EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Eleven. Conflicting ideas about eleven I'm afraid. In some traditions it denotes the renewal of the life-cycle and in others, excess. "Its ambivalence resides in the fact that the excess which it signifies may either mark the beginning of a renewal, or the collapse and breakdown of the number ten, a fault in the universe." At least, that's what my bible, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, says. It goes on, "It is this latter sense that made St. Augustine say that the 'number eleven is the blazon of sin.' Its disturbing activities may be compared with the unbalancing and overenlargement of one of the pillars of the universe (the number ten), a definition of disorder, disease and sin." Later, my bible continues, "Eleven is the symbol of eternal conflict, 'of discord, rebellion, aberration, law-breaking... human sin... and the revolt of the angels." In China, however, 'eleven was the number which in its totality (ch'eng) comprised the way of Heaven and Earth.' It was the number of the Tao. On the other hand, the Bambara consider it to be the number of discord and conflict. The eleventh stage in their story of the Creation was the rebellion of the air-god, Teliko, against the authority of the water-god, Faro." Isn't that just typical! As soon as excess appears in the world, certain gods start to feel threatened and get up on their high horses, warning that the end of the world is nigh, or at least calamity is what will follow once their authority is challenged. On balance, it seems to me, however, that we must regard eleven as a positive number, a number not of static and sterile completeness, like ten, but incompleteness, which leads to dynamic renewal. In short, the world needs discord to move out of its various ruts. Which brings us by a rather circuitous route to where we are now - to Egypt and Greece, even creaky old Britain, but perhaps the less said about the latter the better.
Apart from all that, how did your Bloomsday go? Judging by some of the discussions and comments on the Internet regarding it, Ulysses still generates heat, a lot of it due, I'm afraid to say, to the fact that some people still seem to believe that if a work of art, fiction or poetry does not provide instant gratification it is fit only for academics to unravel. But of course instant gratification invariably means familiar gratification, and if a work of art does not offer that, well, then there's no hope for any of us, is there? The problem is that too many people have already made up their minds about how things should be and they are not going to be budged. Perhaps, such an attitude offers refuge from a world of flux and chaos. Try recommending the virtues of open-mindedness to some of these people and out come all the old rationalisations and excuses organised around their aroused defense-mechanisms. This might go by the name of critical judgement with some people, but true critical judgement, in my not so humble opinion, involves opening up to the flux and dealing with it in creative rather than defensive ways. It's just a pity we can't move on and realise that James Joyce's opus was a product of that self-same flux which, in many ways, has left it behind. It constitutes a moment - as opposed to a monument - a moment in the evolution of fiction that was superceded by other moments, although, of course, it has left an indelible trace. But the instant you try to introduce any kind of perspective into some of these Internet discussions, it's "die u bastard! ppl like u dserve 2 b dcapit8ed! ur a..." whatever it is that u r!
For the first time since Ol' Chanty began, I have been inundated with material and have asked some of these would-be contributors to hold on to their work and send it in again once this issue was published. Something to do with me not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. I need to concentrate on one issue at a time, otherwise I tend to get rather flustered. Now that this issue is out, I will rest awhile before starting to think about Issue Twelve, which I hope will be out in October.
Finally, a great quote from Ezra Pound, especially relevant to the looming US election! "The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing which is the truth." Now ain't that the truth?

Welcome to Issue Eleven. Conflicting ideas about eleven I'm afraid. In some traditions it denotes the renewal of the life-cycle and in others, excess. "Its ambivalence resides in the fact that the excess which it signifies may either mark the beginning of a renewal, or the collapse and breakdown of the number ten, a fault in the universe." At least, that's what my bible, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, says. It goes on, "It is this latter sense that made St. Augustine say that the 'number eleven is the blazon of sin.' Its disturbing activities may be compared with the unbalancing and overenlargement of one of the pillars of the universe (the number ten), a definition of disorder, disease and sin." Later, my bible continues, "Eleven is the symbol of eternal conflict, 'of discord, rebellion, aberration, law-breaking... human sin... and the revolt of the angels." In China, however, 'eleven was the number which in its totality (ch'eng) comprised the way of Heaven and Earth.' It was the number of the Tao. On the other hand, the Bambara consider it to be the number of discord and conflict. The eleventh stage in their story of the Creation was the rebellion of the air-god, Teliko, against the authority of the water-god, Faro." Isn't that just typical! As soon as excess appears in the world, certain gods start to feel threatened and get up on their high horses, warning that the end of the world is nigh, or at least calamity is what will follow once their authority is challenged. On balance, it seems to me, however, that we must regard eleven as a positive number, a number not of static and sterile completeness, like ten, but incompleteness, which leads to dynamic renewal. In short, the world needs discord to move out of its various ruts. Which brings us by a rather circuitous route to where we are now - to Egypt and Greece, even creaky old Britain, but perhaps the less said about the latter the better.
Apart from all that, how did your Bloomsday go? Judging by some of the discussions and comments on the Internet regarding it, Ulysses still generates heat, a lot of it due, I'm afraid to say, to the fact that some people still seem to believe that if a work of art, fiction or poetry does not provide instant gratification it is fit only for academics to unravel. But of course instant gratification invariably means familiar gratification, and if a work of art does not offer that, well, then there's no hope for any of us, is there? The problem is that too many people have already made up their minds about how things should be and they are not going to be budged. Perhaps, such an attitude offers refuge from a world of flux and chaos. Try recommending the virtues of open-mindedness to some of these people and out come all the old rationalisations and excuses organised around their aroused defense-mechanisms. This might go by the name of critical judgement with some people, but true critical judgement, in my not so humble opinion, involves opening up to the flux and dealing with it in creative rather than defensive ways. It's just a pity we can't move on and realise that James Joyce's opus was a product of that self-same flux which, in many ways, has left it behind. It constitutes a moment - as opposed to a monument - a moment in the evolution of fiction that was superceded by other moments, although, of course, it has left an indelible trace. But the instant you try to introduce any kind of perspective into some of these Internet discussions, it's "die u bastard! ppl like u dserve 2 b dcapit8ed! ur a..." whatever it is that u r!
For the first time since Ol' Chanty began, I have been inundated with material and have asked some of these would-be contributors to hold on to their work and send it in again once this issue was published. Something to do with me not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. I need to concentrate on one issue at a time, otherwise I tend to get rather flustered. Now that this issue is out, I will rest awhile before starting to think about Issue Twelve, which I hope will be out in October.
Finally, a great quote from Ezra Pound, especially relevant to the looming US election! "The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing which is the truth." Now ain't that the truth?

CONTENTS
POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS
Thomas Ország-Land
ESSAY
Donald O'Donovan
POEMS
John Greeves
QUOTE
Heraclitus
POEM
Doug Draime
POEM
Stellasue Lee
SHORT STORY
John Greeves
POEMS
Paul Murphy
POEM-EXCERPTS
Richard Jurgens
QUOTE
James Joyce
POEMS
Nina Zivancevic
POEM
Stewart Sanderson
REVIEW & ESSAY-REVIEW
Paul Murphy and Richard Livermore
'ADVERTISEMENT'
POEMS - Thomas Ország-Land
Stateless
Adapted from the Renaissance French of Francois Villon (b. 1431)
& the Hungarian of György Faludy (1910-2006)
A Renaissance image of Francois Villon
from the early decades of modern printing
from the early decades of modern printing
Villon the vagabond was one of Europe’s first modern poets. Faludy, a Jewish-Hungarian master, spent some of his best writing years in exile or prison. This poem about the massive Westward flow of abused stateless migrants that characterises the 21st century is dedicated to The Exiled Writers Ink organization of London.
I've proudly wrapped my dazzling sky around me
yet I have found one faithful friend: the fog.
In banquet halls I've heard my hunger howling.
By fires, I have endured the test of frost.
I am a prince of human kind: I've reached out
and to my thirsty lips, the mud has swelled –
My paths are marked by dead wildflowers: even
the festive seasons wither from our breath.
I stare surprised in disbelief when genial
sunshine holds my frame in still caress.
And thus across three continents I've travelled
and been despised and welcomed everywhere.
I've wrestled with the storms on shrivelled wastelands.
My dress: a leaf that graced a bygone tree.
And nothing's clearer for me than night's fragrance
and nothing darker than high noontide's bleach.
My rising sobs have burst in wary taverns
but in the graveyards I have laughed my fill,
and all I own are things I've long discarded
and thus I've come to value everything.
Upon my stubborn curls, the spell of autumn
collects its silver while, a child at heart,
I cross this freezing landscape never pausing,
and live despised and welcomed everywhere.
Triumphant stars erect their vast cathedral
above me, and dew calms my feet below
as I pursue my fleeing god in grief
and sense my world through every pore in joy.
I've rested on the peaks of many mountains.
I’ve sweltered with the captive quarry-slaves.
And at my cost, I’ve learned to shun the towers
of state and curse our rulers’ power games.
My share of life has been the worst and best,
and thus I've come to find an equal ease
in squalor and beneath the whitest pillars,
a guest despised and welcomed everywhere.
I have no state, no home
– nor choice but freedom.
Between my legs, the playful wind alone
blows a merry duet with my arse.
I wish that I could quell the foolish fears of
the local folks, that they would look at me
beyond my status, and would prize my gift,
this hoard of words I’ve brought to share with them.
The time may come when all my words will rhyme
and I will dip my pen in molten gold
...before I find a restful spot beneath
some wizened thicket, and remain forever
a voice despised and welcomed, everywhere.
Dusk
Blind windows still returned
the blushing glow of the evening
at Centre Point (for long
an empty skyscraper: issue
of our divorce from our purpose),
when life settled down below
on the dusty kerb in the shadows
to rest her exhausted feet.
The lingering glare of the light
burnished the homeward flow
of the yellow, grey and wine-red
cars in the traffic congestion.
Oblivious to their own beauty,
life’s fellow pedestrians morphed
into deities texting urgent
messages through the ether.
A saxophone player took loving
leave of the day... And then
the colours hesitated.
Softly rose the dusk,
billowing out of exhaust pipes,
engulfing London, and slowly
life filled her yearning lungs
with that mellow, polluted air.
I've proudly wrapped my dazzling sky around me
yet I have found one faithful friend: the fog.
In banquet halls I've heard my hunger howling.
By fires, I have endured the test of frost.
I am a prince of human kind: I've reached out
and to my thirsty lips, the mud has swelled –
My paths are marked by dead wildflowers: even
the festive seasons wither from our breath.
I stare surprised in disbelief when genial
sunshine holds my frame in still caress.
And thus across three continents I've travelled
and been despised and welcomed everywhere.
I've wrestled with the storms on shrivelled wastelands.
My dress: a leaf that graced a bygone tree.
And nothing's clearer for me than night's fragrance
and nothing darker than high noontide's bleach.
My rising sobs have burst in wary taverns
but in the graveyards I have laughed my fill,
and all I own are things I've long discarded
and thus I've come to value everything.
Upon my stubborn curls, the spell of autumn
collects its silver while, a child at heart,
I cross this freezing landscape never pausing,
and live despised and welcomed everywhere.
