Armistice

Veterans Day is not just American, so this isn't entirely appropriate, but I leap on any excuse to quote Richard Wilbur. From "For Music."

Mourn for the dead who died for this country,
Whose minds went dark at the edge of a field,
In the muck of a trench, on the beachhead sand,
In a blast amidships, a burst in the air.
What did they think of before they forgot us?
In the blink of time before they forgot us?
The glare and whiskey of Saturday evening?
The drone or lilt of their family voices?
The bend of a trout-stream? A fresh-made bed?
The sound of a lathe, or the scent of sawdust?
The mouth of a woman? A prayer? Who knows?
Let us not force them to speak in chorus,
These men diverse in their names and faces
Who lived in a land where a life could be chosen.
Say that they mattered, alive and after;
That they gave us time to become what we could.

*

Grieve for the ways in which we betrayed them,
How we robbed their graves of a reason to die;
The tribes pushed west, and the treaties broken,
The image of God on the auction block,
The immigrant scorned, and the striker beaten,
The vote denied to liberty's daughters.
From all that has shamed us, what can we salvage?
Be proud at least that we know we were wrong,
That we need not lie, that our books are open.
Praise to this land for our power to change it,
To confess our misdoings, to mend what we can,
To learn what we mean and to make it the law,
To become what we said we were going to be.
Praise to our peoples, who came as strangers,
Who more and more have been shaped into one
Like a great statue brought over in pieces,
Its hammered copper bolted together,
Anchored by rods in the continent's rock,
With a core of iron, and a torch atop it.
Praise to this land that its most oppressed
Have marched in peace from the dark of the past
To speak in our time, and in Washington's shadow,
Their invincible hope to be be free at last—

Lord God Almighty, free
At last to cast their shackles down
And wear the common crown
Of liberté, of liberty.

Singer

While my body grumblingly deals with the aftereffects of my overestimation of my yogic skillz yesterday, one of my favorite Old English-inspired poems has come to mind. Robert Pinsky, writing for the Post's Poet's Choice a few years ago, introduced me to Steven Cramer's excellent "Singer," a modern interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon "Deor." The poet's resignation and freedom from bitterness are striking. Aches and pains from too much exercise are a flimsy but sufficient excuse for posting it.

Singer

I knew trouble and endured it,
grief and desire my companions.
In winter my enemy attacked.
The better of the two, I was bound
in rope made from my own sinew.
All that has passed, and so may this.

There was a man condemned to live
outside the city he loved—even death
meant less in exile—and a woman
who dreaded the child inside her.
Her dreams were dreams of drowning.
All that has passed, and so may this.

If the mind becomes a wolf’s mind,
it will force misery on misery,
make cowards heroes. If courtiers
want the kingdom overthrown, yet fail
to speak, they will remain courtiers.
All that has passed, and so may this.

At first doom sees, wherever it turns,
more doom. Then, in time: joy.
I’ll say this about myself: my name
was a name you knew, and I sang
until another singer took my place.
All that has passed, and so will this.

Too soon?

Exeunt
Richard Wilbur

Piecemeal the summer dies;
At the field's edge a daisy lives alone;
A last shawl of burning lies
On a gray field-stone.

All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer's final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.

Like a lord's great kitchen without a fire in't

Proof that all the cool people like to hang out together: The Revengers Tragedy. I read about the play, attributed to Torneur but probably written by Middleton, years ago and thought it sounded like the standard Jacobean blurdfest. How seriously can you take a play in which the characters' names include Vengeance, Chastisement, Supervacuous, Luxurious, and Spurious? It's the Jacobean equivalent of Tarantino: dark humor, massive body count, few if any sympathetic characters, and lots of madonna/whore treatments for the ladies. Not my cup of tea.

But oh, Netflix, you seductive font of information, someone's done an update and you thought I might enjoy it. Let's see, there's Alex Cox, writer/director of "Repo Man," one of my favorite movies ever to include shrimp, Harry Dean Stanton, and tiny pine-scented air fresheners, directing it as a neo-Orwellian dystopia in Liverpool. You've got the contained nuclear bomb that is Christopher Eccleston, pissed off and out for bloody revenge, with occasional breaks to play ventriloquist with his dead wife's skull. There's Derek Jacobi as the duke, looking like Karl Lagerfeld's recently disinterred twin brother, sleazing around after young women and poisoning their drinks if they're not game. The duke's crew of caddish, manipulative sons includes both Eddie Izzard and Marc Warren, known to the lucky few as Mr. Teatime the assassin from the BBC's Hogfather. All that, and Chumbawamba does the music? Give it! Give it now!

Verdict: It almost works. The acting is generally great, although Castiza and her mother are a bit weak, and Izzard in particular is a pleasant surprise. You can't say he's playing it straight, exactly, but he's more restrained than the rest of the brothers, and his scenes with Eccleston are spot on. Liverpool's combination of industrial works and ancient churches suits perfectly, and the city looks convincingly half-abandoned. The cheerfully wicked music, pop tunes for the apocalypse, burbles along merrily as everything goes to hell.

What didn't work for me was the dialogue. Paring down the original text to make room for shots makes sense, and those edits flow smoothly, but the interwoven modern lines jar too often. "Pistols! Treason! Guards! Help! My lord, the Duke, is murdered!" "No I'm not." Funny, but uneven. I felt cheated whenever contemporary lines were added; the switch from "My hairs are white, but yet my sins are green" to language without that rhythm and flow was like going from Bach to Bolton. The actors do what they can with it, with the seasoned pros managing better than most, but the shifts kept pulling me out of the story.

I'd love to hear other reactions from people who have seen this. "Shakespeare in Love" it ain't, what with the death and the vomiting of blood and the pimping out of siblings for morally dubious gain, so it was never going to get huge play, but it takes a lot of interesting risks.

J'adore

The people at Making Light are warped sick frightening individuals, which is why they've been able to keep the site lively and entertaining even when their hosts are away. They've formulated some useful theorems, too, such as the one about how any work of science fiction (or any fiction, really) is improved by the addition of dinosaurs and sodomy, and that anyone who uses the term "you people" in an online discussion is an unredeemable troll. There's a pretty solid group of regulars who post, many of them pros in the SF publishing field, and the sheer level of erudition that happens in the comments thread is intimidating. I usually watch from the sidelines and pick up things like truffle recipes and coqz heaumez.

John M. Ford, known to his friends as Mike, was one of my favorite contributors, especially when he was posting off-the-cuff poetry to leave readers slackjawed and often howling with glee. Check out his sonnet on entropy, which is a solid emotional kick in the gut, much as "110 Stories" was, and then cleanse your palate with "Harry of Five Points," where he managed to write gangster-and-moll slang in neat iambic pentameter AND bastardized French and to hit all the major plot points of the first few scenes of "Henry V." I figured, when he died last year, that there was no justice in the world and that the days of found poetic joy on Making Light were over.

I am glad to be wrong on the second count. Look upon their works, ye lolcats, and despair.

LOLcat for the Makers
John Dunbar (c. 1500)

I that in heill wes and gladnes
Am trublit now with great sicknes
My sicklie stait is no surprise:
IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ.

Death sovran is of all the tubez,
Of rich, of poor, of l33t, of n00bz;
No mortal shal escaip his eyis:
IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ.

Al flesh is dust; we are but bones;
Baith knight and maid he freely pwns;
Against his glanse brooks no disguyse;
IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ.

He draws al to his dark bucket;
Whoe'er ye be, ye're surely f***kit;
The Walrus wil not sympathise;
IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ.

Our base are al belong to Death
And have done since our natal breath
(This point I'd like to emphasise):
IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ.