maar (1907-1997), the coolest of them all. 

Today's Rune: Warrior. 

Chapel Hill Daze: Pictures of Another Gone World: Internationalist Books

It's like the book title, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Elegiac America. Chapel Hill Daze. Since I first scampered around Franklin Street as a kid till now, a lot of melting. 

Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.

~ from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Lament" (1921)

Internationalist Books is gone! It had, believe it or not, four locations before vanishing into the ether of Saṃsāra. Perhaps it'll cycle through again. The four locations were:

Chapel Hill. 108 Henderson Street (upstairs, above Henderson Street Bar & Grill; aka Linda's Bar & Grill; now Imbibe), by the Continental Café/Hector's (now gone) and across the street from the US Post Office (still there). It was tiny. (Notice in Daily Tar Heel, February 3, 1982). Call 942-REDS. Early 1982 (late 1981)-1984.

Chapel Hill. 408 West Rosemary Street, 1984-1991+. Part of a spacious former house. This allowed plenty of room for meeting, reading, discussing, organizing. I worked at this location as a volunteer. The house is still standing and serves as Mama Dip's Kitchen, which used to be at a nearby location (405 West Rosemary).  

Chapel Hill. 405 West Franklin Street, circa 1995-2014. I took the photo at top on November 24, 2012.  

Carrboro. 101 Lloyd Street, 2014-September 2016. Final stand.

International Books founder Bob Sheldon (April 17, 1950--February 22, 1991) was murdered during the opening phase of the Gulf War, which he opposed. The case remains unsolved. Originally from Colorado, he graduated from Temple University, Philadelphia, and worked as a nurse at UNC, as well as being an organizer and book store founder. He is buried in Colorado Springs (see "Find A Grave"). 

I am really happy to see that his papers are held at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Here's a link to the Guide to the Bob Sheldon Papers, 1968-1991.  

Today's Rune: Possessions. 

Mary Karr: 'The Art of Memoir' (2015, 2016)

Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir. New York: Harper Perennial, 2016; originally published by HarperCollins Publishers in 2015. 

Karr is primarily known as a poet and memoirist; she also teaches, which is how this tome originated, through years of teaching experience. One of the book's "takeaways" (in the shady parlance of our day) is her list of "Required Reading - Mostly Memoirs and Some Hybrids" (pages 221-227). The core text is more pick-and-choose -- whatever may help.

Mary Karr's advice on how to get going with the writing process: "The idea is to unclench your mind's claws . . . don't judge how your thoughts might jet around at first. Eventually you'll start identifying . . . with that detached, watcher self and less with your prattling head." (page 31).

On voice: "The voice should permit a range of emotional tones -- too wiseass, and it denies pathos; too pathetic, and it's shrill. It sets and varies distance from both the material and the reader -- from cool and diffident to high-strung and close." (page 36).

Keep it real: "You'll need both sides of yourself -- the beautiful and the beastly -- to hold a reader's attention. . . Sadly, without a writer's dark side on view -- the pettiness and vanity and schemes -- pages give off the whiff of bullshit." (page 38).

On revision: "the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality." (page 211).

"For me, the last 20 percent of a book's improvement takes 95 percent of the effort -- all in the editing. . . In the long run, the revision process feels better if you approach it with curiosity . . . Writing . . . means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world . . . you do that by fighting for elegance and beauty, redoing or cutting the flabby, disordered parts." (page 215). Amen to that. 

Today's Rune: Initiation.

Chapel Hill Daze: Pictures of Another Gone World: University Square

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World (The Pocket Poet Series, Number One). San Francisco: City Lights, 1955.  A salute to Ferlinghetti, who is ninety-nine years old -- born on March 24, 1919. Graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1941. I saw him give a reading in Chapel Hill in the 1980s, when he was but a young lad in his sixties. Afterwards, he signed my copy of Jack's Book. (I also remember when Harlan Ellison came to town to write a story based on a given first line -- but that's another story). 

And now it's time to turn to pictures of another gone world, a University Square of the Mind, as it were. University Square was an entry point for me, I liked the area for parking, sitting with cups of coffee, writing in journals. And now it's gone, gone, gone, transmogrified into "Carolina Square." The buildings and entire complex that comprised University Square were demolished in 2015. 

