Sunday Poetry XLII -- Never the Same Twice :: Lisel Mueller

“  When I am asked

    how I began writing poems,

    I talk about the indifference of nature.  ”

Alone, these words are fantastic.  Right?  Brilliant.  Sure.  Genius?  …

(See?  I’ve got this thing with “genius,” going back, as far as I can tell, to the day I learned my dad prayed that none of his kids would be one.  (Dad:  prayer answered.)  I guess I bring it up again because there seems to be this indelible connection between the definition—at least in practice—of genius and that of art—art being, or any work thereof, as difficult to define as genius is to identify or, maybe more so, explain.)

…  But it’s the rest of the poem that brings this thing really around to make a glorious connection I didn’t anticipate.  Perhaps it’s this convergence—or the millions just like it that happen all over the world all the time—that drew me in and bubbled up that word—“genius”—again from its little locker back there.

Here’s the poem:

When I am Asked

by Lisel Mueller – Pulitzer Prize winner, 1996

When I am asked

how I began writing poems,

I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,

a brilliant June day,

everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench

in a lovingly planted garden,

but the day lilies were as deaf

as the ears of drunken sleepers

and the roses curved inward.

Nothing was black or unbroken

and not a leaf fell

and the sun blared endless commercials

for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench

ringed with the ingenue faces

of pink and white impatiens

and placed my grief

in the mouth of language,

the only thing that would grieve with me.

It’s those last three lines, right? —that metaphysical power of words—particularly for those who know how, even a little, to really use them?

So I picked out the book, Mueller’s Alive Together, just an hour or so ago from a box of my books I picked out from a mountain of them out in my garage.  (I think this is the benefit of having sold all my bookshelves: I can’t just pick out all the same old books because I have no idea where they are.)  This is another of the books I inherited back at the Saginaw Arts and Sciences Academy from my predecessor.  Unlike the others, this one is full of that teacher's annotations.  Normally, this would bother me, particularly as I’m generally so averse to writing in books that it took me three-quarters of a semester before I started highlighting my law books.

Anyway, by way of the poem above, the experience of reading by way of another reader’s reading, and an interesting thing I heard at church this morning—remarkably apropos—I think I’m a step closer to understanding the confluence of genius in art (if nowhere else).

Hugh Nibley, a once religious studies and linguistics professor at Brigham Young University, was the source of the quotation that caught my attention.  I don’t have the quotation in front of me, nor have I found it online, but here’s the gist of it:  That scripture isn’t the words before us, penned by the prophets, but the experience of reading those words.

That’s pretty big, particularly religiously—well, if you’re one who happens to read scripture, anyway—but nearly as much so for the reader of literature, the viewer of art, and, most approachably, the listener of music.  When I’m trying to pin down why it is I think a certain work, or a certain artist, is genius, it usually begins with not the substance of the art itself, but the ineffable experience that blooms or emerges or ka-pows right there in that intangible space somewhere between my senses and the work.  Even afterward, trying to rationalize it, trying to objectify it, remove that emotional response, I can never separate myself from that initial experience, which brings me to the next of the poems from Mueller:

A Farewell, A Welcome

               After the lunar landings

Good-bye pale cold inconstant

tease, you never existed

therefore we had to invent you

               Good-bye crooked little man

               huntress who sleeps alone

               dear pastor, shepherd of the stars

               who tucked us in               Good-bye

Good riddance phony prop

con man moon

who tap-danced with June

to the tender surrender

of love from above

Good-bye decanter of magic liquids

fortuneteller par excellence

seduce  incubus medicine man

exiles’ sanity       love’s sealed lips

womb that nourished the monstrous child

and the sweet ripe grain Good-bye

               We trade you in as we traded

               the evil eye for the virus

               the rose seat of affections

               for the indispensbile pump

we say good-bye as we said good-bye

to angels in nightgowns                 to Grandfather God

Good-bye forever Edam and Gorgonzola

cantaloupe in the sky

night watchman, one-eyed loner

wolves nevertheless

Aae programmed to howl             Good-bye

               forbidden lover good-bye

               sleepwalkers will wander

               with outstretched arms for no reason

               while you continue routinely

               to husband the seal, prevail

               in the fix of infant strabismus

good-bye ripe ovum        women will spill their blood

in spite of you now          lunatics wave good-bye

accepting despair by another name

Welcome new world to the brave old words

peace    Hope     Justice

truth Everylasting             welcome

ash-colored playground of children

happy in air bags

never to touch is never to miss it

Scarface hellow we’ve got you covered

welcome untouchable     outlaw

with an alias in every country

salvos and roses               you are home

our footprints stamp you mortal

***

I was going to put up one more of her poems (this one inspired by Martin Gardner, no less!), but I think I’ll leave it here.  

