Best and worst Bin Laden reactions

I rarely write about politics because this is a perfect example of a topic where skill of writing is crucial. I basically have nothing to say that isn't better (and worse) said elsewhere.

I of course was interested but didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the Bin Laden brouhaha last week in the news cycles. There was an interesting story on PRI's Science podcast about how a California geography professor predicted his rough whereabouts based on his needs for security and electricity. It was only a general prediction, he didn't pinpoint the actual location in Abbottabad. Does anyone else think this sounds like far too benign of a place? I keep picturing something like this:

As usual, my favorite reaction was from Jon Stewart. The Huff Po has more of his remarks but my favorite was his bit that instead of living in a cave as the legend went, he was tricked out like a Real Housewife.

Courtesy of one of my Twitter feeds (I've become quite addicted to the Twitter lately), my favorite worst reaction was from Geraldo Rivera, who likened his death to...the Apollo moon landing? Why does this bell end still have a tv career?

(thanks to Ali G also, for teaching me cool West London slang like "bell end.")

Haiku of the day-Kobayashi Issa

Also from the Poetry Foundation, here is a haiku from Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828.) He lived a fairly tragic life as you can see from his bio and studied haiku in Edo. Edo, btw, is the original name for Tokyo and was the seat of the Tokugawa Shogunate which would still have been going strong during Issa's life-the Meiji Restoration occurs in 1868. Edo was one of the largest cities in the world at the time. The name means "bay entrance", appropriately.


Before the actual haiku though, a little about haiku because despite it being so simple, I can never remember the exact syllable count. It's 5, 7, 5. This site also tells me that Masaoka Shiki really created the form in the 1890's (haiku means "cutting") and Edo Period writers such as Issa are more properly called hokku. It looks like people also just refer to it as Classical versus Modern Haiku. 


Anyways, enjoy and evidently you can just ignore the 5,7,5 rule here:

[even with insects] by Kobayashi Issa

Even with insects—

some can sing,

    some can’t.

Poem of the day-Carolyn Kizer

If you are at all inclined to like poetry, you should consider subscribing to the National Poetry Foundation's poem of the day email.

Here is Friday's poem from Carolyn Kizer (b. 1925.) Although I hadn't heard of her and apparently she isn't terribly prolific, she won the Pulitzer in 1985 for her collection Yin: New Poems.

What I liked: the flow, the meticulous web of words and imagery and the sadness and disquiet I experience reading it. And it's a reflection we'll all have to make at some time or another.

The Great Blue Heron

By Carolyn Kizer b. 1925
 

M.A.K., September 1880-September 1955

As I wandered on the beach

I saw the heron standing   

Sunk in the tattered wings

He wore as a hunchback’s coat.   

Shadow without a shadow,   

Hung on invisible wires   

From the top of a canvas day,   

What scissors cut him out?   

Superimposed on a poster   

Of summer by the strand   

Of a long-decayed resort,   

Poised in the dusty light   

Some fifteen summers ago;   

I wondered, an empty child,   

“Heron, whose ghost are you?”

I stood on the beach alone,

In the sudden chill of the burned.

My thought raced up the path.   

Pursuing it, I ran

To my mother in the house.

And led her to the scene.

The spectral bird was gone.

But her quick eye saw him drifting   

Over the highest pines

On vast, unmoving wings.

Could they be those ashen things,   

So grounded, unwieldy, ragged,   

A pair of broken arms

That were not made for flight?   

In the middle of my loss

I realized she knew:

My mother knew what he was.

O great blue heron, now

That the summer house has burned   

So many rockets ago,

So many smokes and fires

And beach-lights and water-glow   

Reflecting pinwheel and flare:   

The old logs hauled away,   

The pines and driftwood cleared   

From that bare strip of shore   

Where dozens of children play;   

Now there is only you

Heavy upon my eye.

Why have you followed me here,   

Heavy and far away?

You have stood there patiently   

For fifteen summers and snows,   

Denser than my repose,

Bleaker than any dream,

Waiting upon the day

When, like gray smoke, a vapor   

Floating into the sky,

A handful of paper ashes,

My mother would drift away.

