Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters - review by Terry Kelly

Wandering Star

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, edited by Michael Hofmann, Granta,
512pp, £25 (hardback)

Joseph Roth’s life possessed all the predestined sadness of a classic blues song. An anxious, peripatetic spirit, Roth spent most of his short and constantly harassed existence living out of two or three suitcases, in Hopperesque hotels, pursuing money, drink, brief love affairs – and the journalistic commissions to keep his precarious life afloat. Some of the other constants revealed in poet and translator Michael Hofmann’s stark and frequently dispiriting volume of Roth’s letters were an almost mystical yearning after his lost Austro-Hungarian ‘fatherland’ and his prescient warnings about the rise of Nazi Germany. Often demonstrating a flinty indifference to the feelings of others, particularly in the area of sexual relations, these letters also show there was much to dislike about the scrounging, dyspeptic and self-contradictory author of The Radetzky March. But there was also something almost existentially heroic about the self-destructive Roth as he hurtled towards an early death, in Paris, at the age of forty-four. Often equipped with little more than despair, his chaotic life unravelled.

Roth was born into a Jewish family on 2 September 1894 in Brody, East Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire (now Ukraine). His home life was relatively comfortable. However, he fabricated a much more wayward father-figure and a starker early existence, revealing an early taste for myth-making and a lifelong distaste for domesticity and bourgeois ideas of cleanliness and etiquette. (‘I shit on furniture. I hate houses,’ he declares in one of his final letters.) Following spells at the universities of Lemberg (Lviv) and Vienna, Roth was initially a pacifist but volunteered for the army in 1917 and later exaggerated much of his military career. Roth was a walking contradiction. While he was a cultural nostalgist with a hunger for ‘my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary’, he later offered his services as a kind of political conduit between the Left and the Catholics, to help smash Nazism. He married Friedl Reichler in Vienna in 1922, but the illstarred union was dogged by his wife’s descent into schizophrenia. The sadness that was Roth’s marriage seemed to set the tone for the downward spiral of a life that nonetheless saw him zigzag across mainland Europe, taking in Austria, Germany, France and Russia in a single year. Despite his alcoholism, battles with newspaper editors and supporting a range of dependants, Roth somehow managed to produce a novel or two a year, plus a wealth of short fiction and outstanding journalism.

Hofmann introduces his landmark epistolary volume – arguably the nearest we are going to get to a definitive Roth biography – with a string of negatives, telling the reader what the book does not contain. So: no Roth letters to his parents, wife, his lovers, most of his best friends or the companions of his final years; nothing, even, especially confessional or aesthetic, nor anything laying out the bare bones of Roth’s writing life. Instead, Hofmann argues the letters allow us to trace Roth’s route from Frankfurt to Berlin, Paris, Vienna and Amsterdam. This, he suggests, gives the reader a sense of a ‘westward trajectory’ or ‘swarming movement’ from the writer’s birthplace in the old Habsburg Empire to ‘the locus of exile, disappointment, trepidation, punishment’ that was, finally, Paris in the late 1930s. Hofmann notes that even the masterpiece, The Radetzky March, was written on the move, in no fewer than eleven locations.

Hofmann has proved an indefatigable champion of Roth’s work through a series of translations. At the same time he is known for his dislike of Roth’s well-heeled literary friend, Stefan Zweig, whom he slams as a ‘pedagogically minded patron’. Hofmann’s frequently voiced antipathy towards Zweig seems harsh given that Roth spent much of his time scrounging from the ever-obliging novelist, whom was often repaid with scorn for his financial and personal kindness. While funding his drink habit, however, any cash Roth managed to hang on to also supported several friends and his poor wife Friedl, whose worsening mental state may have precipitated Roth’s alcoholism. It is hard not to feel sympathy for a man who described his fate in almost Kafkaesque terms: ‘I am wriggling in a hundred nets.’

While Roth remained a restless, unhappy spirit, he seemed to find temporary spiritual respite in Paris. Within the generally gloomy context of these letters, it is unusual to encounter Roth’s lyrical rhapsody to the French capital in a letter to fellow journalist, Benno Reifenberg, on 16 May 1925:

I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and that you must come here. Whoever has not been here is only half a human, and no sort of European. Paris is free, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in the most majestic pathos. Any chauffeur is wittier than our wittiest authors.

It was as if Roth had found in France a place and a culture to fill the spiritual and imaginative void left by the loss of his beloved Austro-Hungarian ‘fatherland’. In an interview about Roth at the Bristol Festival of Ideas on 17 February 2012, Hofmann said: ‘In his mind, I think he married his provenance, his origin; he married Jewish Galicia with the Catholic south of France, with Catholic Marseille.’ And it was also in the French capital, while working as the Paris correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ), that Roth seemed to turn definitively against Germany. Hofmann describes Roth’s distasteful comment that Germany had ‘the ugliest prostitutes’ as matching ‘the sarcastic horror paintings of Otto Dix’. Roth’s squabbles with FZ from 1925 onwards seem to signal his growing disenchantment with both Germany and his own life: 'The whole FZ looks to me like a microcosm of Germany. My loathing for it is growing all the time ... the world looks like a German bakery, sugar-sweet and sickening.’ As Hofmann notes at one point in his illuminating running commentary, ‘Roth was ... a great and passionate hater’.

