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Who Did House of the Rising Sun First Before the Animals?
August 1, 2021 by Eric_SFM_admin
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Song: House of the Rising Sun (1964)
Artist: The Animals
Writer: Traditional (arrangement by The Animals, et al.)
House of the Rising Sun Original?
The tune most identified with the animals was not written entirely by them and yet was not a cover. House of the Rising Sun, also known as Rising Sun Blues, was a traditional folk song. Recorded versions of the song go back to the 1930s, the oldest known from Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster of Appalachia, recorded in 1933. It was known, perhaps long before this, and would have been sang as a traditional song by many before. It was one of the many traditional songs collected by Alan Lomax on his journeys for the Library of Congress. He recorded it in the field sung by a Middlesboro, Kentucky woman named Georgia Turner, in 1937. This recording is also sometimes credited as the first, though it clearly is not and it is clear that Turner's knowledge of the song is not unique at all. Nobody knows where the song came from. Like many such songs, it was part of the southern landscape but was probably based on a traditional English folk song.
Texas Alexander – The Risin' Sun
Before I move on I should mention a recording by Alger Texas Alexander, The Risin' Sun. From 1928, this song is sometimes mistakenly listed as the first known recording of 'House of the Risin' Sun' (Rising Sun Blues). However, it is clearly not the same song and it makes no sense that it would have influenced the versions being sung (as a traditional tune) by the early 1930s. The lyrics of the song may indeed be a reference to 'Rising Sun Blues' (house of..):
My woman's got something, just like the risin' sun.
The Risin Sun, perhaps, was a bordello or 'bawdy house' and the something his woman has is sexual, or, perhaps the lyrics had nothing to do with this at all and uses a different slang reference altogether. "My woman got somethin round and it looks just like a bear, sometime I wonder what in the hell is there." It has been claimed that 'rising sun' was African American slang for vagina, but this has never been confirmed.
Regardless, many sources claim that Texas Alexander is the originator of House of the Rising Sun, simply because of the existence of his recording with a similar name. It bears absolutely no resemblance musically or lyrically. There is actually no story at all in the song, let alone a mention of New Orleans, or a house of any kind, or even of a young man or woman whose life is turned upside down. There is also no warning to any younger sibling.(1)
Other such blues songs include:
Rising Sun Blues by Ivy Smith, recorded in 1927
Rising Sun Blues by Charles "Cow Cow" Davenports, 1927
Rising Sun Blues by King David's Jug Band, 1930
Rising Sun Blues by Darby and Tarlton, 1930
The Rising Sun Blues by Peetie Wheatraw, 1935
Early Lyrics
The earliest printed version of lyrics for House of the Rising Sun is from a piece published in Adventure Magazine in 1925: Old Songs That Men Have Sung:
There is a house in New Orleans, it's called the Rising Sun
It's been the ruin of many poor girl
Great God, and I for one.
This column, Old Songs That Men Have Sung was written by Robert Winslow Gordon, a collector of folk songs and then the director of the Library of Congress's Archive American of Folk Song, who wrote:
It not infrequently happens that a given song is found both in a recognizable 'author' version and also in a form showing partial composition by the folk. In some cases it can easily bee seen in which direction the influence has gone; either that the work of an individual author has been adopted and made over by the folk, or that an author has used as his bases a genuine folk-song which he has dressed up to suit his purpose.
The latter is clearly the direction that House of the Rising Sun took, and, indeed, it has been claimed that the song was known in America by 1905. This is also a good time to dispense with the oft-repeated myth that the song was always traditionally sung by a 'female character' from the perspective of a female. This is absolutely false. Like any folk song, the version has always changed to suit the singer and both male and female versions are found throughout its history.
The song is often identified as a 'traditional blues song.' This is incorrect. Although the actual House of the Rising Sun was recorded by many black bluesmen, including Leadbelly, there is no evidence that it arose from the blues or from Urban Blues, as asserted by some. Alan Lomax said that he only ever heard it sung, during his travels, by white southerners. This doesn't mean, of course, that they couldn't have been influenced by traveling black musicians which would have thus influenced the evolution of the song. It is best identifed as an American folk song with potential roots in the folk songs of England.
Josh White Version – Prelude to The Animals
The earliest recorded versions of the song are done in a major key. The first version that I know of done in a minor key is by bluesman Josh White. This early version is by far the closest to the modern version of the song I would suppose that it is White who inspired those who came after him. The melody we know today was the melody sung by White.
The Animals' version of House of the Rising Sun has become the definitive version but it is difficult to know what version of the song they were most inspired by. Several stories have been told of its history. One story is that a ten-year-old Eric Burden, later to become the singer of The Animals, heard Josh White's version and "found the melody haunting." It stuck with him and he later used it to inspire the version done by his band. (1) A more credible story is that Eric Burden first heard the song performed by an English folk singer named Johnny Handle.
Whatever the case, The Animals used Bob Dylan's version as a guide. The guitar part is the same chords used by Dylan, except in arpeggios.
Oddly, keyboardist Alan Price is given sole credit for the arrangement and if you search for the modern lyrics of the song (which has several added verses), Price is listed as the songwriter. Eric Burden explained that this happened because there was not enough room to list all the band members' names on the record label and Alan Price was first in alphabetical order. This caused Price alone to receive royalties from the song, a fact that rankled the other band members, to say the least and was one of the things that led to the breakup of the band. When Eric Burden and the band confronted Alan Price during a 1983 reunion show and asked him whether he was ready to start sharing royalties, Price refused.
Dave Van Ronk to Bob Dylan
It is often claimed that successful versions of old songs were inspired by older and less commercially successful or lesser-known versions or at least non-contemporaneous ones. However, if the Animals used Bob Dylan as a guide, then they ultimately used Dave Van Ronk, without being aware of it. Bob Dylan recorded Van Ronk's arrangement around the same time as the Animals recorded their version.
Bob Dylan used Van Ronk's arrangement as part of his debut album in 1962. Van Ronk used a minor key like Josh White, but also used a descending bass line in half-steps, something quite unusual in a folk song in that day. Van Ronk's version is a big part of what made the song what it is today. He was an influential figure in the folk scene of Greenwich Village during the 1960s and it is said that he showed his new arrangement to a young Bob Dylan who jumped the gun and recorded it himself just a few weeks bore Van Ronk himself was going to record his own version.
Bob Dylan didn't bother to ask Van Ronk's permission until he had obviously already recorded it. Said Van Ronk:
I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague.
Dylan told Van Ronk that everything was going fine before sheepishly asking him "Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of 'House of the Rising Sun?' Van Rink regretfully told him that he was going into the studio to record it himself in a few weeks. Couldn't he wait until the next album? To that, Dylan replied, "Uh oh." It was too late.
While Van Ronk didn't actually own the song, it was generally excepted that you didn't record someone's special arrangement of an otherwise public domain song without at least asking them for verbal permission. It hardly mattered that Dylan jumped the gun, who surely had not known of Van Ronk's intention to record it, as the Animals' version of the song overshadowed his own and became such a huge hit that he stopped playing it. (2)
Van Ronk himself had learned the song from a recording by Hally Wood, a singer and song collector from Texas, who had himself discovered the song through the Georgia Turner field recording by Alan Lomax.
There are two other versions also recorded by Lomax, by Dawson Henson and Bert Martin. There is also a later version recorded by Lomax in 1949, this time by folk singer Jean Ritchie.
Other Notable Versions of House of the Rising Sun
Leadbelly (1944,1948)
Woody Guthrie (1941)
Josh White (1942)
Glenn Yarbrough (1957)
Pete Seeger (1958)
Andy Griffith (1959)
Joan Baez (1960)
Nina Simone (1962)
The Doors (1964)
Tim Hardin (1967)
Leslie West (1975)
Jody Miller (1973)
Dolly Parton (1981)
What is the House of the Rising Sun?
Nobody really knows, originally, what the 'house' was supposed to be. Many renditions of the song are not clear and never really describe just what the house is. I mentioned a house of ill-repute above. This is one assumption. Another is that it was a prison. A very distinct possibility, and the one I think most likely, is a gambling house. The early lyrics from 1925, mentioned before, collected by archivist Robert Winslow Gordon (given to him by William Burroughs) mentions a rounder:
It's called the Rising Sun
It's been the ruin of many a poor girl,
Great God, and I for one
If I had listened to what my mother said,
I'd be at home today,
But I was a young and foolish poor girl,
Let a rounder lead me astray
Oh mother, mother tell me why,
You treat that rounder cold?
I'd rather be that rounder's wife
Than to wear your crown of gold
Now tell my sister in Baltimore
Not to do as I have done,
To shun that house in New Orleans,
A rounder could be a gambler, especially a person who earns his living playing cards. A rounder could also be a drunk, someone who spends a lot of time in bars. Since either version of a rounder could have been found in a bar, and a bar can also be a gambling house, we at least know that the House of the Rising Sun, in this version, was not a prison, and probably never was meant to be. The Rising Sun is not where they send you when you are lead astray, but the place that leads you astray in the first place.
There are other versions that make the 'house' clearly a 'whorehouse' or brothel. The modern versions of the lyrics owe the most to Georgia Turner's version recorded by Lomax, which seems to have been the most popular version. (1) In Lomax's written version of the song, he added stanzas collected from other singers to "finish" the song (it doesn't really make sense to try to finish a folk song, hence the quotes). Here is the Turner version:
They call the Rising Sun.
It's been the ruin of many a poor girl
And me, O God, for one.
Go tell my baby sister
Never do like I have done
To shun that house in New Orleans
My mother she's a tailor,
She sewed these new blue jeans.
My sweetheart, he's a drunkard, Lord, Lord,
Drinks down in New Orleans.
The only thing a drunkard needs
Is a suitcase and a trunk.
The only time he's satisfied
Is when he's on a drunk.
One foot is on the platform
and the other one on the train.
I'm going back to New Orleans
To wear that ball and chain.
Lomax added other stanzas, presumably from Bert Martin:
If I had listened what Mama said,
I'd be at home today.
Being so young and foolish, poor boy,
Let a rambler lead me astray.
Fills his glasses to the brim,
Passes them around.
Only pleasure he gets out of life
Is hoboin' from town to town.
Going back to New Orleans,
My race is almost run.
Going back to spend the rest of my days,
Beneath that Rising Sun.
Anthony, Ted. Chasing the RISING SUN: The Journey of an American Song. Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Bronson, Fred. The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits. Billboard Books, 2003.
Whatley, Jack. "How Bob DYLAN Broke an Unwritten Rule of Folk Music by Recording 'House of the Rising Sun'." Far Out Magazine How Bob Dylan Broke an Unwritten Rule of Folk Music by Recording House of the Rising Sun Comments, 23 Sept. 2020, faroutmagazine.co.uk/bob-dylan-broke-unwritten-rule-house-of-the-rising-sun/.
Categories Folk Tags 1960s Songs, Folk Music, folk rock, Who Did It First? Post navigation
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Family therapy is important because it takes the problem/s and doesn't blame an individual but makes it a group (a family) problem to work on and improve.