RAINER RILKE, KATE MILFORD, and THE READERS' SPIRAL

Maybe it's just me.  Does any other reader out there (of the few who actually read this) find that reading--the Reading Beast--is actually an autotrophic being?  I'm at a point in my life when I can't really spare the time or the money to casually head over to the book store and spend a couple hours parsing out a new author to approach, and if reading--or at least, my Reading--didn't manage to feed itself, I would quickly lose energy, atrophy, wind down, and just watch television (not that I don't do too much of this-the-latter anyway).  Thankfully, authors can't seem to help revealing their own inspiration for writing the very book I'm reading in the words of their characters and narrators.  While this has happened with likely half the books I've read in the last year (and if not directly then indirectly in narrators' and characters' word, with little research (thank Worldwide Web!) I learn who and what inspired these authors), I've been able to create, or locate rather, a whole network of authors and artists and poets and musicians that tie back to those authors, and aren't subsequently found creators so more so a sure thing (reading enjoyment-wise), since they inspired those of whom I already approve, than something I gamblingly picked up at the bookstore from some, say, bargain shelf?

I recently finished Kate Milford's YA The Boneshaker, a fantastic (and phantastic) little novel that successfully manages to combine American folklore, deals with the devil, steam-punk, crossroads, and bicycles.  I loved it.  I want to read it again.  If I were still teaching 7th grade English, I'd put it on my yearly book list and do up study questions and research projects and everything.  In the story--or the American of the story--are demons and angels.  Well, the angels are fallen angels, or, in this case, "jumpers," and one of comes out during a traveling medicine show and admits that he can't tell if he's alive or dead (this is before we know he was a "jumper").  When the protagonist, a spunky young teen by the name of Natalie Minks, approaches him and asks about it, the old--VERY old--man mentions a poet named Rilke who said something of the same think: angles can't tell if they're alive or dead.  

Rilke?  Sounded familiar.  Sounded like one I was supposed to read in college and maybe skipped to go play steel drums.

The next day, at the library (no home internet connection at this point), I looked him up (sadly, I couldn't post then, as per the library's stringent web security measures) and was delighted with what I found.  I expect there will be more posts on Rainer Rilke and, if nothing else, his elegies:

The Duino Elegies

The First Elegy

Rainer Rilke

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic

Orders? And even if one were to suddenly

take me to its heart, I would vanish into its

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains

to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry

of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can

we make use of? Not Angels: not men,

and the resourceful creatures see clearly

that we are not really at home

in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains

some tree on a slope, that we can see

again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,

and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit

that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.

Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of space

wears out our faces – whom would she not stay for,

the longed-for, gentle, disappointing one, whom the solitary heart

with difficulty stands before. Is she less heavy for lovers?

Ah, they only hide their fate between themselves.

Do you not know yet? Throw the emptiness out of your arms

to add to the spaces we breathe; maybe the birds

will feel the expansion of air, in more intimate flight.

Yes, the Spring-times needed you deeply. Many a star

must have been there for you so you might feel it. A wave

lifted towards you out of the past, or, as you walked

past an open window, a violin

gave of itself. All this was their mission.

But could you handle it? Were you not always,

still, distracted by expectation, as if all you experienced,

like a Beloved, came near to you? (Where could you contain her,

with all the vast strange thoughts in you

going in and out, and often staying the night.)

But if you are yearning, then sing the lovers: for long

their notorious feelings have not been immortal enough.

Those, you almost envied them, the forsaken, that you

found as loving as those who were satisfied. Begin,

always as new, the unattainable praising:

think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling

was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.

But lovers are taken back by exhausted Nature

into herself, as if there were not the power

to make them again. Have you remembered

Gastara Stampa sufficiently yet, that any girl,

whose lover has gone, might feel from that

intenser example of love: ‘Could I only become like her?’

Should not these ancient sufferings be finally

fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that, loving,

we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured

as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight,

something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.

