Cincinnatus

Rough Draft

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

17 February 2013

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Cincinnatus

When Cincinnatus in a desperate time

Was called to serve the undeserving state
Imperiled by the armies of the kings
And weakened by senatorial whisperings
Our conscript father laid aside the plough
Forswore retirement and his peaceful fields
Unwillingly took up the imperium
And journeyed thus to disharmonious Rome
To teach, to govern, and to sanctify
A people lost and drifting with the age
To hazard all in the forum of the world
Not for himself, not for brittle applause
Blown by the wind, noisy for a brief time
As when October’s leaves make temporal show
And then decay through winter’s cold demands
Nor for the silky smiles of ambassadors
The approval of jugglers and panderers
The cricket-voices of mummers and polls

No

But rather for the fuller at his cloth

The builder with his plans and rule and line
The seamstress working a wedding dress
The laughing child at play with her favorite doll
The sunburnt fisherman drawing his nets
The mother teaching her child his aves
The farmer treading the fruitful furrow
The humble priest offering holy rites
The parish tipstaff on his daily beat
The scrivener with his busy abacus
The chemist with his pots and potions and pills
The healer, whose pallid patients are her prayers
The artist, whose lines and colors delight
The barrister, pleading for true justice
The magister lettering inattentive youths
The woman whose shop displays good, homely needs
The sick man on his penitential bed
The young recruit on obscure weary watch
The wretched beggar who gives holy blessings

For these a Cincinnatus offered all
Repute, honor, perhaps his very life
And when, withered with age and cares of rule
Painfully unsure of step and sight and self
He wisely, humbly left the robes of office
In prayerful trust to the Will of God
And wearily wended to the Altar of beginnings
To give himself and his last days to us
Still serving, bidding for us with priestly heart
Let none he faithfully serves question his prayers
Or mock him with idle speculations
For flattering courtiers are as common as smiles
Painted upon false lips, hiding false desirings
And generals arise from time to time to draft
Houris to their beds and youths to their deaths
As do the successors of Simon Magus
Pirouetting in their temples to self
-
But Cincinnatus – O happy Cincinnatus
Whose memory is incense in the night
Or a candle in the holy darkness:
His Tenebrae is our continued blessing

 

 

Jack Kerouac in Houston

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Jack Kerouac in Houston

In Houston I saw a man in a shiny metal helmet featuring two antennae (the helmet, not the man) blocking traffic and waving his arms madly while screaming.  Perhaps he was trying to hitch a ride to his home planet.  If he continues that sort of thing in the street he will soon find his way to another world under the wheels of a Mercedes-Benz with a tastefully discreet University of Texas Alumnus sticker.

Before an excellent lunch at Kenny & Ziggy’s New York (it’s really in Houston, but, well, you know) Delicatessen, 2327 Post Oak Boulevard, 77056, www.kennyandziggys.com), the daughter-person took me to Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet Street, 77005, www.brazosbookstore.com. 

Located in a retro-1960s building in a charming neighborhood, Brazos Bookstore is a Texas cultural treasure.  Associated with the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, the Academy of American Poets, the American Institute of Architects, Rice University, the Baker Institute, the Houston Public Library, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and a number of local publishers and literary magazines, Brazos Bookstore is an independent agora for readers and writers, and swears no obedience to polls, fashions, top-ten lists, marketing gnomes, or the alligator-shoe boys.

The store is well-lit and features comfortable chairs and a large table for spreading out a folio, a map, a picture, a newspaper, a manifesto, or a magazine.  The various genres are categorized clearly, and the staff are helpful and cheerful.  Alas that there is no coffee machine or cat, but towards the back an orange stripe on the floor leads you on an Alice-in-Wonderland journey through a workroom to the minimalist but clean and wheelchair-accessible euphemism with framed art and a neat length of iron I-beam angling from the floor to the ceiling.

Brazos Bookstore nurtures young Tejano, Texian, and Texan writers, yes, but you will also find John Keats and Evelyn Waugh.  As with any good book store, the staff will order “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” for you, which keeps your credit card information off the snooping and thieving magic electric box of wondrous misinformation and obedience.

A panel of announcements keeps one current with literary, artistic, and musical events, and perhaps it all sounds a little self-consciously artsy, but we must ask ourselves if we as workers and builders and waiters and cowboys are going to celebrate the First Nations, Spanish, Mexican, German, African, Czech, English, Lebanese, Jewish, Swedish, Danish, French, Chinese, and other cultures that Hegelize into our look-out-world-here-we-are Texas culture/s, or are we going to slump into isolated corners passively obeying the mother-ship lights and noises from magic electric boxes of wondrous misinformation and obedience?

As the country-and-western song says, if you’re going to play in Texas, ya gotta have a fiddle in the band.  A flute will do too.  Or your book or poem, your painting, your sculpture, your backyard fence that is your sculpture, or that functional and aesthetically-pleasing iron I-beam that keeps the building from falling down on the night-shift welder and the aging adjunct faculty dude considering the nature of iambs and their relevance in contemporary poetry.

So what’s your fiddle, eh?

But back to the announcements:  Orange Show Monument (I don’t know what that is) at 2401 Munger Street in Houston is hosting a Kerouac Fest on the 9^th of March from three to ten.  For most of us, three to ten means three in the afternoon until ten at night, but with Kerouac-istas one can never be quite sure.

 The occasion features a film screening, a poetry showcase (I don’t know if that’s a metaphor or if cabinetry is part of the evening), poetry buskers (one fears that this might involve English Morris Dancers leaping about with copies of Shelley and Byron strapped to their legs with cords hand woven by Huguenot descendants in The Fens), a panel discussion (be still, my heart), a twitter by Exquisite Corpse (or not), readings, live jazz (as opposed to dead jazz), something about Domy Books, and a chance to exchange Kerouacan bon mots with Oscar Pena, Salvador Macias, Chris Wise, The Free Radicals, DJ Black Slacks, Michael Hoerman, Dr. Chuck Taylor, Dr. Chris Carmona, Kelly Ann Ellis, and Josh Hayes.

You can order a ticket in advance for $10 at orangeshow.org, or you can buy one at the door / gateway / portal to an alternative universe for $15.

I left Houston without seeing Helmet-Guy again.  I wish him happiness.  I hope he drops the helmet of endless and self-destructive introspection, reads a little Kerouac, and learns to play a fiddle of some sort.

-30-

Is This Seat Saved?

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Is This Seat Saved?

As Abraham was called to leave his home,

To serve one God in haunted emptiness
Where errant spirits misguided pilgrims’ steps
Into those thickets that entangled lost souls

And

As Brother Francis, barefoot in the wild,

With rock and prayer rebuilt long-fallen shrines
When they had crumbled into weed-choked ruins
Where wolves gnawed on the bones of civilization

Now

An old man riding in a city bus,

Wearing spectacles and a cheap wristwatch,
Has come to see us through the wilderness,
And enkindle for us the Easter fire

From My Cold, Dead Paws

 

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

From My Cold, Dead Paws

Last week a police dog discharged a firearm into a house on Crescent Street in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

At around two in the morning the police were in cold pursuit (cold, because of the snow) of three perfectly innocent young men on their way home from Bible study.  At some point the driver stopped the car so that one of other theologians could bury his pistol Bible in a snow bank. 

The police put an end to scripture study and set a specially trained dog, Ivan, to search the snow bank.  Ivan found the Bible pistol and, to everyone’s surprise, discharged it into a nearby house.  That’s a pretty good accomplishment for a critter without an opposable thumb.

Ivan.  That’s a Russian name.  What does this tell us about Soviet moles, not to mention dogs, in the Lawrence Police Department, sniffing out secrets and the ham sandwich Corporal Bronski brought for his lunch?

Among the charges filed on the humans were possession of a stolen firearm, which was also an unregistered firearm, which was also a firearm whose serial number had been filed off (that won’t work, future James Bonds; the cops have ways of making the serial numbers talk), and for shooting at some folks earlier in the night, probably because of a spirited dispute over sanctification versus justification. 