Fortunately, however, Roth’s professional squabbles with Germany and its newspaper editors eventually segued into a much more prescient analysis of the country’s drift towards Nazism. By 1934 he tells Zweig that he is prepared to act as a ‘bridge’ between the ‘Leftists’ and the Catholics in any potential plans to unite forces against Hitler. Frequently given to rhetorical flourishes, Roth loftily declares that ‘what I want to do is protect Europe and humanity, both from the Nazis and from the Hitler Zionists’. He accuses Zweig of political obtuseness, warning his long-suffering literary friend-cum-creditor in August 1935 that ‘the urge to humiliate Jews didn’t begin yesterday or today; it’s been part of the platform of the Third Reich from the very start ... The founding principle, so to speak, of National Socialism, is none other than contempt for the Jewish race!’

A bundle of human contradictions, Roth was a constant cadger, on the run from despair, debt, unhappy love affairs and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. But he was also a gregarious man and a sensualist. Writing from Russia in October 1926 he feels the absence of female company like a wound: ‘No women. Hence the isolation. Nothing but men is like a desert full of sand.’ As his wife grows distant through mental illness, Roth pursues several love affairs, partly to reawaken his numbed senses. Falling for a twenty year-old girl in Antibes in early 1931, he calls his actions ‘cretinous stupidity’, but is in thrall to Eros, confessing that ‘for the first time since my wife’s illness, I feel alive again’. Roth’s erotically charged letter to Zweig about the affair also reveals an almost clinical distance from the sexual act: ‘Three Catholic hymens before the real one, a shouter, and I practice the art of deflowering whilst feeling little pleasure.’ It is almost as if Roth has developed a second or third skin to protect him from the frazzled chaos of his life. He signs off that his wife ‘is doing badly’ before offering this callous coda: ‘I may be a sonofabitch, but defloration in a literary setting, that’s worth something to me.’

Although Michael Hofmann harbours a seemingly personal dislike of Zweig, it is Roth’s old friend who provides one of the most revealing and heartfelt passages in the book. In fact, the friendship between the two writers – however fraught and fractious – is arguably the great love affair revealed in these letters. Zweig writes to his combative, imperious and often ungrateful old friend in the autumn of 1937. Their relationship is apparently disintegrating into sourness and protracted silences, yet he is both eloquently forgiving of Roth’s attempts to ‘diminish’ him in the eyes of others and perceptive about the source of Roth’s despair:

Push me away all you like, it won’t help you! Roth, friend, I know how hard things are for you, and that’s reason enough for me to love you all the more, and when you’re angry and irritable and full of buried resentments against me, then all I feel is that life is torturing you, and that you’re lashing out, out of some correct instinct, perhaps against the onlyperson who wouldn’t be offended thereby, who in spite of everything and everyone will remain true to you ...

Ironically, in Roth’s last extant letter to Zweig, dated 10 October 1938, he exhorts his friend not to submit to pessimism, telling him: ‘You are a defeatist.’

One of Roth’s novels is called Flight Without End. In terms of his restless life, it is an instructive title. A tragic hero, Roth was perhaps only really at home within his own imaginative life. Writing was a respite from the pell-mell of his existence, as the shadows gathered around him and Europe in Auden’s ‘low dishonest decade’. In Hofmann, Roth has found a literary champion of the first order who has raised his profile and reputation by translating ten of his books over the last twenty-four years. The poet’s footnotes (which, Hofmann told his Bristol audience, became ‘addictive’) represent a telling critique of both a wandering spirit of the 1930s and the
art of writing itself.

TERRY KELLY

http://thelondonmagazine.org/

Book Marx...

Groucho Lives! (In Two Places)

By DICK CAVETT
March 30, 2012

For the Groucho Marx fans of this column who continue to plead for more, the information contained herein, if new to you, might just make your day.

There are two very different books out, both of which are musts to grace the bookshelves of the Groucho addict: Robert Bader’s “Groucho Marx and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales: Selected Writings of Groucho Marx” and Steve Stoliar’s “Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho’s House.”

Those who may have read these books when they first appeared need not feel left out. Both are updated and expanded editions. Both contain abundant new stuff.

Woody Allen has said that of the greats, Groucho had the richest number of gifts. He could sing, dance and act, and beyond those fairly common gifts, when you add the distinctive voice, faultless instinct for wording, genius wit, hilarious physical movement, rich supply of expressions and physical “takes” — and the list goes on — it arguably adds up to the most supremely gifted comedian of our time.

And there’s one thing more. He could write. A born scribe. And many a Groucho fan is unaware of the degree to which this was true.

This problem has been put to bed by Bader’s book. (Full disclosure: I know Rob from the masterful job he did putting together the “Dick Cavett Show” DVD sets.) Bader, too, can write, and in a fresh, humorous, scholarly and entertaining way, with shrewd analysis and observations about the products of Groucho’s pen and typewriter.

If your reaction to this is, “So what did he write?” this book holds the answer. In his early years, and aside from his books, Groucho’s written pieces appeared widely, including in the beloved magazine College Humor and, yes, The New Yorker. Bader has found and retrieved priceless specimens of Groucho’s impressively large output from all over, some of the pieces early enough to have been bylined “Julius H. Marx,” Groucho’s vrai nom. Open the book to any page and try not to laugh.

Prime among the delights for me are speeches Groucho gave at colleges and elsewhere through the years. As you read them, it’s almost like having him present. So tone-perfect are these pieces that you can’t help hearing the famous voice and its witty inflections in your mind’s ear. It’s a wonder.

A Marx Brothers fanatic virtually from birth, Bader is an intrepid researcher and gets stuff nobody’s got. For another, coming book, he can be found one day in the Lincoln Center Library or, on another, in local newspaper files in, say, Red Oak, Iowa, sleuthing out yellowing, local Marx Brothers clippings, reviews and material from their vaudeville days.

Groucho preferred the company of writers to that of actors. In Los Angeles, when he took me to the Hillcrest Country Club for lunch, he steered us past a table of beckoning movie faces to the writers’ table, where I met fabled “names” from a lifetime of reading screen credits. He told me once, “I’d rather be known as an author and remembered for my writing than for all the rest of it.” (He told others that, too, of course.) He was immensely proud of having been a houseguest of his pen pal T. S. Eliot. The only problem, he said, was that Eliot kept addressing Groucho’s then-wife, Eden, as “Mrs. Groucho.”

Groucho was a well-read, well-educated man (the “self-” method) and the only 9th-grade dropout I ever met who had read all of Iris Murdoch’s novels. I think he was quietly delighted when I, with my (envied) Yale degree, had to confess to having read not one.

Steve Stoliar, while still college-age, was part of the successful campaign to force the 1974 re-release of “Animal Crackers,” the Marxes’ 1930 film, then inexplicably in mothballs and in danger of being lost, deteriorated and forgotten. This brought him to Groucho’s attention. Sufficiently impressed by Steve’s knowledge of the world of Marx, Groucho offered him a job and he “woke up” inside his hero’s house, transformed from mere fan into archivist, general amanuensis and companion to his personal god. A dream that he hadn’t dared to dream had come true. How many of us can say that?

“Raised Eyebrows” is an invigorating read. A gulping Stoliar got used to opening the front door to a who’s who of the arts and letters: S. J. Perelman, Bob Hope, Steve Allen, Morrie Ryskind, Jack Lemmon, George Burns and many more cherished friends.

Guests, after dinner, were treated to a cabaret with their host by the piano singing, with perfect pitch, “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” “Father’s Day,” “Show Me a Rose,” “Omaha, Nebraska (In the Foothills of Tennessee)” and other favorites, often with Marvin Hamlisch volunteering at the keyboard.

“Raised Eyebrows” could easily have been written as a delightful memoir only. It is that, but much more. There’s no way Stoliar could have avoided dealing with the rhino in the room: the enigmatic, half-mad Erin Fleming, the young woman who came into Groucho’s life at a crucial time and who became, in a complex and bizarre way, his Lady Macbeth. As you’ll see, she was equally adept at doing wondrous things for Groucho, and appalling ones.

Depending on whom you ask, she was either the best or worst thing that could have happened to the aging star, who provided her a pass into a world of fame and the big time that she could never have otherwise achieved. In my view, she was both: the worst and the best. Young and pretty and vivacious when Groucho met her, Erin and her ambition worked — some would say wormed — their way into his home and she became, in effect, his life-manager. Her story as told by Stoliar is the stuff of one swell hair-raising novel or movie.

On the plus side, she got Groucho up and out of near despair at a time when he was feeling forgotten. (A woman who lived near Groucho described how, in a deeply lonely period of his life following a divorce, he would walk his dog in front of his neighbors’ homes, hoping, she said, to be invited in for a drink, a visit or a meal. That gets to me.)

Another paradox about Groucho was the contrast between his claim to be shocked by the dirty talk and material of the 1960s and ’70s and his own propensity for the hilarious, filthy remark.

“I don’t belong in this age,” he said once on my show, where he also discussed the Broadway musical “Hair” and its then-shocking nudity. “I was going to go buy a ticket,” Groucho said, “but I went back to my hotel room, took off my clothes, looked at myself in the mirror and saved eight dollars.” (He’d have saved a lot more today.) Would-be comedy writers: Note the perfect ad-lib wording, syllable count and cadence.

Bader did some bowdlerizing of Groucho’s stuff in the original edition of his book, and has kicked himself for it. In the interval he decided to restore everything, feeling it was not his duty to deny the reader Groucho unadulterated. (Congratulate me for not using the phrase “letting it all hang out.”)

Did I mention that both books are updated from previous versions and that both contain enough rich new stuff to delight the heart and mind of the earlier reader? Stoliar’s update on Erin Fleming re-visits the old question about whether she eventually attained the state of genuine madness.

Long-memoried viewers of Ted Koppell’s “Nightline,” on the very night the verdict in the crazy “Erin Fleming vs. Bank of America” trial came down against her (there is much to Google on this case), would not need a degree in psychiatry to diagnose what appeared to be someone certifiably unhinged. Imagine the lack of charm and appeal it would take to cause a jury to decide against a young woman, in favor of so revered an institution as a bank! At one point, news-coverage viewers of the trial got to see Fleming point across the courtroom and shriek at a Bank of America attorney, “That man murdered Groucho Marx!”

Stoliar’s update section also includes some fascinating information about Erin’s mystery-enshrouded demise.

The truth is, Marx devotees will need to get both books. And if you’re not a devotee, get them anyway. Fix a drink, light a fire (I won’t add “only if you have a fireplace”), put one book on each side of you and dip alternately. There are so many worse ways you could spend your time.

