E-mails & sundry late October Correspondences

Date:	Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:39:58 -0800 (PST)
From:	"James Welsch" <_________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Happy Nevada Day!
To:	"Kristin Jarvis" <_______@yahoo.com>

Mrs Jarvis,

Actually, Nevada Day is tomorrow, but never too early to celebrate.

Some quotes about appreciating life:

Well, I got me a fine wife, I got me a fiddle,
When the sun's comin up, I got cakes on the griddle,
Life ain't nothin' but a funny, funny riddle,
Thank God I'm a Country Boy!

-John Denver

Just like Michael Haverty!

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well read & wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, & talking about this & that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

So I do the same now, & so do my kids & grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, & exclaim or murmer or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

-Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (2005). I'm planning on sending this book to Barbara Lee, Berkeley's representative, & Nancy Pelosi, when they win next week, especially if Pelosi is the new House Speaker. He says our country has been taken over by people without consciences. Because of our government, one of America's great writers in his old age has given up on the human race, like Twain & Einstein before they died, & now Hawking! I also plan on sending Richard Pombo (R-Stockton) an e-mail saying "I hope you die poor!" Can I get arrested for that?

When it will be questiond "When the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?"
"O no no I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!"
I question not my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look thru it & not with it.

-William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment.

You know, I just went with "Brian Aha" (Cuban guy I lived with in Slonim 11) to a Halloween party full of gay lawyers, & you were the first person he asked about. I guess you impress a certain fine film on people's memories. Ah memory, my theme, that wingéd host that soared about me...

Diet of champagne not beer... Hardly stops one adding weight, but keeps the scrotum crisp.

-Professor Veen, in Nabokov's Ada or Ardor.

Well, a happy 27th to you & 145th to Nevada!

Peace & Love,
Mr Welsch

Posted on the New York Times Caucus Blog as a comment on "Nancy & Denny: Hanging the Drapes in the House", today:

They are going to villify any rising Democrat, anyone who could potentially take over leadership! If she were Jim Webb, they’d paint him as a gay activist. The fact she’s a woman from San Francisco is enough, they don’t even have to mention her record, ambition, or specific ideals. Even if she doesn’t represent Unamerican values like peace & taxes.

Aren’t Fox News watchers getting nauseous of everyone accusing everyone of just playing politics? Isn’t that how we get things done in this country? It was the Republicans who tried to impeach a president when the third-in-line was an ambitious Republican. Throw in a little more corruption, & Pelosi could be a true leader.

— Posted by Hardrhythm

Date:	Thu, 12 Oct 2006 15:32:02 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"James Welsch" <______@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Quarter way thru life
To:	"Kristin Jarvis"

Mrs. Haver-jar (?)

Hmm, what is your last name(s)? I always address my e-mails to ex-Bonnie Whiting as "Mrs. Smith", the last thing she wants to be called, love of her husband notwithstanding.

What are you up to?

Thanks for being one of two (the other: Melinda Rice) who sent me a birthday note. I was alone in a bar at midnight, & I got a free drink for answering a quiz question correctly (Only sports star who makes his own bed at hotels? I deduced "Tiger!") Sorry, it actually wasn't depressing, nor am I lonely, but it's an easy style of self-deprecating birthday-humor. Also, incidentally, I just re-read our last correspondence so as not to be redundant in this one, & there was a bit of miscommunication: I wasn't harrasing you for not ever visiting Tahoe, I was just describing why moving to the bay area had its advantages. In two months, I've been visited by a staggering amount of old friends.

I could be commissioned, by the way, to write a series of arguments, if you're ever at the point when considering pros of moving here. It's expensive, for instance, but I have a totally-super-sweet-ass apartment (huge, central location, 1905 building) for only $1k/month. But that's just bragging. Ha ha ha, suckers! I've also yet to find employment, but that may not be wholly the economy's fault.

