Bill Murray Reads Wallace Stevens

Some days are just blessed. Imagine the greatest thing you could possibly find on the internet … it would have to involve Bill Murray, wouldn’t it? Well, I was updating the Poets Page and had gotten around to Wallace Stevens when boom. I found it. The greatest thing on the internet: Bill Murray Reads Wallace Stevens …

Apparently, Bill Murray read two Stevens’ poems at Bubby’s Brooklyn as part of Poets House’s 17th Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge back in 2012. As expected, the recital is amazing. Murray first recited “The Planet on the Table” followed by “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”. We are ever grateful. Links to both of these poems can be found on our Stevens page.

Want to read more about it? After digging around a little more, found this piece with even more Murray recitals at Open Culture.

Let’s Talk About Mercury …

Mercury is cool … both the planet and the element.  Neither is very friendly to human life.  There is, of course, a Mercury that is crucially important to modern human life, at least a happy one, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about really.  Even though we love you, Freddie, this is not your post.

No, right now I am thinking of the planet and an image I just saw that is supposedly the clearest picture ever taken of the planet mercury.  It’s pretty gorgeous, and I can’t look at it without thinking about Alice Oswald and her wonderful poem “Excursion to the Planet Mercury“.  I think maybe each enhances the other.  Check’em out:

 

Ain’t it beautiful?  Deceptively so, perhaps … perhaps not.  Let’s ask Alice.

 

Excursion to the Planet Mercury

 

certain evenings a little before the golden
foam of the horizon has properly hardened
you can see a tiny iron island
very close indeed to the sun.

all craters and mirrors, the uncanny country
of the planet Mercury – a mystery
without I without air,
without you without sound.

in that violently magic little place
the sky is racing along
like a blue wrapper flapped and let go
from a car window.

now hot now cold
the ground moves fast,
a few stones frisk about
looking for a foothold

but it shales it slides
the whole concept is only
loosely fastened
to a few weak tweaks of gravity.

o the weather is dreadful there:
thousand-year showers of dust
all dandruff and discarded shells
of creatures too weak to exist:

paupers beggars toughs
boys in dresses
who come alive and crumble
at the mercy of metamorphosis.

no nothing accumulates there
not even mist
nothing but glimmering beginnings
making ready to manifest.

as for the catastrophe
of nights on Mercury,
hiding in a rock-smashed hollow
at about two hundred degrees below zero

the feather-footed winds
take off their guises there,
they go in gym shoes
thieving and lifting

and their amazed expressions
have been soundproofed, nevertheless
they go on howling
for gladness, sheer gladness

– Alice Oswald

If you  haven’t read any Alice Oswald before, what have you been doing with your life?  She’s amazing, and her Spacecraft Voyager 1: New and Selected Poems is highly recommended as a good place to get familiar with her work.  Also … it should be noted, her work is best appreciated when read aloud.  Do it.

Special thanks to these guys, who had the poem online.

 

Understanding the Universe

Been trying to make more time to write, mostly on the bus ride to work.  Was listening to Modest Mouse “Third Planet” the other day walking to the bus and was prompted by the “gonna shake that eye’s hand” line to start waxing philosophical.

Well, the truth of the matter is that ultimately, you don’t have to defend your understanding of the universe to anyone but yourself.  And that’s not to suggest an I’m ok you’re ok sort of philosophy, far from it.

It’s more like putting trust into the integrity of every individual human mind: you must make peace with and/or conquer your own demons, de-haunt your own ghosts, solve your own internal riddles. No one can do it for you- why would anyone even bother, given everyone possess their own shadow, claimed or unclaimed? This excludes, of course, the innocent child.

Sure, there is earnest altruism, good parenting for example; there is also codependency where someone gets to ignore their own haunts by focusing on someone else’s. The best that can be done is guidance, whether finding or giving.

If you’ve ever received guidance, then you know, it can come from anywhere and in any form.  If you’ve ever given guidance, then you should remember: often things are internalized differently than intended, and what most helps someone could be a throw away line or flippant statement off the cuff.  Whereas the most well thought out advice often falls on deaf ears.  Guidance is tricky … both finding and giving.

This is sorta where another kind of faith comes in to compliment the aforementioned trust in every human’s own desire/need for mental integrity. And this is a faith in … well, I’m catholic, so I call it the Holy Spirit, but lots of people call it many different things, karma even sometimes. We’ll have to have another post about karma vs. divine justice in the future.

Anyway, here we run into a faith & understanding that the Holy Spirit wants every individual soul to be as holy as it can be. Being a divine spiritual being formed out of the purity of the love between the Father and the Son, it is entirely probable the Holy Spirit wants this far more than any human possibly could.  This is why overly intrusive/regulatory systems of enforcing holiness become tiresome. Not only do they forget there is no virtue in coercion, but they also demonstrate a lack of faith in the Holy Spirit’s work.