Trying as usual to think of how to close this off, a problem Groucho never had in his letters, I remembered an example. He once ended:

Well, Richard (I’d say “Dick” but my secretary is a spinster), I’m running out of things to say. And they should be running out of me.
Anyway, good-bye ’til hell freezes over. And if you’ve read this far, there’s something wrong with you.
Groucho

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/groucho-lives-in-two-places/

Crazy Love...

Upside Looking Down...

You're Telling Me...

Jackie Blue...

Love's Melody...

The Moon's a Harsh Mistress...

Knockin' Lost John...

Mary Skeffington...

Adrienne Rich RIP

Adrienne Rich, Influential Feminist Poet, Dies at 82

By MARGALIT FOX
Published: March 28, 2012

Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.

The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, with which she had lived for most of her adult life, her family said.

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets.

All this helped ensure Ms. Rich’s continued relevance long after she burst genteelly onto the scene as a Radcliffe senior in the early 1950s.

Her constellation of honors includes a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994 and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for “Diving Into the Wreck.” That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.

In the title poem, Ms. Rich uses the metaphor of a dive into dark, unfathomable waters to plumb the depths of women’s experience:

I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. ...
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Ms. Rich was far too seasoned a campaigner to think that verse alone could change entrenched social institutions. “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy,” she said in an acceptance speech to the National Book Foundation in 2006, on receiving its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. “Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.”

But at the same time, as she made resoundingly clear in interviews, in public lectures and in her work, Ms. Rich saw poetry as a keen-edged beacon by which women’s lives — and women’s consciousness — could be illuminated.

She was never supposed to have turned out as she did.

Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore on May 16, 1929. Her father, Arnold Rice Rich, a doctor and assimilated Jew, was an authority on tuberculosis who taught at Johns Hopkins University. Her mother, Helen Gravely Jones Rich, a Christian, was a pianist and composer who, cleaving to social norms of the day, forsook her career to marry and have children. Adrienne was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

Theirs was a bookish household, and Adrienne, as she said afterward, was groomed by her father to be a literary prodigy. He encouraged her to write poetry when she was still a child, and she steeped herself in the poets in his library — all men, she later ruefully observed. But those men gave her the formalist grounding that let her make her mark when she was still very young.

When Ms. Rich was in her last year at Radcliffe (she received a bachelor’s degree in English there in 1951), W. H. Auden chose her first collection, “A Change of World,” for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series, a signal honor. Released in 1951, the book, with its sober mien, dutiful meter and scrupulous rhymes, was praised by reviewers for its impeccable command of form.

She had learned the lessons of her father’s library well, or so it seemed. For even in this volume Ms. Rich had begun, with subtle subversion, to push against a time-honored thematic constraint — the proscription on making poetry out of the soul-numbing dailiness of women’s lives.

A poem in the collection, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” depicting a woman at her needlework and reprinted here in full, is concerned with precisely this:

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Once mastered, poetry’s formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against, and by her third collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” published by Harper & Row, she had pretty well exploded them. That volume appeared in 1963, a watershed moment in women’s letters: “The Feminine Mystique” was also published that year.

In the collection’s title poem, Ms. Rich chronicles the pulverizing onus of traditional married life. It opens this way:

You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time. ...
Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact.

Though the book horrified some critics, it sealed Ms. Rich’s national reputation.

She knew the strain of domestic duty firsthand. In 1953 Ms. Rich had married a Harvard economist, Alfred Haskell Conrad, and by the time she was 30 she was the mother of three small boys. When Professor Conrad took a job at the City College of New York, the family moved to New York City, where Ms. Rich became active in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

By 1970, partly because she had begun, inwardly, to acknowledge her erotic love of women, Ms. Rich and her husband had grown estranged. That autumn, he died of a gunshot wound to the head; the death was ruled a suicide. To the end of her life, Ms. Rich rarely spoke of it.

Ms. Rich effectively came out as a lesbian in 1976, with the publication of “Twenty-One Love Poems,” whose subject matter — sexual love between women — was still considered disarming and dangerous. In the years that followed her poetry and prose ranged over her increasing self-identification as a Jewish woman, the Holocaust and the struggles of black women.

Ms. Rich’s other volumes of poetry include “The Dream of a Common Language” (1978), “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far” (1981), “The Fact of a Doorframe” (1984), “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991) and, most recently, “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,” published last year.

Her prose includes the essay collections “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” (1979); “Blood, Bread, and Poetry” (1986); an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” published as a slender volume in 1981; and the nonfiction book “Of Woman Born” (1976), which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct.

For Ms. Rich, the getting of literary awards was itself a political act to be reckoned with. On sharing the National Book Award for poetry in 1974 (the other recipient that year was Allen Ginsberg), she declined to accept it on her own behalf. Instead, she appeared onstage with two of that year’s finalists, the poets Audre Lorde and Alice Walker; the three of them accepted the award on behalf of all women.

In 1997, in a widely reported act, Ms. Rich declined the National Medal of Arts, the United States government’s highest award bestowed upon artists. In a letter to Jane Alexander, then chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which administers the award, she expressed her dismay, amid the “increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice,” that the government had chosen to honor “a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

Art, Ms. Rich added, “means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”

Ms. Rich’s other laurels — and these she did accept — include the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

She taught widely, including at Columbia, Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell and Stanford Universities.