Politics: Don't vote for warmongers / war-profiteers - the general sentiment in Berkeley, so I'm told. Jenny's working as a peace-canvasser. Is the situation hopeless / beyond our democratic control?
Beer: Boont, a brown ale from Mendocino, I think; Abbey Cat, & others from the Lost Coast Brewery in Eureka; anything made by Anchor Steam, in SF.
Literature: Nabakov, Vonnegut, & the Death's Jest-book (1829, a strange neo-Jacobean play by late-Romantic proto-absurdist mock-gothic Thomas Lovell Beddoes). I might be writing a secret sensational novellette in my free time, but can it be sensational if it's secret?
Music: The bay area is amazing. I've already seen an opera & several concerts for free. I've been playing at an open mic every tuesday & singing sacred harp every monday, both good practice, for something. As for "popular" genres, I can't figure out why, 40-years since Dylan plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival, people have yet to figure out how to mix live rock music. & hip-hop is even worse! These are genres not only about volume, but about lyricisim & lyrics, & you can never hear what they're saying & you ears hurt! Bah! It's frustrating, having a classical training, & always trying to see as much various music as possible. But the two days of live free bluegrass in Golden Gate Park, every year, last weekend, was incredible - Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, Freakwater (who you should "check out" if you've never heard of them), five stages, &c.

I hope you're well. I should have some new pictures digitalized soon. I always love seeing yours, of puppets, &c. "Halloween show"? "Exotic ghosts?"

Peace, Love, Roberta Joan Anderson, by Jo,
James

Date:	Fri, 13 Oct 2006 07:41:03 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"kristin jarvis" <_________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Re: Quarter way thru life
To:	"James Welsch" <_______@yahoo.com>

James,

Sounds like a lovely way to spend the quarter century mark.  While being around others is great fun, I
always need a little time for reflection when I round anoter year.  I believe I celebrated with a bellini
that night, which is a mimosa except with peach juice. From what I can remember twenty five was swell.  In
fact, it was my first time as an adult in San Fran... Speaking of that lovely city, if we had the resources
and a job waiting we would move there in a second. While perhaps we saw only a portion of the city, and
spent way too much money on the amazing food and drink, I can imagine it could be just as lovely on a
smaller budget.  That said, as we were dreaming of moving there, a new Walmart opened in Oakland and
there was an article about the throngs of fairly educated folk beating down the door trying to get a
job.  But we did love the city, saw lots of performances, went to the Asian, modern and mechanical
toy museums, ah, it was incredible.  That said, I think I have decided not to attend grad school, which
makes the possibility of moving there even slimmer. I'm actually fairly happy in this city and we've
finally started finding a place in the arts community here.

I'm in a show right now at the Center (for puppetry arts) which is incredible fun.  I'm part of a piano
trio of sorts for the show and we get to play and sing great music but also create some of the foley and
narrate the stories.  We perform Mr. Ghost Goes to Town, The Blob!, Danse Macabre, Funeral March of the
Marionettes, the great song from the 1920s called "Creepy" among others.

So you're singing sacred harp?  We performed a few songs in that tradition for Michael adaptation of
Gilgamesh.  He's singing in a group regularly here so we went to the Southeastern conference.  The sound was
just incredible.  Have you seen the documentary?  It's called Awake my Soul: the Story of the Sacred Harp.
It's a little low budget but tells the history of the music and the southern tradition quite nicely,
although they do point out a few too many times that the form defies any classical notion of musical
structure.

Well, I should go as I need to start the day.  Before my call tonight we're going to the last weekend of the
Lakewood junk/antiques fair.  It's this incredibly huge fair set on an old fairground in the middle of
the city quite near our house.  You can find pretty much anything there.  They are tearing the beautiful
and quirky location down to make way for condos. I hope you the best for your 25th year.

With love,
Kristin (Jarvis)
(I've kept my last name because I am quite fond of it
and Michael seemed to have no objections.  So,
officially, I guess I'm Mrs. Jarvis, although when you
attach the Mrs. it sounds rather odd...)

To:	[someone I don't know on MySpace]
Date:	Oct 23 2006 5:30 PM
Subject:	The Mimosa's Witnesses
Body:	[_____], Well, I've been trying to get Lisa Rybovich Cralle, our mutual friend apparently, back out here to have a Mimosa's Witnesses "service", an organized semi-religious event for our semi-religious organization, the Mimosa's Witnesses, which congregates & transubstantiates on Sunday Mornings, & occasionally, but not yet tangibly, goes canvassing evangelically, with platters of champagne & orange juice, you see. So, if you have any interest in our secular cult, our tithe is low (only 9% of your income!), & the rewards are high (earthly paradise, at least on the Sabbath), & services are held regularly (I'm trying to spearhead an initiative this weekend) in Berkeley your home town! & postings thru YourSpace. Peace, The Archpope of Transubstantiation

Maude and the Triangle of Death

From the Archive: Holy Sonnet III

III.

There is one force to fuse the universe.

Is jealousy a fallen form of love,

Wrath a misunderstanding of above?

