Ulalume
Onward!
Onward...(photo, South side of Chicago, by John H. White)
Muse upon the Muses! Track the progress of the arts and sciences here! Comedy Groucho Marx → Bob Hope → Woody Allen → Adam Sandler Dance Hindu Classical Dance → Formal Court Ballet → Nijinsky → Nureyev → Baryshnikov → Free Form Frog-leg Elegiac Poetry Tristia (Ovid) → ‘O Captain! My Captain!‘ (Whitman) → Duino Elegies (Rilke) → ? Epic Poetry The Odyssey by Homer → The Aeneid by Virgil → The Comedy by Dante → ? The Cantos by Ezra Pound → ? Historical writing The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) → Annals (Tacitus) → The Twelve Caesars (Suetonius) → Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed…
Continue Reading →Sans Souci
"Yum! Canape of insouciant artist's eye..." (Painting by G. Assereto)
In an article by Luke Carmen in Meanjin (Autumn 2016) he observes “the senselessness, doubt and despair our anti-art overlords are inculcating in our so-called culture industries“. “Getting Square in a Jerking Circle”, overwritten and jejune as it is, assails the arts philistines who will always be with us, and is certainly about the mark as far as that goes. But so what? Take the cash, and the art will look after itself. Carmen’s lament is as old as the hills: The advantage is almost always on the side of the cunning social arts satellite than the demented scribbler. In a culture like…
Continue Reading →The Lyin’, the Pitch, and the Allodoxaphobe
Tim Robbins listens to an uncomfortably realistic pitch in Robert Altman's "The Player"
I watched the 2016 Academy Award ceremony recently, that horde of virtue signallers, with their silly names, silly hair, silly clothes and sanctimony, barely able to read the teleprompters, and it occurred to me that here I am, beavering away in obscurity, when I could be writing award-winning scripts. I mean, I’ve not seen enough films to know what the people want, but I have sat through enough to know what they deserve. Since they’ve done Batman vs Superman, what about James Bond vs Obi-Wan Kenobi? So I’m sitting in one of those Potemkin cabins on the lot (of my mind), facing three illiterate…
Continue Reading →Stations of the Cross
(by Hans Holbein)
‘We quiver here for fear, a badly shaven lot, Leaderless and clear in fractured polyglot, Take a very long line and see it moves apace; It is the time of fishes, ticket punched another place. Sun-treader, comb your morning hair, sweep this private road in anger. What of other highways? Go tell King Mwanga, The royal house is empty, the servants all abroad, Scattered to the corners, a tuneless monochord. Their hearts a lute for strumming, diseased the ebb and flow, Sad cypress and unfulfilled watercress, What do you know?’
Continue Reading →Stars in the Drug Show
Who can tell the honest score When no-one knows or can be sure That the ball in the net / an incomplete pass Or the bungled catch / upon the grass Weren’t planned? Should you work the mobile phone, With your team well in the zone Where Olympic pride / the bikes they ride Head for the lowlands, on a peptide Of flasks, all banned? We’re all ‘stars in the drug show’ now, We made it happen – we showed them how By greasing on our couches, betting And buying all they sold us, letting Them jab their engorged hand.
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