Ms. Rich’s survivors include her partner of more than 30 years, the writer Michelle Cliff; three sons, David, Pablo and Jacob, from her marriage to Professor Conrad; a sister, Cynthia Rich; and two grandchildren.

For all her verbal prowess, for all her prolific output, Ms. Rich retained a dexterous command of the plain, pithy utterance. In a 1984 speech she summed up her reason for writing — and, by loud unspoken implication, her reason for being — in just seven words.

What she and her sisters-in-arms were fighting to achieve, she said, was simply this: “the creation of a society without domination.”


Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” reprinted from “Collected Early Poems” by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1993 by Adrienne Rich. With the permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company Inc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html?pagewanted=all

Last night's setlist

At The Habit, York (with Ron): -

The Singer Not The Song
Bye Bye Love
Chains
World Without Love
Words

A very busy evening, something that hasn't happened for quite a while. And a landmark for me - a lad called Andy who plays regularly on the York open mic scene covered Falling - and gave me a name-check. A humbling experience.

21st Century Newcastle - on video...

Woman's ear bitten off in Newcastle street brawl
by Michael Brown
Evening Chronicle Apr 4 2012

ROLLING in the middle of the road, two women brawl in broad daylight in a city centre street.

The scene unfolded in Newcastle when two couples clashed.

One of the women had half her ear bitten off.

Shoppers also saw one man hit the women with a metal chair while they threw punches and wrestled on the ground in front of a Stagecoach bus.

The incident took place in Newgate Street – officially branded the most crime-heavy street in the city.

As dozens of passers-by looked on, one man repeatedly smashed the chair into the women with a sickening thud.

Holly Bradshaw, 18, from Wardley, Gateshead, works at Subway and was about to take in the chairs and tables from the sandwich shop’s outside area when the violence flared.

“I was heading outside to clear away the tables and chairs when I saw the fight,” she said.

“The lads came running across the road, then one picked up a chair and swung it at the other.

“The chair missed him and went right across the road.

“All this fighting seemed a bit heavy for a Monday night.”

Another eyewitness, who asked not to be named, was walking from a nearby Chinese supermarket at around 7.25pm when he heard shouting.

“The two women had grabbed each other by the throats and were wrestling each other to the ground in the middle of the road,” he said.

“They were properly scrapping.

“At the same time, a guy in a light top and trousers was chasing another man across the road towards Subway – wildly swinging punches as he went.

“They wheeled round, and as the chased man began to retreat back across the road, the other chap grabbed a metal chair from outside Subway and threw it at him. It missed, so he picked up another and threw that too.

“The two men then confronted each other in the road and were arguing with each other in front of a Stagecoach bus that had pulled up and found its path blocked by the chairs.

“All the time the women were still going at it.

“The chased man walked away across the street and the guy in the lighter trousers picked up one of the chairs from the road and walked towards the women.

“After a moment’s hesitation, he laid into them with the chair, swinging it up above his head and down into them two or three times.

“It must have had some force because even from 30 yards away you could hear an awful thwacking sound.

“Eventually a passer-by plucked up the courage and tried to separate the women, which they eventually did. But then the two pairs just kept arguing from a distance as they walked up Nun Lane – and then the cops showed up.”

Last night police said they were holding a 35-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman on suspicion of assault, while the woman who had her ear bitten was believed to be receiving hospital treatment.

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/evening-chronicle-news/2012/04/04/woman-s-ear-bitten-off-in-newcastle-street-brawl-video-72703-30690732/

Tonight's setlist

At the Waggon & Horses, York: -

Love Song
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Falling

A magical evening of music - that's all I can say; tremendous stuff.

Didn't intend to play Falling, but the host demanded it.

19th Century Newcastle in photographs...

A secondhand clothes seller at Newcastle cloth market reads as customers inspect her goods.

A set of original glass negatives showing street scenes of 19th century Newcastle has been found by Aaron Guy, who works at the city's Mining Institute
Photograph: NEMiPA – Collection of the Society of Antiquaries, Newcastle

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/picture/2012/mar/30/eyewitness-newcastle-upon-tyne?INTCMP=SRCH

Victorian Newcastle brought to life in photographic treasure trove
Newly discovered collection of photographic plates shows meat markets, rag sellers and street scenes from 1880s

Ciara Leeming
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 March 2012

When Aaron Guy peered into a forgotten box in an ancient Newcastle building, he could not have guessed the treasures contained inside. The curious photo archivist had stumbled upon a remarkable set of original early glass negatives, detailing everyday street scenes of 19th-century Newcastle.

Meat markets, fairs, rag sellers, small corner shops and larger than life street characters are among the subjects which feature in the high-quality, 300-image collection.

Guy, who works at the city's Mining Institute, was helping to shift old furniture for the Society of Antiquaries when his attention was diverted to the box.

"The society were moving to a smaller building and were passing some of their belongings to other organisations," he said. "I was just being nosy really, peering into boxes, when I happened to spot that one contained some really old glass negatives. I thought they seemed interesting so we asked for permission to bring the plate boxes back to our office to have a proper look."

The work seems to date back at least to 1880 and the cohesion of the images suggests at least a third of them may have been created by a single photographer. His deliberate documentation of working-class life was unusual for the period, perhaps more in tune with the celebrated street photographers who followed in his footsteps almost a century later, in the 1960s and 70s.