Ivan-the-Dog wasn’t arrested or even ticketed, which seems terribly species-est in favor of quadrupeds.  Quadrupeds get off but bipeds don’t.  What kind of Massachusetts justice is this, hah?  Yeah, tell me something, Massachusetts.  It’s time for bipeds to occupy Lawrence and stand up (on two legs) for our rights!

When the Lawrence Police refer to a bullpup, they really mean a bullpup.

Is Ivan a candidate for the Westminster Dog Show or the Winchester Gun Show?

The perceptive reader can tell where all this is going: when beagles are outlawed, only outlaws will have beagles.

Ted Kennedy’s car has killed more people than your Chihuahua.  Come to think of it, Kennedys flying airplanes have killed more people than your Chihuahua. 

Dog control is careful aim at a fire hydrant.

When a cop is minutes away, miniature French poodles count.

The west wasn’t won with a registered rat terrier.

Collar criminals, not Rin-Tin-Tin.

The SS, when not partying down, might in a panic put the White House on lockdown: (Buzz / click) “All units, we have a suspicious-looking subject with a suspicious-looking Pomeranian on foot near the south gate…”

Imagine the old, grizzled, non-nonsense sergeant on the rifle range: “This, you ****y-looking bunch of *****s, is yer shoulder-held, semi- or fully-automatic, gas-operated dachshund.  Its muzzle velocity is about twenty snuffles a minute…”

The court case against the three young, um, scholars ought to be interesting.  After all, proving that one of them fired the weapon earlier is going to be a matter of testimony and laboratory examination; there are no witnesses.  As for the Ivan-the-police-dog, a number of bipeds (but are bipeds quite trustworthy?) saw him shoot the gun on that wild night in Lawrence.  Wow!  In this trial the fur will really fly.

Fur.  Fly.  Get it?

Didn’t want it, huh?

-30-

Cincinnnatus - Rough Draft

Rough Draft

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

17 February 2013

Cincinnatus

 
When Cincinnatus in a desperate time
Was called to serve the undeserving state
Imperiled by the armies of the kings
And weakened by senatorial whisperings
Our conscript father laid aside the plough
Forswore retirement and his peaceful fields
Unwillingly took up the imperium
And journeyed thus to disharmonious Rome
To teach, to govern, and to sanctify
A people lost and drifting with the age
To hazard all in the forum of the world
Not for himself, not for brittle applause
Blown by the wind, noisy for a brief time
As when October’s leaves make temporal show
And then decay through winter’s cold demands
Nor for the silky smiles of ambassadors
The approval of jugglers and panderers
The cricket-voices of mummers and polls
No
But rather for the fuller at his cloth
The builder with his plans and rule and line
The seamstress working a wedding dress
The laughing child at play with her favorite doll
The sunburnt fisherman drawing his nets
The mother teaching her child his aves
The farmer treading the fruitful furrow
The humble priest offering holy rites
The parish tipstaff on his daily beat
The scrivener with his busy abacus
The chemist with his pots and potions and pills
The healer, whose pallid patients are her prayers
The artist, whose lines and colors delight
The barrister, pleading for true justice
The magister lettering inattentive youths
The woman whose shop displays good, homely needs
The sick man on his penitential bed
The young recruit on obscure weary watch
The wretched beggar who gives holy blessings
For these a Cincinnatus offered all
Repute, honor, perhaps his very life
And when, withered with age and cares of rule
Painfully unsure of step and sight and self
He wisely, humbly left the robes of office
In prayerful trust to the Will of God
And wearily wended to the Altar of beginnings
To give himself and his last days to us
Still serving, bidding for us with priestly heart
Let none he faithfully serves question his prayers
Or mock him with idle speculations
For flattering courtiers are as common as smiles
Painted upon false lips, hiding false desirings
And generals arise from time to time to draft
Houris to their beds and youths to their deaths
As do the successors of Simon Magus
Pirouetting in their temples to self
-
But Cincinnatus – O happy Cincinnatus
Whose memory is incense in the night
Or a candle in the holy darkness:
His Tenebrae is our continued blessing

 

 

An October Chill

October, 2012
Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An October Chill

 

A merry dachshund yaps and leaps for leaves

Wind-blown across the still-green summer grass

As autumn visits briefly, and looks ‘round

To plan his festive moonlit frosts when next

Diana dances ‘cross November’s skies.

