The sublime Rose Macaulay

From Personal Pleasures: Reading
Here is one of the oddest of the odd inventions which man has sought out, this conveying to one another by marks scratched on paper thoughts privately conceived in the mind. It shows, as all the arts show, the infinite publicism of humankind, the sociability, the interdependence, which cannot endure to have a thought, to conceive a tale, a tune, a picture, an arrangement of words, or anything else, but all must forthwith be informed of it. And how avidly we run to be informed. We have already consumed many thousands of tales, poems, essays and what-not but we are never satiate, we are greedy always for more.

No one puts Baby in the corner

Mencken vs. Eddy

H.L. Mencken reviewing "Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind" by E.F. Dakin in The American Mercury, November, 1929

"Mr. Dakin's sub-title, it seems to me, is rather far-fetched. The peculiar mixture of vapors and sagacities which marked Mrs. Eddy's sayings and doings from end to end of her long life showed few of the characteristics of the virginal mind. Rather it would be more plausible (without throwing the slightest doubt upon her virtue) to compare he peculiar wisdom to that of a bordello keeper, for in it a sharp sense of reality and a weakness for the occult were curiously mingled. She was seldom if ever taken in by concrete human beings, but there was never a time when she did not believe quite incredible things about the powers and principalities of the air.
...Perhaps in grossly bad taste (I liken) this sense of the transcendental to a shaking fear of black cats, opals and cross-eyed men. In Mrs. Eddy it took the form of an incurable dread of malicious animal magnetism. This MAM pursued her during all the years of her prophesying and... brought down upon her the persecution of mesmerists, spiritualists, lawyers, newspaper reporters and other fiends from Hell; it haunted her days and made horrible her nights.
Despite her contention that disease was only an illusion, her ill health continued, and the temptation to blame it on malicious animal magnetism was hard to resist. Her terror was extreme- during her last years she maintained a staff of healers in her house to combat the waves of M.A.M. issuing from (her rival's students). They were on duty in sailor-like watches for the 24 hours of the day but it was all in vain."

When Gods were fun

Dionysus wandered about Greece looking for an entrance to Hades. He asked Prosymnus to show him the way. Prosymnus agreed on the condition Dionysus would allow himself to be "made love to as a woman is" by which he meant that he wished to sodomize the god. When Dionysus returned from Hades prepared to grant the favor, he discovered in the time that had passed, Prosymnus had died. He took a branch from a fig tree that grew over the man's grave, fashioned a member, and penetrated himself with it.

-paraphrased from "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso

No one puts Baby in the corner

Erik Satie

The use of the occult

Robsjohn-Gibbings on mixed media:
"One of the supposedly most mystifying things the Cubists did was to paste strips of newspapers, labels from bottles and so forth on their canvases. It was a favorite and old trick in occultism to arrange for the juxtaposition of quite unrelated objects. the mixing of such objects was a foolproof method used by magicians, witches and witch doctors to impress and bewilder the audience. This bringing together of such irrational unconnected objects suggests a secret formula that was beyond ordinary mortal's comprehension. The witches in Macbeth, for instance, throw into the steaming cauldron the eye of a newt, the toe of a frog, the finger of a birth-strangled babe and so on.

Robsjohn-Gibbings on Max Jacob

Max Jabobs admires one of his many puppets

From: Mona Lisa's Mustache:

"Among the major enthusiasms of Max Jacob and his group were the paintings of Henri Rousseau, the customs-house inspector.... It is not without significance that this fascination with Rousseau has a connection with the occult, for Rousseau was entirely persuaded that he painted according to the dictates of his dead wife whose astral hand guided his brush."
"Certain of Max Jacob's declarations contain a strange mixture of a profound Christian religiosity with a curious emotionalism and cunning. Typical of Jacob's mystical hallucination and sense of publicity was the claim that the Deity had appeared to him in his room on the Place Ravignan... and followed up this visit by sitting in the next seat to Jacob in a cinema"

Robsjohn-Gibbings on Picasso

From: Mona Lisa's Mustache- A Dissection of Modern Art

"As well as longing to be a clown, Picasso in these early days could be found copying the Old Masters in the Louvre and painting in his studio in the manner of Gaugin, Degas, and more often Toulouse-lautrec. So closely did he imitate the last that at first glance some of the paintings of the two artists seem indistinguishable. In 1901, with one eye on El Greco, Picasso painted a series of archly pathetic mothers, dyspeptic femme fatales, and peevish acrobats. This shivering gallery of neuroticism is now quite rightly known as the master's 'blue period'. Between 1905 and 1906, putting these doom-eager Madonnas and emaciated harlequins behind him, he painted a group of neo-Greco-Roman nudes, ususally seen through a haze of terra-cotta pink. These fin-de-siecle tanagras are now known as products of the 'rose period'."

Ishi, the wild man of California

From "Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect man" by John Kasson
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Photo of Ishi wearing the primitive clothing in which he was discovered.... by Kiefer Sutherland apparently.
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"With his gentle, friendly disposition, Ishi played the role of Rousseauian noble savage far better than had Wild Peter or Victor. His reactions to modern civilisation aroused keen interest. Traveling around San Francisco shortly after his arrival, he was unnerved by the crowds. The exclamation "HANSI SALTU!!!!" burst from his lips: "Many white people, many white people!"

Link to delightful song performed by Ishi ca. 1911:
http://www.umbc.edu/MA/index/number1/nettl1/nettl03.wav

Welles and Hemingway

David Thomson in Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles
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(Welles' radio roles) account "for the development of a kind of superior fraudulence in his voice.
There were those who detected this rising bogusness. Welles was the first choice to read the narration for the documentary movie 'This Spanish Earth'. The narration had been written by Ernest Hemingway, who claimed he had no desire to read it himself- until he heard Welles' voice. Then he objected and said he would do it himself. 'Every time Orson said the word infantry', he said, 'it was like a cocksucker swallowing.'"

Moderation

Nietzsche again:
This deification of the principle of individualization, if it is thought of in general as commanding and proscriptive, understands only one law, that of the individual, that is, observing the limits of individualization, moderation in the Greek sense. Apollo, as the ethical divinity, demands moderation from his followers and self-knowledge, so that they can observe moderation.. And so alongside the aesthetic necessity of beauty run the demands "Know thyself" and "Nothing in excess." Arrogance and excess are considered the essentially hostile daemons of the non-Apollonian sphere, therefore characteristic of the pre-Apollonian period, the age of the Titans, and of the world beyond the Apollonian, that is, the barbarian world.

Mencken on Catholicism

In The American Mercury: July 1929:
No one can be a good Christian and not believe in demons of all kinds, including those which animate vampires and witches. The Catholic church teaches categorically that they exist.. thus we are forced to assume that Al Smith believes in demons, and that it would not surprise him at all to see one of them enter a bellboy at the Biltmore and cause a dreadful ruction.

The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche

While in the theatre daytime might be only artistic and stage architecture only symbolic, and the nature of the metrical language might have an ideal quality, nevertheless, on the whole, a misconception still ruled: it was not enough, Schiller claimed, that people merely tolerated as poetic freedom what was the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus, according to Schiller, was the decisive step with which war was declared openly and nobly against naturalism in art. Such a way of looking at things is the one, it strikes me, for which our age (which considers itself so superior) uses the dismissive catch phrase "pseudo-idealism." I suspect, by contrast, that with our present worship of naturalism and realism we are situated at the opposite pole from all idealism, namely, in the region of a wax works collection. In that, too, there is an art, as in certain romance novels of the present time. Only let no one pester us with the claim that with this we have overthrown the artistic "pseudo-idealism" of Schiller and Goethe.
Of course, it is an "ideal" stage on which, following Schiller's correct insight, the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of the primitive tragedy, customarily strolled, a stage lifted high above over the real strolling stage of mortal men. For this chorus the Greeks constructed a suspended hovering framework of an imaginary natural condition and on it placed imaginary natural beings. Tragedy grew up out of this foundation and, for that very reason, has, from its inception, been spared the embarrassing business of counterfeiting reality.
That is not to say that it is a world arbitrarily fantasized somewhere between heaven and earth. It is much rather a world possessing the same reality and credibility for the devout Greek as the world of Olympus, together with its inhabitants. The satyr as the Dionysian chorus member lives in a reality permitted by religion, sanctioned by myth and culture. The fact that tragedy begins with him, that out of him the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy speaks, is a phenomenon as foreign to us here as the development of tragedy out of the chorus generally.
Perhaps we can reach a starting point for this discussion when I offer the claim that the satyr himself, the imaginary natural being, is related to the cultural person in the same way that Dionysian music is related to civilization. On this last point Richard Wagner states that civilization is neutralized by music in the same way lamplight is by daylight. In just such a manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself neutralized by the sight of the chorus of satyrs. This is the most direct effect of Dionysian tragedy: generally , the state and society, the gap between man and man give way to an invincible feeling of unity which leads back to the heart of nature.
The metaphysical consolation, which as I have already indicated, true tragedy leaves us, that at the bottom of everything, in spite of all the transformations in phenomena, life is indestructibly power and delightful, this consolation appears in lively clarity as the chorus of satyrs, the chorus of natural beings, who live, as it were, behind civilization, who cannot disappear, and who, in spite of all the changes in generations and a people's history, always remain the same. With this chorus, the profound Greek, capable of the most delicate and the most severe suffering, consoled himself, the man who looked around with a daring gaze in the middle of the terrifying destructive instincts of so-called world history and equally into the cruelty of nature and who is in danger of longing for the denial of the will of Buddhism. Art saves him, and through art life saves him.