And what our ancestors calld Adam’s curse

A fractured reflection of the grand

And ancient scheme our divine selves created,

When with our seed the future permeated,

With nourishing desire, filled the land.

My love it is a drunken spinning wheel

With one still center which will never move,

And tho the sands the four winds breathing feel.

Our lives exist infinity to prove.

The twist is that the fuel we call desire

Will never be consumed despite the fire.

Music Review: Cuomo! & the Fucking Buckaroos!

La vie mes amis, it's true, sometimes the smallest concerts are the best times. Last night, I went by myself by BART to see a friend play, Cuomo!, a songwriter from Brooklyn whose couch I had surfed on & off for a month last January – (his girlfriend was my girlfriend's girlfriend.) He's wandering around the West Coast for a while on “tour”, playing in the streets, coffee shops, & just about breaking even with the payed gigs. The show was posted as “6:00pm” at the Mama Buzz coffee shop, so I arrived early with my book & drank a Californian drink, the very name of which might classify me & strike fear in the hearts of Fox News pundits. After fifty pages of Nabokov, tthere was no sign that there would be a show that night. Dave & Myan, his part-time upper-harmony from Maine, had gotten lost in rush hour, & when they arrived, there was still no sign of the featured act, a local folk-punk band. Oh, you know, we drank a few pints, spoke of politics & women, I made the occasional wity comment. At eight (an hour before the place closes), they sang their songs for me & a random girl in the back. Cuomo's music was exciting, poetic, & enthusiastically performed. Finally, half of the Fucking Buckaroos noisily stumbled in with a wave of apologies, bleary-eyed, they too had gotten lost. They played a short set (I would classify it as “The-Pogues-meets-Sam-Spade”) Some audience member (was it me?) requested a love song. The poor banjo-plucking Buckaroo was losing his voice. Despite diminished numbers, it was a great evening with better music than I've been experiencing elsewhere in my new town. I even hosted the after party, to which Myan invited the only other audience member, the girl in the back, a 100% turn-out. Ah, les soirées que j'ai! Je baiserais une amibe, mais je n'ai aucun aileron.

Party Announcement!

Date:	Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:59:32 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"James Welsch" <__________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Burns Burthday Bush Bash
To:	"James Quill" <______@yahoo.com>
CC:	"Samuel Tear Amidon" <_______@gmail.com>, "Rachel Eley" <_______@yahoo.co.uk>

James.

Actually I screwed up the math: January 25th, 2009!

Your 27th, Rab's 250th, & five days after Bush leaves office.

Maybe we should fly to Ayrshire to celebrate. Where's your uncle's castle?

James.

__________________________________________________________________________________

New Song

How do you pronounce the word?

I'm the son of Abraham, the son of man,

And the elephants have gone crazy,

And the birds can sing the longest song I've ever heard,

And I'll miss it all, like only a lover can.

Were the garments rolled in blood?

And I know the maple, and I know the oak,

And the ass's back is broken,

And the phthalate left her barren in the darkest mud,

But I'll think of you, with every shaft of smoke.

Straightway from the holy land,

Whose sanctity such floods of human blood,

Unnatural rain for it, will soon wash out.

I'll look no more lest my brain turn,

And I'll break the yoke, & I'll topple down,

For the green never gets counted,

And the whales are swimming deeper than we'll ever learn,

Will you visit me, will bring my wasted crown?

Straightway from the holy land,

Whose sanctity such floods of human blood,

Unnatural rain for it, will soon wash out.

How could I forget the sky?

I'm the great crusader, I'm the pirate pilgrim,

But the ants are still in hiding,

But their industry will never foul the food supply,

So I'll raise my cup, and I'll fill yours past it's brim.

Movie Review: Borat

Last Thursday, I was walking thru the U.C. Berkeley Campus, & I stumbled into line for free passes to an advance screening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. There was a slight confusion about my status as student (I told them I was a Scientology Major), but I got my big postcard. So I saw it this Thursday, in a hall full of rowdy, fully-appreciative 18-to-22-year-olds, probably the only suitable environment.