Harvest Time in the Fens

January 2013
Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Harvest Time in the Fens

St. Michael’s Church, Chesterton

 

A calendar knows little of a day,

Of any day; its arbitrary squares

Mark seasons as they amble on their way

From holy Advent ‘til the harvest fairs,

 

When summer’s crops, all red and gold and blue,

Along with piglets, ducks, some well-fed hens,

Are carted squeaking, squealing, creaking to

Saint Michael’s fields in the Anglian fens.

 

Old Father William lifts a pint (no less!)

With farmers selling cows and chicks and corn,

For he is merry too, and quick to bless

The laboring marsh-folk on this autumn morn.

 

Earth, sky, and air mark seasons as they fall,

And now comes Martinmas, joyfully, for all.

Paterfamilias

January, 2013
Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Paterfamilias

For Eldon

An empty chair beside the fireplace waits,

And lamplight falls upon an open book,

Pen, pocketknife, keys for the pasture gates,

Dad’s barn coat hanging from its accustomed hook.

 

But he will not return; his duties now

Transcend the mists of the pale world we know,

And you in grief must carry on, somehow;

Your duty is here, for God will have it so

 

The good man takes that chair reluctantly;

It is a throne of sorts, and one imposed,

Not taken as a prize, triumphantly,

But in love’s service, and in love disposed.

 

An empty chair beside the fireplace waits

For you, whom doleful duty consecrates.

A Hitchhiker Arrested

January, 2013
Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Hitchhiker Arrested

Hunched in his football letter jacket, he,

Graduated into anonymity,

Flogged by his demons through the winter air,

Screams out his might-have-beens to the sirens

      there.

On Manchester's THE LAST LION

January, 2013
Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On Manchester’s The Last Lion

 

There were lions then,

Tawny in the pale twilight,

Roaring down the dark

Sending Your Daughter to War

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Sending Your Daughter to War

A covy of Merovingians in court dress sat around in the White House last month and decided that sending young women into combat is a good idea.

Well, if Betty, Veronica, and Barbie can kill and die in this nation’s undeclared wars (cf. The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8), we might as well go ahead and send in the children, too. 

After all, the nasty young man who shot schoolchildren in Connecticut, the nasty old man who, as of this writing, is holding a five-year-old hostage, the actions of Cardinal Mahony, the inaction of absentee sperm-donors, and the assembly-line murder of children under the Goebbels-esque euphemism of freedom-of-choice make abundantly clear that in this nation children are disposable.

No less a national figure than Rahm Emanuel, currently the mayor of Chicago, where they know something about disposing of children, said last week that children are “our greatest resource.”

Resource. 

Mr. Emanuel presumably loves his own children, but to him and to our national government your children are nothing more than a resource, like a bunker full of coal, a grain elevator full of corn, a tank farm full of oil.

The idea of humans as a resource is nothing new to Mr. Emanuel; in 2006 he advocated compulsory service for young people.  Compulsory.  The President proposed the same idea in 2008. 

Women have served in combat, but as an accident of their roles as physicians, nurses, corpsmen, pilots, and drivers; now they are to be assigned to combat by intent.

Women are often smaller than men, and children definitely are, so they would be, logistically, far more economical in combat.  They eat less, so feeding them would be cheaper, and the generalissimos can stuff more of ‘em into helicopters and trucks to get them to the fighting where they would make smaller targets.  Smaller blankets, smaller uniforms, smaller body armor, smaller bandages, smaller body-bags.  Their little guns would require less steel and plastic, so, hey, let’s Go Green, eh. 