Final thoughts on The Last Kingdom, a few more lines + first and last

There was a part where this book dragged after Uhtred joined Alfred the Great's side. He was ambivalent. He didn't like Alfred (here, a smart but manipulative and tediously pious leader who contrasted with the life-loving Ragnar. Ragnar and Ravn dying, especially of Danish double-crossing sucks.) Alfred forces a wife on Uhtred that owes a large debt to the Church which Uhtred has to pay. Uhtred thinks about Bebbanburg. Uhtred thinks about the Danes. More ambivalence but he still is determined to fight for England. And so on. But the story picks up steam again towards the end as it reaches the Battle of Cynuit in 878. Coincidentally, the site of that battle was recently identified.

Also, the feared Viking leader Ubba really did die at that battle. In the book, he of course dies in a climactic mano a mano with Uhtred who here shares some proper final Viking moments with him:

I knelt by Ubba and closed his nerveless right fist about the handle of his war ax. "Go to Valhalla, lord," I said. He was not dead yet, but he was dying for my last stroke had pierced deep into his neck, and then he gave a great shudder and there was a croaking noise in his throat and I kept on holding his hand tight to the ax as he died. 

One of the things I like about Cornwell is his ability to bring clarity and readability to battle scenes which typically are confusing and dreary (see: almost everyone since James Fenimore Cooper.) All of the confusion and gore and exhileration of combat are captured well here I think-such as when Ubba's downfall is slipping in someone's guts.

I recently heard someone on BBC 4's travel show Excess Baggage talking about the difficulty of traveling with a harp when she was hired as a harpist for a cruise line (she said it was the definition of "excess baggage.") I just mention this because this is the second time in a week harps have come up when I read these final thoughts of Uhtred's:

Every lord has a harp in the hall. As a child, before I went to Ragnar, I would sometimes sit by the harp in Bebbanburg's hall and I was intrigued by how the strings would play themselves. Pluck one strings and the others would shiver to give off a tiny music. "Wasting your time, boy?" my father had snarled as I crouched by the harp one day, and I supposed I had been wasting it, but on that spring day in 877 I remembered my childhood's harp and how its strings would quiver if just one was touched. It was not music of course...but after the battle in Pedredan's valley it seemed to me that my life was made of strings and if I touched one then the others, though separate, would still make sound. I thought of Ragnar the Younger and wondered if he lived, and whether his father's killer, Kjartan, still lived, and how he would die if he did, and thinking of Ragnar made me remember Brida......

Daft thoughts, I told myself. Life is just life. We live, we die, we go to the corpse hall. There is no music, just chance. Fate is relentless. 

"What are you thinking?" Leofric asked me.

"I'm thinking about a harp."

"A harp!" he laughed. "Your head's full of rubbish."

"Touch a harp," I said, "and it just makes noise but play it and it makes music." 

"Sweet Christ!" He looked at me with a worried expression. "You're as bad as Alfred. You think too much."

There is something kind of satisfying to me also that a key battle was won by drearily pious Alfred's army by a man who worships Odin and plans on meeting his fallen comrades again in Valhalla.

First and last--

First:

My name is Uhtred. I am the son of Uhtred, who was the son of Uhtred and his father was also called Uhtred.

Last:

For I am Uhtred, Earl Uhtred, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and destiny is everything.

A poem of the day twofer--W.S. Di Piero and Kim Addonizio

First, from W.S. Di Piero who is a native of South Philly and, among other things, an Italian translator.

What I like: the bright colors and the sounds the words make as you read them.

Sales

Sales

By W. S. Di Piero b. 1945

Miguel might, if he speaks English, call the colors

of ukuleles stretching their necks from yards

of canvas duffel yoked across his shoulders,

auroral azul, cherry pop, or mojito green,

under this Pac Heights sky where the awful rich

snap their heels past shop windows, past goatskin bags

and spiked heels that bring them closer to heaven,

fibristic sheets of celadon paper from Zhejiang,

FIAT cremini, and Cinco de Mayo gelato.