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December 17, 2019 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, Italian poetry, poetry, religious poetry, translation, writing	Basilicata, canzoni, Caroline Maldonado, Dante, Don Diego Sandoval de Castro, Favale, Giovan Michele, Goddess Fortuna, honour killings, Isabella Morra, Italian poetry in translation, King Francis I, Renaissance Italy, Rocco Scotellaro, Smokestack Books, sonnet
While travelling in the Basilicata region of Southern Italy – in effect, the arch of the 'foot' of that country – researching her earlier translations of the little known twentieth century male poet, Rocco Scotellaro (1923-1953), Caroline Maldonado heard of the much earlier, even less known poetry of Isabella Morra. Born around 1520, Morra was one of eight children. Her father, Giovan Michele fled into exile in France when Isabella was about eight years old. A cultured woman – knowledgeable in science, music, literature and the classics – her life prospects were utterly curtailed by her father's absence and she was left in the care of her brothers.
Her resulting frustrations may be imagined – and astonishingly they are also vividly portrayed in her poems – but her violent death, aged 26, is not clearly understood. There were rumours of an affair between Isabella and a Spanish count and poet, Don Diego Sandoval de Castro, though he was also the husband of a friend of Isabella's and almost certainly admired by her as much as a writer as a man. But her brothers believed the rumours and seem to have killed her – an honour killing to protect the family name. Maldonado's book, Isabella, published by Smokestack Books, contains – in parallel text – all of Isabella's known work, just ten sonnets and three canzoni. The book also includes Maldonado's own introduction to Morra and 17 original poems by her, inspired by Morra's work and her "strange, pitiful tale".
Castello di Isabella Morra
Given the period in which she wrote, it is the raw, personal nature of many of Morra's poems, their direct style of address, that is so surprising. Maldonado's decision to make the work as "accessible as possible to a contemporary reader" accentuates this as does her choice not to re-create closely the rhyming of the originals. Morra creates a strong sense of an actual place. It is a place of imprisonment, one she loathes, the village of Favale: "this vile, odious hamlet". She looks favourably on neither the place nor its people:
Here once again, O hell-like wasted valley,
O Alpine river, shattered heaps of stone,
spirits stripped bare of all goodness or pity,
you will hear the voice of my endless pain.
An unsympathetic ear might sense something brattishly self-regarding here and, given her youth and sheltered upbringing, that would not be surprising. But it is partly this sense of a little girl lost that is so moving. There are several sonnets concerned with her father's absence. Sonnet III addresses him directly:
I, your daughter Isabella, often look out
hoping for a wooden ship to appear,
Father, that will bring me back news of you.
The first line's poignant allusion to their relationship reminds the reader that he has been absent from her life for many years. As she gazes out hopefully, she and the dismal locale seem to merge, "so abandoned, so alone!" In sonnet VIII, ominously anticipating the end of her life, she imagines her father's too-late return: "Tell him how, by my death, I appease / my bitter fortune and the misery of my fate". It is the capricious – even vengeful – Goddess 'Fortuna' that Morra often rails against. In Sonnet I, she is assaulted by "cruel Fortune". Sonnet VI is a tirade against her mistreatment, initially from a literary standpoint (Morra had hoped to make a name for herself "with the sweet Muses"):
You have promoted every minor talent,
Fortuna, rewarded every sordid heart,
you now compel my own, long past all tears,
to face still more hardship, feel more desolate.
Fortune is also berated for bringing down King Francis I (defeated in battle in 1544), the French monarch who she hoped might protect her father and even bring about a reconciliation between them. Fortuna's femininity leads Isabella into the awkward position of maligning all women in saying that Fortuna is an "enemy to every noble heart".
Given such a small body of work and uncertainties about its editing and arrangement, it's hard to be certain of any sense of development. But over the ten sonnets Maldonado gives us, Morra's complaints about her lot do seem to modulate into something more resigned and accepting. This is more the tone of Sonnet IX, in which "unholy Death or cruel Fortune" are again the enemies of her "rising hopes" but there are signs of greater resilience: "worn down as I am it will do me no harm". The final Sonnet also takes up a more distanced perspective:
You know, in those days, how bitterly I wrote,
with what anger and pain I denounced Fortune.
No woman under the moon ever complained
with greater passion than me about her fate.
What has given Morra greater strength is her religious faith: "Neither time nor death, nor some violent, / rapacious hand will snatch away the eternal, / beautiful treasure before the King of Heaven.
Caroline Maldonado
A similar progression shows itself in the three canzoni too. A modern reader is likely to find her early passionate rebelliousness most engaging, the lines in which she says she will use her "rough, unpolished tongue" to rail against her dismal fate. It's Fortuna again who is identified as the culprit, plaguing her "ever since the days of milk and the cradle". One of her complaints is that she has never had the opportunity to hear her own beauty praised and the loneliness and frustration of this young woman is perhaps transformed into the passionate address of the second canzoni. It takes its place in that tradition of religious poems which express a spiritual fervour through language that can be hard to distinguish from the words of a more fleshly lover. Morra appeals to Christ: "I will love only you". She will use her skill in words to "sculpt [his] heavenly body" and she proceeds to describe his forehead, eyes, hair, neck, lips, hands and feet. The canzoni's traditional five-line envoi on this occasion is a sort of breathless admission of the impossibility of her task, though even here, the passionate feelings are unmistakable:
Canzone, how crazy you are,
to think that you could enter the sea
of God's beauty with such burning desire!
The third canzoni – as did the final Sonnet – takes up a longer perspective in which the landscape of her actual imprisonment has become a more symbolic location: "To be in these dark / and lonely woods in days gone by / used to burden my heavy body". It's impossible not to think of Dante's much earlier journey through the "dark wood" of despair. Morra also suggests she has emerged from its dangers, walking now "along solitary roads / far from human intrigue". We sense a new humility; whether metaphorically or not, she presents herself as "dressing my frail body in rough clothes". How distant in time we'll never know, but Morra has evidently travelled a long way from those earlier complaints at her unjust treatment. Especially in the third canzoni, her delight in the natural world rings genuinely true and through that natural world she sees God – or rather "God's great Mother", Mary, the female figure who has now ousted the hated Fortuna.
Rocco Scotellaro
Morra's own few works end on such a note of resolve and hard-won redemption. That she faced a brutal and unjust murder at the hand of her own family is brought out more clearly by Maldonado's own poems. She is partly interested in the contrast between the more contemporary (and male) poet, Scotellaro and the fate of Morra. As she has surely done in producing this fascinating little book, Maldonado intends to give Morra a voice in many of these new poems and, in 'Scirocco', we hear this imprisoned young woman poignantly repeating, "Who will ever hear me?" Both translator and publisher are to be congratulated in this recovering of an almost lost female voice from Renaissance Italy.
December 10, 2019 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, contemporary Dutch poetry, creative writing, ecopoetry, ekphrastic poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, political poetry, teaching, writing	Adlestrop, cancer poems, Edward Thomas, ekphrastic poetry, emoji poems, Grenfell Tower fire, Hercules, Hieronymous Bosch, le neant, le presence, Lieke, Pavilion Poetry, Salt Publishing, Seren Books, Sheeple, Tamar Yoseloff, The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes, Yoko Ono, Yves Bonnefoy
Last week I attended the launch of Tamar Yoseloff's new collection, published by Seren Books. Tammy and I have known each other for a long while, are both published by Seren and, in her role at Hercules Editions, she has just published my own recent chapbook, Cargo of Limbs. So – in the small world of British poetry – I'm hardly an unconnected critic, but I have the benefit of having followed her work over the years, reviewing her most recent New and Selected, A Formula for Night (2015) here.
In an earlier blog post, I spoke – in rather tabloid-y terms – of the tension in Yoseloff's poems between the "sassy and the sepulchral". In 2007's Fetch (Salt), there were "racy, blunt narratives" which in their exploration of female freedom, restraint and taboo made for vivid, exciting reading. The other side of her gift inclines to an "apocalyptic darkness", a preoccupation with time, loss, the inability to hold the moment. In A Formula for Night, the poem 'Ruin' invented a form in which a text was gradually shot to pieces as phrases, even letters, were gradually edited out, displaying the very process of ruination. Interestingly, The Black Place develops this technique in 3 'redaction' poems in which most of a text has been blacked out (cut out – see Yoko Ono later), leaving only a few telling words. A note indicates the source text in all three cases was the booklet Understanding Kidney Cancer and the author's recent experience of illness is an important element in this new collection.
But unlike, for example, Lieke Marsman's recent The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes (Pavilion Poetry, 2019 – discussed here), Yoseloff's book is not dominated by the experience of illness (and one feels this is a deliberated choice). The book opens with 'The C Word' which considers the phonetic parts of the word 'cancer', as well as its appearance: "looks like carer but isn't". But – within its 12 lines – Yoseloff also considers the other C word, "detonated in hate / murmured in love". The poem is really about how an individual can contain such divergent elements, "sites of birth / and death". So unanticipated personal experience is here being filtered through the matrix of this writer's naturally ambivalent gift.
Illness re-emerges explicitly later in the collection, but for much of it there is a business as usual quality and I, for one, am inclined to admire this:
I refuse the confessional splurge,
the Facebook post, the hospital selfie.
I'm just another body, a statistic,
nothing special. Everyone dies –
So Yoseloff gives us a marvellous send-up of Edward Thomas' 'Adlestrop' in 'Sheeple', a central place on the darker side of Yoseloff-country: "The heartland. Lower Slaughter". There is urbanite humour in 'Holiday Cottage' with its "stygian kitchen", bad weather, boredom and kitsch:
We stare at the knock-off Hay Wain
hung crooked over the hearth
and dream of England: the shire bells,
the box set, the M&S biscuit tin
'The Wayfarer' is one of many ekphrastic poems here – this one based on a Bosch painting – but the "sunless land" is patently an England on which "God looked down / and spat". These are poems written in the last 3 years or so and, inevitably, Brexit impinges, most obviously in 'Islanders' ("We put seas between ourselves, / we won't be rescued") but the cityscape equally offers little in the way of hope. There is a caricaturing quality to the life lived there: everything "pixilates, disneyfies" ('Emoji') and gender relationships seem warped by inequitable power, by self-destructive urges and illness: "I'd super-shrink my dimensions, / wasting is a form of perfection" ('Walk All Over Me').