More women and children can be flung into a medevac helicopter when they’re wounded, and more of their little corpses can be loaded onto a transport for fuel-efficient shipping to Andrews Air Force Base where really important people can pretend to be sad when the tiny, flag-covered caskets (note to budget office – smaller flags) are offloaded.

So you think this nation will never send children into combat?  Really?  But what is an 18-year-old girl?

When teenaged girls are shipped off to war, where will the grown men be?  Some will log-in on conservative websites acting all John Wayne while tippy-tapping their support of the little-bitty troopettes, and others will be shooting skeet or doing something with groundhogs.

Who would have thought that Anne Boleyn’s father would be our national guy role model?

-30-

 

One Day in the Life of a Chicken Nugget

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

One Day in the Life of a Chicken Nugget

King: Forks?

Becket: Yes.  It’s a new instrument…for pronging meat and carrying it to your mouth.  It saves you dirtying your fingers.

King: But then you dirty the fork?

Becket: Yes.  But it’s washable.

King: So are your fingers.  I don’t see the point.

-      Becket, Jean Anouilh

In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Shukov always removes his hat when eating.  As a long-term prisoner in one of Stalin’s Siberian gulags, his purpose is to work and suffer until he dies.  Cold, malnourished, and overworked, there is no reason for Shukov to take off his cap over his evening bowl of fish heads and other, more mysterious bits of solids floating in the hot water except for this: Shukov is determined to maintain his sense of self. 

Most of the other prisoners have completely surrendered to dehumanization.  Shukov, too, can do nothing against the tyranny of Communism, but he can choose to remember who he is.  That he takes off his cap in the grim, cold chow hall causes him to stand out.

Shukov also eats with a spoon, a forbidden object, and not with his hands or a wood chip.  He cast the spoon from a scrap of aluminum in another camp some ten years before, and has managed to keep it concealed from the perpetrators of progress.  The illegal spoon is another symbol of Shukov’s self-hood, of civilization.

He can do nothing about his ugly, padded uniform made from scraps.  His number, Shcha-854, painted on his cap and trousers, is the identity imposed upon him.  But inside, and through subtle acts, he keeps his dignity.

The gulag’s chow hall anticipates modern dining in America: men wear their caps in restaurants and eat mysterious substances with their hands, and their formless clothing is badged with the alias identities of the Communist factories where it is made.

Quite often moderns stand as petitioners before windows or at stainless-steel counters in cinder-block, bunker-like structures for food and drinks whose antecedents, shipping, and handling are questionable.  Consider the now common chicken nugget, now made by many purveyors of comestibles, which is not a nugget although it may share some strands of DNA with a long-dead chicken.

Fred Turner, the man who in the 1980s invented the first chicken nugget for McDonald’s, died last week.  A generation has grown up eating this staple of fast food and cafeteria service.  Mr. Turner’s chicken nugget is finger food, perfect in a country where the possession of knives, forks, and spoons, even soft plastic ones, by The People can be suspect.

Hamburgers (not from Hamburg), tater tots (made from real tots?), tacos, wraps (not your granny’s coat), fish fingers (one wants to see that fish in the wild), and steak fingers (ditto for that cow), are all ordered from pictures and sometimes through loudspeakers: “That’s be a snakefinger basket, big ol’ chemical fizzy-drink, and fries!  Oh, and Prisoner #6 is to report to the delousing shed!”

In our sad world, are dishes, forks, napkins, menus, identifiable foodstuffs, and sitting at a table with one’s hat off really important?

In Jean Anouilh’s fictionalized play about the relationship between King Henry II and Thomas Becket, the king is unfamiliar with forks, an otherwise trivial matter which foreshadows his own uncivilized behavior later on.

 When the king says to Becket that he doesn’t see the point of a fork, Becket replies “It hasn’t any, practically speaking.  But it’s refined, it’s subtle.  It’s very un-Norman.”