Voices, voices. Hear then, my heart, as only

saints have heard: so that the mighty call

raised them from the earth: they, though, knelt on

impossibly and paid no attention:

such was their listening. Not that you could withstand

God’s voice: far from it. But listen to the breath,

the unbroken message that creates itself from the silence.

It rushes towards you now, from those youthfully dead.

Whenever you entered, didn’t their fate speak to you,

quietly, in churches in Naples or Rome?

Or else an inscription exaltedly impressed itself on you,

as lately the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.

What do they will of me? That I should gently remove

the semblance of injustice, that slightly, at times,

hinders their spirits from a pure moving-on.

It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth,

to no longer practice customs barely acquired,

not to give a meaning of human futurity

to roses, and other expressly promising things:

no longer to be what one was in endlessly anxious hands,

and to set aside even one’s own

proper name like a broken plaything.

Strange: not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange

to see all that was once in place, floating

so loosely in space. And it’s hard being dead,

and full of retrieval, before one gradually feels

a little eternity. Though the living

all make the error of drawing too sharp a distinction.

Angels (they say) would often not know whether

they moved among living or dead. The eternal current

sweeps all the ages, within it, through both the spheres,

forever, and resounds above them in both.

Finally they have no more need of us, the early-departed,

weaned gently from earthly things, as one outgrows

the mother’s mild breast. But we, needing

such great secrets, for whom sadness is often

the source of a blessed progress, could we exist without them?

Is it a meaningless story how once, in the grieving for Linos,

first music ventured to penetrate arid rigidity,

so that, in startled space, which an almost godlike youth

suddenly left forever, the emptiness first felt

the quivering that now enraptures us, and comforts, and helps.

Wednesday's for Kids [30] -- ORIGAMI

Watching the new POTTERMORE announcement this morning on Facebook, not because of it's similarity to pop-up books, which are plenty cool, too, but because, well ... uhm.  I don't know.  Whatever.  It reminded me of origami this time.  Must be the owl at the end of the ad.  Anyway, origami is cool for kids, and for grownups--even, and perhaps especially, for the lazy ones who just want to look, rather than do.

For kids:

I had this book when I
was a kid; I have no idea
where it is now.

For grownups:

I REALLY want this book.  Discover this
on your own.  Really.  Do it.  Amazing.

Here is Robert Lang (click his name for his website and surf around the spectacular compositions), one of the two foremost experts in origami--not, originally anyway, because of his artist proclivities, but because of his work's scientific/mathematic necessities--talks about it below.

All with a single sheet, un-cut sheet of paper:

Wednesday's for Kids XXVIII -- THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS, by Dav Pilkey

Do you doubt it?  Maybe it's one of those you-had-to-be-there kind of moments, like you can't really get it unless you're reading it on the family room floor with two little kids who think that all it takes to make something hilarious is to add the words fart, poop, or underwear.  And that's not even what makes this book work!  It is, quite simply, a brilliant and absolutely hilarious fantasy-- "modern fairy-tale" --of nearly every grade school kid in the world brought perfectly to paper.

Best friends and fourth graders, George and Harold, are classic class clowns and the bane of their hapless principal, Mr. Krupp.  In desperation the man installs hidden surveillance cameras and finally catches them red-handed pranking the cheerleaders and football team with itching powder and who-knows what else, and he hauls the culprits to his office to deliver sentence.  Instead of suspending them or following other school protocol, however, he opts for revenge and, counting on the little kids' fear of the gigantic football players, threatens to show the team the surveillance footage if they don't do just what he says.  After "four to six" weeks of cleaning the man's house, washing his car, mowing his lawn, and whatever else I don't even remember--feeding him grapes while the other fans him with banana leaves or something--their Hail Mary, a 3-D Hypno-Ring, finally arrives in the mail, and all you-know-what ensues when they take it to his office (called in after failing to show up at his home first thing in the morning to make him breakfast or something) and try it out.

Of course, the 2-dollar ring works exactly as advertised, and Principal Krupp, mystically changed by the power of hypnosis, strips to his tighty-whities, throws a curtain around his shoulders, and defenestrates himself from the school office in the noble names of Peace and Justice and by authority of his terrible new gift, Wedgie Power.  And that's just the beginning!

Now go ahead: tell me this isn't brilliant!

Wedneday's for Kids XXVI -- SEEK and DESTROY (well, except for the DESTROY part)

Today is a day for brevity.