So let's do the Proust thing and bring back some of the names of that lost world. 

In the 1980s, let's say around 1983, you could walk from Columbia Street along Franklin Street on the "north" side, going toward Carrboro, and you'd pass Logo's Book Store (Christian books?), Mr. Gatti's Pizza, the Yogurt Pump, a jewelry store, an electronics store, the entrance pathway to He's Not Here (which always made me think of the Alamo - lots of stories to go with He's Not Here); a Pizza Hut, a sporting goods shop, the Pump House, a funeral home, McFarling's Exxon, Hunam's Restaurant, and a parking lot that ended with Church Street. If you kept going, you'd pass another parking lot, a telephone building, Peppi's Pizza, Woofer & Tweeter, a Gulf station; Fowler's Food (giant deli type meat place), McFarling's garage, Chapel Hill Rare Books, Martin Keith Book Shop, a florist, Phoenicia Restaurant, Village Pharmacy and Noel's Sub Machine. 

The only place left standing from the previous paragraph is He's Not Here.

Let's walk back to the intersection of Columbia and Franklin and cross the street to the "south" side.

Just at the corner is a large Baptist Church (still). Back around 1983, there was next a beauty salon (Scissorium) of which I remember nothing except that maybe it was a small single story stand alone. 

University Square was divided into three large sections: University Square East, University Square, and University Square West. The anchor for East was a CCB (Central Carolina Bank) Bank with ATM designed to trick students into overdrafts (or so it seemed to students). East included Kemp Jewelers: Circle Travel (anyone wonder about travel agencies?  This was one and I went in there occasionally); the Chapel Hill barbershop; Aesthetic Styling Salon; Cabana Tanning Center; Monkey Business -- never went in that one and have no idea what it was pitching.

University Square [Central]. Time-Out Restaurant was a 24-hour place with biscuits and salty kinds of college student food. The aroma of fresh buttered biscuits perpetually hovered about.

There were green and white awnings that fringed the roof edges, and cool passageways that let you cross through to the back side of the complex, one of my favorite design features that I often took advantage of -- built-in desire paths.

Time-Out still exists but has moved to where Hector's once stood, at 201 East Franklin at Henderson, across Henderson Street from the US Post Office.

Swensen's Ice Cream was one of the those old-fashioned places that left me bewildered -- a lot like Mayberry's. There are three Swensen's left in the entire USA, as of this post. Mayberry Ice Cream is down to a couple left in North Carolina, I think.

Other places in the middle section: Ken's Quickie Mart; Knit-A-Bit; Second Sole (shoe repairs, I think); Cameron Craft. The Painted Bird had various types of cool little things, arts type goodies. I think they had stationary and cards, too. 

And there was my favorite University Square hangout of all, on the side facing away from Franklin Street: The Looking Glass Café. More on this at some point, I suspect. The scent of fresh coffee permeated. There's a place with the same name now open in nearby Carrboro, at 601 West Main Street. I'll have to inquire to see if they are connected in some direct way, or even indirectly by inspiration. 

University Square West. Little Professor Book Center. I frequently ducked into this and many of the other Chapel Hill book and record stores. At its peak, there were more than one hundred Little Professor book stores around the USA; there are now (in July of 2018), as far as I can determine, three left.

Other stuff: Tyndall's Formal Wear (rentals, mostly); Shoe Doctor; University Opticians; Fine Feathers - clothes; and T'Boli Imports. The last one had lots of wine, if memory serves.

I have no idea what was in the upper floors of the main buildings: offices, apartments, condos?  

University Square: gone but not forgotten. Anyone who has any idea of what the above is about, please add details, memories, observations. And if not about here, how about somewhere that you once knew that's now part of another gone world?

Photos: "Downtown Chapel Hill" website; University Gazette (2008); Wiki Commons (July 28, 2008). 

Invaluable resource to cross-check memories, places:  OCCUPANTS AND STRUCTURES OF FRANKLIN STREET, CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA AT 5-YEAR INTERVALS, 1793-1998, by Bernard Lee Bryant, Jr. Chapel Hill Historical Society, printed out by J.D. Eyre in 1999. Link here.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Jim Jarmusch's 'Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai' (1999)

Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), shot in New Jersey with Japanese dreams. Stars Forest Whitaker in the title role, as a retainer of low-level mobster Louie (John Tormey). 