-30-

From 2012: Super-Servile Sunday

Lawrence Mack Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
From The Road to Magdalena
Available from amazon.com as
a Kindle and as fragments of
dead tree

Super-Servile Sunday

O sink not down to that corrosive couch,

Docile before the Orwellian screen
That regulates the lives of the servile,
Dictating dress and drink, demeanor, dreams;
Declare your independence from the sludge
Of vague obedientiaries who drowse
Away their empty lives in submission
To harsh, diagonal inches of rule,
Poor weaklings chanting tainted tribal songs
In chorus hamsterable, huddled, heaped,
While costumed in their masters’ liveries,
And feeling little while thinking even less,
The very model of the State’s non-men,
Predictable and dull, submissive ghosts
Crowded, herded in cosmic cattle chutes,
Reflected in dim, noisy nothingness.

But you, O you, be not of them, but be

A wanderer in the moonlight, one known
To God and to His holy solitude.

 

1.21.13, Sergeant Rock Talks to the Trees

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Sergeant Rock Talks to the Trees

Fifty shades of electronic dyes have been splashed on the screens of millions of little plastic boxes regarding young people’s sense of entitlement.  The stereotype promoted is that young people in our time suffer unrealistic expectations of privilege and immunity from the consequences of their own actions.

Thank goodness we have such positive, grown-up role models as 41-year-old Lance Armstrong, 61-year-old General David Petraeus , and 72-year-old Senator Barbara “Don’t call me ma’am” Boxer to help America mold the youth of tomorrow into selfless adults focused on the greater good of the Republic.

Stereotyping is wrong; it considers an isolated action or attribute in an individual and falsely applies it to a group sharing other attributes of the individual which are not connected psychologically, ethically, or morally to the first attribute.  If, say, an 80-year-old woman microwaves cats for amusement, it does not thus follow that microwaving cats is an attribute common to all 80-year-old women.  Joseph Stalin smoked a pipe, but few pipe-smokers are atheist genocidal maniacs.  The late Kim Jong-Il of North Korea wore pantsuits, but that doesn’t mean that people who wear pantsuits are fond of herding people into slave-labor camps.

Stereotyping is the assembly of false analogies, and is as illogical as it is unethical. 

And, certainly, bashing the young is no new thing:  C. S. Lewis criticized the post-war fashion in excessive praise of children in “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.”  But then he got married and helped raise stepsons, and apparently decided that young’uns weren’t so bad after all.

One cannot deny that many 15- to 20-year-olds are narcissistic; that is a function of childhood which the maturing person sloughs off through self-discipline.  To fault a 15-year-old for being narcissistic is to fault a 15-year-old for being, well, 15 years old.  Generally, they get over it, but sometimes they fail, and then they become environmentalists.

Although we help young people grow out of self-obsession, the Marines are now to be taught to be narcissistic (and when one writes “narcissistic,” one thanks whatever gods Henley thought of for spell-check, eh!), according to the Associated Press.

In Camp Pendleton’s sunny clime where I used to spend my time (sorry, Rudyard), Marines will now be taught “meditative practices, yoga-type stretching and exercises based on mindfulness.”

In 2011 a Naval Health Research Center scientist (whoever that august personage might be) conducted one of the first experiments – more are to follow -- on Marines in which, after a practice assault on a practice Afghan village with lots of practice shooting and practice screaming and yelling, the Marines (whose new battle cry is “Over the Top, Devil Lab Rats!”) were then required to take some me-time to practice their Buddhist-inspired meditation techniques and get in touch with their feelings.

One of the let’s-all-go-to-our-happy-place practices prescribed for the Marines, according to the AP, was “to sit in silence and stare at their combat boots, becoming aware of how their feet touched the classroom floor.”

One does not imagine that the giddy Mujahadeen in Afghanistan will indulge Marines in breaking off a fight to take a therapeutic pause to contemplate how their combat boots touch the blood-sodden ground:

“Private Smith, have you checked that weapon?  We can expect a counterattack.”

“No, Gunny-Guru; I’ve been marveling at my new one-ness with the universe in meditating upon the circle of life and being-ness in my bootlaces.  I feel so at peace.”