I walked the twenty blocks to campus, many hours early, & drank a few “soltice”-style pints in the university “lair”. There was loud thumping music, of course, but I spent both lemon-tinted pints reading Nabokov's Ada; Or, Ardor. With some European upper-class inflection, as Ada's mother has, both title & subtitle are supposed to sound about the same. I'm about a hundred pages into this book, about one-sixth. It's shocking, like Borat. It was a shocking night. Ada, in its own way a sequel to Lolita, is about cousins who are actually siblings, who have, whilst summering in Eden, their first physical contact. Wordplay & entymology, it's about anagrams: insect, incest. I guess it could be a companion-piece to Lolita – Humbert Humbert, you remember, had a proto-nymphet experience when he was a youth, which set the stage for his later perversion. A better way to understand it, both Van Veen & Humbert recognize true beauty & respond with an unquenchable erection. Humbert is fundamentally un-creative tho, & although he loves his nymphet, he doesn't get her intellect, & he's never really interested in her beautiful brain, his fatal flaw if anything is – one critic compares the book to a despot possessing a population, demanding allegiance thru rape whilst shutting himself off from true connection. I shouldn't comment yet on the quality of Van's lust, but I think he is legitimately turned on in part by his sister's intellect, even if he's bored by her pretentious scientific descriptions of caterpillars.

Sasha Baron Cohen is in a great position to mock American culture, expose it as racist & backwards, & Americans are dying to be constantly reaffirmed in this suspicion. At his best on Da Ali G Show, he acts far over the top, so that no sane focused individual could be fooled by the fraud of a fake foreigner making impossible & impossibly offensive cultural mistakes – yet they routinely are fooled. It's a similar charade with Ali G, the A-side of the shtick, with a “how stupid do these politicians think the 'hip-hop generation' actually is?” But, damn, what's with all the poop humor in this new movie? Maybe, because of my indoctrination as enlightened humanist, or my upbringing with Gallagher, I am not surprised nor scandalized by masturbation or feces, & therefore cannot be grossed-out or moved to a chuckle by gross-out stunts. If taking down Americans & exposing their prejudices is so easy, what can be learnt by bringing your own poop in a bag to the dinner table (because the foreigner didn't understand the flush)? Wouldn't anyone, not just racist Southern Christians, be dismayed? There are priceless moments – like when Borat, at a rodeo, gets the whole audience to cheer for something like “May George Bush drink the blood of every last Iraqi woman & child”; or when a cowboy tells him in confidence to shave his mustache so that he doesn't look like a Muslim terrorist. I guess I wanted more sociology & less scatology. I'm still convinced that the best movie ever made about racism is Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, using humor to discuss gray areas of the soul that a cheesy movie like Crash can't scrape away at. Borat, with its mockumentary format & deceiving character acting, had a potential to take Blazing Saddles into a post-9/11 world, but it seemed more inspired by Mel Brooks' fart jokes than by his comic insights.

From the Archive: Holy Sonnets I-II

I.

My metered speech, exalted language –

O yes there is a scheme to poetry.

My mundane words enshroud the lotus tree

And sound of beauty high transcend the page

And music what we hear & vision see

And manifest the cosmos with to be.

But no there is no way to hide my face

Exclusively in unseen silent realms:

Try as I might my ideal concepts lace

Themselves in woman’s eyes & outward imagery

That ecchoes in your rural pen & see

My grace immortal in all art’s embrace.

I speak of everything & all exists,

For thru my sustenance the earth subsists.

II.

My words are music & my thought is food.

I nourish all the cosmos with my pen,

And from it dust from dust will rise again.

All your reflections of my face are good.

My images are bread from which you live.

My outward nourishment permeates in.

The cycles that you breath & eat begin

When one intakes & I that apple give.

O must you woman mourn over your pangs

& you usurping king control our deaths?

No you will never take your feard last breaths,

For from a tree the fire stealer hangs.

My knowledge from the branch is what one eats

And art th’ imagination excretes.

September Review; two e-mails; plus, a Rilke poem translated.

September ended well this year, with visions of a drunken universe, transubstantiated mimosas on several sabbaths, and play-acting as with the idle rich. On the poetical front, my political soldiers were armed with “bunker busters”, for which our commander-in-chief couldn't get funding, but my imagination knows an alchemy which no congress can poo-poo. Musically, however, the world's body was impotent & incontinent.

I'll conclude this month's weblog with a thought. What if our government made it harder to get a driver's lisence? My sister once proposed that the drinking age & driving age be switched. Meaning, one should practice being a drinker when one is going to anyway, and postpone controlling 35-hundred-pound hunks of steel until we've passed thru our “collegiate maturity”.