Perhaps 'Girl' shows us the figure of a survivor in such a hostile environment, her energy reflecting those female figures in Fetch – "a slip, a trick, a single polka dot" – but the darkness seems thicker now, the lack of lyricism, the impossibility of a happy ending more resolved:
She's good for nothing because nothing's
good: sirens drown out violins
and crows swoop to carnage in the street.
As the blurb says, the book boldly eschews the sentimental sop, the capitalist hype, for truths that are hard, not to say brutal. 'Little Black Dress' takes both the archetypal 'girl' and the author herself from teen years to widowhood in a dizzyingly rapid sonnet-length poem:
drunk and disorderly, dropping off bar stools one
by one, until the time arrives for widow's weeds
and weeping veils, Ray-Bans darkening the sun.
And it is – unsurprisingly – mortality (the sepulchral) that eventually comes to the fore. A notable absence is the author's mother, who has often been a powerful presence in previous books. Here she re-appears briefly in 'Jade'. The stone is reputed to be efficacious in curing ailments of the kidneys and a jade necklace inherited from Yoseloff's mother leads her to wonder about the inheritance of disease too: "a slow / release in her body, passed down, // down". Both parents put in a fleeting appearance in the powerful sequence 'Darklight', the third part of which opens with the narrator standing in a pool of streetlight, "holding the dark / at bay". She supposes, rather hopelessly, that "this must be what it's like to have a god". Not an option available to her; the dark holds monsters both within and without and not just for the child:
Back then
my parents would sing me to sleep;
now they're ash and bone. Our lives are brief
like the banks of candles in cathedrals,
each a flame for someone loved;
It's these thoughts that further the careful structuring of this collection and return it to the experience of a life-threatening illness. 'Nephritic Sonnet' is an interrupted or cut off – 13 line – sonnet that takes us to the hospital ward, the I.V. tubes and – as she once said of the city – the poet finds "no poetry in the hospital gown". Except, of course, that's exactly what we get. The determination or need to write about even the bleakest of experiences is the defiant light being held up. Yoseloff does not rage; her style is quieter and involves a steady, undeceived gaze and also – in the sequence 'Cuts' – the powerful sense that (as quoted above) "I'm just another body, a statistic, / nothing special. Everyone dies".
It's this sense of being "nothing special" that enables 'Cuts' dispassionately to record very personal experiences of hospital procedures alongside the contemporaneous facts of the Grenfell Tower fire and (another ekphrastic element) a 1960s performance piece by Yoko Ono called 'Cut Piece'. These elements are 'leaned' against each other in a series of 13 dismembered sonnets, each broken up into sections of 6/3/4/1 lines. The fragmentary, diaristic style works well though there are risks in equating personal illness with the catastrophic accident and vital political questions surrounding Grenfell. Ono's performance piece offers a further example of victimhood, one more chosen and controllable perhaps. What's impressive is how Yoseloff avoids the magnetic pull of the ego, displaying – if anything – a salutary empathy for others in the midst of her own fears.
The book is titled after a Georgia O'Keefe picture, reproduced on the cover. O'Keefe's steady gaze into the darkness created by the jagged relief of the Navajo country is something to which Yoseloff aspires, though it "chills me / just to think it into being". It is the ultimate reality – a nothing, le néant – though like the ultimate presence of other writers (Yves Bonnefoy's le presence, for example), can at best only be gestured towards:
We'll never find it; as soon as we arrive,
the distance shifts to somewhere else,
we remain in foreground, everything moving
around us, even when we're still.
Along such a difficult path, Yoseloff insists, O'Keefe's art found "the bellow in a skull, / the swagger in a flower". And, even in the most frightening brush with her own mortality, the poet will follow and does so in a way that is consistent with her own nature and work over many years.
December 3, 2019 December 3, 2019 martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, ecopoetry, Great War poetry, poetry, teaching, writing	All life is cellular, Birches, Desert Places, Edward Thomas, First World War poetry, Louise Saul, Maggie Butt, Mark Holihan, Mending Wall, Modernism, narrative irony, Palmers Green Library, Palmers Green Poetry, Robert, Robert Frost Notebooks, Stopping by Woods on a Snowyy Evening, Surrealist poetry, The Road Not Taken, The Tuft of Flowers, ulteriority
A few weeks back, I was asked to contribute to an afternoon event in Palmers Green Library, north London, with the title – from Robert Frost's poem – 'The Road Not Taken'. It was introduced by Maggie Butt, with readings of their own poetry around the theme by Mark Holihan and Denise Saul. I was also asked to deliver a few thoughts on the work of Robert Frost. What follows is an edited transcript of what I said then and I think of it as a basic introduction for the general reader to Frost's work and some of the ideas which I see recurring in it. As previous posts have mentioned, I've been teaching Frost for a few years recently – thanks to all those students who made me go back and read the poems again!
Despite the apparent simplicity of many of his poems, the real identity of Robert Frost (1874-1963) is hard to pin down. Though raised in late 19th century America, his first book was published in England. Though on the brink of the Modern, a year before the First World War, these poems used plain language and traditional forms. He loved Europe, befriending Edward Thomas – stirring him from prose into poetry – yet Frost sailed back to the US, to farming, north of Boston. By all accounts he was never a very successful farmer, though he often presented himself as talking downright farmer-like common sense. Some find his work consolatory; but he was famously called a 'terrifying' poet, a bleak Modernist.
If all this sounds slippery, then Frost took it into his poetics too. He said that, while writing a poem, he was conscious of saying two things at once. But he always wanted to say the first thing so well that any reader who liked that part of the poem might feel able to rest there. Yet, he implies, for those interested in going further, beyond the particular, overt or explicit meaning – say, two farmers re-building a wall between their properties, a man stopping to watch snow fall in a wood, a mower and a butterfly – there is always an ulterior meaning (at least one) that might also be opened up.
At all levels, such defining walls, barriers and boundaries – physical, mental, spiritual – proliferate in Frost's work. But his view of them is complex. These walls are often porous. But sometimes they can seem impenetrable. I can't vouch for the accuracy of his biological knowledge, but here is something else Frost repeatedly jotted down in his Notebooks: "All life is cellular. No living particle of matter however small has yet been found without a skin – without a wall."
On one side, these secure boundaries seem necessary for a successful life – like the wall round all cellular organisms. He would say: "I want to be a person. And I want you to be a person". But the dangers are obvious. The cellular wall of identity becomes more than a means of self-definition and grows to become an exclusion zone, a solitary place, a state of solipsism. Many of Frost's figures and narrators are found to be struggling with this state. Yet Frost's comments about identity, wanting to be a person, wanting you to be a person, in fact continue: "then we can be as interpersonal as you please. We can pull each other's noses – do all sorts of things".
So the presence of these cellular walls do not necessarily hold us back. They are as often porous or permeable. Yet they seem also to offer a firm foundation from which we may reach out, we can humanly interact. We can pull each other's noses. And there is indeed much pulling of noses in Frost's poems. In particular, he liked to pull the nose of the person he chose to narrate many of his poems. There is very often an irony at work against the speaker. His poems are often more dramatic than lyric.
We might ask why is Frost so concerned about being a person, about the relative security of identity? Because, in other moods, he knows the dangers posed by the absence of any functioning cellular membrane: the leaking out of personality into the surrounding world, of identity dissipating to become nothing, the risk – as it were – of personal extinction.
There is a little poem called 'The Cow in Apple Time' which (on the face of it) is about a cow who is driven by an unspecified desire to disregard the walls about her pasture. The wall is no more than an open gate to her. She charges through and greedily eats fallen apples, growing intoxicated, her face splattered with apple juice. But in this kind of gluttonous state she grows sick, in pain:
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.
It's a perfectly satisfying poem about a rural incident – perhaps Farmer Frost, had once witnessed it himself. But there is Frost's ulteriority too. The cow is consistently described using terms which anthropomorphise her. The wall breaker is perhaps on one level really human, a rebel, a sinner – written in 1914, some have even suggested the cow is an invasive force. However we see her, she is punished for her disregard of, her undervaluing of, those walls and boundaries which perhaps ought to serve to define her life.
Remember this is the same Robert Frost who disparaged the writing of free verse, by many of his more obviously Modernist contemporaries, as trying to play tennis with the net down. The same Robert Frost who disparaged the, then fashionable, interest in Surrealism with its wild leaps over convention, its dislocation of the senses, the shock value of the illogical. For Frost such practices could lead only "to undirected associations and kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper".
The cow with the aching stomach is paralleled by a dying peach tree in 'There Are Roughly Zones'. The narrator has moved "far north" and has transplanted a peach tree and now the northern winter is threatening it. He sits indoors and frets about it, trying to blame the weather rather than himself. But self-criticism arises all the same and it is human "ambition" that gets the blame, that "limitless trait in the hearts of men". More precisely:
[. . .] though there is no fixed line between right and wrong,
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed.
I love the messy pragmatism implied by "roughly zones". One of his recurring concerns, Frost said, was with "the impossibility of drawing sharp lines and making exact distinctions" – no red lines, lines in the sand, defined boundaries, but zones of negotiation, places calling for compromise, no fundamental clarity, rather a feeling-out, a region requiring a dialogue.
As in a poem like 'The Tuft of Flowers'. A man comes to a mown field to turn the cut grass, the hay, to help its drying. He looks about for the man who had earlier mowed the grass:
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been, – alone,
'As all must be,' I said within my heart
The hermetically cellular, or as we would now say, atomised nature of society seems to be assumed by the narrator. It looks like there is going to be no breaking of boundaries here. But a "[be]wildered" butterfly passes him, looking for flowers that grew there yesterday, now cut down. The butterfly leads him to a "leaping tongue of bloom" left deliberately, out of "sheer morning gladness" by the mower. The narrator hears the message from this "tongue of bloom" which speaks of each man as a "spirit kindred" to the other. It's as if they now enter into a dialogue, revising the earlier solipsistic observation. Now:
'Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
'Whether they work together or apart.'
There is a rosy-edged hint of sentimentality here perhaps. But the fanciful dialogue between the two men (who actually never meet) represents a successful negotiation into that rough zone between individuals, the cellular membrane is actually permeable, and the result here is consolatory.
In 'Mending Wall', two farmers meet to patrol on either side of a dry-stone wall marking the boundary between their farms. Parts of it are always falling down. They build it back up. But the paradox is that the action of building up what separates them, brings them together each year to perform the task. The wall does not prevent or act as a brake on their relationship – rather it facilitates it – it perhaps is their relationship, what links them. From their respective sides – from their respective identities or persons – they are free to become 'interpersonal'. But the mischievous, sceptical, modern-minded narrator expresses doubts about the importance of walls, particularly when "He is all pine and I am apple orchard". His neighbour is a more traditional, unquestioning man, who likes to repeat his father's advice: "Good fences make good neighbours". The narrator mocks him (though in silence, in his head) as "an old-stone savage", lost in actual and intellectual "darkness". But it is significant that the wall-believer has the last word. For me, it is the moderniser is the one being ironised. If he was a versifier, he'd be trying to write poems with the net down.
Why Frost's concern with the importance of walls? Because – in still other moods – he has looked into the abyss of experience without them. One example is given in the 16 terrifying lines of 'Desert Places'. The narrator here seems to have taken the more modern, sceptical wall-mender's view to heart. It seems there are no bounds here – all have vanished under "Snow falling and night falling fast oh fast". That note of fear there adds to the nightmare feeling and when the outward-looking eye turns to look within – to find himself – he finds nothing: "I am too absent-spirited to count". That phrase is an echo of 'absent-minded'. There is a vacancy within and without – no mind, spirit, self, identity. There is only the concluding, devastating rhymes of "empty spaces . . . where no human race is . . . my own desert places".
And if 'Desert Places' evokes the desolation of a world viewed in the absence of a relatively secure cell-walled self, then 'The Most of It' shows us the horrifying effects of being walled in. In this poem, the narrator "thought he kept the universe alone". There seems nothing else but him, only a "mocking echo of his own [voice]". Yet he does remotely feel a desire for dialogue – perhaps just in being human – and does express a desire not for "copy speech. / But counter-love, original response". But when the universe does eventually break into his consciousness, it arrives not in the form of dialogue or a negotiated relationship but as an utterly alien thing.
It emerges only as a strange, vague "embodiment" that "crashed" and "splashed" towards him and is recognised only by means of a simile. Perhaps it is an elk.
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.
There, Frost captures the egoist's struggle to comprehend what is other than him; followed by the arrogance of his dismissal of it. And perhaps this is a particularly masculine thing. Yet there is no need to attribute these feelings to Frost himself. The speaker is best read as a dramatic representation of one extreme of Frost's concern for borders and boundaries that are vital for our own selfhood yet must be porous enough to allow for knowledge and experience.
So in 'Birches' the narrator remembers – as a boy – climbing slender birch trees, to the top, only to leap out and bend them down with his weight. This swinging of birches can be seen – ulteriorly – as representing Frost's belief in those negotiated rough zones of a life. We climb up, out of our element, but not too far:
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
And if we find this frustratingly ambivalent – Frost sitting carefully on the fence – then he often rubs our noses in it. 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' famously concludes with two lines which are identical. For me, the repetition introduces greater ambiguity into the moment. Does the narrator stop, perhaps to die, entranced by the snowfall? Or does he shake himself up, turn back to his life in the village, his roles and responsibilities?
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
Frost throws the question back to the reader. What Frost knows is that we do not keep the universe alone. We are parts of a whole – but the borderlands are uncertain – sometimes we cross them and lose touch with ourselves, at other times we too easily accept them and fall into egotistical isolation. There maybe be a happy medium – but Frost's dynamic poems suggest the truth is we can never find and hold to that; we are always involved in the complicated fraught business of negotiation, of swinging birches, of chasing butterflies, of building walls that will promptly fall down again.
November 12, 2019 martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, poetry workshops, writing	A Boat Called Annalise, Brooklyn Bridge, Dannie Abse, Dannie Abse 'The Presence', Federico Garcia Lorca, Gillian Clarke, Jim Neat, Joan Abse, late flowering love, Lynne Hjelmgaard, Mary J. Oliver, New York City, poems of grief, poems of remembrance, Sere, Shearsman Books, The Ring, Torbay Poetry Festival, widowhood
Last night I was at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden for the launch of two new collections from Seren Books. Lynne Hjelmgaard was reading from A Second Whisper and Mary J. Oliver was launching her debut collection, Jim Neat: the Case of a Young Man Down on His Luck. Oliver's book is a curious, thought-provoking mix of family research and prose/poetic fictions. But I've known Hjelmgaard for a few years now as a workshop colleague and as a friend of Dannie Abse and I wanted to gather some thoughts here on her new poems.
In her playfully titled poem, 'Ode to a Danish Lamp', Lynne Hjelmgaard constructs a paean to a piece of electrical equipment which ends rhetorically, "Why do you move me so?" Some clues to the answer are scattered through the poem; they lie in comparisons. The lamp is an example of "Nordic metallic cool", beside which the speaker – "a mere human" – feels humbled. She and the rest of the room, we are told, arrange themselves about the lamp which hence serves as a focal point and even a source of "answers". It's as if the lamp is wired up to a clearer, less divided, perhaps purer world:
[. . . ] the charged interior, a territory,
where no country nationality race
or religion has any significance.
In contrast, the human figure is more embedded in a world of time, place and quotidian specificity while the lamp emerges with its "fine, oh so thin aluminium rim" as a denizen of a less troubled realm. The speaker is moved because excluded from such a realm and the majority of the poems in A Second Whisper focus precisely on our more compromised, familiar world, particularly the 'merely human' experiences of time, memory and loss.
Without being a particularly philosophical poet, Hjelmgaard writes as someone who is an "expert at loss". Another less typical poem describes – in great detail – Brooklyn Bridge and the area around it (the poet was born in New York City). She remembers sailing out under the bridge:
Manhattan is a chain with many links,
some are broken, lost and never repair,
but others can be retrieved even at a distance.
For what can shine so brightly at sea
but a city, once loved, left behind?
Hjelmgaard's focus on links lost or remembered is probably hard-wired into her constitution (these thematic roots usually are) but it has also been provoked by biographical influences. Her 2011 book, The Ring (Shearsman Books) was dedicated to the memory of her Danish husband, Stig – who died in 2006 – and followed an American woman's travels around Europe, mourning and negotiating that loss. Dannie Abse, among others, praised those poems: "Widowhood allows them to acquire a poignant universality". Five years later, A Boat Called 'Annalise' (Seren Books), was full of more poems of remembrance, evoking the sea journey the newly married couple made out of New York to Europe, via the Caribbean.
There are further poems written to and about her husband in this new book. In 'As We Silently Agree', the husband appears to the widow, "in some kind of afterlife", and is seen busying with a boat's anchor chain, searching the ship's log and weather charts. This is perhaps a dream poem:
Our fingers clasp in recognition
as we silently agree:
what does it matter now
if you don't keep the course?
And 'Scorpion Hill' may be another example of dreamwork, the wife this time revisiting a once-shared house in the Caribbean. Its final image is of many moths clustering round "a single light bulb / left on during the night". These are fine poems of time and sustaining memory – that bulb still burning – in which the past and those lost within it are shown to revisit the survivor.
Hjelmgaard's treatment of this traditional theme is neither religious nor consolatory in any facile way. The pain of great loss is heartfelt and yet she manages to persuade the reader – it's less intellectual than that, maybe she draws her readers in to the actual experience – that what lies in the past still retains is power to evoke pleasure and even that the future's gifts are to be welcomed, even anticipated. In 'To a Chestnut Tree', addressing the tree in its autumnal state, the narrator is sure, "There will always be another one. / And another. // Loss can be moved through like a room". What a magnificent line that last one is. There is a wisdom in it, however modestly it may be presented.
Time takes – but time also provides. Another poem of trees has a fir leaning eventually into a "beloved palm" – though it may take a century or two of slow growth. A lonely tamarisk on a cliff top also has the capacity to "wait until it can drink / from the bay eighty feet below". Hjelmgaard finds her themes in the smallest incidents. Unpacking a suitcase after a journey, she finds she has brought two extra items home with her. One is a fossil of a snail which seems to represent a determined persistence through time (60 million years perhaps, in this case). The other – a flighty stowaway – is a spider which she finds "already busy / making yourself at home". The spider evokes an improvisatory optimism, an adaptability, even an adventurousness, which I see as some of the most distinctive elements in the themes of Hjelmgaard's work.
It's these qualities to which Gillian Clarke is responding in her comment on A Second Whisper, where she finds in the book "the story of a special late love after bereavement". In recent years, the British poet who has written most powerfully and movingly about bereavement and the encroachment of the past into the present is Dannie Abse. This is from his poem 'The Presence' about the loss of his wife, Joan:
It's when I'm most myself, most alone
with all the clamour of my senses dumb,
then, in the confusion of Time's deletion
by Eternity, I welcome you and you return
improbably close, though of course you cannot come.
The opening 14 poems of A Second Whisper explore the loving relationship that sprung up between Hjelmgaard and Dannie Abse after the deaths of Stig and Joan. Her opening prose piece takes us directly into everyday details. The two bereaved poets meet: "And for a time it was the four of us. Though one day, without ceremony, we noted their absence". Thus set free, the ones still living proceed, though along no clear path, "wherever poetry and Eros chose to take [them]"