The American Mercury: April, 1928 Vol. XIII

H.L Mencken reviews the biographies of Isadora Duncan and Aimee Semple McPherson:
"Superficially, to be sure, they differ enormously. La Duncan (posthumously, alas!) devotes a large part of her volume to shameless bragging about her drabbing; La McPherson (still alive, glory to God!) devotes at least a third of hers to proofs she was chaste. But that is all only on the surface: deep down the two gals are tremendously alike. Both are mystics and hear strange voices over the sky rim....
"What gives (Duncan's book) solid interest is not this pathetic and almost mannish interest in mulling over cold amours, but the author's laborious and vain effort to explain the principles of her so-called Art. This effort leaves it revealed as precisely what it was: a mass of puerilities without any more rational basis than golf or spiritualism. Isadora simply loved to prance around in a shift; all the rest was simply afterthought."
(McPherson) was attracted to Los Angeles, it appears, by the climate. The Bible Belt was sending a steady stream of its rheumatic... in that direction and she simply followed. The result, as everyone knows, was a swift and roaring success. The town has more morons in it than the entire state of Mississippi."

My idol on pigeons, Stein, & owls

There's an Owl in My Room
James Thurber, The New Yorker, 17-Nov-1934

I saw Gertrude Stein on the screen of a newsreel theater one afternoon and I heard her read that famous passage of hers about pigeons on the grass, alas (the sorrow is, as you know, Miss Stein's). After reading about the pigeons on the grass alas, Miss Stein said, "This is a simple description of a landscape I have seen many times." I don't really believe that that is true. Pigeons on the grass alas may be a simple description of Miss Stein's own consciousness, but it is not a simple description of a plot of grass on which pigeons have alighted, are alighting, or are going to alight. A truly simple description of the pigeons alighting on the grass of the Luxembourg Gardens (which, I believe, is where the pigeons alighted) would say of the pigeons alighting there only that they were pigeons alighting. Pigeons that alight anywhere are neither sad pigeons nor gay pigeons, they are simply pigeons.
It is neither just nor accurate to connect the word alas with pigeons. Pigeons are definitely not alas. They have nothing to do with alas and they have nothing to do with hooray (not even when you tie red, white, and blue ribbons on them and let them loose at band concerts); they have nothing to do with mercy me or isn't that fine, either. White rabbits, yes, and Scotch terriers, and blue-jays, and even hippopotamuses, but not pigeons. I happen to have studied pigeons very closely and carefully, and I have studied the effect, or rather the lack of effect, of pigeons very carefully. A number of pigeons alight from time to time on the sill of my hotel window when I am eating breakfast and staring out the window. They never alas me, they never make me feel alas; they never make me feel anything.

Nobody and no animal and no other bird can play a scene so far down as a pigeon can. For instance, when a pigeon on my window ledge becomes aware of me sitting there in a chair in my blue polka-dot dressing-gown, worrying, he pokes his head far out from his shoulders and peers sideways at me, for all the world (Miss Stein might surmise) like a timid man peering around the corner of a building trying to ascertain whether he is being followed by some hoofed fiend or only by the echo of his own footsteps. And yet it is not for all the world like a timid man peering around the corner of a building trying to ascertain whether he is being followed by a hoofed fiend or only by the echo of his own footsteps, at all. And that is because there is no emotion in the pigeon and no power to arouse emotion. A pigeon looking is just a pigeon looking. When it comes to emotion, a fish, compared to a pigeon, is practically beside himself.
A pigeon peering at me doesn't make me sad or glad or apprehensive or hopeful. With a horse or a cow or a dog it would be different. It would be especially different with a dog. Some dogs peer at me as if I had just gone completely crazy or as if they had just gone completely crazy. I can go so far as to say that most dogs peer at me that way. This creates in the consciousness of both me and the dog a feeling of alarm or downright terror and legitimately permits me to work into a description of the landscape, in which the dog and myself are figures, a note of emotion. Thus I should not have minded if Miss Stein had written: dogs on the grass, look out, dogs on the grass, look out, look out, dogs on the grass, look out Alice. That would be a simple description of dogs on the grass. But when any writer pretends that a pigeon makes him sad, or makes him anything else, I must instantly protest that this is a highly specialized fantastic impression created in an individual consciousness and that therefore it cannot fairly be presented as a simple description of what actually was to be seen.