Something for kids and that kids love:

Who doesn't love "Where's Waldo"?

And a write up?  I'll let the Wiki do the work.

'Nough said.

Wednesdays for Kids XXV -- Choose Your Own Adventure

Started in 1975, Choose Your Own Adventure books, plus a riffraff of of imitators (some good--some even as good as better--and some not so good), have since been the launch pad for many a reading career, including mine.  While most of my childhood was spend in the unlikely-for-kids realm of nonfiction, so-called "game books," and a very select few novels, introduced me to fiction and led to the field's general take-over of my literary preferences.  Much like the "cha-ching" stories I told with my friend on sleepless overnights, I, an alleged control freak, along with another--friend and/or author--got to determine the story.  I loved them!

If you've never experienced the satisfyingly meaty pulp of Choose Your Own Adventure books and all their absolutely awesome badness, get yourself straightened out and pick up a set!  Your childhood is still recoverable.

INVISIBLE CITIES, by Italo Calvino -- Excerpt

from Chapter 7:
Cities and the Sky 2

This belief is handed down in Beersheba: that, suspended in the heavens, there exists another Beersheba, where the city's most elevated virtues and sentiments are poised, and that if the terrestrial Beersheba will take the celestial one as its model the two cities will become one. The image propagated by tradition is that of a city of pure gold, with silver locks and diamond gates, a jewel-city, all inset and inlaid, as a maximum of laborious study might produce when applied to materials of the maximum worth. True to this belief, Beersheba's inhabitants honor everything that suggests for them the celestial city: they accumulate noble metals and rare stones, they renounce all ephemeral excesses, they develop forms of composite composure.

They also believe, these inhabitants, that another Beersheba exists underground, the receptacle of everything base and unworthy that happens to them, and it is their constant care to erase from the visible Beersheba every tie or resemblance to the lower twin. In the place of roofs they imagine that the underground city has overturned rubbish bins, with cheese rinds, greasy paper, fish scales, dishwater, uneaten spaghetti, old bandages spilling from them. Or even that its substance is dark and malleable and thick, like the pitch that pours down from the sewers, prolonging the route of the human bowels, from black hole to black hole, until it splatters against the lowest subterranean floor, and from the lazy, encircled bubbles below, layer upon layer, a fecal city rises, with twisted spires.

In Beersheba's beliefs there is an element of truth and one of error. It is true that the city is accompanied by two projections of itself, one celestial one infernal; but the citizens are mistaken about their consistency. The inferno that broods in the deepest subsoil of Beersheba is a city designed by the most authoritative architects, built with the most expensive materials on the market, with every device and mechanism and gear system functioning, decked with tassels and fringes and frills hanging from all the pipes and levers.

Intent on piling up its carats of perfection, Beersheba takes for virtue what is now a grim mania to fill the empty vessel of itself; the city does not know that its only moments of generous abandon are those when it becomes detached from itself, when it lets go, expands. Still, at the zenith of Beersheba there gravitates a celestial body that shines with all the city's riches, enclosed in the treasury of cast-off things: a planet a-flutter with potato peels, broken umbrellas, old socks, candy wrappings, paved with tram tickets, fingernail-cuttings and pared calluses, eggshells. This is the celestial city, and in its heaven long-tailed comets fly past, released to rotate in space from the only free and happy action of the citizens of Beersheba, a city which, only when it [s—]*, is not miserly, calculating, greedy.

---

* In effort to keep this blog family friendly.

INVISIBLE CITIES -- Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino

I've done this a few times: start talking about a book before I finished it (Fever Dream, All the Pretty Horses, and Witch and Wizard come to mind).  This time, I needed a new book to take with me to my son's karate class (is it bad of me not to focus with more diligence and dedication?).  Last week I'd taken along a copy of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, but the novel didn't exactly "click," so I'll save it for another day.  Today, on the other hand, I grabbed Calvino's Invisible Cities, and what a pleasant surprise the first 25 pages were (I hardly saw a kick or heard an ai-yah!)!  I'm not going to get too into it here (most basically: Marco Polo's talking to Kublai Kahn about the cities of the latter's kingdom, the former describing without verbal language, but gesticulation, pantomime, and artifacts, while the monarch understanding through them experiencing, certainly, something else entirely, which experience of dramatic and accepted miscommunication is actually very similar in concept to some of the cities remarkably described by Polo -- hugely post modern and delightfully poetic), but it is pointedly similar to Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, and so similar, in fact, that I cannot imagine (and I've made similar connections before, but never with any certainty; this, I feel, must be certain) Lightman not having gained inspiration from Calvino.  I am terribly excited to read the rest of this brief "novel" (author and book-critic monster, Gore Vidal, wasn't content classifying this book as a novel, nor work, meditation, or poem, but a "marvelous invention") and am breaking off here and now to get back to it.