Even at their first meeting – on a train journey back from the Torbay Poetry Festival – the presence and absence of time was notable. Minutes were not to be wasted in the presence of the older poet, says the younger narrator. But mysteriously – this is in late October – the waitress at the station café is seen taking away the clock to change the hour. A photograph of the two poets at a reading shows the younger woman "less sure of herself", while Abse is more comfortable with the attention. But at 85 years old, Abse begins appearing in these poems as more and more in decline. "Aged and dying you grew more tender", as 'A Second Whisper' puts it. In this poem – as in several others – Hjelmgaard is visiting Abse at home.
I knew just how to open your front door quietly.
Its lock a whisper, a second whisper to shut.
This image – absolutely precise in its remembrance, yet also powerfully suggestive – is like the earlier line about walking through loss as through a room. The first whisper has a respectfulness, concerned with quietude, with the sensitivity of the artist, the closeness of death. The second whisper is full of ambivalence: protective perhaps from the noisy, nosey world, wanting to secure the intimacy, wanting to defend the loved one from the inevitable, yet a foreshadowing of that very inevitability.
'A Thief Is in the House' has death portrayed as an invader, breathing heavily, thumping up the stairs to the dying figure whose "eyes [are] prepared // for nothingness". But these poems are not overwhelmed by grief. As if taking a leaf out of Abse's own poems of mourning and remembrance, Hjelmgaard's predominant tone is one of recall and revisiting – even of re-visitation. Walking alone on Hampstead Heath, she hears the lost lover chanting a Lorca poem; because one day they sheltered under an awning on Golders Green Road, every time it rains now, "the rain /stops everything / to think of you". And in an exquisite lyric, 'Speak to me Again at Dusk', Hjelmgaard yearns to resume her conversations with the dead poet, yet her tone – which might have been one of pleading and despair – in fact retains a clear appreciation of the lasting value of what has been and a pleasured openness to the present (hear those noisy roosters in a moment!). Such deep-grained attitudes seem to have been a mutual common ground between these two writers and perhaps was one of the constitutive elements in their late-flowering love:
These lines among many lines
are words just for you
and the roosters that speak them
just before dawn.
November 3, 2019 November 3, 2019 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, Classical poetry, contemporary German poetry, creative writing, German poetry, Great War poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry in performance, political poetry, translation	Adnan al-Sayegh, Amel Alzakout, Cargo of Limbs, Choman hardi, Dan O'Brien, Hercules Editions, p21 gallery, Peter Huchel, Shears, Stephen Watts, These Numbered Days
Apologies for the relative silence from my blog. I have been busy preparing and working to propel into the world two new books of poetry. The first out has been These Numbered Days, my new translations of the GDR poet, Peter Huchel, published by Shearsman Books.
The second book will be published by Hercules Editions, It's called Cargo of Limbs – more details of it can be found here. I'll also post the launch event details below – it's an open and free event and I would be delighted to see you there.
September 17, 2019 September 17, 2019 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, Irish poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry competitions, writing	bildungsroman, cancer poems, close analysis of poetry, Forward First Collections, Forward Poetry prize, Hippocrates, Icarus, Innocence to Experience, Kappa Mountain, loss of mother, memory, Nintendo Games, Penguin Poetry, Peter breughel, Roy Orbison, Sir Walter Ralegh, SuperMario, syllabic verse, T S Eliot, The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd, W H Auden, William Wordsworth, Yoshi's House
As in the previous four years, I am posting – over the summer – my reviews of the 5 collections chosen for the Forward Prizes Felix Dennis award for best First Collection. This year's £5000 prize will be decided on Sunday 20th October 2019. Click on this link to access all 5 of my reviews of the 2018 shortlisted books (eventual winner Phoebe Power), here for my reviews of the 2017 shortlisted books (eventual winner Ocean Vuong), here for my reviews of the 2016 shortlisted books (eventual winner Tiphanie Yanique), here for my reviews of the 2015 shortlisted books (eventual winner Mona Arshi).
The full 2019 shortlist is:
Raymond Antrobus – The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins) – reviewed here.
Jay Bernard – Surge (Chatto & Windus) – reviewed here.
David Cain – Truth Street (Smokestack Books) – reviewed here.
Isabel Galleymore – Significant Other (Carcanet) – reviewed here.
Stephen Sexton – If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin Books)
This year's Forward First Collection shortlist is astonishingly good but, for its cleverness, its ambition and coherence, its technical mastery and above all for its vulnerability in dealing with the eternal themes of childhood, love and loss, death, time and memory, I hope Stephen Sexton's book wins the award in October. It's a curious read in some ways – superficially fast and easy, its technical brilliance well hidden, its narrative quite buried though not really hard to trace, its emotional heft at times blunt and utterly naked, at others complex and many-layered.
Halfway through the book, in 'Forest of Illusion 2', Sexton recalls fishing for rainbow trout with some success. The bait is taken and "with a flick / of the wrist [he] hoisted the fish from one world and into the next". It's this kind of transition that is the subject of the whole book though the direction of travel is clearer in the recurrent images of young Icarus. The boy who thought he could fly near the sun (filtered through Breughel and then through Auden) is aptly evoked in this poetic bildungsroman of a boy struggling with the traumatic transition from innocence to experience.
The book's title is the opening line of Sir Walter Ralegh's 'The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd' in which the Nymph rejects her suitor's optimistically seductive blandishments:
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
But Sexton's particular withering is not one of romantic love but the loss of a mother to cancer and by the end of the book, the wriggle room implied by Ralegh's opening word, 'If', is significantly altered to the much more brutal 'when'. This is no hypothetical idyll but an actual, remembered one and the loss of it is unavoidable. The post-conclusion, coda-poem, 'Yoshi's House', turns upon the reader with a compassionate yet clear warning: "some day dear friend [you will find] my sad head upon on your shoulders" (sic).
Sexton has written a genuine, contemporary long poem (not a long assemblage of lyrics). His lines are 16 syllables in length throughout, yielding a prosy, chatty, fluid sort of voice which avoids the risk of drag by keeping the reader on our toes by a relative absence of punctuation and a penchant for eliding two thoughts or images together in one single line. This generates occasional moments of misreading, but it is also the technical reflection of Sexton's focus on the translation of innocence into the darkening of experience. The heard voice is quick, erudite and briskly allusive; despite being mostly in the present tense, it is not wholly the naïve voice of the child. The other aspect of the whole poem this fluid transitioning relates to is the exploration of the child's obsession with the fantasy world of his computer games and the way he must slide from one world (on a screen) to the one we call 'real'.
The computer games are specifically the Nintendo games of the 1990s which give the sections their odd names – Yoshi's Island, Donut Plains, Vanilla Dome, Valley of Bowser – and account for individual poems' titles, some of which I have already referred to. The games may be out of date but Sexton's evident knowledge of them (love of them) means part of the originality of this book is they are fully integrated into the composition of the poems and raise questions about how absorbing such fantasy worlds can be and how the facts of reality are to be negotiated and reconciled successfully (perhaps, particularly by boys who seem so drawn to the former and so easily in denial about the latter).
Sexton's own story is given in a Note and the poem called 'Yoshi's Island 1'. In the summer of 1998, his mother took a photograph of him, back to the camera, squatting before a TV, the family garden just glimpsed out of a window to the left. Here already, the screen world and the outside world through the window are juxtaposed. The boy is keener on the former:
Here spotted mountain and cirrus here sloping plateaux drawn down
carnivorous plants and no sun gold by the cherish underground
fly agaric throbs everywhere with fire plants and dinosaurs.
The vivid, colourful, playful and safe fantasy worlds of Nintendo – its caricatures, its rules – is one of escape:
On Kappa Mountain past the great lake circumscribed with goldenrod
the abandoned palace is full of treasure glowing underground
in granaries and arsenals and economy of losses
and gains the beloved is gone but there is always the story.
The man looking back at his younger self passes judgement: "one of the worlds I live in is as shallow as a pane of glass". But this shallowness is immediately challenged when the child is told of his mother's illness, of "cells which split and glitch". The following poem has thoughts of his (real) father interrupting (if only for one line) in his screen time:
. . . for the first time in some time I thought of our father at home
the Sirocco in from the south turtle doves in the huge wheat fields
'#1 Iggy's Castle' suggests the same thing: in the midst of oceans of lava, fantastical islands and cartoonish incinerations, the boy hears his mother moving about the house, a woman in real pain, "whose feet whose toes / whose hands whose fingers whose ankles whose head she says are on fire".
Within 20 pages or so, a poem appears which resides wholly in the 'real' world of a family visit to the Ulster Hospital and a visit to McDonald's since his mother "has lost her sense of taste". The narrative suggests there follows a period of respite. The doctors – in the boy's mind they come and go as wizard-like Merlins "in blue scrubs" – remove the cancer. Though back at home his mother remains weak and unsteady so the boy concocts a "mess in a tray" for the school bake sale. In awkward self-defence, he acknowledges, "No one is going to like this [. . .] but I have done my best". His observation obviously has a far wider application in the circumstances, and one of Sexton's great achievements in the poem – in amongst the allusiveness and technical skill – is to be as open and vulnerable as this. In '#5 Roy's Castle' he recalls his mother working "her old-fashioned Singer". Roy Orbison is on the radio. She is making curtains for the room "she'll in future return to" when she has become ill. The way time collapses in on itself in such a Wordsworthian 'spot of time', the way in which "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future", is expressed with devastating simplicity: "the sewing machine ticks so fast these small years go by in minutes".
But the cancer has returned. 'Choco-Ghost House' is unique in that we hear Sexton's mother's voice, nervously complaining of a "pain in my side like a bird in a holly tree". Her son, still half inhabiting his fantasy world of wizards and exotic settings, is perhaps now starting to use that experience to get a handle on what is really happening. The doctor – now a "Hippocrates" figure – is described as going about "the magic task / of grinding down a rhino's horn to infuse with ground down rubies". Even these sorts of quasi-defensive imaginings are eventually dropped and the bald reportage of a last hospital bedside conversation between mother and child is almost too painful to read. The long syllabic lines here have room for the hesitations and repetitions of such emotionally-charged moments without any ironic distancing:
It's me I'm here is what I say but I am not since she is not.
Then she says I want to go home once more for one once more one night
and I say you can't go home now she says I know not now after.
The sequence ends with the longest poem in the book – still barely the length of a page – which recounts the mother's return home in her coffin. Even here the young boy blurs the arrival of the "wood panelled box" with the arrival of the "sharp-cornered TV" before which he has so often squatted to play his Nintendo games. Penguin's blurb talks of the poem ultimately suggesting "the necessity of the unreal" but actually we see the child fighting his way free of it. Halfway through this final poem, the revelation comes in a fluid, unpunctuated instant: "I felt my head turn into stone no it wasn't the old TV". It's in this poem that Sexton alludes to the title of his book. Hedged around with the necessary qualifications imposed by the passage of years, by the unreliability of human memory, the cloaking device of powerful emotion, he recalls a childhood safe and secure in the light of his mother's presence, the flashlight of her camera behind him, before him the vibrant, simple colours of Nintendo:
[. . .] her voice moves around the edge of the world and now I think I
remember what I mean to say which is only to say that once
when all the world and love was young I saw it beautiful glowing
once in the corner of the room once I was sitting in its light.
September 3, 2019 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, Gay poetry, New British Poetry, poetry, poetry competitions, poetry in performance, political poetry, post-colonial writing, writing	Ali Smith, Brixton Riots 1981, Chatto Poetry, Fordham Park, Forward First Collections, Forward Poetry prize, George Padmore Institute, Grenfell Tower fire, Linton Kwesi Johnson, New Cross Fire 1981, performance poetry, Ted Hughes Award for New Work, W H Auden, Windrush Generation
Jay Bernard – Surge (Chatto & Windus)
Jay Bernard's Surge is a slim volume carrying with it a great deal of political as well as publishing history. Its early stirrings seem to have been Bernard's residency at the George Padmore Institute in north London where they explored documents relating to the New Cross Fire in January 1981. Often dubbed the 'New Cross Massacre', thirteen young people died in a fire at a birthday party. The fire may have been racially motivated arson and certainly the authorities' response to the incident was unconvincing, possibly obstructive. There is a direct line from this incident, through the imposition of SUS laws and 'stop and search' in South London and the SWAMP 81 police crackdown and the subsequent, so-called Brixton Riots of April 1981. The Scarman Report in November of that year laid the blame for the riots squarely on the police action. In our contemporary landscape, and especially after the Grenfell Tower fire and the still-unresolved shameful treatment of the Windrush Generation, it's easy to see why Bernard wanted to write about New Cross.
But Surge itself has since gone through various forms. There were 10 original poems written quickly in 2016. There was a performance piece (at London's Roundhouse) in the summer of 2017 (it was this version that won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in poetry in 2017). But it has taken 3 years for this Chatto book to be finalised. In an interview just last year, Bernard observed that they were still unclear what the "final structure" of the material would be. I'm possessed of no insider knowledge on this, but it looks as if this "final" version took some considerable effort – reading it makes me conscious of the strait-jacket that a conventional slim volume of poetry imposes – and I'm not sure the finalised 50-odd pages of the collection really act as the best foil for what are, without doubt, a series of stunningly powerful poems. The blurb and publicity present the book (as publishers so often do) as wholly focused on the New Cross and Grenfell fires but this isn't really true and something is lost in including the more miscellaneous pieces, particularly towards the end of the book.
Bernard writes of events in the past by deploying a multiplicity of voices which are given the power to haunt backwards and forwards through historical time. Unusually, their own voice is heard in 'Ark'. They are here searching through an archive of documents of "flaking Letraset and amber glue" that also (punningly) acts as an 'ark' to bring the dead back to the present. What preoccupies the narrator is how and where to "file / the damp smoke and young bones" of the New Cross victims. The conclusion seems to be they cannot be securely and finally located anywhere while the country still experiences "the burning house, the child made ash, the brick in the back / of the neck, the shit in the letter box and piss up the side of it".
Bernard's poetic voice is at its best when making full use of the licence of free forms, broken grammar, infrequent punctuation, the colloquial voice and often incantatory patois. So a voice in 'Harbour' wanders across the page, hesitantly, uncertainly, till images of heat, choking and breaking glass make it clear this is someone caught in the New Cross Fire. Another voice in 'Clearing' watches, in the aftermath of the blaze, as an officer collect body parts (including the voice's own body): "from the bag I watch his face turn away". The cryptically titled '+' and '–' shift to broken, dialogic prose as a father is asked to identify his dead son through the clothes he was wearing. Then the son's voice cries out for and watches his father come to the morgue to identify his body. This skilful voice throwing is a vivid way of portraying a variety of individuals and their grief. 'Kitchen' offers a calmer voice re-visiting her mother's house, the details and familiarity evoking simple things that have been lost in the death of the child:
I have held this house
in my arms and let it sob
on the bathroom floor, heard it in
the background of a call,
heard it speak a kind of love –
A vigorously rhythmic patois voice is used in 'Songbook', recycling the horrific narrative again as a young boy and girl dance happily until:
Me seh di heat ah di night ah come up thru di floor
Black smoke ah rise tho dem nevah did know
Gyal fall back inside an we no see her no more
No bright green dress up pon di third floor
Bernard acknowledges their debt here to Linton Kwesi Johnson's earlier poem about the New Cross Fire; you must listen to Bernard give a mesmerising performance of their own great poem here.
I'm guessing most of the poems I have referred to so far come from the early work of 2016. Other really strong pieces focus on events after the Fire itself. 'Duppy' is a sustained description – information slowly drip-fed – of a funeral or memorial meeting and it again becomes clear that the narrative voice is one of the dead: "No-one will tell me what happened to my body". The title of the poem is a Jamaican word of African origin meaning spirit or ghost. 'Stone' is perhaps a rare recurrence of the author's more autobiographical voice and in its scattered form and absence of punctuation reveals a tactful and beautiful lyrical gift as the narrator visits Fordham Park to sit beside the New Cross Fire's memorial stone. 'Songbook II' is another chanted, hypnotic tribute to one of the mothers of the dead and is probably one of the poems Ali Smith is thinking of when she associates Bernard's work with that of W.H. Auden.
But when the device of haunting and haunted voices is abandoned, Bernard's work drifts quickly towards the literal and succumbs to the pressure to record events and places (the downside of the archival instinct). A tribute to Naomi Hersi, a black trans-woman found murdered in 2018, sadly doesn't get much beyond plain location, a kind of reportage and admission that it is difficult to articulate feelings ('Pem-People'). There are interesting pieces which read as autobiography – a childhood holiday in Jamaica, joining a Pride march, a sexual encounter in Camberwell, but on their own behalf Bernard seems curiously to have lost their eagle eye for the selection of telling details and tone and tension flatten out:
The bus heaves past Loughborough, to Camberwell,
to the green, buzzing with students drunk on Friday,
drunk on art and trendy and young: wine bottle young,
rollie-young, tight, flat-chested young. I follow you down,
I follow you up to the stairs of your flat [. . .]
The mirroring architectonic of the collection emerges with the poems written about the Grenfell Tower fire. So we have 'Ark II', two pools of prose broken by slashes which seem to be fed by too many tributary streams: the silent marches in Ladbroke grove, the Michael Smithyman murder and abandoned investigation, Smithyman's transition to Michelle, and the burning of the Grenfell Tower effigy, the video of which emerged in 2018.
In an earlier blog post I was thinking about "the (in)adequacy of a certain English poetic voice to confront the scale of ecological issues, or as a vehicle for expressing certain cultural differences, or as a way of exploring the kind of tragic and grievous event represented by the Grenfell fire and its aftermath". I think Bernard offers answers to this sort of question in their New Cross Fire poems but the challenge of Grenfell (is it the lack of historical distance?) does not yield the same sort of success. The final poem in the book, 'Flowers' is a case in point. Each quatrain carries a rhetorical question, creating a formal rather than urgent or passionate impression, and the valid question is will "anybody speak of" the kinds of issues raised elsewhere in the book. Yet the canonic imagery invokes the speech of flowers, the transition from summer into winter (done much more effectively in 'Stone'). In the context of a live reading, in the context of the horror, the grief, the injustices, the historical perspectives raised so very successfully elsewhere in Surge, I'm sure this sort of poem has an impact. But in the cold light of day, Bernard's voice here sounds confined by expectations they ought to be ignoring and ends by giving a rather awkward performance – especially when it's compared to the fluid, passionate, skilful, clever, eloquence of something like 'Songbook'.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Maurice Edu Getting Some Oxygen
The United States beat Mexico last night for the first time in 75 years at Azteca stadium in Mexico City. It was just a friendly match, not a World Cup qualifier or anything, but still a huge win for a scrambled together U.S. team.
Mexico dominated the match in terms of possession, but didn't have too many changes given all their time on the ball. Chicharito missed a clear header and then was denied by Tim Howard not once but twice.
The biggest challenge in playing in Aztecz stadium is the not only the fans screaming at you, usually upwards of 100,000, but you're playing at an altitude of 7,217 feet above sea level. Maurice Edu tweeted these pictures of the team celebrating and taking in some much needed oxygen. Not only is it hard to breath because of the altitude but there's usually some smog to go along with it.
Here's the team celebrating…notice the oxygen tank?
Joe Cole's Goal Versus Sweden
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Pedro Doesn't Pass to Torres
Update: Pedro said – "To tell the truth, I didn't see Fernando and only had in my mind the goal.…
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Speed is an essential component of all sports, especially soccer. Someone who is said to be fast is someone useful…
Dino Zoff Country: Italy Club: Trophies: History: Dino Zoff (born February 28, 1942) is an Italian former football goalkeeper and the…