Triumphant stars erect their vast cathedral
above me, and dew calms my feet below
as I pursue my fleeing god in grief
and sense my world through every pore in joy.
I've rested on the peaks of many mountains.
I’ve sweltered with the captive quarry-slaves.
And at my cost, I’ve learned to shun the towers
of state and curse our rulers’ power games.
My share of life has been the worst and best,
and thus I've come to find an equal ease
in squalor and beneath the whitest pillars,
a guest despised and welcomed everywhere.
I have no state, no home
– nor choice but freedom.
Between my legs, the playful wind alone
blows a merry duet with my arse.
I wish that I could quell the foolish fears of
the local folks, that they would look at me
beyond my status, and would prize my gift,
this hoard of words I’ve brought to share with them.
The time may come when all my words will rhyme
and I will dip my pen in molten gold
...before I find a restful spot beneath
some wizened thicket, and remain forever
a voice despised and welcomed, everywhere.
Dusk
Blind windows still returned
the blushing glow of the evening
at Centre Point (for long
an empty skyscraper: issue
of our divorce from our purpose),
when life settled down below
on the dusty kerb in the shadows
to rest her exhausted feet.
The lingering glare of the light
burnished the homeward flow
of the yellow, grey and wine-red
cars in the traffic congestion.
Oblivious to their own beauty,
life’s fellow pedestrians morphed
into deities texting urgent
messages through the ether.
A saxophone player took loving
leave of the day... And then
the colours hesitated.
Softly rose the dusk,
billowing out of exhaust pipes,
engulfing London, and slowly
life filled her yearning lungs
with that mellow, polluted air.
ESSAY
SIMON RODIA, ARCHITECT OF DREAMS
by
Donald O’Donovan
"Nothing is so rare on the part of any man as an act of his own."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire cat, when she disappeared, left her smile behind. Simon Rodia did the same thing. The Italian immigrant, born in Ribottoli at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, was here among us for 90 years, thirty-some of which he spent in Los Angeles. When he departed, Simon Rodia left behind his smile, Nuestro Pueblo, Watts Towers, a marvel of visionary architecture that soars above the desolation of South Central Los Angeles like a phoenix rising from its own ashes.
Simon Rodia's biographical details are sketchy, unremarkable and rather dreary. Named Sabato (Sabbath) Rodia by parents who wanted him to be a priest, he received little schooling and could neither read nor write Italian or English. As a teenager he followed his elder brother to America, possibly to evade the draft. After a stay in Pennsylvania, where his brother had settled, he moved to Seattle, then to Los Angeles where he took up the trade of tile-maker.
In his adopted country Sabato was known as "Sam" Rodia. However, the name "Simon"—a misapplication by a journalist in 1937—stuck, and Simon Rodia is the name that appears on the on-site plaque commemorating Watts Towers and the name by which Rodia is known to the world.
Two broken marriages, the death of a daughter, two sons from whom he was painfully estranged and rarely saw, a growing dependence on alcohol, and a life of toil in a country whose language he could scarcely speak or understand and whose customs were strange to him—this was Rodia's portion during his middle years. In later life he became increasingly withdrawn, solitary and single-mindedly preoccupied with the building of his fanciful creation on the site of his home at 1765 East 107th Street. To his neighbors in Watts Simon Rodia was an eccentric, an urban recluse, "that crazy Italian."
When Rodia began work on the Towers at the age of forty-two he had no patron or other source of financial aid. He held a full-time job, laboring eight hours a day as a tile setter and cement finisher, then worked evenings, weekends, and nights, in every kind of weather and at his own expense, to build the miniature walled city he called Nuestro Pueblo. Rodia built Watts Towers by hand, alone, over a thirty-year period, without machine tools, without nails or bolts, without scaffolding, without written plans, and without concern for financial reward. Simon Rodia had no Guggenheim Fellowship, nor was his monumental effort supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities or by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation or by any foundation. Watts Towers is thus a symbol of a creative endeavor that flies in the face of all odds, the great achievement of one man working alone without financial help or help of any kind to build his version of the Statue of Liberty, a gift to his adopted country, the whimsical kingdom of Nuestro Pueblo which today has become an art Mecca visited each year by thousands of people from all over the world.
Rodia's homemade Taj Mahal both astounds and delights the eye with the chromatic brilliance and endless inventiveness of its pinnacle spires and loop-the-loops and the bright decorative detail of its Byzantine mosaics. Broken symmetry and a freewheeling juxtaposition of unexpected objects lend a Coney Island ambiance to this architectural fantasy at the end of a dead-end street in one of the world's most inhuman cities. Watts Towers is a cohesive work consisting of seventeen sculptures including, in addition to the towers, a gazebo, a north and south wall, and the Ship of Marco Polo, the mast and tall spires of which are appropriately encrusted with hundreds of seashells, giving the brightly-tiled vessel the look of a dream galleon or a jeweled Venetian gondola carved from white marble.
In his artful assemblage Rodia has achieved what one might call "reverse trivialization." Commonplace objects, taken out of their usual context and presented in a playful and imaginative way, reveal their intrinsic mystery and wonder, making us suddenly see them as through the eyes of a person from a distant century or a distant planet, or through the eyes of a child.
In 1921, when Rodia bought his house at 1765 East 107th Street, Watts was a peaceful urban village squatting beside the railroad tracks. Neighbors knew each other and doors were left unlocked. Chickens scratched and pecked in every yard and each family had a cow, a horse or two, and a windmill for pumping water. The story of Watts is in fact a history-in-microcosm of the evolution of Los Angeles: from Eden to Armageddon in the space of a few generations. It is out of this milieu, the "magnificent desolation" of Los Angeles, that Rodia's fantasy kingdom rises like a beacon of welcome to everyone who has not been assimilated by the machine culture.
What was the source of Rodia's inspiration? Certainly not his surroundings. Rather, his inspiration almost certainly came from the magical memories of his Compania childhood, somehow kept alive in his heart inviolate and untouched by the sordidness and banality of his outer world. Springing as he did from the Italian master-builder tradition, it was Simon Rodia's manifest destiny to create Watts Towers. As a boy, from the steep medieval streets of his Compania hill town near Nola, Rodia would have seen the cathedral spires of Naples, and in Nola the great Roman mosaics and the beribboned wooden towers carried in the Festival of Lilies, celebrating San Gennaro, Nola's patron saint. It is also reasonable to assume that as a child he visited the Romanesque cathedral at Matera, and that he saw, at least from the shore, Castel dell'Ovo, built in 1154 by William I on the island of Megaris in the Bay of Naples at the foot of Mount Vesuvius.
Is Watts Towers folk art, outsider art, art brut, or no art at all? This question is best left to the international art establishment with its penchant for classification and its ingrained reluctance to recognize any artist who has not studied at the Sorbonne, the National Academy of Design, the New York Academy of Art or the School of Fine Arts. Artists who conform to the conventions of the latest chic are judged to be good or great and those who work outside of the current vogue are ignored. Yet it is precisely the rigid structure of these arbitrary schools of art that often prevents vital and innovative work, and the most valuable artists are those who have not come under the deadening and stultifying influence of academic mentors. To realize the truth of this we have only to look at the stunning artifacts left behind by the Native American peoples who flourished on "our" continent for some 20,000 years before the invasion of the white man, or the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime paintings, or the native art of Polynesia that fascinated Gauguin, or the Iberian and West African carvings that inspired Picasso. To these add the cave-paintings at Lascaux.
Although we know very little about the Paleolithic artists who created the magnificent cave-paintings at Lascaux, there is one thing we can say for certain: they didn't study at the Sorbonne. The truth is that the international art establishment, with its credentials, canons and criteria, has no more idea of what constitutes great art or even of what constitutes art per se than the New York publishers have of what constitutes literature.
During the years of Rodia's residence in LA, 1921 to 1954, the city's population was growing. By applying US Census Bureau demographic indices to the population figures for the period we can estimate that there were, during Rodia's tour of duty, about 400,000 professional people—that is, 400,000 doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, judges and college professors—living and working in Los Angeles. These would have been primarily men, white men, affluent white men who enjoyed a moneyed lifestyle and the social and career benefits conferred by higher education. How many of these privileged individuals made a contribution of anything like the magnitude of that made by the illiterate Italian immigrant, Simon Rodia?
Simon Rodia was the hero of his own life. Out of the sorrow and disorder of his personal melodrama, he created an art that partakes of the transpersonal. The Marco Polo of his own imagination, Simon Rodia made a thirty-year odyssey, a voyage of discovery in a dream-ship, in a treasure ship called Watts Towers. He turned himself inside out, revealing the shining lineaments of his soul, made manifest in a work of visionary architecture that is both inspiring and redeeming.
I find it significant that Simon Rodia called his creation Nuestro Pueblo (italics mine). Not my town, but our town. Our town. Watts Towers was Rodia's gift to us, to Los Angeles, to his fellow Americans, and to the world.
As Americans, we are all of us immigrants, if we take the trouble to go back a few generations. Our ancestors came here from Europe and Africa, from Asia, from the Pacific Islands and from every other corner of the globe. For this reason, a valuable contribution made by a fellow immigrant—especially one fresh off the boat—moves us deeply. Here's Watts Towers, and one of our boys built it. So, hats off to you, Sam! Hats off to Simon Rodia, Architect of Dreams.
SIMON RODIA, ARCHITECT OF DREAMS
by
Donald O’Donovan
"Nothing is so rare on the part of any man as an act of his own."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire cat, when she disappeared, left her smile behind. Simon Rodia did the same thing. The Italian immigrant, born in Ribottoli at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, was here among us for 90 years, thirty-some of which he spent in Los Angeles. When he departed, Simon Rodia left behind his smile, Nuestro Pueblo, Watts Towers, a marvel of visionary architecture that soars above the desolation of South Central Los Angeles like a phoenix rising from its own ashes.
Simon Rodia's biographical details are sketchy, unremarkable and rather dreary. Named Sabato (Sabbath) Rodia by parents who wanted him to be a priest, he received little schooling and could neither read nor write Italian or English. As a teenager he followed his elder brother to America, possibly to evade the draft. After a stay in Pennsylvania, where his brother had settled, he moved to Seattle, then to Los Angeles where he took up the trade of tile-maker.
In his adopted country Sabato was known as "Sam" Rodia. However, the name "Simon"—a misapplication by a journalist in 1937—stuck, and Simon Rodia is the name that appears on the on-site plaque commemorating Watts Towers and the name by which Rodia is known to the world.
Two broken marriages, the death of a daughter, two sons from whom he was painfully estranged and rarely saw, a growing dependence on alcohol, and a life of toil in a country whose language he could scarcely speak or understand and whose customs were strange to him—this was Rodia's portion during his middle years. In later life he became increasingly withdrawn, solitary and single-mindedly preoccupied with the building of his fanciful creation on the site of his home at 1765 East 107th Street. To his neighbors in Watts Simon Rodia was an eccentric, an urban recluse, "that crazy Italian."