It is my understanding the Holy Spirit can sculpt any soul into a saint, can sculpt any substance from sand to clay to metal to diamond.  It goes better for us the more pliable we are, of course, but diamond, which would presumably make for a beautiful saint, is not pliable at all.  Hmmm.  Father Carapi used to talk about this sort of thing, and I guess he would really know … at least his story always made him seem to be as stubborn as diamond …

And that’s about all I got around to on the bus ride.  There are so many caveats to make that weren’t made.  Still, there really aren’t any caveats to be made, are there?  That was sort of the point.  It doesn’t matter to me if someone thinks like Terry Pratchett that there are worlds out there existing in discs balanced on the backs of elephants surfing a great cosmic turtle through space.

That’s cool, as long as that’s what works for them … like it passes their own integrity test in the silent solitude of their own minds.  And then, maybe it doesn’t pass this test, but it doesn’t count as a significant test to that person … that’s fine too.  We can discuss it … I will not argue it … we may can debate some things if it can be done in the right spirit of mutual illumination, but again … when it comes to understanding the universe … read that first line of the second paragraph again.

Of course, there are always those who have to stretch the limits of all things … I give you, Pastafarians:

Nah, I’m just kidding … I could probably party with these dudes … esp. if they catered the event. 🙂

Monday Morning Mishap

So the usual morning routine is to walk to the bus and ride a tiger transit to campus. It’ Monday. A subroutine of the morning walk is to fish out my ear buds & get some tunes going for the ride. Today I pulled my ear buds from my inside jacket pocket & noticed some trash that had to go.

Monday is trash day on my side of Auburn so I took advantage of a green herby curby in route & ditched the unwanted cargo. I walked on a pace or two before going back into my inside pocket to get my ear buds, only they weren’t there. Odd, I thought. There always there in jacket weather.

It is Monday. Maybe one of my kids nicked’em sometime this weekend and didn’t put’em back. I checked my other pockets thinking maybe I had already put them with my phone, nope- not there either. I was thinking about turning back now, but then horror struck and I wondered if i accidentally tossed them with that trash. Oh no!

I had already walked way past the herby curby, which was way far from my front door-turning around at this point for either reason would blow. Decided to switch my lunch-a plastic grocery bag of goodies-from one hand to the other so I could check a different pocket I knew would be fruitless,’and there they were.

They were in my hand the whole time. So I thought it’s gonna be one of them kinna days. And then the bus took the extended, tardiness inducing fisheries route. Yep-one if them kinna days.

Except then I thought again-I’ve had time to write this thanks to fisheries … Nothing even happened; I didn’t lose my ear buds. I didn’t have to go back for anything, and I had an opportunity to laugh at myself early in the day to remind myself I’m an idiot. Like losing my pencil behind my ear, which I haven’t done in a while but used to do regularly, I lost something in my own hand. How foolish, yet all too common.

Emily Dickinson has that poem about a jewel in her hand, and Princess Leia has that wonderful line about the tighter the grasp the more star systems slip through our fingers. Star systems, dude, star systems … Think about that. I Just lost some ear buds. Except, I really didn’t. Tempest in a Teapot …

Mildly Addictive Tron Game

If you’re a child of the eighties – born in the seventies but did a lot of fun and memorable stuff in the eighties – then you likely plugged more quarters than you care to admit into arcade games. And when we say games in this context, we mean vintage arcade games in all their 8-bit glory. Sure, unless you have a kid who is cool enough to be into retro games, most young folks just can’t appreciate what they’re getting out of their home consoles in replay value. Sure, the games are sixty bucks a pop, and that’s outrageous. But play them enough and consider it on a quarter-per-restart scale, and you find a value that just increases with every time you play.

One game in particular that I must have plugged at least fifty dollars worth of my grandmother’s quarters into was that Tron game. No, not the Discs of Tron one that you stood inside and dueled other disc wielders – I played the one some, but mostly I played one that had multiple aspects of the Tron movie … the spiders, the bikes, and, of course, the master control dude at the end. Well, imagine my delight in finding a Tron Flash game that does the bike part after finding that Contra flash game the other day. I had to check it out … about half an hour later, I realized I was still playing it. Enjoy (doesn’t seem to work on mobile, btw):
http://www.classicgamesarcade.com/games/tron.swf

Can’t remember what some of the other parts of that game were. I remember the bikes and the spiders, but what else was there? I know you had to throw a disc into the master control face at the end, but I think there were two other parts to get through first. Hmmm … Had the same issue with trying to remember all the stages from that Journey arcade game the other day … dang that game was awesome!