Smiling past them, he passes with his happy load,

a display model whole and nude in his hand,

on sale to no one, uplifted like a Stratocaster

sacramental from mahogany forests in Paraguay.

Source: Poetry (June 2009).

The second is from Kim Addonizio, a poet who lives in Oakland, California who was won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pushcart Prize.

Why I like it: spring as a motif of creeping dread and paranoia. A bold choice. 

Onset

By Kim Addonizio b. 1954 Kim Addonizio

Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers,   

bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of   

is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications.   

Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing.

And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately

I can’t stand them, the shelves of canned beans and soups, freezers   

of identical dinners; then the snowflake-diamond-snowflake of the rug

beneath my chair, rows of books turning their backs,

even my two feet, how they mirror each other oppresses me,

the way they fit so perfectly together, how I can nestle one big toe into the other

like little continents that have drifted; my God the unity of everything,

my hands and eyes, yours; doesn’t that frighten you sometimes, remembering

the pleasure of nakedness in fresh sheets, all the lovers there before you,

beside you, crowding you out? And the scouring griefs,

don’t look at them all or they’ll kill you, you can barely encompass your own;

I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring   

and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.

Aria--the movie, parte uno

As seems to be frequently the case, this is yet another movie that I like while the rest of the world finds it weird and/or pretentious (see also: Boxing Helena.) It's from 1987 and gathered 10 prominent directors (Bruce Beresford, Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, Robert Altman, Julien Temple, etc.) to make music videos based on operatic arias. I'm sure this is ringing those memory bells now, along with the movie poster:

No? Well, everyone panned it. Even the New York Times. You know who did kind of like it? My second favorite movie critic, Roger Ebert (RIP, Gene Siskel.) I re-watched this recently and thought at least it would give me the opportunity to learn a wee bit about opera.

This leads into a brief interlude where I tell my own unspectacular opera tale. I went to see Madame Butterfly performed a few years ago at OSU. I had never been to an opera before and thought I was really expanding my cultural horizons. Plus how gloriously smug to tell people, "Oh Sunday? I can't. I'm going to the opera you see. Tut tut old chap." The smugness was short-lived because the opera experience itself turned out to be an interminable 3 hours of wondering when she was going to die already. It was like The English Patient all over again. You know what? I fucking hated The English Patient. I would have been better off listening to Weezer's Pinkerton album again. How does "El Scorcho" relate to the album's operatic origins exactly?


So yes, here's a little bit about the operas and composers from the first 3 segments since I doubt I'll be seeing them live but knowing about them means I will crush the Will Shortz crossword:

1.) Un Ballo in Maschera by Verdi: based on the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden in 1792 at a masked ball (ahh, now the title makes sense.) The story of this opera is, well, probably more interesting than the opera. Verdi had lots of trouble getting this staged in his native Italy, whose censors objected to regicide being portrayed on stage. He finally staged it in the US in 1861 after alterations that removed the Swedish locale and the historical names. These are typically restored in contemporary productions. In 1955, Marian Anderson broke the color barrier by performing the part of Ulrica in a production at the Met. Verdi lived from 1813-1901.

The video is directed by Nicolas Roeg and is typically weird, not the least of which for casting his then wife Theresa Russell in an updated version of the story as King Zog of Albania who survived an assassination at the Vienna Opera in 1931 (where he was viewing Leoncallo's Pagliacci which turns up later in the film. How meta.) Wikipedia has a Commander Data moment and mentions this is the first time that a head of state exchanged gunfire with their attackers.

(also, not that weird that Roeg cast Theresa Russell. While they were married, she seemed to be a required fixture in his flicks, like Gerard Depardieu and French movies during the 80's.)



2.) La Forza Del Destino by Verdi: about a doomed love affair in 18th century Spain between a South Americna nobleman and a Spanish nobleman's daughter. Her brother stabs her to death when she tries to help him after being mortally wounded in a duel with her boyfriend.

The video is by Charles Sturridge and is something about kids stealing and burning a Mercedes. Did not understand, especially now that I know what the opera is about.