When Rodia began work on the Towers at the age of forty-two he had no patron or other source of financial aid. He held a full-time job, laboring eight hours a day as a tile setter and cement finisher, then worked evenings, weekends, and nights, in every kind of weather and at his own expense, to build the miniature walled city he called Nuestro Pueblo. Rodia built Watts Towers by hand, alone, over a thirty-year period, without machine tools, without nails or bolts, without scaffolding, without written plans, and without concern for financial reward. Simon Rodia had no Guggenheim Fellowship, nor was his monumental effort supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities or by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation or by any foundation. Watts Towers is thus a symbol of a creative endeavor that flies in the face of all odds, the great achievement of one man working alone without financial help or help of any kind to build his version of the Statue of Liberty, a gift to his adopted country, the whimsical kingdom of Nuestro Pueblo which today has become an art Mecca visited each year by thousands of people from all over the world.
Rodia's homemade Taj Mahal both astounds and delights the eye with the chromatic brilliance and endless inventiveness of its pinnacle spires and loop-the-loops and the bright decorative detail of its Byzantine mosaics. Broken symmetry and a freewheeling juxtaposition of unexpected objects lend a Coney Island ambiance to this architectural fantasy at the end of a dead-end street in one of the world's most inhuman cities. Watts Towers is a cohesive work consisting of seventeen sculptures including, in addition to the towers, a gazebo, a north and south wall, and the Ship of Marco Polo, the mast and tall spires of which are appropriately encrusted with hundreds of seashells, giving the brightly-tiled vessel the look of a dream galleon or a jeweled Venetian gondola carved from white marble.
In his artful assemblage Rodia has achieved what one might call "reverse trivialization." Commonplace objects, taken out of their usual context and presented in a playful and imaginative way, reveal their intrinsic mystery and wonder, making us suddenly see them as through the eyes of a person from a distant century or a distant planet, or through the eyes of a child.
In 1921, when Rodia bought his house at 1765 East 107th Street, Watts was a peaceful urban village squatting beside the railroad tracks. Neighbors knew each other and doors were left unlocked. Chickens scratched and pecked in every yard and each family had a cow, a horse or two, and a windmill for pumping water. The story of Watts is in fact a history-in-microcosm of the evolution of Los Angeles: from Eden to Armageddon in the space of a few generations. It is out of this milieu, the "magnificent desolation" of Los Angeles, that Rodia's fantasy kingdom rises like a beacon of welcome to everyone who has not been assimilated by the machine culture.
What was the source of Rodia's inspiration? Certainly not his surroundings. Rather, his inspiration almost certainly came from the magical memories of his Compania childhood, somehow kept alive in his heart inviolate and untouched by the sordidness and banality of his outer world. Springing as he did from the Italian master-builder tradition, it was Simon Rodia's manifest destiny to create Watts Towers. As a boy, from the steep medieval streets of his Compania hill town near Nola, Rodia would have seen the cathedral spires of Naples, and in Nola the great Roman mosaics and the beribboned wooden towers carried in the Festival of Lilies, celebrating San Gennaro, Nola's patron saint. It is also reasonable to assume that as a child he visited the Romanesque cathedral at Matera, and that he saw, at least from the shore, Castel dell'Ovo, built in 1154 by William I on the island of Megaris in the Bay of Naples at the foot of Mount Vesuvius.
Is Watts Towers folk art, outsider art, art brut, or no art at all? This question is best left to the international art establishment with its penchant for classification and its ingrained reluctance to recognize any artist who has not studied at the Sorbonne, the National Academy of Design, the New York Academy of Art or the School of Fine Arts. Artists who conform to the conventions of the latest chic are judged to be good or great and those who work outside of the current vogue are ignored. Yet it is precisely the rigid structure of these arbitrary schools of art that often prevents vital and innovative work, and the most valuable artists are those who have not come under the deadening and stultifying influence of academic mentors. To realize the truth of this we have only to look at the stunning artifacts left behind by the Native American peoples who flourished on "our" continent for some 20,000 years before the invasion of the white man, or the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime paintings, or the native art of Polynesia that fascinated Gauguin, or the Iberian and West African carvings that inspired Picasso. To these add the cave-paintings at Lascaux.
Although we know very little about the Paleolithic artists who created the magnificent cave-paintings at Lascaux, there is one thing we can say for certain: they didn't study at the Sorbonne. The truth is that the international art establishment, with its credentials, canons and criteria, has no more idea of what constitutes great art or even of what constitutes art per se than the New York publishers have of what constitutes literature.
During the years of Rodia's residence in LA, 1921 to 1954, the city's population was growing. By applying US Census Bureau demographic indices to the population figures for the period we can estimate that there were, during Rodia's tour of duty, about 400,000 professional people—that is, 400,000 doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, judges and college professors—living and working in Los Angeles. These would have been primarily men, white men, affluent white men who enjoyed a moneyed lifestyle and the social and career benefits conferred by higher education. How many of these privileged individuals made a contribution of anything like the magnitude of that made by the illiterate Italian immigrant, Simon Rodia?
Simon Rodia was the hero of his own life. Out of the sorrow and disorder of his personal melodrama, he created an art that partakes of the transpersonal. The Marco Polo of his own imagination, Simon Rodia made a thirty-year odyssey, a voyage of discovery in a dream-ship, in a treasure ship called Watts Towers. He turned himself inside out, revealing the shining lineaments of his soul, made manifest in a work of visionary architecture that is both inspiring and redeeming.
I find it significant that Simon Rodia called his creation Nuestro Pueblo (italics mine). Not my town, but our town. Our town. Watts Towers was Rodia's gift to us, to Los Angeles, to his fellow Americans, and to the world.
As Americans, we are all of us immigrants, if we take the trouble to go back a few generations. Our ancestors came here from Europe and Africa, from Asia, from the Pacific Islands and from every other corner of the globe. For this reason, a valuable contribution made by a fellow immigrant—especially one fresh off the boat—moves us deeply. Here's Watts Towers, and one of our boys built it. So, hats off to you, Sam! Hats off to Simon Rodia, Architect of Dreams.
POEMS - John Greeves
π
Pi the symbol of life
with digits never repeating
themselves. One of nature’s
precursors with the certainty
of laws bound in circles; a golden
ratio of antiquity, relating the
inner circumference of knowledge
and numbered lives, to our paths
trod in never ending cycles beyond
the constancy of time and space
towards a new infinity.
The One and Nines
I used to like films with brief encounters,
heroes and heroines,
the distant clatter of steam, separating strangers,
as sharp locomotives penetrated the darkness
of her long look back.
Back then, on a Saturday night,
I liked the moment when the curtain rustled,
lights dimmed like anguished yellow eyes,
while celluloid fish flickered for a second
in blue wisps of expectant smoke,
before the lion roared.
I liked the timeless melodies;
the interlace of love and dread,
in throated lumps,
as Sam played it again,
while half the town whimpered,
as the heroine cried
to lift the greyness from our days.
I liked the magnificence of old Hollywood,
white ties and tails,
crystal voices, ephemeral glamour,
which freed us from the northern grim,
bought riches to our ragged Cinderella town.
I liked the make belief of hope
it gave to ordinary lives…
the possibility of love,
viewed from afar,
in the last row of the one and nines,
where true heroes and heroines embraced,
the misty close-up of a lingered kiss.
QUOTE - Heraclitus
"Even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe."
POEM - Doug Draime
Dragons On The Cliffs
There were dragons
clinging to the cliffs,
he swore. Gentle
dragons that talked
nonstop as he
drank his cheap port
on the huge rocks
by the shoreline.
Dragons without
fire and inhalation
flaming from
all their orifices.
Three of them, he said.
One was pitch black as
darkest night, one was
pale blue like the sky
on sunny days,
and the other a dark olive
from the depths
of the forrest. They told
him they had lived among
humans in the beginning
peacefully,
before man chose to turn
from the light and
separate from creation,
to fabricate division among
all creatures of the earth.
Then came the mad and foul
dragon slayers; war and
mayhem. Dragon claws
served on sliver platters.
Their brothers’ heads torched in
bonfires across the universe.
The old ragged wino
stopped talking
for a moment and
pointed to the cliffs,
his hand shaking; his rank
breath of port and
cigarettes,
unredeemed.
“They were right there,
just an hour go, before you
got here, when the big orange
sun was sinking
down into the Pacific,
they were
talking like crazy men.
And they told me other
real crazy shit, that they
told me never to repeat
to a living soul,”
He smiled slightly, as he took
another blast of port,
and just wandered away
staggering down the beach,
a man that had seen
another world.
POEM - Stellasue Lee,
A Continuous Spectrum of Color
How is it possible not to feel forgiveness
when all our maples open red, color
of bravery, purity, happiness, heat,
and fire. Our river birches unfurl in green
as if Saint Patrick’s Day were a holiday
they had to honor all Spring. As dusk settles
I can smell yams baking in the oven. The sky
fills with purple. Christopher Smart wrote
that purple is black blooming, but also it’s the color
of royalty, imperialism, nobility, Easter,
Mardi Gras, wisdom and rage. I know purple
will fade. Night will fall. I will lay my body down
and I will sleep. Ah, but my mind, now that
is a different color altogether. It continues…
forgive, forgive, until morning steals in
on rays of orange, the color of healing, of power.
π
Pi the symbol of life
with digits never repeating
themselves. One of nature’s
precursors with the certainty
of laws bound in circles; a golden
ratio of antiquity, relating the
inner circumference of knowledge
and numbered lives, to our paths
trod in never ending cycles beyond
the constancy of time and space
towards a new infinity.
The One and Nines
I used to like films with brief encounters,
heroes and heroines,
the distant clatter of steam, separating strangers,
as sharp locomotives penetrated the darkness
of her long look back.
Back then, on a Saturday night,
I liked the moment when the curtain rustled,
lights dimmed like anguished yellow eyes,
while celluloid fish flickered for a second
in blue wisps of expectant smoke,
before the lion roared.
I liked the timeless melodies;
the interlace of love and dread,
in throated lumps,
as Sam played it again,
while half the town whimpered,
as the heroine cried
to lift the greyness from our days.
I liked the magnificence of old Hollywood,
white ties and tails,
crystal voices, ephemeral glamour,
which freed us from the northern grim,
bought riches to our ragged Cinderella town.
I liked the make belief of hope
it gave to ordinary lives…
the possibility of love,
viewed from afar,
in the last row of the one and nines,
where true heroes and heroines embraced,
the misty close-up of a lingered kiss.
QUOTE - Heraclitus
"Even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe."
POEM - Doug Draime
Dragons On The Cliffs
There were dragons
clinging to the cliffs,
he swore. Gentle
dragons that talked
nonstop as he
drank his cheap port
on the huge rocks
by the shoreline.
Dragons without
fire and inhalation
flaming from
all their orifices.
Three of them, he said.
One was pitch black as
darkest night, one was
pale blue like the sky
on sunny days,
and the other a dark olive
from the depths
of the forrest. They told
him they had lived among
humans in the beginning
peacefully,
before man chose to turn
from the light and
separate from creation,
to fabricate division among
all creatures of the earth.