Stay tuned.

read Gore Vidal's essay on Italo Calvino's fictions here

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON and PRESTON/CHILD

"The Carolina Parrot,"
by John James Audubon

I just now noticed, flitting over to Google.com for a moment to look something up, that today is the birthday of John James Audubon.  Normally, I don't take more than passing note of whoever's birthday it is that Google happens to be celebrating on any given day, however, this time, it happens to coincidentally coincide with the popcorn novel I'm currently reading, Fever Dream, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, who are, as it happens, my favorite popcorn novelists.

(I've been reading the Preston/Child books for so long--sheesh, something like fifteen years now--that opening their newest Pendergast novel is a little like a reunion with old friends, my two personal favorites of which are, of course, Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast, FBI, and Lieutenant Vinnie D'Agosta, NYPD.  As far as the books themselves are concerned, and with the slight exception of a very few missteps on the authors' parts, the stories are fast, fun, gripping, and surprisingly literary.)

The plot of this particular contribution to the series is bent around the late, great John James Audubon and his treatment of the Carolina Parrot, as well as a lost painting of his called "The Black Frame," so-called because no one knows it's actual subject and, which, if you're interested, is an invention of the authors.  As you read this very post (anyone, anyone?) I'm nearing the end of the book (trying to slow down and savor it, for it will be another year or more before their next effort is released in paperback), which happens to be their best in quite a few years.  And as before (I'm thinking particularly of one piano composer and savant, Charles-Valentin Alkan), the authors have sparked in me interest in an area, albeit highly specialized, where I'd previously only spent little time.

Regardless of plot and the "literariness" of this particularly esoteric popcorn, the birds and wildlife of Mr. Audubon are fascinating, and, nostalgically speaking, have always held company in my memory and imagination with Norman Rockwell, as  both painters were on regular display via gigantic coffee table books at my grandparents' homes.

an excellent online gallery for John James Audubon

Rudyard Kipling -- Our Next Author: PLEASE CAST YOUR VOTE

Rudyard Kipling

While I can't say I've read tons of Kipling, I've made it through a fair amount of his verses and many of his stories.  For better or worse (likely the latter), I have not read The Jungle Book, and the Disney version, like the original or not (likely the latter), is on my short list of all time favorite movies.  That said, of his poetry/verse stuff I've read, this is my favorite:

I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
In deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.

Was there aught that I did not share
In vigil or toil or ease, –

One joy or woe that I did not know,
Dear hearts across the seas?

I have written the tale of our life
For a sheltered people's mirth,
In jesting guise – but ye are wise,
And ye know what the jest is worth.

It is the prelude poem, brief and surprisingly elegant, to his "Departmental Ditties."


SO HERE IT IS (because of the hope for short/fun):  I suggest that Kipling be our next author, and hope, therefore, to narrow our search down to one from the following three (please read a little about each and indicate your preference below in comment):

• Kim
• Just So Stories (with original illustrations here)
• The Jungle Book (all three novels here in various forms, thanks to the treasure of Gutenberg.org)

* added later, because, well, who doesn't need friends:

THE WALL'S NEXT BOOK (we're winding up for our 6th already!)

Our last book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (discussed here; reviewed here), by Umberto Eco, was a bit of a monster; I'm hoping we can decide on a slightly shorter, simpler text next (though not necessarily "easier," if you get my drift).  I've got some thoughts, but would love to hear your ideas first.

Please, sound off below.