text:
Q: CMake find_path fails for simple paths I am facing issue on getting cmake work with custom boost libraries for my project (relate question here
Its failing in find_path step so to debug further i tried different combinations for this find_path all failed. Even the simple query below fails for me (complete-folder-path is complete path to the folder from root).
ls <complete-folder-path>
main.cpp

part of Cmake file
find_path(_TEST_Path "main.cpp" HINTS "<complete-folder-path>")
message(WARNING ${_TEST_Path})

This prints
 _TEST_Path-NOTFOUND

What am i missing here ?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
import unittest
import mock

from midnite.util import USBMixin
from usb.core import Device

class TestUSBMixin(unittest.TestCase):

    @mock.patch('usb.core.find')
    @mock.patch('usb.util.get_string')
    def test_usb_init(self, mock_get_string, mock_find):
        # the order of get_string being called doesnt actually matter
        # so rather than an iterable for side effect the function below
        # is used. This will allow get_string calls to be issued in any order
        side_effect = [
            'fake_manufacturer',
            'fake_product',
            'fake_serialnumber'
        ]

        def t_get_string(_, index):
            return side_effect[index]

        mock_get_string.side_effect = t_get_string
        mock_dev = mock.Mock(spec=Device)
        mock_dev.iManufacturer = 0
        mock_dev.iProduct = 1
        mock_dev.iSerialNumber = 2
        mock_find.return_value = mock_dev
        u = USBMixin()
        t_idVendor = 0xDEAD
        t_idProduct = 0xBEEF
        u.usb_init(idVendor=t_idVendor, idProduct=t_idProduct)
        self.assertIs(u.usb_dev, mock_dev)
        mock_find.assert_called_once_with(
            idVendor=t_idVendor,
            idProduct=t_idProduct
        )
        self.assertEqual(u.manufacturer, side_effect[mock_dev.iManufacturer])
        self.assertEqual(u.product, side_effect[mock_dev.iProduct])
        self.assertEqual(u.serial_number, side_effect[mock_dev.iSerialNumber])
        self.assertEqual(mock_get_string.call_count, 3)
        self.assertIn(mock.call(mock_dev, mock_dev.iManufacturer),
                      mock_get_string.call_args_list)
        self.assertIn(mock.call(mock_dev, mock_dev.iProduct),
                      mock_get_string.call_args_list)
        self.assertIn(mock.call(mock_dev, mock_dev.iSerialNumber),
                      mock_get_string.call_args_list)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


You can create a template out of many assets in your project. You can create templates from the Camera, Thumbnails or the Timeline view.
From the Stage view, you can create a template from a panel's layer or a selection of layers. Note that if a motion was created on the selected layer, it will be included in the template.
From the Thumbnails view, you can create a template from an entire panel. Note that if there is a layer or camera motion in the selected panel, it will be included in the template.
From the Timeline view, you can create a template out of an entire panel or a sound clip. Note that if there is a layer or camera motion in the selected panel, it will be included in the template.
In the Library view, select a folder to store your template.
In the Stage view, select one or more layer tabs and drag them to the right side of the Library view.
In the Rename dialog box, rename the new template. If you want to rename a template after it is created, right-click it and select Rename.
In the Thumbnails view, select a panel and drag it to the right side of the Library view.
In the Timeline view, select a panel or sound clip and drag it to the right side of the Library view.
In the Rename dialog box, rename the new template.
If you want to rename a template after it is created, right-click it and select Rename.