Then came the mad and foul
dragon slayers; war and
mayhem. Dragon claws
served on sliver platters.
Their brothers’ heads torched in
bonfires across the universe.
The old ragged wino
stopped talking
for a moment and
pointed to the cliffs,
his hand shaking; his rank
breath of port and
cigarettes,
unredeemed.
“They were right there,
just an hour go, before you
got here, when the big orange
sun was sinking
down into the Pacific,
they were
talking like crazy men.
And they told me other
real crazy shit, that they
told me never to repeat
to a living soul,”
He smiled slightly, as he took
another blast of port,
and just wandered away
staggering down the beach,
a man that had seen
another world.
POEM - Stellasue Lee,
A Continuous Spectrum of Color
How is it possible not to feel forgiveness
when all our maples open red, color
of bravery, purity, happiness, heat,
and fire. Our river birches unfurl in green
as if Saint Patrick’s Day were a holiday
they had to honor all Spring. As dusk settles
I can smell yams baking in the oven. The sky
fills with purple. Christopher Smart wrote
that purple is black blooming, but also it’s the color
of royalty, imperialism, nobility, Easter,
Mardi Gras, wisdom and rage. I know purple
will fade. Night will fall. I will lay my body down
and I will sleep. Ah, but my mind, now that
is a different color altogether. It continues…
forgive, forgive, until morning steals in
on rays of orange, the color of healing, of power.
SHORT STORY
RETURN TO HADES
John Greeves
It’s the third week of September and already many of the Athenians have boarded up their summer homes and headed back to the city. There’s a minute change to the season on the island of Skyros, you sense it in this strange expectation, as if summer is shifting gently with Persephone to another place.
Pomegranates are shortly to be harvested, along with the quinces, fennel leaves and root, the peppers and radishes and the beans. The sky has lost its concentrated blueness and there’s capriciousness about the light. People still sunbathe on the beach, but outside the tavernas, sun umbrellas and loungers are all being brought in for the winter. There’s a feeling of unease, as if nature is reclaiming itself and human beings like everything else must be tidied away to let the land sleep. All through the summer, the gods have sounded from rocky caverns; though rational explanations would have us believe this is due to plate tectonics and other scientific explanation.
The rain hasn’t fallen for three months and the narrow paths, which snake their way up and down the town, slithering and diverging, undulating and dipping, rising and falling, their surfaces glinting like mirrored glass from the passage of endless feet remain bone dry. It’s as if these stones bear the imprint of memory lined in their irregular tortoiseshell of marbled blacks, cream and mottled browns. Paths, which twist and turn and wind themselves high above the white stepped houses to the ancient citadel above, where Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur was thrown from the cliff by Lycomedes, King of Skyros.
Skyrian houses enclose these narrow paths. They’re the ancestors of fortified towers and these later structures rise up similarly around a square base. The houses have become sleeker over the years, the course rock walls rendered and coated in white, a blue wavering line skirting a no man’s land between the descending wall and the path delineates the boundaries. Windows are hung with wooden shutters and verandas and balconies decked with climbing plants and metal furniture. Inside, a wide convex fireplace occupies a corner of the room, above a carved wooden platform or mezzanine level projects itself across the room. Everywhere is miniaturised, like a ‘Sylvanian’ toy house with crockery and wares on show around the walls. The traditional child sized furniture has been removed and modern fittings added in overblown proportions for the tourist. The room hums with the recently installed air conditioning and there are casual wires sprawling from some of the fittings.
Tonight the air is heavy and charged, and no end of twisting and turning in bed or casting off the flimsy sheet can arrest this feeling of unease. My suitcase looks pregnant, its lid stretched over a hastily assembled lump. But it’s time for sleep and not worrying about impeccable packing. I will be leaving early in the morning, so I’ll need my rest.
Zeus, lord of the sky, rain god, cloud gatherer, bringer of thunderbolts and storm has suddenly been awoken. There’s no doubting his unruly voice. The ground quakes, and the dark room is lit momentarily in a ghostly hue, as the hills fill with the rumble of thunder. The rain is intense beating on the outside table like an over taut kettledrum. It’s relentless, as if Zeus has been dragged from the slumber of his bed by some half-witted human and is now hammering down curses from above. The bedside light flickers and then cuts out, as the storm continues, until it greets the early morning greyness of the rising day.
Breakfast has moved inside when I meet the others in the centre above. The large terrace where we all used to sit, looking down at the donkey track to the sea is clothed in depressing wetness of departure. Not even the crows venture out to remonstrate against the day. The rain hasn’t stopped and only moderates slightly, in its crescendo of rapid arpeggio. We’re not prepared, but have to ensure all our travelling arrangements are linked together, if we are to return home today. Wearing a plastic carrier bag on your head does nothing to enhance the day.
A small truck, we are told, will pick up the suitcases after it has zigzagged through a maze of twisting streets. It’s a round about way from the far side of town and the only route possible by a small four wheeled vehicle to get vaguely near us.
Our luggage lies heaped at a pick up point awaiting collection in the driving rain.
We will walk through town following an inclined path, flanked by tavernas and shops and out past the central square and out onto a tarmac road where we will catch the public bus to the port and the ferry to the island of Evia.
Normally, the walk to the square takes about ten minutes, but today is different. We hope to find our luggage at the port, before the ferry heads off, then it’s a coach round this island, before we catch another ferry to the mainland and board the coach once again for Athens and the airport.
The rain hasn’t abated. I feel a sudden sympathy for Noah and how he must have appeared to his detractors, as he went about his business, as inconspicuously as possible, building his ark, before the great flood came.
It would have been better, if I had been forewarned about this weather and not dressed in a formal shirt and lightweight beige trousers. I’ve made an effort, smartened up for my return. They don’t expect me turning up at home like a beach bum at the end of a holiday. ‘You’ve had your break’ they’ll say, ‘now it’s time to…’ I can hear their voices ringing in my ears.
Within seconds of venturing out, I feel my clothes clinging to me. Is it possible to feel so wet, so that water becomes another layer beneath clothes and skin? But this is nothing to the mountain torrent that has replaced the path, so that it tears over ridges in white frothed anger and threatens to drag all before it. Now we understand why there is no street drainage. The town is built along the natural watercourses, which sweep down from the rocky hillsides. I have seen dried up rivers on the other side of the island, but no one warned us about this!
‘We can’t go on,’ I can hear a voice behind me. But, there’s no alternative, so one by one we wade through the water. The foaming torrent is more spectacular than forceful, and by staying close to the side of the building it’s possible to make progress way slowly through the rapid streams. We’re all bedraggled when we climb on the bus at the other side of the town. The bus driver seems unconcerned, as if things like this happen every day.
My watch face has steamed up. A Greek cosmos has entered the face, one of Zeus’s jokes, blurring time and the warm embracing sunshine I felt for a while. The tiny drops are reminders of the casual talk and laughter and those enduring memories we all shared.
It seems far removed from that final evening and the lingering goodbyes that happened hours ago. ‘We must stay in touch,’ seems like a washed out hope, when there are ferries and planes to catch today. I’m sure that after our eventual return, they’re will be the usual flurry of e-mails, holiday photographs for a while, then memories will start to fade as people return to another existence. I wonder when a memory finally becomes solidified in time.
The following Saturday, I glance at the watch face, there’s still the disc of condensation. The jeweller suggests I buy another watch. He’s very philosophical, claiming nothing these days lasts, including shoes, bicycle inner tubes, let alone misted up watches last. ‘They’re a hindrance to a busy life’ he claims ‘and best replaced as soon as possible.’ I’m not so sure what he means, memories or misted up watches, and leave the shop slightly perturbed. I’m not ready to let my watch go that easily.
There’s a large haze of mizzled droplets within the watch that has started to contract like the pupil of the eye. Numbers and time has reappeared by my first day at work. By the end of the week, water resistance to a 100m has emerged behind the damp eye, and the second hand is followed by a minute wake. The contents of my suitcase have long been unpacked, and whites separated from colour. The days seem bleak outside. By week two, the sphere inside my watch face, has shrunk to the size of a five pence piece. It’s become symbolic like one of those O. Henry stories with a prophetic bent. In his story ‘The Last Leaf ’, Johnsy lies in bed with pneumonia counting the falling leaves. She’s determined to die, when the last leaf falls. It’s as if my watch has taken on a new symbolism of waning memories and I wonder what will happen when it finally clears.
E-mails have become less frequent and the photographs have been stored away on the shelf. The Cyclops in my watch has shrunk at an alarming rate to become an unperceivable dot. By the following Monday, no one in work mentions holidays, it’s as if all memories have departed and my watch has finally stopped.
POEMS - Paul Murphy
Electra
Is expressionist sunlight on the grave’s slanted mirror.
Has become a complete index of numerous lies
Myths, trembling sensuous poetical dreams
Lank hair torn at its roots, hair is braided, tied back
Arms, legs, torso tangled together and the knowledge
Is somehow impaled on the rich white light
Of the moon’s succumbing glories, tenuous like egg white,
Orange rind, wasted purposes, antinomies.
Elektra is dust in her Sophoclean splendour
She mouths the word sister, sister, sister.
Salome
Has been bitchslapped, wants to fuck the lifeless torso
Of John someone, who, let’s face it, is getting what
He deserves. Dance Salome until rosy glowing light
Fills your breasts, caresses your moist cunt.
Then the head of John is conceived, delivered
Into the hands of political Herods who know
That blood, blood, blood drips and drips
Down your ass, legs, splendidly petit breasts.
Your dancing ecstatically because John is dead.
The evil fucking woman hating liar is dead.
POEM-EXCERPTS - Richard Jurgens
From The Cyprus Accord
13.
we’re fans of some of the same writers
the older deader safer ones maybe
we share a delight in Vanity Fair
(the book of Becky Sharp of course
she doesn’t think much of the American rag)
and we both admire the passion
of Emily’s Wuthering Heights
and the roistering of Tom Jones
and all of Dickens naturally
that great explorer
of the English genius for pathology
the moderns are a source
however of some dissonance between us
Hanif Kureishi is okay in little doses
his Intimacy quite good
but she absolutely will not read
anything by Bruce Chatwin
a real writer wouldn’t be so handsome
and nothing either by that heavy intellectual
monsieur Milan Kundera
she grew up gaming with the lads
and goes by Grand Theft Auto Girl online
she’s generation X for god’s sake
and kids these days will think she’s old
and even she considers that
the heroes of my youth
are dead as dinosaurs really
and no one reads them anymore
17.
I haven’t been too nice to you she said
I think I’ve been quite naughty
and naughty girls need punishment
but somehow I don’t think you’d blindfold me
and strap me to the bed and strip me naked
and have me all weekend that way
you wouldn’t have the balls to do that
would you?
18.
We walk around the city, arm in arm.
We’re staying in a boutique hotel, mitteleuropa zen, in
the 1st District. A great last-minute deal.
The summer air is as thick and velvety as the juice of
a freshly roasted coffee bean.
If we want to, we can do anything together.
We want to.
Though you never know.
I don’t know why I told that story of a country girl
who arrives in Vienna for the first time.