Þ




[that is, leave a comment]

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XVIII -- chapter 17: THE BIRTH OF AN ATHEIST

Baptism of Augustine of Hippo

1. Interesting parallel: As an adult, the forgetfulness came without warning, like death in the night unexpected; as a child, death came without warning and all around him, and he had to work, "providently," to push out its memory, forget, and move on with his life.  The forced forgetting is very much like the Christian notion of repentance, but repentance must be voluntary like the childhood flushing of repugnant memory.  How then would you metaphorically qualify Yambo's adult amnesia?  Finally, as baptism is sometimes identified as a second birth, or spiritual birth/rebirth, does it fit in anywhere with all this?
2. How is Yambo's conclusion, "God does not exist," not surprising, coming as it does, of course, from his life and development?
3. Describe Yambo's relationship with sin.  How might this lead to the man we know (if we know) he became later?
4. Fine books and fine music become Yambo's gods after the episode in the gorge.  How is this, well, idolatry so much more convenient, yet, at least by the strictures of human limitation, comparably satisfying/challenging?
5. Yambo's life experiences were echoed in and formulated by his books.  He found meaning, explanation, and interpretation at writers' hands.  He experiences a form--perverted--of chaste indulgence by the leniencies allowed in text, "not flesh."  Does this open a window, as it were, overlooking the First Folio; and, by extension, how is the First Folio indeed Lila?

Wednesdays for Kids XVIII

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana VIII -- chapter 7: THE MEMORIOUS

1. Just the first two paragraphs of this chapter already give the impression of the trope of one's life flashing before his eyes.  Obviously there are inherent problems to the application of this metaphor here; the Benjamin Button/Signor Pipino complex, on the other hand, may be more appropriate.  Thoughts?
2. "Sibilla was now beginning to seem like a distant childhood memory, while everything I was gradually excavating from the fog of my past was becoming my present" (emphasis added).  Explain.
3. In color, Eco's description of the attic resembles that of Joyce's general description of Dublin (a perhaps likely comparison, considering Eco's admiration for Joyce): brown, in all its variations.  However, this attic is nothing like Dublin.  What is the difference--defined in terms of color, or substance--between the two?
4. I don't generally associate Eco with poetry, the way I do with other prose writers, like, and especially so, Borges (who wrote a lot of poetry); however, this sentence, "If a cellar prefigures the underworld, an attic promises a rather threadbare paradise, where the dead bodies appear in a pulverulent glow, a vegetal elixir that, in the absence of green, makes you feel you are in a parched tropical forest, an artificial canebreak where you are immersed in a tepid sauna," is gorgeous and poetic.  More, there's a potentially fascinating indication in it, ascribing a sort of natural metaphor (and recalling and defining vast amounts of literature in the process) to the house, or even to architecture in general.
5. Further to the Dantean "Commedic" (#4) and Button/Pipino themes (#1), justify Eco's use of his brief "womb" analogy, and why, perhaps in Yambo's case, the genetic (is the adjectival form of genesis really genetic?) locus of garret is more appropriate than cellar.
6. Some great "p" words here: pluvial, pulverulent (and here)
7. What is the inherent problem with Yambo's belief that Clarabelle's treasure is "certainly there"; or, rather, what's the inherent issue to what we might call The Paradox of Clarabelle's Treasure?
8. Further information of Clarabelle as a name: Clara (also clara/chiara, Italian, meaning "clear"); belle (also bella, Italian, meaning "beautiful" and related to bene, for good); and Claribel, and Clara.
9. All three tins' illustrations (two of them: the cocoa "Due Vecchi" ("two old people"), the antacid, "Brioschi" (company name)) have a woman serving a man, and note the ages of the women, where given.  Appropriate?  And, of course, the image-within-an-image....
10. This paragraph with the repeating images and infinite return/regression, is pretty bleak, hopeless.  If he is indeed at the bottom of the regression, holding the tin, then it should be finite, else there would be no bottom; but in fact, by the physics of reflection and Mobius strips and whatnot, it is infinite, in which case Yambo will never arrive at himself.
11. "At the instant he knew, he ceased to know."  This recalls, of course, the flashing-before-the-eyes mentioned in #1.
12. Yambo, the author, is the forebear of our protagonist's nickname, yet it's his our hero's hero, Ciuffettino, with whom our Yambo identifies himself.  (Did you get that?)
13. If you haven't yet read "Funes, His Memory," By Borges, (here, "Funus, the Memorious," and not my preference for translation, ignorant though I am generally of Spanish), you should do so now.
14. I'm not going to bother with speculations on the cresch's fountain. 