People who do not understand pigeons-and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them-should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons. Pigeons come closer to a zero of impingement than any other birds. Hens embarrass me the way my old Aunt Hattie used to when I was twelve and she still insisted I wasn't big enough to bathe myself; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle; and so on down to swallows at twilight who scare the hell out of me. But pigeons have absolutely no effect on me. They have absolutely no effect on anybody. They couldn't even startle a child. That is why they are selected from among all birds to be let loose, with colored ribbons attached to them, at band concerts, library dedications, and christenings of new dirigibles. If any body let loose a lot of owls on such an occasion there would be rioting and catcalls and whistling and fainting spells end throwing of chairs and the Lord only knows what else.
From where I am sitting now I can look out the window and see a pigeon being a pigeon on the roof of the Harvard Club. No other thing can be less what it is not than a pigeon can, and Miss Stein, of all people, should understand that simple fact. Behind the pigeon I am looking at, a blank wall of tired gray bricks is stolidly trying to sleep off oblivion; underneath the pigeon the cloistered windows of the Harvard Club are staring in horrified bewilderment at something they have seen across the street. The pigeon is just there on the roof being a pigeon, having been, and being, a pigeon and, what is more, always going to be, too. Nothing could be simpler than that. If you read that sentence aloud you will instantly see what I mean. It is a simple description of a pigeon on a roof. It is only with an effort that I am conscious of the pigeon, but I am acutely aware of a great sulky red iron pipe that is creeping up the side of the building intent on sneaking up on a slightly tipsy chimney which is shouting its head off.

There is nothing a pigeon can do or be that would make me feel sorry for it or for myself or for the people in the world, just as there is nothing I could do or be that would make a pigeon feel sorry for itself. Even if I plucked his feathers out it would not make him feel sorry for himself and it would not make me feel sorry for myself or for him. But try plucking the quills out of a porcupine or even plucking the fur out of a jackrabbit. There is nothing a pigeon could be, or can be, rather, which could get into my consciousness like a fumbling hand in a bureau drawer and disarrange my mind or pull anything out of it. I bar nothing at all. You could dress up a pigeon in a tiny suit of evening clothes and put a tiny silk hat on his head and a tiny gold-headed cane under his wing and send him walking into my room at night. It would make no impression on me. I would not shout, "Good god almighty, the birds are in charge!" But you could send an owl into my room, dressed only in the feathers it was born with, and no monkey business, and I would pull the covers over my head and scream.
No other thing in the world falls so far short of being able to do what it cannot do as a pigeon does. Of being unable to do what it can do, too, as far as that goes.

The tribulations of Buddy, careless dog.

Ford Madox Ford on Henry James

Exactly what may have been his intimate conviction as to, say, what should be the proper relation of the sexes, I don't profess to know... he had a personal horror of letting his more august friends come into contact through him with anyone who might be even remotely expected of marital irregularities.... Once he had got it well fixed in his head that I was a journalist, he conceived the idea that all my friends must be illegally united with members of the opposite sex.
It happened that two extraordinarily respectable wives of two eminent editors... took it in their heads to call on James at Rye. I had hardly so much as a bowing acquaintance with them, but the next day, happening to go into Rye, I met the Old Man down by the harbor. Just at the point where we met was a coal yard whose proprietor had the same name as one of the husbands of those ladies. James stopped short and with a face working with fury, pointed his stick at the coal man's name above the gate and brought out the exasperated words: "A couple of jaded.... WANTONS!...." and nothing whatever more.

From: My School Days by E. Nesbit

I acquired many marbles, and much gingerbread, and totally eclipsed Cissy Thomas who had enjoyed the fleeting sunshine of popular favour on the insecure basis of paper dolls.

The Sound and The Fury

From the second section- June Second, 1910:
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
It was propped against the collar box and I lay listening to it. Hearing it, that is. I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear. Like Father said down the long and lonely light-rays you might see Jesus walking, like. And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
Through the wall I heard Shreve's bed-springs and then his slippers on the floor hishing. I got up and went to the dresser and slid my hand along it and touched the watch and turned it face-down and went back to bed. But the shadow of the sash was still there and I had learned to tell almost to the minute, so I'd have to turn my back to it, feeling the eyes animals used to have in the back of their heads when it was on top, itching. It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
And so as soon as I knew I couldn't see it, I began to wonder what time it was. Father said that constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function. Excrement Father said like sweating. And I saying All right. Wonder. Go on and wonder.

and:

Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said. Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs. Outside outside of them always but. Yellow. Feet soles with walking like. Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed. With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up.

The Magic Bedknob

by Mary Norton
"The charitable attitude to adopt, Carey," said Aunt Beatrice in her precise, cutting voice, "is that you are not quite right in your head. This story about a South sea island, cannibals.... lagoons....If it were necessary to lie, a child of three could do better."
Carey swallowed.
"A magic bed..." Aunt Beatrice smiled acidly. "It might interest you to know, Carey, that I bought that bed myself in 1903, quite new, from Baring and Willow's- a most reputable firm," she added, "and not given to innovations".