And the first thing she sees is a woman in a fur going into a shining department store,
leading a black panther on a golden chain.
And the manager, the under-manager, and the floor staff line up to bow the vision and
her creature through the gilded door.
The story is true. It happened in Europe quite recently. Can you imagine?
But your phone is switched off.
Well, I need my space sometimes too.
I’m enjoying the smell of the roses in the Volksgarten.
And eiskaffee. Probably Vienna’s best contribution to
culture, civilization and etc.
This notepaper was provided by the Café Meierei.
21.
she listens to the silent world
the leaves that rustle in the street
the hum of a sleeping city
she listens to the man who’s breathing
on the truckle bed that they allow him here
for all the nurses on the ward agree
hers is a tragic story
and she recalls the day
when specialists she’d never seen before
arrived all in a solemn flurry
to talk about the test results
and in the room the thermostat
plunged suddenly to zero
and all she wanted then
was certainty
(well years?
or months?
or weeks?)
but they wouldn’t be specific
she looks into the darkness
she thinks about this city
where she has spent it seems
the last years of her life
she thinks about the house she shares
with someone who she loves
and wishes she did not
the place will be a tip quite probably
and need a three-day clean-up
and it is strange to know
where your last memories were lived
she thinks about her parents too
the silent Sunday dinners
when she flew home to visit
the off-key jokes about her time abroad
and questions when she planned to start her life
at home as any normal person should
and how ironic it is now
that they are visiting at last
and at this hour she recalls
how she’d dreamed of living
to see her child grow up
her son who’s sleeping in the new-born ward
and sometimes wishes none of this were true
and nothing that she knew existed
for if we do not love our world
we cannot lose by leaving it
she’s thinking now
an attitude of non-attachment
would make it easier to go
QUOTE - James Joyce
"The important thing is not what we write, but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously: everything is inclined to flux and change nowadays and modern literature, to be valid, must express that flux. . . "
POEMS - Nina Zivancevic
Andy Warhol’s Factory
When I ran into you at the Tower Records’s
You were with Jackie Curtis who was about
To marry Peter, or someone else you invited me
To the wedding and Gerard Malanga followed in
With Leo Castelli who was the guest of honour at
Jackie's wedding and the amphetamines were taking
A walk on all sides of the street which was a dock in
The Meat District and West Highway
Where I was trying to find my way out
And you were such a big star Andy,
And now this posthumous show at le Grand Parlays in Paris
Like I said in my postscript I am glad that I’m still alive
And breathing and
You are posted for eternity
Society
They
Should not get
Used too much
To my presence said I
At the Academy of French Poets
In their Senate full of the elderly
And the mentally handicapped
The walls were thick with stupidity
And sadness and all their patrons of art
Prone to some subtle form of madness,
Doggerel is what they’d write
If you gave them a pen, a lecture
On the Beat generation if I found time
To do it, oh man!
Society,
I’ve kept you on a leash
For quite a long time,
You’ve howled and barked
And snivelled at my door and
Whenever you tried to visit me
I threw you a bone, and
Whenever you tried to get close to me
I shut my windows open.
Love Is Just A Four-Lettered Word
(Sonnet for my Ex)
Shall I compare thee to a winter’s day?
You are colder, more tempestuous, duller and
More painful than any climate ever
Experienced by a mortal made in clay
Wherever you move you exude stupid and icy airs
So self-assured and aggrandising, you tortured
My soul with fluff and moralizing
As you don’t read, my master of half-bigotry,
You confuse the words ‘fuck’ and ‘love’ and then
Call them Nina’s poetry, after all, they’re all four lettered
and in the end what really matters is that you can
live without my letters
pink, orange, yellow and banana, your colours shine
I am so happy living so far away from your cheery shrine!
POEM - Stewart Sanderson
Sumerian Bull Figurine
There are reasons in its curves, the geometric slant
of neck and fetlock, requiring that we give
consideration – the lack of final cant
resolving it. Stone cannot be resolved
by human questions, any more than it
would yield to force. Our eyes meet roughshod slate
and bounce back asking. Like an open ended grate
put over subjectivity: a pit.
Like the one it came from. Dug out from under thick
stratigraphy, piled up as long as death
made us recoil from this refractive life
which is a mirror. It resists us from that trench
to the market shelf. Now here, scarred by the breath
of history, it holds those reasons like a knife.
Electra
Is expressionist sunlight on the grave’s slanted mirror.
Has become a complete index of numerous lies
Myths, trembling sensuous poetical dreams
Lank hair torn at its roots, hair is braided, tied back
Arms, legs, torso tangled together and the knowledge
Is somehow impaled on the rich white light
Of the moon’s succumbing glories, tenuous like egg white,
Orange rind, wasted purposes, antinomies.
Elektra is dust in her Sophoclean splendour
She mouths the word sister, sister, sister.
Salome
Has been bitchslapped, wants to fuck the lifeless torso
Of John someone, who, let’s face it, is getting what
He deserves. Dance Salome until rosy glowing light
Fills your breasts, caresses your moist cunt.
Then the head of John is conceived, delivered
Into the hands of political Herods who know
That blood, blood, blood drips and drips
Down your ass, legs, splendidly petit breasts.
Your dancing ecstatically because John is dead.
The evil fucking woman hating liar is dead.
POEM-EXCERPTS - Richard Jurgens
From The Cyprus Accord
13.
we’re fans of some of the same writers
the older deader safer ones maybe
we share a delight in Vanity Fair
(the book of Becky Sharp of course
she doesn’t think much of the American rag)
and we both admire the passion
of Emily’s Wuthering Heights
and the roistering of Tom Jones
and all of Dickens naturally
that great explorer
of the English genius for pathology
the moderns are a source
however of some dissonance between us
Hanif Kureishi is okay in little doses
his Intimacy quite good
but she absolutely will not read
anything by Bruce Chatwin
a real writer wouldn’t be so handsome
and nothing either by that heavy intellectual
monsieur Milan Kundera
she grew up gaming with the lads
and goes by Grand Theft Auto Girl online
she’s generation X for god’s sake
and kids these days will think she’s old
and even she considers that
the heroes of my youth
are dead as dinosaurs really
and no one reads them anymore
17.
I haven’t been too nice to you she said
I think I’ve been quite naughty
and naughty girls need punishment
but somehow I don’t think you’d blindfold me
and strap me to the bed and strip me naked
and have me all weekend that way
you wouldn’t have the balls to do that
would you?
18.
We walk around the city, arm in arm.
We’re staying in a boutique hotel, mitteleuropa zen, in
the 1st District. A great last-minute deal.
The summer air is as thick and velvety as the juice of
a freshly roasted coffee bean.
If we want to, we can do anything together.
We want to.
Though you never know.
I don’t know why I told that story of a country girl
who arrives in Vienna for the first time.
And the first thing she sees is a woman in a fur going into a shining department store,
leading a black panther on a golden chain.
And the manager, the under-manager, and the floor staff line up to bow the vision and
her creature through the gilded door.
The story is true. It happened in Europe quite recently. Can you imagine?
But your phone is switched off.
Well, I need my space sometimes too.
I’m enjoying the smell of the roses in the Volksgarten.
And eiskaffee. Probably Vienna’s best contribution to
culture, civilization and etc.
This notepaper was provided by the Café Meierei.
21.
she listens to the silent world
the leaves that rustle in the street
the hum of a sleeping city
she listens to the man who’s breathing
on the truckle bed that they allow him here
for all the nurses on the ward agree
hers is a tragic story
and she recalls the day
when specialists she’d never seen before
arrived all in a solemn flurry
to talk about the test results
and in the room the thermostat
plunged suddenly to zero
and all she wanted then
was certainty
(well years?
or months?
or weeks?)
but they wouldn’t be specific
she looks into the darkness
she thinks about this city
where she has spent it seems
the last years of her life
she thinks about the house she shares
with someone who she loves
and wishes she did not
the place will be a tip quite probably
and need a three-day clean-up
and it is strange to know
where your last memories were lived
she thinks about her parents too
the silent Sunday dinners
when she flew home to visit
the off-key jokes about her time abroad
and questions when she planned to start her life
at home as any normal person should
and how ironic it is now
that they are visiting at last
and at this hour she recalls
how she’d dreamed of living
to see her child grow up
her son who’s sleeping in the new-born ward
and sometimes wishes none of this were true
and nothing that she knew existed
for if we do not love our world
we cannot lose by leaving it
she’s thinking now
an attitude of non-attachment
would make it easier to go
QUOTE - James Joyce
"The important thing is not what we write, but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously: everything is inclined to flux and change nowadays and modern literature, to be valid, must express that flux. . . "
POEMS - Nina Zivancevic
Andy Warhol’s Factory
When I ran into you at the Tower Records’s
You were with Jackie Curtis who was about
To marry Peter, or someone else you invited me
To the wedding and Gerard Malanga followed in
With Leo Castelli who was the guest of honour at
Jackie's wedding and the amphetamines were taking
A walk on all sides of the street which was a dock in
The Meat District and West Highway
Where I was trying to find my way out
And you were such a big star Andy,
And now this posthumous show at le Grand Parlays in Paris
Like I said in my postscript I am glad that I’m still alive
And breathing and
You are posted for eternity
Society
They
Should not get
Used too much
To my presence said I
At the Academy of French Poets
In their Senate full of the elderly
And the mentally handicapped
The walls were thick with stupidity
And sadness and all their patrons of art
Prone to some subtle form of madness,
Doggerel is what they’d write
If you gave them a pen, a lecture
On the Beat generation if I found time
To do it, oh man!
Society,
I’ve kept you on a leash
For quite a long time,
You’ve howled and barked
And snivelled at my door and
Whenever you tried to visit me
I threw you a bone, and
Whenever you tried to get close to me
I shut my windows open.
Love Is Just A Four-Lettered Word
(Sonnet for my Ex)
Shall I compare thee to a winter’s day?
You are colder, more tempestuous, duller and
More painful than any climate ever
Experienced by a mortal made in clay
Wherever you move you exude stupid and icy airs
So self-assured and aggrandising, you tortured
My soul with fluff and moralizing
As you don’t read, my master of half-bigotry,
You confuse the words ‘fuck’ and ‘love’ and then
Call them Nina’s poetry, after all, they’re all four lettered
and in the end what really matters is that you can
live without my letters
pink, orange, yellow and banana, your colours shine
I am so happy living so far away from your cheery shrine!
POEM - Stewart Sanderson
Sumerian Bull Figurine
There are reasons in its curves, the geometric slant
of neck and fetlock, requiring that we give
consideration – the lack of final cant
resolving it. Stone cannot be resolved
by human questions, any more than it
would yield to force. Our eyes meet roughshod slate
and bounce back asking. Like an open ended grate
put over subjectivity: a pit.
Like the one it came from. Dug out from under thick
stratigraphy, piled up as long as death
made us recoil from this refractive life
which is a mirror. It resists us from that trench
to the market shelf. Now here, scarred by the breath
of history, it holds those reasons like a knife.