Wednesday's for Kids XVII -- A IS FOR ANYTHING, ESPECIALLY SCARRY

Alphabet books are a dime a dozen--at least if you can find the crappy ones in the remainder bins at the back of your local Barnes and Noble or thrift store.  Sure, there are some really good ones out there, and I don't devalue their ability to assist an otherwise stubborn toddler's interest in learning the alphabet, but why let someone else do what your kids can already do better?  My favorite alphabet book isn't really an alphabet book at all, but a word book, the Best Word Book Ever in fact (whose vain title reminds a little of Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and whose content is, in its own sphere, equally staggeringly genius), by Richard Scarry, which I grew up with, examined weekly and carefully as a kid sitting in church (at least until I outgrew that particular kids' luxury), and attempted multiple times over the years to replicate.  At once the best kids' dictionary ever and just plain flippin' fun to look at.

I recommend, highly, Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever, not to mention anything else done by the man.

While I don't--or can't, really--recommend any one particular "A Is For..." alphabet book, at least not one that's published, as I mentioned before and if you're dealing with kids, make your own!  Way more fun, the kids get more out of it, and it's something they'll be proud to show off, hang on their wall, and mail to Grandma and Grandpa.  I'm one of my own, in fact and appropriate for the blog, that will be titled, "A Is for Author."  Geeky?  Geeky.  Yes!  And fun!

Sunday Poetry XIX -- PRIMO LEVI and SE QUESTO E' UN UOMO

Primo Levi’s introductory poem, or invocation, to his “memoir” (a difficult label, inasmuch as he takes some liberties generally afforded only to novelists, though everything in its essence in the book is true and speaks of his 11 months in Auschwitz), If This Is a Man (Se questo e’ un uomo in its original Italian) has a handful of English translations, none of which really satisfies me (which could break us into a great discussion of translation philosophy, but I don’t want to be the one doing the talking in this case—not yet, anyway).  I have far less problem with a memoirist taking liberties with characterizations and weather details of his own story than I do of another writer jabbing his stamp at and into another’s words.  For some reason it’s different with something like Dante’s L’Inferno, of which I enjoy three or four different English translations as much as I do the original.  In this case—and this much more modern than anything of Dante's—I’ll try and let you be the judge.  I find the original Italian just so much more powerful.  

Here is Levi’s prefatory poem first in Italian, then as translated by Stuart Woolf (who was supervised by Levi), then in an anonymous translation, and finally by my own deliberately hyper-literal “translation,” with very nearly google-translater obtuseness (meant solely as a utility for comparing the translations to the original):

Italian, original

Voi che vivete sicuri
nelle vostre tiepide case,
voi che trovate tornando a sera
il cibo caldo e visi amici:

Considerate se questo è un uomo
che lavora nel fango
che non conosce pace
che lotta per mezzo pane
che muore per un si o per un no.
Considerate se questa è una donna,
senza capelli e senza nome
senza più forza di ricordare
vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo
come una rana d'inverno.

Meditate che questo è stato:
vi comando queste parole.
Scolpitele nel vostro cuore
stando in casa andando per via,
coricandovi, alzandovi.
Ripetetele ai vostri figli.

O vi si sfaccia la casa,
la malattia vi impedisca,
i vostri nati torcano il viso da voi.

English, Woolf

In your warm houses,

You who find warm food

And friendly faces when you return home.

                Consider if this is a man

                Who works in mud

                Who knows no peace,

                Who fights for a crust of bread,

                Who dies by a yes or a no.

                Consider if this is a woman

                Without hair, without name,

                Without the strength to remember,

                Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,

                Like a frog in winter.

Never forget that this has happened.

Remember these words.

Engrave them in your hearts,

When at home or in the street,

When lying down, when getting up.

Repeat them to your children.

                Or may your houses be destroyed,

                May illness strike you down,

                May your offspring turn their faces from you.

English, Anonymous

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.

Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

English, Me (again, not intended as a real translation)

You all who live secure

In your warm houses,

You all who find returning at evening

Food hot and faces friendly:

Consider if this is a man

                Who works in the mud

                Who doesn’t know peace

                Who fights for half bread

                Who dies for a yes or a no.

                Consider if this is a woman,

                Without hair and without name

                Without more strength to remember

                Empty the eyes and cold the womb

                Like a frog of winter.

Meditate/Contemplate that this has happened:

I command you these words.

Engrave them in your heart

Standing in house going by street,

lying down getting up;

Repeat them to your children.

                Or your house be ruined for you,

                The sickness get in your way,

                your babies turn their face from you.