The most arresting images are from the Newcastle streets, but the collection also contains work from other parts of the north-east, most recognisably Tynemouth and Lindisfarne.

By 1871 Newcastle industrialist Joseph Swan had devised a method of producing dry photographic plates, which meant there was no immediate need for a darkroom and chemical processing, and made photography more convenient and commercially viable. Within a few years his city factory was the largest and most successful manufacturer of dry plates in the world.

By the 1880s, Newcastle was prosperous and sophisticated. It had a thriving cultural and intellectual scene, with frequent lectures, debates and scientific demonstrations. Yet this photographer chose to point his lens at ordinary people.

"We know very little about where these negatives have come from," Guy said. "They were never catalogued and the society doesn't recall how or when it came by them. We aren't even completely sure whether they are one photographer's archive, or if they were produced by several individuals. Photography would have been a very expensive hobby at that time, but this person was shooting in a very contemporary way.

"Despite the cumbersome equipment he would have been using – a large plate camera, probably on a tripod – I would describe this as observational documentary, almost photojournalistic in style.

"The work doesn't look staged, but if it was then the photographer was doing things very differently from his contemporaries. This work feels less distant and more engaged than other series I have seen.

"It may have been someone with means, or a commercial photographer with quite a distinctive viewpoint, who decided that Joe Bloggs on the street was more interesting to photograph in his spare time than the high society of Newcastle. He was really quite ahead of his time in that respect."

Guy and his colleagues are still scanning the work and researching locations and possible identities of the photographer. They are also keen to find another 15 boxes of plates which were sent by the Society of Antiquaries to other places.

"I was really quite lucky to find this box," he said. "I don't know if someone forgot it or planned to pick it up later. The aim now is to date and catalogue the work, and then to put it out to other organisations in the city and hopefully get it seen, because it really belongs to the people of Newcastle."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/mar/29/19th-century-newcastle-photographic-plates

Street scenes of 19th-century Newcastle – in pictures

A remarkable set of original early glass negatives detailing everyday 19th-century street scenes has been found by Aaron Guy, who works at Newcastle's Mining Institute. Most are from Newcastle, but some in the collection are from other parts of the north-east. The photographer is unknown

• All images from NEMiPA - Collection of the Society of Antiquaries, Newcastle







http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/gallery/2012/mar/29/19th-centrury-newcastle-in-pictures#/?picture=388048802&index=0

See also http://www.mininginstitute.org.uk/

Bob takes Katherine over Audrey...

Ahhhhhhhh........

Martin Scorsese's Favourite 11 Horror Films

11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time
Oct 28, 2009

Martin Scorsese—the man who brought you Taxi Driver and The Departed—shares his favorite horror movies of all time.

1. THE HAUNTING

“You may not believe in ghosts but you cannot deny terror!” was the tagline for this absolutely terrifying 1963 Robert Wise picture about the investigation of a house plagued by violently assaultive spirits.

2. ISLE OF THE DEAD

There’s a moment in this Val Lewton picture, about plague victims trapped on an island during the Greek civil war, that never fails to scare me. let’s just say that it involves premature burial.

3. THE UNINVITED

Another, more benign haunted house picture, set in England, no less atmospheric than The Haunting—the tone is very delicate, and the sense of fear is woven into the setting, the gentility of the characters.

4. THE ENTITY

Barbara Hershey plays a woman who is brutally raped and ravished by an invisible force in this truly terrifying picture. The banal settings, the California-modern house, accentuate the unnerving quality.

5. DEAD OF NIGHT

A British classic: four tales told by four strangers mysteriously gathered in a country house, each one extremely disquieting, climaxing with a montage in which elements from all the stories converge into a crescendo of madness. Like The Uninvited, it’s very playful…and then it gets under your skin.

6. THE CHANGELING

Another haunted house movie, filled with sadness and dread. George C. Scott, recovering from the death of his wife and child, discovers the angry ghost of another dead child in the mansion where he’s staying.

7. THE SHINING

I never read the Stephen King novel, I have no idea how faithful it is or isn’t, but Kubrick made a majestically terrifying movie, where what you don’t see or comprehend shadows every move the characters make.

8. THE EXORCIST

A classic, endlessly parodied, very familiar— and it’s as utterly horrifying as it was the day it came out. That room—the cold, the purple light, the demonic transformations: it really haunts you.

9. NIGHT OF THE DEMON

Jacques Tourneur made this picture about ancient curses near the end of his career, but it’s as potent as his films for Val Lewton. Forget the demon itself—again, it’s what you don’t see that’s so powerful.

10. THE INNOCENTS

This Jack Clayton adaptation of The Turn of the Screw is one of the rare pictures that does justice to Henry James. It’s beautifully crafted and acted, immaculately shot (by Freddie Francis), and very scary.