REVIEW
YAYOI KUSAMA RETROSPECTIVE AT THE TATE MODERN
Yayoi Kusama (1929-) was born in Nagano Prefecture in a hill town in the Japanese Alps about 130 miles west of Tokyo just before the second world war. She grew up in a traditional Japanese family with a traditional set of Japanese values that maintained that a woman should complete her education, then marry and have children. However, Yayoi possessed creativity and wanted to fulfill herself through her art rather than taking on a traditional role. This meant that she soon came into direct opposition to her family and especially her mother.
Her parent's business was marketing seeds and they were very opposed to Yayoi's artistic vocation. However she managed to complete one year of art school training in Kyoto in 1948 but the constraints of family, gender and being Japanese led her to rebel against these constraints and to become familiar with contemporary American culture but also the legacy of French surrealism, experimental art and the techniques of frottage found in Max Ernst and the work of the Catalan artist Joan Miro. Her work is often a symbiosis of the vegetal, physical and human and it is often marked by her own experience of war and the defeat of her country in WW2.
Kusama's work has often been compared to that of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and to her colleague Eva Hesse (1936-1970) and perhaps her real strength as an artist lies in her painting rather than her sculptures which do seem to resemble closely the work of Hesse, for instance. Kusame's works seem to reflect on an existence found somewhere between the mountains and the seashore since there are so many references to the maritime and the aquatic, to the sea's edge, to seaweed, tendrils, to underwater sea anemones that also resemble dildos, to floating sperm that might also be floating sea wrack, to roots that wind and wind around each other and disappear into the depths of the ocean or to the infinite horizon. Kusame has expressed her dread of both phalli and industrially produced foodstuffs hence the repetition of symbols of phalli and also mass-produced pasta which is literally stuck onto her canvases.
In 1957 Kusama moved to America at the behest of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) who she was previously in correspondence with. At first she lived in Seattle but eventually moved to New York where she became a colleague of the American artist Donald Judd, completed an important set of large abstract works presented here as the Infinity Net Paintings which were probably a response to the Abstract Expressionism of artists like Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), the then dominant aesthetic movement in America. Kusama joined the New York avante garde, her ambition was to rival the paintings of the great abstract expressionists. However she moved on swiftly from the public sphere of art museums and public competitions to the private realm of commerce, moving her preoccupations from high art to pop art. Her interests and activities embraced soft sculpture, installations, collage. By the mid 60's she had moved to the street, involving herself in 'happenings' which placed the artist at the centre of her own work rather than her earlier works which were more impersonal. She also worked on films, multi-part sculptures and eventually, by the 1980s and 1990s, to the brightly coloured phatasmagoric canvases which are the continuous diaristic renderings of what the artist sees today. She now works with acrylic paint, a temporary, fast drying medium which is the antithesis of traditional oil painting with its evocation of the work of the Great Masters.
Her sculptures evoke tentacular creatures as in Heaven and Earth (1991) and brittle mosaics as in her work Prisoner's Door (1994). Her artwork is typically eclectic, utilising a mix of mediums such as ink, ballpoint pen, watercolour, gouache and india ink. In her work Yellow Trees (1994) endless tentacles or roots are folding and unfolding through and around each other. In Sprouting (The Transmigration of the Soul) (1987) bubbling spermatozoa becomes a typical, synaptic patterning or Weeds (1996) with its infinite pattern, minimalist repetition and blank surface. The big acrylic canvases evoke brighter more buoyant work and a release from the dour abstraction of her repetitious collages of the 1970s which also summarise an entire decade of American pop art influence. The polka dot pattern that Kasume assumes throughout her work as a series of dots and nets as in I'm here but Nothing (2000/2012), a work which is a living room inverted through dim lights and the glistening coloured polka dots that cover everything.
Kasuma returned to Japan in the 1970s and feeling herself unable to cope with the real world self-admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital where she lives to this day, although she somehow escaped its confines to be with us at the opening of her retrospective event at the Tate Modern, London, earlier this week. She apparently makes the journey from the hospital to her studio everyday, returning each evening. This begs a question, why did she return to Japan, to its conservative, sterile confines which were ultimately summed up by the walls of the hospital that became her home? A work like I Who Committed Suicide (1977) seems to evoke this period and Kusame said at some point that without her art she would have committed suicide. The last exhibit is the Infinity Mirror Room, an installation which she first utilised in 1965, evoking as it does the infinite regress of art that moves between the earliest memories of the artist to the very last. Perhaps that's a good place to end this retrospective because the faded remains of those artworks summarise a life lived richly in a period of vast transition and energy between two worlds. These imply both beginnings and endings, east and west, tradition and revolution, sanity and madness or better still, the sensitivity of the artist in a world desensitised to subtlety, ambiguity, carefully arranged revolutionary statements or happenings bypassed by the conduits of power summed up in her invite to have sex with President Richard Nixon in return for ending the Vietnam War. Nixon never took up the invite but eventually had to end the Vietnam War anyway. He might as well have had sex with Yayoi then which goes to show just how stupid 'tricky Dicky' was.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London, February 2012
Her parent's business was marketing seeds and they were very opposed to Yayoi's artistic vocation. However she managed to complete one year of art school training in Kyoto in 1948 but the constraints of family, gender and being Japanese led her to rebel against these constraints and to become familiar with contemporary American culture but also the legacy of French surrealism, experimental art and the techniques of frottage found in Max Ernst and the work of the Catalan artist Joan Miro. Her work is often a symbiosis of the vegetal, physical and human and it is often marked by her own experience of war and the defeat of her country in WW2.
Kusama's work has often been compared to that of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and to her colleague Eva Hesse (1936-1970) and perhaps her real strength as an artist lies in her painting rather than her sculptures which do seem to resemble closely the work of Hesse, for instance. Kusame's works seem to reflect on an existence found somewhere between the mountains and the seashore since there are so many references to the maritime and the aquatic, to the sea's edge, to seaweed, tendrils, to underwater sea anemones that also resemble dildos, to floating sperm that might also be floating sea wrack, to roots that wind and wind around each other and disappear into the depths of the ocean or to the infinite horizon. Kusame has expressed her dread of both phalli and industrially produced foodstuffs hence the repetition of symbols of phalli and also mass-produced pasta which is literally stuck onto her canvases.
In 1957 Kusama moved to America at the behest of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) who she was previously in correspondence with. At first she lived in Seattle but eventually moved to New York where she became a colleague of the American artist Donald Judd, completed an important set of large abstract works presented here as the Infinity Net Paintings which were probably a response to the Abstract Expressionism of artists like Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), the then dominant aesthetic movement in America. Kusama joined the New York avante garde, her ambition was to rival the paintings of the great abstract expressionists. However she moved on swiftly from the public sphere of art museums and public competitions to the private realm of commerce, moving her preoccupations from high art to pop art. Her interests and activities embraced soft sculpture, installations, collage. By the mid 60's she had moved to the street, involving herself in 'happenings' which placed the artist at the centre of her own work rather than her earlier works which were more impersonal. She also worked on films, multi-part sculptures and eventually, by the 1980s and 1990s, to the brightly coloured phatasmagoric canvases which are the continuous diaristic renderings of what the artist sees today. She now works with acrylic paint, a temporary, fast drying medium which is the antithesis of traditional oil painting with its evocation of the work of the Great Masters.
Her sculptures evoke tentacular creatures as in Heaven and Earth (1991) and brittle mosaics as in her work Prisoner's Door (1994). Her artwork is typically eclectic, utilising a mix of mediums such as ink, ballpoint pen, watercolour, gouache and india ink. In her work Yellow Trees (1994) endless tentacles or roots are folding and unfolding through and around each other. In Sprouting (The Transmigration of the Soul) (1987) bubbling spermatozoa becomes a typical, synaptic patterning or Weeds (1996) with its infinite pattern, minimalist repetition and blank surface. The big acrylic canvases evoke brighter more buoyant work and a release from the dour abstraction of her repetitious collages of the 1970s which also summarise an entire decade of American pop art influence. The polka dot pattern that Kasume assumes throughout her work as a series of dots and nets as in I'm here but Nothing (2000/2012), a work which is a living room inverted through dim lights and the glistening coloured polka dots that cover everything.
Kasuma returned to Japan in the 1970s and feeling herself unable to cope with the real world self-admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital where she lives to this day, although she somehow escaped its confines to be with us at the opening of her retrospective event at the Tate Modern, London, earlier this week. She apparently makes the journey from the hospital to her studio everyday, returning each evening. This begs a question, why did she return to Japan, to its conservative, sterile confines which were ultimately summed up by the walls of the hospital that became her home? A work like I Who Committed Suicide (1977) seems to evoke this period and Kusame said at some point that without her art she would have committed suicide. The last exhibit is the Infinity Mirror Room, an installation which she first utilised in 1965, evoking as it does the infinite regress of art that moves between the earliest memories of the artist to the very last. Perhaps that's a good place to end this retrospective because the faded remains of those artworks summarise a life lived richly in a period of vast transition and energy between two worlds. These imply both beginnings and endings, east and west, tradition and revolution, sanity and madness or better still, the sensitivity of the artist in a world desensitised to subtlety, ambiguity, carefully arranged revolutionary statements or happenings bypassed by the conduits of power summed up in her invite to have sex with President Richard Nixon in return for ending the Vietnam War. Nixon never took up the invite but eventually had to end the Vietnam War anyway. He might as well have had sex with Yayoi then which goes to show just how stupid 'tricky Dicky' was.
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London, February 2012
ESSAY-REVIEW
THE SHAKESPEARE ENIGMA - Peter Dawkins
Polair Publishing, P O Box 34886, LondonW8 6YR
ISBN 0-9545389-4-3 (£15.99 + £3.50p&p)
www.polairpublishing.co.uk
I must confess to believing that the question of who wrote the plays of William Shakespeare is a very secondary academic question compared, for instance, to the question of who had Christopher Marlowe assassinated. After all, the latter question tells us very much more about the nature of power, and is therefore, in an age of similar political skulduggery, much more relevant to how we are governed, and to what lengths the powers-that-be are willing to go to suppress uncomfortable revelations about themselves. Don't forget Marlowe was a spy as well as a 'blabbermouth' who could not keep his atheistic opinions to himself and was therefore about to be tried for 'blasphemy'. (An interesting aspect of this is the fact that in Elizabethan times atheism was a capital offence because it denied the Divine Right of monarchs and was therefore considered treason - so poor old Kit Marlowe might have ended up hung, drawn and quartered instead of just stabbed in the eye!) Had his case gone to court, many unwelcome things about the English intelligence service at the time might have come to light, and it was necessary to avoid that possibility. We should also never forget that Marlowe's murderer was given a royal pardon even before his case went to trial. The story that has come down to us that Marlowe was killed in a tavern-brawl over the price of a meal should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt, I believe. It has always been a very convenient one for the powers-that-be, since it stops people asking further questions. However, since the question of who wrote Shakespeare seems to be the only game in town these days, perhaps we should play it and see where it gets us.
The Shakespeare Enigma (First published in 2005, though still in print, I believe.) by Peter Dawkins is scholarly, well-researched and extremely meticulous as regards the details of the case he is trying to present, which is, namely, that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare. If I have found this book as fascinating as I have, it is partly because of the insights it gives concerning the actual politics of the Elizabethan era - especially the episodes surrounding the different court-factions and the whole Essex affair and the use of Shakespeare's play, Richard II, in Essex's rebellion against the Queen - as well as what it has to say regarding the esoteric wisdom-traditions which formed much of the background at the time Shakespeare and Bacon were writing. It is also an extremely good - if at times somewhat hagiographical - biography of Francis Bacon, who was one of the most important intellectual and political figures of his time. But for all this, I remained unconvinced about much of the argument, which depended too much on what I thought was largely circumstantial evidence and the kinds of coded encryptions that Alan Turing would be hard put to unravel, although Dawkins, it must be said, does a pretty good job. To give just one example of the former, the name Antonio appears a number of times in Shakespeare’s plays. For Dawkins, that indicates, somehow, that their real author, Francis Bacon, had his beloved older brother, Anthony Bacon, in mind while writing them. And to give an example of the latter, what for example should we make of the following passage? "The Bacon rebus incorporated in the Dionysian headpiece of the Shakespeare Folio is formed by two rabbits sitting prominently in the two upper corners of the picture, balanced in an extraordinary way on scrolls of flowering vegetation. They are each facing outwards, in the opposite direction and away from the centre of the emblem: hence they are sitting back to back. Since the common name for rabbit was cony (the word is used several times in Shakespeare's plays, for instance,) two conies sitting back to back are baconies, or Baconies." It's possible I suppose, but exactly what a court of law would make of such ‘evidence’ is anyone's guess. Would it really be able to convict the felon, William Shakespeare from Stratford-on-Avon, of fraud or of being a mask for someone else who did not want his name associated with what he had written? I doubt it. It is, after all, a very tenuous kind of evidence placed against the much more definite fact that in a number of his sonnets the writer actually calls himself Will. Or is this just another false trail laid by the foxy Bacon?
Nevertheless, I have to say that I was very impressed by the way Dawkins marshalled all this 'evidence' in favour of his thesis, although, of course, he leaves out anything which would not support it so well. He has gone back to sources, to actual documents at the time, which seem to establish plausible links between Bacon and Shakespeare. Not only that but he has provided some very interesting, if perhaps wobbly, interpretations of statements made about Shakespeare by fellow dramatists such as Robert Greene and Ben Jonson. While he was dying Greene wrote his Groats-worth of Wit, describing the young Shakespeare as "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is well able to bombast out blank-verse as the best of you." Was this just envy of a rising talent? Not according to Dawkins, who interprets Greene thus "...in Renaissance symbolism, the crow is associated with... literary plagiarism. In this instance, the actor is the upstart Crow beautifying himself with the words that come from the feathers (ie. the quill pens) of the playwrights." He could have a point, but the trouble is other interpretations may be equally valid. It's a bit like asking, "When Derek Bentley said, 'Let him have it!' to Christopher Craig in the famous murder-case, did he mean 'Give him the gun.' Or 'Shoot him!'? After all, on the face of it, either interpretation is equally possible." The same can be said about Jonson's writing "and though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek," of Shakespeare after he died. Did Jonson mean "even supposing you had had small Latin and less Greek" or did he mean that Shakespeare actually did have small Latin and less Greek? The grammatical ambiguity between the conditional and indicative moods here begs interesting semantic questions. But does it actually make for a case against Shakespeare having written the poems and plays credited to his name?
With all the impressive detail presented, a definite picture of Shakespeare begins to emerge from Dawkins' account - a picture not of Shakespeare the poet and dramatist, but of Shakespeare the scholar, the multi-lingual polymath, the magus, the politician, the lawyer, the courtier, et cetera. This is not a mercurial magpie Shakespeare who was free to swoop down and pick things up wherever and whenever he could and use it in his plays, but Shakespeare the systematic scholar with a certain conscious agenda to renew learning along clearly defined lines, which coincided precisely with the project Francis Bacon had set himself in The Great Instauration. It's a Shakespeare, in other words, made over in the image of Bacon.
Dawkins’ chief argument against the Stratford-born Shakespeare is a familiar one - namely, that there is no evidence that Shakespeare had had any real education, or had read any books. (Is there any evidence to the contrary?) He was more interested in the business side of theatre, buying New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon and acquiring a coat of arms. Not only that, but he possessed no books when he died. There is no evidence of his having knowledge of the law and the plays show - according to Dawkins - that, just as he was an expert orator, the author of Shakespeare's plays was an expert lawyer as well - rather like Bacon in fact. There may be a certain force in these arguments, but I wonder if it occurs to Dawkins that a lot of what goes on in a court of law is theatre anyway - right up a playwright's street, you might think! And from that, it’s only a question of developing an interest in the law based on its affinity with the theatre. The same is true of oratory. One of the best orators I have ever seen - judging by his effect on his audience - was the Italian fascist politician, Almirante, in Florence in 1983. He had been an actor and it showed in his oratorical techniques. He knew how to subdue an audence to breathless silence, then raise that same audience to a crescendo of claps and cheers, accompanied by fascist salutes. It was amazing to watch. He had that crowd eating out of the palm of his hand, while punctuation his oratory with words like "La Famiglia", "La Patria" and "La Tradizione". He demonstrated very clearly, if any demonstration was needed, how strong the kinship between acting and oratory is. Another point Dawkins makes is that the man from Stratford-on-Avon didn't seem to belong to any of the intellectual circles of the day. Well, frankly, neither do I, but I’m not sure what difference that makes. Nor does he appear to have travelled widely enough to write many of his plays, which display apparently an intimate knowledge of countries like Italy - despite his rather shaky geography in a number of cases! Furthermore, he was not buried with state-honours, nor were his remains placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. Surely a genius of his stamp would have been the apple of the Establishment's eye of the time, although, of course, one can point to many great poets for whom the exact contrary was the case. Shakespeare might have been too much of an embarrassment to the Elizabethan and Jacobean ruling-class for him to be given recognition while still alive or just after he'd died. After all, even if he was not a 'roaring boy' like Christopher Marlowe, his work did pose many uncomfortable question for the ruling-class at the time. (The idolatry which presently surrounds Shakespeare, didn't get going till very much later, and only at the cost of suppressing much of the potential content of his plays.) And the fact that he was a plebeian could only have exacerbated matters. “What, not one of us. How dare he presume to move out of his sphere?” The attitude is still pretty rife. Above all, I think Dawkins is guilty of trying to create a Shakespeare in his own image, which is also the image of his hero, Francis Bacon - that is, Shakespeare the systematic scholar, rather than Shakespeare the magpie-poet who, through the unifying medium of his imagination, transformed what he picked up into art. He didn’t have to be a systematic scholar for that, but he did have to be open and receptive to whatever was ‘in the air’ around him. Presumably, being an actor, he was able to read and probably therefore to write. (There is also the story of him having been a country school-teacher, before he fetched up in London.) Chances are that he read what there was to read and others recommended, and picked up the rest by keeping his ears and eyes open, as well as his mind, unconsciously assimilating knowledge from here, there and everywhere else. I have known people - dyslexics for instance - whose grasp on many subjects is quite remarkable, even though they have read very little. Dawkins also picks up on Ben Jonson's description of the actor, William Shakespeare, "Hee was... honest, and of an open and free nature, had an excellent Phantsie, brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he did flow with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped." as proof, somehow, that, because Shakespeare had no control over his flowing facility, he could not have been the great orator he'd have had to have been to write plays like Julius Caesar. It's all rather far-fetched. Why on earth should one have to be a great orator to write a piece of great oratory in a play? Writing and speaking are two very different activities. Any fool can see that. Far-fetched also are his remarks on Jonson's saying that Shakespeare should have blotted a thousand (lines). Dawkins thinks we should take this to mean that, because Jonson, a very careful user of words, left out the "out" from "blotted", he was really saying that Shakespeare wrote—the meaning of "blotted" according to Dawkins—no lines at all. Talk about clutching at straws! In addition, we should remember that, compared to our own time, there was so much less to actually know; so what exactly would it take to become familiar with much of the learning of the time - even the more esoteric stuff which Dawkins goes into in such fascinating detail? I see no barrier to the idea of someone like Shakespeare knowing so much more about so much less than we know and being deeply into things that we'd have less time for, even if he was just a jumped up country bumpkin! So, all in all, I think, the argument that the Stratford man could not have known enough to write his plays doesn’t really stack up. After all, Jonson was a bricklayer's son and Marlowe a cobbler's son and it seems to me they were quite learned! Besides, does it never occur to some people that a rigorous and systematic formal education may be more of a hindrance than help to a poet?
Another argument against the authorship of Bacon, is simply stylistic. Just to take one example, where in Shakespeare does one encounter the word “mought” for “might”? Bacon uses it often. (It has been pointed out to me, that “may” would have been Shakespeare’s preferred choice of words.) Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Bacon didn‘t write Shakespeare. But too many doubts plagued me while reading this book. For me, what's missing from the argument is a picture of Shakespeare as a living poet and dramatist in his own right - a dramatist, moreover, for whom working in the theatre as both an actor and manager engaged in a collaborative effort to produce plays which the public would be willing to pay to see, would have been a very valuable asset to him as a playwright - rather than someone whose poetry and drama had simply been annexed to other fields of intellectual activity and made to serve them in some kind of auxiliary role in the privacy of a scholar‘s study. Much of this activity, indeed, was so cryptic and obscure, so concerned with the creation of rebuses and ciphers for future generations to unravel, that one begins to wonder exactly what it had to do with the writing of poetry and plays in an immediate day to day sense. Of course, I may be wrong. I quite often am. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that Dawkins should have brought 'Shakespeare' - whoever he was - to life as a living, breathing artist and this, I think, he failed achieve.
Richard Livermore
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
'ADVERTISEMENT'
Ol' Chanty does not normally do free publicity, but John Bennett's work I think is worth it.
________________________________
Now available: U-Haul with Dinosaur, the collected uncollected stories of John Bennett.
Of this collection, John Bennett says, "The stories in U-Haul with Dinosaur were written over a period of time stretching from the late Seventies into the new millennium. They don't necessarily appear in the order in which they were written, and consequently the reader is at times exposed to violent shifts in style and perception from one story to the next--a little like being in a Formula-One race car with Ayrton Senna as it snakes through the Brazilian Grand Prix, down-shifting on the curves and roaring away at 150 mph on the straightaways. These are the last of my uncollected stories, a genre I no longer dabble in, and if there is a common thread that runs through them, it involves drinking and not drinking and love gone haywire."
152 pages of electric shock.
Dynamite cover, art by Don Brontsema, design by Chris Yeseta.
Ordering information:
Send check or money order for $15 made out to Hcolom Press to the address below. Postage included for U.S. orders. Foreign order, add $10.