Young Marines assaulting a strongpoint will soon, under the tutelage of Navy scientists, fling flowers and the collected works of Alan Watts at the enemy.

In sum, we needn’t worry about ordinary young people working painfully through adolescence; they’re doing better than many of the adults.

-30-

1.27.13, Music to Freeze to Death By

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Music to Freeze to Death By

The re-packaging of all the Titanica continues, demonstrating that nothing succeeds in show business like the deaths of hundreds of people and the recycling of the old Cowboy and the Lady theme: working-class lad corrects the ‘tude of the haughty rich girl, who falls in love with him and cooks, cleans, and has lots of babies happily ever after.  This was amusing with Gary Cooper and Merle Oberon, but quickly deteriorated into Nazi / Communist leveling ideology in the 1942 Titanic and in every subsequent Titanic film.

Last year Sony published a CD of music from the Original Motion Picture (yes, in caps, as if there could be an unoriginal motion picture), and, more interestingly, some of the popular songs that were part of the White Star songbook: “Valse Septembre,” “Marguerite Waltz,” Wedding Dance,” Poet and Peasant,” “Blue Danube,” “Song Without Words,” “Estudiantina,” “Vision of Salome,” “Titsy Bitsy Girl,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,”  “Sphinx,” “Barcarole,” “Orpheus,” “Song of Autumn,” and “Nearer My God to Thee.”

James Horner’s soundtrack is quite familiar, and the Irish influence is very appropriate, given that the ship was built in Belfast.  The design was English, but strong Irish hands riveted the plates.

The music aboard the Titanic was not Irish, though; Austrian seems to be the dominant influence, along with bits of English, German, Yiddish, and African-American.  The songs popular in 1912 are an interesting look at popular culture.  Some of the music is light classical, and some are the musical equivalent of Victorian parlor poetry.  Ragtime, a predecessor to jazz, might have been considered somewhat daring.

Apparently the musical selections were by request and quite mixed: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” might be followed by a Viennese waltz and then an operatic overture.  Neither musicians nor the audience fixated on genres, leaving themselves aesthetically open to new possibilities.

There were only eight musicians aboard the Titanic, contractors from a music agency: one pianist, three violinists, three cellists, and a bassist. They played as two different groups among the various dining rooms, in concert, and at divine services for first class and second class passengers.

There was no guitarist, so the dying were spared that when the end came.

The matter of “Nearer My God to Thee” has often been debated, but the testimony of the survivors is that after a sequence of lighter music, the musicians played the hymn toward the end.  The movies cue the music precisely to the sinking of the ship, but life is seldom so tidy.  Disasters, personal or collective, seldom feature a soundtrack. 

Curiously, no one has yet made an epic film about the hundreds of people who die in nightclub fires.  The Titanic is often used as a metaphor for our hubris in depending upon technology, but filmmakers never film the hubris of nightclub owners who lock emergency exits.  And while hundreds suffocate and burn to death, what does the band play?

And now, this Sunday, thousands and thousands of people will crowd themselves together into a relatively small space with not nearly enough escape routes if there’s a crisis: a bomb, a riot, a flash mob, or a cascading panic of undetermined origin.

Do we make progress?

And what will the band play?

-30-

LinkedIn - a Caution

Please know that from 16 January until 21 January (at least) LinkedIn sent, without my knowledge, a great many invitations purporting to be from me. There is no question of an error because some of these false invitations were made on days when I did not access LinkedIn. I canceled my account with LinkedIn and will not accept any emails with a LinkedIn connection. I am, of course, always happy to read notes and letters from friends and professional contacts via my aol address.

LinkedIn? Not Anymore

Please know that on 16 January LinkedIn sent, without my knowledge, a great many invitations purporting to be from me. I am canceling my account with LinkedIn and will not accept any emails with a LinkedIn connection. I am, of course, always happy to read notes and letters from friends and professional contacts via my aol address.

The Road to Magdalena

 

 

My latest book, The Road to Magdalena, is available from Amazon.com at .99 for the Kindle edition and $6.95 for the paperback. Sample pages are featured on the site:

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Magdalena-Lawrence-Mack-Hall/dp/1480245151/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1356744853&sr=8-1&keywords=the+road+to+magdalena

6 January 2013: The Downton Abbey Typewriter and Dog

6 January 2013

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

The Downtown Abbey Typewriter and Dog

The popular Sunday-night emo-wallow Downton Abbey is predictable in plot but surprisingly strong in character development.  One first-season episode, for instance, features a housemaid, Gwen, who does not intend to remain a housemaid, and who secretly buys a typewriter and takes a correspondence course so she can try for a better job as a secretary.

The typewriter, which enjoyed a run of about a century, is a machine which resulted from technological change and which in its turn advanced cultural change.  A product of the industrial revolution, the process of mechanical writing sped up communications and the storage and access of information – a typist layering up to five sheets of carbon paper and typing paper could produce an original document and five accurate copies simultaneously.  Had Bartleby the Scrivener access to a typewriter he might not have succumbed to depression.

For reasons that remain obscure, the use of typewriters converted the historic male role of secretary to a woman’s job, and in the 1980s many young men were reluctant to learn about computers because of testosterone-withering keyboards – “typing’s a girl thing!”

Plain paper – in this country, 8 ½ inches by 11 inches – has shifted in name from letter paper to typing paper to copy paper to computer paper, following the pen, the typewriter, the photocopier, and the computer into a world barely recognizable to Bartleby and Gwen.

Gwen in Downton Abbey wants to make a better world for herself.  Although the great houses and their squads of servants would begin fading into tourist sites and council housing after World War I, probably no one in 1912 could have anticipated such a rapid end.  Gwen only knows that she wants to work in an office and thus enjoy more control of her own life.  Her Imperial Model A typewriter, manufactured in Leicester from 1908-1915, is for her a symbol of emancipation.  As such, it is an object of suspicion to the less-ambitious among her fellow servants.

Gwen mentions having saved for the machine; given her low wages and the high cost of new technology, her typewriter was probably most of a year’s income.  Gwen had to earn her way and pay for her learning by herself; there were no community colleges and no encouragement.

For men, the typewriter became a symbol of the square-jawed writer and poet, smoking cigarettes, sloshing whiskey, and beating out novels and poetry in garrets on the Left Bank of the Seine.  One imagines Ernest Hemingway posing for a publicity photograph standing thoughtfully on a railway line, his trusty old typewriter slung over his back.

C. S. Lewis, however, advised young writers never to employ a typewriter, maintaining that the mechanics of it disrupted one’s flow of thought.  Lewis preferred a steel pen and bottle of ink all his life.

For the beatniks, the typewriter, according to the creepy and self-obsessed Allen Ginsburg, was holy, a sacred adjunct to creativity.  The thesis is unproven since Ginsburg never found anything more fascinating to write about than himself.  In this he prefigured great numbers of self-absorbed narcissists eternally admiring themselves in little boxes of endless tautology.

For revolutionaries, the typewriter was a way of rapidly generating and publishing manifestos.  Tina Modotti, a cute, fascinating, and treacherous Red, made a famous photograph of her lover Julio Antonio Mella's typewriter, though as a Stalinist operative she may have been one of the causes of his unsolved murder.

Once the revolutionaries were successful, they in their turned banned the typewriter.  In most Communist states typewriters had to be registered, and in at least one workers’ paradise, Romania, the possession of an unregistered typewriter was a death penalty offense into the 1980s. 

Gwen’s Imperial Typewriter is usable today, a century after it was constructed; none of the electronic gadgets the reader uses today will exist within five years.  Lord Grantham, the worthy Mr. Carson, and Gwen may yet have something to teach us about lasting values.

What Lord Grantham, Mr. Carson, and Gwen perhaps will not tell us is why, at the opening of each episode of Downton Abbey, the viewer is mistreated to a very large view of the west end of an eastbound dog.  Perhaps the producers of the show are telling us what they think of us?

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