11. PSYCHO

Again, it’s so familiar that you think: great movie, but it’s not so scary anymore. Then you watch it…and quickly start thinking again. The shower…the swamp…the relationship between mother and son—it’s extremely disturbing on so many levels. It’s also a great work of art.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/10/28/martin-scorseses-top-11-horror-films-of-all-time.html

Ebb Tide - opening sequence

A Hedley/Kelly Production

Earl Scruggs - by Steve Martin

The Master from Flint Hill: Earl Scruggs

by Steve Martin
17 Januray 2012

Some nights he had the stars of North Carolina shooting from his fingertips. Before him, no one had ever played the banjo like he did. After him, everyone played the banjo like he did, or at least tried. In 1945, when he first stood on the stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and played banjo the way no one had ever heard before, the audience responded with shouts, whoops, and ovations. He performed tunes he wrote as well as songs they knew, with clarity and speed like no one could imagine, except him. When the singer came to the end of a phrase, he filled the theatre with sparkling runs of notes that became a signature for all bluegrass music since. He wore a suit and Stetson hat, and when he played he smiled at the audience like what he was doing was effortless. There aren’t many earthquakes in Tennessee, but that night there was.

As boys in the little community of Flint Hill, near Shelby, North Carolina, Earl and his brother Horace would take their banjo and guitar and start playing on the porch, then split up and meet behind the house. Their goal was to still be on the beat when they rejoined at the back. Momentously, when he was ten years old, after a fight with his brother, he was playing his banjo to calm his mind. He was practicing the standard “Reuben” when found he could incorporate his third finger into the picking of his right hand, instead of his usual two, in an unbroken, rolling, staccato. He ran back to his brother, shouting, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” He was on the way to creating an entirely new way of playing the banjo: Scruggs Style.

He was only twenty-one when he was in on the founding of bluegrass music, adding the Scruggs’ banjo sound to Bill Monroe’s great blend of guitar, bass, fiddle, mandolin, and Monroe’s iconic high, lonesome voice, singing, “It’s mighty dark for me to travel.” He had already been playing Scruggs style for eleven years. On the Grand Ole Opry’s Ryman Auditorium stage, the banjo had been played well, but mostly in the old style, and mostly by comedians, prompting Uncle Dave Macon, a beloved regular, to say about Earl from the wings, “That boy can play the banjo, but he ain’t one damned bit funny.”

It was at the Ryman, in 1946, that he met his future wife, Louise. They made eye contact while he was performing as she sat in the third row, stage left. Ten years later, when it became obvious that Earl was not only famous but verging on a legend, Louise, exhibiting country firmness and gumption, became his gate-keeper, defending the soft-spoken Earl from celebrity abuse, ill-advised contracts, and too many free dates or dubious honors. But Earl always obliged the youngsters and amateurs (including this writer, whom Earl showed how to play “Sally Goodin’,” his way, when I was twenty-two).

Sometime after Monroe denied him songwriting credit on “Bluegrass Breakdown,” Scruggs left Monroe, changed the F chord in “Bluegrass Breakdown” to E minor, and wrote “Foggy Mountain Breakdown. ” It became, arguably, the most famous banjo instrumental, a song that speeds along at a clip of eleven notes per second. It is known by most people as the theme from the movie “Bonnie and Clyde,” and also supplied Earl with an income for life.

The banjo lends itself to showing off: it’s often played fast and thrillingly, fingers flying up and down the neck, the right hand connecting to the left with seemingly impossible accuracy. But Earl always remembered his mother’s advice when he was a boy: “Play something that has a tune to it.” His first and last priority was to make music, which keeps his sound melodic and accessible. Yet, even professional players today say, “How did he do that?” It is not easy to make the melody note land in the right place when rolling three fingers over five strings, but Earl could syncopate, “bend” a string—which caused one note to move unbroken into another—and he could audibly retune the banjo in the middle of a song, leading to the invention of a mechanical device called “Scruggs’ pegs.” Earl knew when and how to surprise the heck out of the listener.

After he left Monroe, in 1948, Scruggs teamed up with Lester Flatt, who had also left Monroe, and Earl maintained his position, unassailed, as the greatest and most influential banjo player who ever lived. They toured the rough backroads of the bluegrass circuit, where jarring potholes knocked their instruments haywire, and they tuned each night to Flatt’s G string on his guitar—which, over the months, crept up in pitch. By the end of the tour, they were often a half-step too high, which they soon learned suited Flatt’s baritone voice.

The long zigzag march through the clubs and radio stations of America counted, though, and Monroe was annoyed as Flatt and Scruggs became as famous as he was. In 1962, they headlined the Newport Folk Festival, sold out Carnegie Hall, and, one year later, Earl’s banjo helped send “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” to No. 1 on the country charts. Then the Bob Dylan revolution and Beatles revolution hit almost simultaneously. At one point, a producer convinced the band to incorporate this new music into Flatt and Scruggs, persuading poor Flatt to sing “Everybody must get stoned.”

In the late nineteen-sixties, Earl continued to be introduced to new sounds through his musical sons Randy and Gary, and also by drop-ins to his Nashville house: Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and others who wanted to pick with the famous Earl Scruggs. Ravi Shankar came by with his sitar, and, after their unlikely jam session, they satisfied Ravi’s mystical craving for Kentucky Fried Chicken by sharing a bucket. Eventually, Earl grew his hair a bit long, joined Randy and Gary to create the Earl Scruggs Revue, and added drums to the band—a bluegrass no-no. A few years later, he released a solo album featuring songs by Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. When he showed up at a Washington, D.C., anti-Vietnam War protest, the country-music world from which he sprang wondered if he had blown a gasket.

A grand part of American music owes a debt to Earl Scruggs. Few players have changed the way we hear an instrument the way Earl has, putting him in a category with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Chet Atkins, and Jimi Hendrix. His reach extends not only throughout America, but to other countries, including Japan, where bluegrass bands, strangely, abound, as well as Australia, Russia, the U.K., Italy, Germany, and the Czech Republic, which boasts not only bands but banjo makers. Most, if not all, of the banjo players play Scruggs style.