The film is a most excellent fantasy piece revolving around Ghost Dog, the quiet assassin; aging gangsters; Raymond, a French-speaking Haitian ice cream truck man (Isaach De Bakolé); Pearline (Camille Winbush), a very young reader of books; and active carrier / messenger pigeons, also known as war pigeons.  

The character Ghost Dog filters the world through Yamamoto Tsunetomo's Hagakure / Hidden Leaves (from the early 1700s), which strictly and philosophically lays out the samurai way of life.  Many of its "leaves" are read aloud by Ghost Dog over intertitles that show the corresponding text, in English. 

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Totally hip flick with a groovy soundtrack courtesy of RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan. Throughout the film, there are lots of allusions to books, other movies, mixed genres and alternate codes of naming and living. There may be a sequel forthcoming. 

Today's Rune: Protection. 

Gwynne Edwards' 'Lorca: Living in the Theatre' (2003). Part I

Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: Living in the Theatre. London and Chicago: Peter Owen, 2003.

I have found this to be very helpful as a guide to plays by Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), and for a serious delving into Spanish and modern theatre in general. Of course, written plays go back to the ancient Greeks and are a hallmark of literacy. Ancient theatrical performances foreshadow cinema, television, YouTube and God knows what else that's coming in the future. Maybe time travel.

In Lorca: Living in the Theatre, Edwards focuses on six major plays, each given its own chapter. They are:

The Public / El público (1930)
When Five Years Pass / Así que pasen cinco años (1931)
Blood Wedding / Bodas de sangre (1931) 
Yerma (1934)
Doña Rosita the Spinster / Doña Rosita la soltera o El lenguaje de las flores (1935)
The House of Bernarda Alba / La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936)

The Public was so far ahead of its time that Lorca quipped even then: "This is for the theatre years from now." It was not performed until the 1970s; professionally, not until the 1980s (see pages 42-43 and 55+).

Edwards gives a brief overview of Lorca's formative time spent at the Residencia de Estudiantes (pages 44-46), which sounds like an ideal place to soak up and exchange new ideas and energies. World class lecturers came through (from Albert Einstein to H. G. Wells) and fellow students included the likes of Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989).  

Edwards thereby discusses Lorca's "magpie approach in all his work" (page 47) -- meaning he drew from eclectic sources and styles, including Surrealism and Classical Theatre, visual art, dance, Gypsy and Arabic music and poetry, cinema and Catholicism. He was on fire!  

(To be continued). 

Today's Rune: Strength. 

Jim Jarmusch: 'Dead Man' (1995)

Jim Jarmusch, Dead Man (1995). Stars Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer with appearances by Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton and Jared Harris, among several other notables. 

A frontier rite of passage in which the West is Truly Wild. Close attention is paid to period detail, and the setting is more Northwest than West, defamiliarizing the familiar. Jarmusch's use of fade to black fade-ins and fade-outs gives the film an episodic feel, like coming in and out of consciousness. 

William Blake, Depp's character, is a fish out of water everywhere he goes. When he goes West, young man, from Cleveland to Machine, a terrible place to which he's conveyed by coal-burning rail, the end seems nigh. Along the way, brutish fellows shoot at bison and anything else that moves outside the cars. In Machine, avaricious frontier capitalists forge deals with the Devil in a Hellish World. To quote William Blake the poet from "And did those feet in ancient time"  (circa 1804):

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

The hero of Dead Man is "Nobody," played by Gary Farmer. Cast out of his own homeland and left to wander, he is Blake's spirit guide and moral compass. Blake, with a bullet lodged near his heart, is pursued by psychopathic bounty hunters to the Ends of the Earth. 

From Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" (circa 1803); 

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born,

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie

When we see not thro' the eye,

Which was born in a night to perish in a night,

When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,

To those poor souls who dwell in night;

But does a human form display

To those who dwell in realms of day.

Nobody and William Blake arrive at the Makah village, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, at the Edge of the World.   

Today's Rune: Initiation.