3.)Armide by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687): this is considered the French composer's masterpiece. It's the story of a witch and niece of the king of Damascus, Armide, who casts a spell on a soldier from the First Crusade named Renaud. She intends to kill him but falls in love with him instead. She casts a love spell on him but then is tormented by the thought his love for her is the result of a spell. She casts other spells to get out of this predicament and frets and in the process is cursed to love Renaud forever. Meanwhile, he is rescued by his Crusader buddies and snaps out of it. Good thing too because those Turks in the Holy Land aren't going to just kill themselves.

(All this talk of witches in the Holy Land makes me think Lully was....not an expert in Muslim culture.)

The video is by Godard and is something about a bunch of weightlifters ignoring a pair of women who are cleaning equipment in their gym. Eventually the women get naked, but the men still are oblivious. They try to stab the men but can't. Apropos of Godard, it's pretentious as shit and makes no sense if you know the original story and little sense if you do.

Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola style

I watched Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette flick this week. I liked it, for the record. The problem as with most historical flicks is that I didn't know who many of the cast actually were. I was also curious what happened to many of them. The film concluded with the October Revolution in October, 1789 as the royal family fled Versailles for the Tuileries. It's a good place to end it. I did not need to see Kirsten Dunst beheaded.



So--

--Ambassador Mercy (Steve Coogan)  was an Austrian minister and a powerful court advisor. He became Governor of the Austrian Netherlands in 1792. He was appointed Ambassador to England in 1794 but died shortly after arriving there.
--Madame DuBarry (Asia Argento), Louis XV's mistress, was beheaded in 1792. I'm going to be typing that a lot. Her last words, "Encore un moment" have become famous in existential circles.
--Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis) was a court flunky whom Marie Antoinette nicknamed Madame Etiquette for her obsession with it. She and her husband were beheaded in 1794.
--Princess de Lamballe (Mary Nighy) was married to some rich French guy briefly and then became Marie Antoinette's confidante at court. She was moved to La Force prison for her safety when the revolution broke out as the people hated her for being a close friend of the queen. She was convicted in a revolutionary tribunal in 1792 and then was apparently torn apart by an angry mob.
--Aunt Victoire (Molly Shannon) was Louis XV's sister. I spent the whole movie wondering who this bitch was. She did survive the revolution with her sister, Adelaide, and became something of a fugitive in Italy, terrified that assassins of the Revolution would find them. She died of breast cancer in 1799. Also, the king's sisters were apparently such bitches that Marie Antoinette made her daughter play with poorer children so she wouldn't grow up to be that way herself. Also a bitter irony, she may have been the true source of the "Let them eat cake" line.
--Marie Therese, Marie Antoinette's daughter, survived the terror and was extradited to Austria in 1795. Her story is too long to recount but she never seemed to recover from the Revolution. She lived in exile in Britain, returned briefly during the Bourbon Restoration in 1815. Lots of political gerrymandering follows during which she was briefly the Queen of France, her family leaves France for the last time in 1830, living first in Edinburgh and then Prague. She died childless in Vienna of pneumonia in 1851.
--Count Fersen (Jamie Dornan) was a Swedish count who was indeed suspected of having an affair with Marie Antoinette like in the movie. He survived his part in the Revolution but was himself killed in a monarchic revolution in Sweden in 1810 where he was trampled to death.
--Louis Joseph, the Dauphin, died, apparently of tuberculosis, in 1789.
--Louis Charles became the Dauphin automatically when his brother died. He too died officially of tuberculosis in 1795 while imprisoned. The cause of death is controversial. There were also rumors he had escaped and various "real" Louis' popped up over the intervening years, causing lots of grief for Marie Therese.

Is this the most depressing blog post ever? Everyone dies horribly and/or alone-except for those that are dismantled by angry mobs of course. No wonder existentialists look to this moment in history for inspiration. Gloomy motherfuckers.

I didn't mention them but of course poor Louis XVI was executed in 1793, followed by Marie in October of the same year just a few weeks from her 38th birthday. Her sister-in-law Elizabeth was executed in 1794.