Earl is now eighty-eight, and it’s been seventy-eight years since he first shouted, “I’ve got it!” and reinvigorated the banjo. Picking with Earl at his home in Nashville is a holy anointment, and playing Earl’s banjo, the one he recorded “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on in 1949, well, that’s like holding the Grail. Sometimes on these special evenings, everyone will sit around playing their instruments, and the tunes will glide easily from one to another, like it has on the porches and living rooms of America for hundreds of years. But then Earl will settle in, playing backup or taking the lead, and you hear the sound, the one you heard when you first fell in love with the banjo, and you can’t help but have a slight intake of breath. Unmistakable. That’s Earl Scruggs. The five-string banjo could not have had a better genius.

The author wishes to thank Gary Scruggs, Pete Wernick, and Tony Trischka for confirming facts and contributing memories to this article.



http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/01/steve-martin-earl-scruggs.html

Earl Scruggs RIP

Banjo innovator and bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs, a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, died on Wednesday at a Nashville hospital at age 88.

A four-time Grammy winner, Scruggs was perhaps best known in popular culture for "The Ballad of Jed Clampett," the theme song for "The Beverly Hillbillies" television program, and for "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," a Flatt & Scruggs classic which was used in the 1967 classic film, "Bonnie and Clyde."

Last night's setlists

At The Habit, York: -

Set 1 (with Ron): -
Crying In The Rain
Chains
The Singer Not The Song
Bye Bye Love
The Sound Of Silence
Love Hurts
Let It Be Me

Set 2 (solo): -
Things We Said Today
Too Far Gone
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Long May You Run

A strange night in some ways. Very quiet until about 11:15 when suddenly the place was packed.

Something Fine...

Tonight's setlist

At the Waggon & Horses, York: -

Mellow My Mind
Falling
There Stands The Glass

A laid-back evening for the open mic punter. Some excellent toons from Dave Ward Maclean, Lee Parry & the wonderful Carol Henderson. Top stuff!

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #148

Joseph Wright of Derby...

Restoration of Joseph Wright of Derby paintings reveals hidden details
Tiny figures and flames hidden for a century re-emerge in paintings due to go back on display in painter's native city

Maev Kennedy
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 23 February 2012

Sparks flew when the world's largest collection of paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby was cleaned – along with wind-blown spray flashing in sunlight, flames shooting from mountain tops and tiny figures suddenly revealed skulking in inky shadows.The conservation work on the paintings, before the reopening this weekend of the gallery in his native city dedicated to his work, astonished Lucy Salt, keeper of fine art at the city museum, who thought she knew every inch of the paintings, and suddenly saw details invisible for more than a century re-emerge.

Wright remains a bit of a mystery to her. He was born in 1734 a few hundred yards from the museum, a town clerk's son who taught himself to draw by copying prints. Although he went on to study in London, and exhibited at the Royal Academy until he fell out with them because he thought they undervalued his work and chipped his frames, and travelled in mainland Europe where he saw Vesuvius erupting, an experience recalled in scores of his paintings, he spent nearly his entire life in Derby and died in a house almost within sight of his birthplace.

Nothing in his life explains the drama and passion in his work which made him famous – although he knew many scientists, inventors and philosophers, and watched the scientific experiments shown in many of his best-known works, including the spellbound group watching a demonstration of an orrery."There's a really wild streak in Wright. He was very intelligent, and had a very wide circle of extremely interesting and intellectual friends, but he was obviously quite a difficult man, nervous, ill, anxious, increasingly reluctant to leave his house. And yet the paintings don't reflect that at all," says Salt.The gallery owns one of his last works, painted two years before his death at the age of 63, when he had probably already suffered a stroke and was complaining of pain and tremor in his hands. It is a glittering view of Rydal waterfall, in which he achieved his ambition of showing every pebble below the ripples of water, a painting full of light and happiness. Wright commented grumpily in a letter than he was frozen working on it, and never so glad to get out of a wood in his life.It was a critic in his lifetime who called him "Joseph Wright of Derby" to distinguish him from another artist Wright, but the grand title has stuck ever since, much to the satisfaction of his home. Although his paintings are in many major collections, including the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Collection, Derby started collecting his work as soon as the Victorian museum was built.The first, the Alchemist, was bought by public subscription for £1,000, and The Orrery followed for the same then huge price.

It sometimes seems to Stuart Gillis, head of museum transformation, that the squatters in the house where Wright died care more about him now than his city. The squatters have made a little display board about the building and the artist, while the city allowed the house – which was also the birthplace of the first astronomer royal, John Flamsteed, and the home of Wright's great friend the clockmaker John Whitehurst, subject of a tender portrait in the collection – to fall into dereliction.To Gillis – and to the designer Wayne Hemingway, who formally reopened the gallery – Wright is the link between the worlds of art, science and manufacture, who could inspire a new generation. "He's not an easy sell," Gillis says. "This isn't just easy sugary stuff. There's real worth here, the world as viewed from the English 18th-century provinces."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/23/restoration-joseph-wright-derby-paintings?INTCMP=SRCH

Newcastle in the 80s

See http://www.eccentricsleevenotes.com/index.htm