Hcolom Press
605 E. 5th Ave.
Ellensburg, WA 98926
U.S.A.
or:
order through the Hcolom Press web page: http://hcolompress.com/Books.html
send inquiries to: dasleben@fairpoint.net
The Shakespeare Enigma (First published in 2005, though still in print, I believe.) by Peter Dawkins is scholarly, well-researched and extremely meticulous as regards the details of the case he is trying to present, which is, namely, that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare. If I have found this book as fascinating as I have, it is partly because of the insights it gives concerning the actual politics of the Elizabethan era - especially the episodes surrounding the different court-factions and the whole Essex affair and the use of Shakespeare's play, Richard II, in Essex's rebellion against the Queen - as well as what it has to say regarding the esoteric wisdom-traditions which formed much of the background at the time Shakespeare and Bacon were writing. It is also an extremely good - if at times somewhat hagiographical - biography of Francis Bacon, who was one of the most important intellectual and political figures of his time. But for all this, I remained unconvinced about much of the argument, which depended too much on what I thought was largely circumstantial evidence and the kinds of coded encryptions that Alan Turing would be hard put to unravel, although Dawkins, it must be said, does a pretty good job. To give just one example of the former, the name Antonio appears a number of times in Shakespeare’s plays. For Dawkins, that indicates, somehow, that their real author, Francis Bacon, had his beloved older brother, Anthony Bacon, in mind while writing them. And to give an example of the latter, what for example should we make of the following passage? "The Bacon rebus incorporated in the Dionysian headpiece of the Shakespeare Folio is formed by two rabbits sitting prominently in the two upper corners of the picture, balanced in an extraordinary way on scrolls of flowering vegetation. They are each facing outwards, in the opposite direction and away from the centre of the emblem: hence they are sitting back to back. Since the common name for rabbit was cony (the word is used several times in Shakespeare's plays, for instance,) two conies sitting back to back are baconies, or Baconies." It's possible I suppose, but exactly what a court of law would make of such ‘evidence’ is anyone's guess. Would it really be able to convict the felon, William Shakespeare from Stratford-on-Avon, of fraud or of being a mask for someone else who did not want his name associated with what he had written? I doubt it. It is, after all, a very tenuous kind of evidence placed against the much more definite fact that in a number of his sonnets the writer actually calls himself Will. Or is this just another false trail laid by the foxy Bacon?
Nevertheless, I have to say that I was very impressed by the way Dawkins marshalled all this 'evidence' in favour of his thesis, although, of course, he leaves out anything which would not support it so well. He has gone back to sources, to actual documents at the time, which seem to establish plausible links between Bacon and Shakespeare. Not only that but he has provided some very interesting, if perhaps wobbly, interpretations of statements made about Shakespeare by fellow dramatists such as Robert Greene and Ben Jonson. While he was dying Greene wrote his Groats-worth of Wit, describing the young Shakespeare as "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is well able to bombast out blank-verse as the best of you." Was this just envy of a rising talent? Not according to Dawkins, who interprets Greene thus "...in Renaissance symbolism, the crow is associated with... literary plagiarism. In this instance, the actor is the upstart Crow beautifying himself with the words that come from the feathers (ie. the quill pens) of the playwrights." He could have a point, but the trouble is other interpretations may be equally valid. It's a bit like asking, "When Derek Bentley said, 'Let him have it!' to Christopher Craig in the famous murder-case, did he mean 'Give him the gun.' Or 'Shoot him!'? After all, on the face of it, either interpretation is equally possible." The same can be said about Jonson's writing "and though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek," of Shakespeare after he died. Did Jonson mean "even supposing you had had small Latin and less Greek" or did he mean that Shakespeare actually did have small Latin and less Greek? The grammatical ambiguity between the conditional and indicative moods here begs interesting semantic questions. But does it actually make for a case against Shakespeare having written the poems and plays credited to his name?
With all the impressive detail presented, a definite picture of Shakespeare begins to emerge from Dawkins' account - a picture not of Shakespeare the poet and dramatist, but of Shakespeare the scholar, the multi-lingual polymath, the magus, the politician, the lawyer, the courtier, et cetera. This is not a mercurial magpie Shakespeare who was free to swoop down and pick things up wherever and whenever he could and use it in his plays, but Shakespeare the systematic scholar with a certain conscious agenda to renew learning along clearly defined lines, which coincided precisely with the project Francis Bacon had set himself in The Great Instauration. It's a Shakespeare, in other words, made over in the image of Bacon.
Dawkins’ chief argument against the Stratford-born Shakespeare is a familiar one - namely, that there is no evidence that Shakespeare had had any real education, or had read any books. (Is there any evidence to the contrary?) He was more interested in the business side of theatre, buying New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon and acquiring a coat of arms. Not only that, but he possessed no books when he died. There is no evidence of his having knowledge of the law and the plays show - according to Dawkins - that, just as he was an expert orator, the author of Shakespeare's plays was an expert lawyer as well - rather like Bacon in fact. There may be a certain force in these arguments, but I wonder if it occurs to Dawkins that a lot of what goes on in a court of law is theatre anyway - right up a playwright's street, you might think! And from that, it’s only a question of developing an interest in the law based on its affinity with the theatre. The same is true of oratory. One of the best orators I have ever seen - judging by his effect on his audience - was the Italian fascist politician, Almirante, in Florence in 1983. He had been an actor and it showed in his oratorical techniques. He knew how to subdue an audence to breathless silence, then raise that same audience to a crescendo of claps and cheers, accompanied by fascist salutes. It was amazing to watch. He had that crowd eating out of the palm of his hand, while punctuation his oratory with words like "La Famiglia", "La Patria" and "La Tradizione". He demonstrated very clearly, if any demonstration was needed, how strong the kinship between acting and oratory is. Another point Dawkins makes is that the man from Stratford-on-Avon didn't seem to belong to any of the intellectual circles of the day. Well, frankly, neither do I, but I’m not sure what difference that makes. Nor does he appear to have travelled widely enough to write many of his plays, which display apparently an intimate knowledge of countries like Italy - despite his rather shaky geography in a number of cases! Furthermore, he was not buried with state-honours, nor were his remains placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. Surely a genius of his stamp would have been the apple of the Establishment's eye of the time, although, of course, one can point to many great poets for whom the exact contrary was the case. Shakespeare might have been too much of an embarrassment to the Elizabethan and Jacobean ruling-class for him to be given recognition while still alive or just after he'd died. After all, even if he was not a 'roaring boy' like Christopher Marlowe, his work did pose many uncomfortable question for the ruling-class at the time. (The idolatry which presently surrounds Shakespeare, didn't get going till very much later, and only at the cost of suppressing much of the potential content of his plays.) And the fact that he was a plebeian could only have exacerbated matters. “What, not one of us. How dare he presume to move out of his sphere?” The attitude is still pretty rife. Above all, I think Dawkins is guilty of trying to create a Shakespeare in his own image, which is also the image of his hero, Francis Bacon - that is, Shakespeare the systematic scholar, rather than Shakespeare the magpie-poet who, through the unifying medium of his imagination, transformed what he picked up into art. He didn’t have to be a systematic scholar for that, but he did have to be open and receptive to whatever was ‘in the air’ around him. Presumably, being an actor, he was able to read and probably therefore to write. (There is also the story of him having been a country school-teacher, before he fetched up in London.) Chances are that he read what there was to read and others recommended, and picked up the rest by keeping his ears and eyes open, as well as his mind, unconsciously assimilating knowledge from here, there and everywhere else. I have known people - dyslexics for instance - whose grasp on many subjects is quite remarkable, even though they have read very little. Dawkins also picks up on Ben Jonson's description of the actor, William Shakespeare, "Hee was... honest, and of an open and free nature, had an excellent Phantsie, brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he did flow with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped." as proof, somehow, that, because Shakespeare had no control over his flowing facility, he could not have been the great orator he'd have had to have been to write plays like Julius Caesar. It's all rather far-fetched. Why on earth should one have to be a great orator to write a piece of great oratory in a play? Writing and speaking are two very different activities. Any fool can see that. Far-fetched also are his remarks on Jonson's saying that Shakespeare should have blotted a thousand (lines). Dawkins thinks we should take this to mean that, because Jonson, a very careful user of words, left out the "out" from "blotted", he was really saying that Shakespeare wrote—the meaning of "blotted" according to Dawkins—no lines at all. Talk about clutching at straws! In addition, we should remember that, compared to our own time, there was so much less to actually know; so what exactly would it take to become familiar with much of the learning of the time - even the more esoteric stuff which Dawkins goes into in such fascinating detail? I see no barrier to the idea of someone like Shakespeare knowing so much more about so much less than we know and being deeply into things that we'd have less time for, even if he was just a jumped up country bumpkin! So, all in all, I think, the argument that the Stratford man could not have known enough to write his plays doesn’t really stack up. After all, Jonson was a bricklayer's son and Marlowe a cobbler's son and it seems to me they were quite learned! Besides, does it never occur to some people that a rigorous and systematic formal education may be more of a hindrance than help to a poet?
Another argument against the authorship of Bacon, is simply stylistic. Just to take one example, where in Shakespeare does one encounter the word “mought” for “might”? Bacon uses it often. (It has been pointed out to me, that “may” would have been Shakespeare’s preferred choice of words.) Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Bacon didn‘t write Shakespeare. But too many doubts plagued me while reading this book. For me, what's missing from the argument is a picture of Shakespeare as a living poet and dramatist in his own right - a dramatist, moreover, for whom working in the theatre as both an actor and manager engaged in a collaborative effort to produce plays which the public would be willing to pay to see, would have been a very valuable asset to him as a playwright - rather than someone whose poetry and drama had simply been annexed to other fields of intellectual activity and made to serve them in some kind of auxiliary role in the privacy of a scholar‘s study. Much of this activity, indeed, was so cryptic and obscure, so concerned with the creation of rebuses and ciphers for future generations to unravel, that one begins to wonder exactly what it had to do with the writing of poetry and plays in an immediate day to day sense. Of course, I may be wrong. I quite often am. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that Dawkins should have brought 'Shakespeare' - whoever he was - to life as a living, breathing artist and this, I think, he failed achieve.
Richard Livermore
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Ol' Chanty does not normally do free publicity, but John Bennett's work I think is worth it.
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Now available: U-Haul with Dinosaur, the collected uncollected stories of John Bennett.
Of this collection, John Bennett says, "The stories in U-Haul with Dinosaur were written over a period of time stretching from the late Seventies into the new millennium. They don't necessarily appear in the order in which they were written, and consequently the reader is at times exposed to violent shifts in style and perception from one story to the next--a little like being in a Formula-One race car with Ayrton Senna as it snakes through the Brazilian Grand Prix, down-shifting on the curves and roaring away at 150 mph on the straightaways. These are the last of my uncollected stories, a genre I no longer dabble in, and if there is a common thread that runs through them, it involves drinking and not drinking and love gone haywire."
152 pages of electric shock.
Dynamite cover, art by Don Brontsema, design by Chris Yeseta.
Ordering information:
Send check or money order for $15 made out to Hcolom Press to the address below. Postage included for U.S. orders. Foreign order, add $10.
Hcolom Press
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or:
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send inquiries to: dasleben@fairpoint.net