I've been trying to picture what a city would look like with 25% fewer cars. My beautiful new apartment overlooks a huge parking lot; &, to walk to my favorite coffee shop & the bar where I play guitar, I have to walk thru two parking lots, cross a busy intersection, & walk down a quiet residential street which is nonetheless completed lined with parked cars. And my “commute” is only four blocks, taking about eight minutes! & I must pass a couple hundred cars! In addition to the obvious green considerations, a decrease in the number of cars would thin out some of the places where they congregate. But what would we do with all that space? Gardens, trees, patios, piazzas, museums, circuses, playgrounds, sculptures, trails, ponds, kitchens, lemonade stands – you know, the things that used to fill up a city before cars took over fifty years ago. How we might replace the noise of traffic is another issue.

Who would be the volunteers to stop driving, to decrease the amount of cars by 25%? What if the driving age was not 21 but 30? This would operate under the assumption that no healthy, single, childless twenty-something actually needs his car to commute to work or to get his groceries home. And this would operate under the assumption that no poor, entry-level-job, college-indebted twenty-something needs to be spending (on average) ten thousand dollars a year on something superfluous, noisy, dangerous, & polluting. Even renting an automobile for travel, the dozen times a year that might be necessary, plus the price of trains or public transportation, adds up to strikingly less than the price of owning one.

But of course, one could not expect, & one would not want, a law like that to ever appear. But what if it were a subject of morality instead of legislature. Christians, for instance, don't expect the government to enforce abstinence until marriage; why should conscious liberals want anyone but their community to discourage automobile-ownership until necessity. And by reshaping our society, necessity would quickly dwindle.

Date:	Sun, 1 Oct 2006 23:03:40 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"S. Sandrigon" <_________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	Birds
To:	"Rachel Eley" <________@yahoo.co.uk>

Rachel,

We just finished watching Attenborough's Life of Birds. I used to love those Oxford coots so much, until I saw them killing all their own babies tonight. I got pretty choked up at the end when he was giving his "save the birds" speech.

I'm up thru Act Three of the Jest-book. I haven't quite figured out how to respond yet. I'd love an explanation of the song "Squats on a toad-stool" [III.iii.322-67]. It seems to be about an aborted fetus wondering which of God's gross creatures it should inhabit next; but, why, Rachel, why?

I've more or less put off my job hunt until I finish reading it, & then I'll tell you how I liked it. How's school?

Peace,
Sandy

_____________________________________________________________________

Date:	Mon, 2 Oct 2006 19:43:40 +0000 (GMT)
From:	"Rachel Eley" <__________@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject:	Re: Birds
To:	"S. Sandrigon" <__________@yahoo.com>

Sandy,

When in Oxford, Nick and Geoff Schullenberger developed a highly detailed cosmology of ducks, in which coots featured as 'the fallen ones' and were charged with undertaking the devil's work, as far as it extended to the river bank, and for guarding portals to the underworld beneath their enormous and evil-looking nests. The two became so possessed by this idea that the sight of coots made them visible angry and, on occasions, prone to hissing. Only recently do they appear to have forgotten about it. I am not going to tell them what you saw.

As to dear little frog-voice, I'm not quite sure what to tell you. Of course he is not the only bodiless childfull who longs for a body in the play. He has been torn from from womb, as others from the tomb, and the question for all is of course 'where next'? Dying and staying dead just doesn't seem to be an option in a play written by a compulsive poet-experimental anatomist. Perhaps it's worth remembering too that Isbrand is an orphan, and one who spends much of his time plunging in and out of different bodies (court-fool, brother, conspirator, revolutionary leader, meglomaniac). His belief that he can choose who he wants to be is central to his character. ('I would have seized the sky some moonless night,/ And made myself the sun; whose morrow rising/ Shall see me new-created by myself.) I think he admires frog-voice, who like him aspires to be 'more than human'. Creating yourself and creating others (through alchemy, necromancy or the apothecary's art - all practised in the play) seems to be tactics in this foolish power struggle. What happens to Nature and humanity, I'm not sure.

School has begun well. Somehow my 'vocational' degree (that's what I told my parents anyway) involves me comparing and evaluating the relative merits of 'bio-ethics', deep ecology eco-socialism and Gaia theory. I shall be a hippy!

More later; I am trying to keep on top of the reading list this time around and i've a core class tomorrow. So far no sign of the old demons.

Love
Rachel

I notice you, in all of everything:

That which is good, you are, like to a brother,

That which is small, you shine, like to a sapling,

That which is huge, you give, like from a mother.

Such is the awesome theater of powers:

To go thru things, as with a slave's perfection,

To grow in roots, to flow with sap and flowers,

And in the canopy, as with a resurrection.

-from Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Studenbuch

(trans. by the weblogist)