The Welsh Liberal Democrats would deliver smaller class sizes in Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Bridgend, the Welsh Liberal Democrats announced today.
Announcing a key policy for the Assembly elections, South Wales West Assembly Member, Peter Black, made clear that the Welsh Liberal Democrats would work to ensure that infant classes normally contain no more than 25 pupils, prioritising the largest classes first.
Over 71,740 infant pupils in Wales are currently taught in classes of 25 or more, with 59% of infant classes having over 25 pupils.
In July it was revealed that over 800 teachers and support staff are being made redundant across Wales, which will have a major impact on pupils and their learning. The Welsh Liberal Democrats would ensure that schools have the funding to employ more teachers so that class sizes can be capped at 25, to protect the quality of education for pupils.
"Parents' views have been ignored for too long. Time after time I speak to understandably worried parents whose main priority is for their children to be taught in smaller classes. Only the Welsh Liberal Democrats will deliver that.
"In Swansea there are 195 classes over 25 and 5,626 pupils being taught in those classes. In Neath Port Talbot there are 103 classes over 25 and 3,027 pupils being taught in those classes. In Bridgend there are 129 classes over 25 and 3,689 pupils being taught in those classes. We need to tackle this.
"This is all about giving teachers the time to do what they do best: teach. They would be under less pressure as they would have more time to give children individual attention and improve the quality of lessons.
"The Welsh Liberal Democrats would work to ensure that infant classes normally contain no more than 25 pupils, prioritising the largest classes first. We would invest in more teachers, to give them the time to focus on a child's individual needs which we believe is central to raising standards.
"The issue of class sizes is one of the most pressing for teachers and it is a concern that is raised almost without fail whenever NUT Cymru seek the views of our members. It is, unfortunately, something that has been off the political agenda for some time and so we are pleased to see the Welsh Lib Dems proposing a concrete policy to address it.


Having Tucsonans fill the many volunteer opportunities in Tucson AZ has brought recognition to our city. Movoto Real Estate just announced "America's 10 Most Caring Cities," and Tucson came ranked No. 3.
Movoto concluded that if people need support for their troubles, no matter what they are, you will be able to find it in Tucson AZ. Tucson ranked third. just behind Atlanta, Georgia and Austin, Texas.
Movoto evaluated the 100 biggest cities in the United States to find the top 10. The ratings were based public date. Research included per-capita income, student-counselor ratio. charitable donations, lowest crime rates, pet shelters, homeless services, mental health counselors and therapists, car-pooling and Facebook "likes" for local charities and causes.
There are literally hundreds of charities in Tucson, however here are a few of the more notable ones.
Through strong community support, hundreds of people are work to make bells every year. The bells are placed all-around the city to emphasize community kindness to make it a kinder place to live. Ben's Bells is located on University Boulevard near the U of A. Accordingly, many students and local citizens alike volunteer their time at Ben's Bells every day.
There are community food bank locations and donation centers across Tucson as well as Southern Arizona. Many individuals find the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona the perfect way to give back. You can volunteer or donate food items. What ever your interest the food bank can always use your assistance. The food bank along with community volunteers strive to make Tucson a even better place to live.
As a private, nonprofit enterprise the Humane Society accepts and adopts homeless animals. The Humane Society of Southern Arizona passionately believes that all animals are entitled to a good home. Volunteer opportunities are available in education, administration, special events, adoption, and many more sectors of the Humane Society activities and out reach programs.
Ronald McDonald House provides comfort and support to families and children dealing with severe illness or injury. The charity provides a home for families who have to travel to receive healthcare in Tucson. Home and family volunteers as well as donations are always needed and appreciated. Want to cook dinner for house guests? Volunteer for the Chef for a day program. Looking for an even simpler and easier way to give back? Collect pop tabs to donate them to the Ronald McDonald House to help raise money.
Volunteer Opportunities In Tucson – Angel Charity for Children, Inc.
Angel Charity for Children is an all-volunteer organization that helps to finance grant requests that will significantly help Tucson youth. Angel Charity works with children's organizations to provide essential funding to grow and learn. The Angel Charity for Children helps make Tucson's youth healthy and happier. Community members are encouraged to donate or participate in upcoming events to raise money for the cause.
Tucson is a great place to live. Participating in the long list of volunteer opportunities in Tucson AZ will make you and the City of Tucson even better.
Considering a move to Tucson? Perhaps planning for that future place to retire? We can help.


text:
Gordon Thomas Stuart (30 May 1924  22 July 2015) was a Canadian-born Welsh portrait artist, known for his portrayals of Dylan Thomas.

Stuart was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and attended Ontario College of Art and Design.  He met Thomas in 1953 and completed an oil sketch of Thomas and three oil paintings, one in the National Gallery of Art in London, one at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and one located in the Uplands in Thomas's home.

Stuart also completed portraits of Jimmy Carter, Sir Kyffin Williams, Aeronwy Thomas, Sir George Martin, and Cliff Morgan.

Stuart served in the Canadian Army during World War II and after returning to Canada, later lived in Paris and London before settling in Wales.

References

2015 deaths
1924 births
Artists from Toronto
Welsh artists
Canadian people of World War II
Canadian painters
Canadian emigrants to the United Kingdom

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Done in a Day (DIAD) refers to a community project that can be completed in one day, or an 8 hour time frame. Done in a Meeting (DIAM) refers to a project that can be completed during one of our general membership meetings and typically takes 10 – 15 minutes to complete. The Junior League of Sarasota, Inc. provides DIAD and DIAM applications to more than 400 agencies in Sarasota County each summer. The DIAD committee makes a recommendation to the Board for a selection of projects, the number of projects are based on the year's budget.
The Hunger Outreach committee has been busy providing much needed resources to the families in Sarasota and surrounding communities who need it most. We started the year off by partnering with Healthy Start Coalition of Sarasota County and the Big Latch-On event. The Big Latch-On is a celebration event for women that promotes and supports breastfeeding and offers peer support to each other. For the event, we donated 1,000 baby onesies to be distributed during the event and were also given out to new mothers at local hospitals.
Another component of the overall nutrition initiative, KITK specifically empowers children in Kindergarten through 6th grade and their families to make healthy choices about nutrition and fitness and fight against childhood obesity. This program inspired by the Junior League of Calgary's Junior Chefs program began in 2006 and is now promoted in more than 200 communities across four countries. Locally we partner with organizations, festivals and events that serve this demongraphic in order to do hands on demonstrations for children and families in our community.
A collection of past projects.


Feedburner Feed Replacement which forwards all feed traffic to your Feedburner feed without the need to mess with your .htaccess file.
Now that Yahoo and MSN have agreed to start using the XML-based sitemap structure implemented by Google, most sites will benefit from creating a Sitemap file.
Included in the default installation of 2.x and up. Backup, Backup, Backup. I run nightly backups of all the WordPress-based sites I'm involved with and dump them to a dedicated gmail account.
If you have any interest in getting traffic to your site from search engines, use Optimal Title. Google has a nasty habit of dropping pages from a basic WordPress installation into their supplemental index because of the way WordPress titles pages. Using Optimal Title to list the entry title followed by the blog name is one way to avoid the supplemental mess.
There are Akismet fans and Spam Karma fans. Spam Karma is more than adequate for the sites I'm involved with. Akismet is included by default and the ultra-paranoid will have no problems running both together.
Statcounter for WP drops the Statcounter tracking code in the footer of all pages in your site. Best of all, it is a text box-based append so you could also use this to add whatever tracking program you use – not just Statcounter.
Related Entries encourages stickiness by adding related links to previous entries in your posts.
UTW is the "multi-headed hydra of a plugin." Tags have become ever so popular and with UTW you can tag your entries, keep things organized, or include the AJAXy search box which is also included.
There are few others I use a on regular basis, but the above represent my most often used. Your mileage may vary.


We extend a welcome to anyone so interested – you don't even have to be an active beekeeper.
The organization publishes an informative newsletter, sets up exhibits, and participates at fairs and charitable activities, in order to accomplish our principal goals: to educate and inform Maine beekeepers on the theory and practice of sound beekeeping, to represent the interests of beekeepers before the state legislature and in the statewide agricultural community, and to provide information about bees and beekeeping to the public-at-large.
Our membership represents every level of experience and expertise.
Our newsletter, is published bi-monthly for the months of February, April, June, August, October, and December. The production schedule and the contents of the newsletter are timed to coincide with the "Beekeeper's Calendar". This is the yearly sequence of events observed in nature which impact hive activities and determine the responsibilities and actions of the beekeeper.
This all-day gathering of beekeepers from all over the state features speakers of national reputation, a buffet luncheon, and a fund-raising raffle. There is a charge for admission above dues. Membership in the organization is required to attend.
We are proud to be able to collectively support important scientific research. Currently $1 (7% of regular annual dues) is donated to the EAS Foundation for Honey Bee Research.
A membership packet will be confirmation to new members that your contact information and dues have been received.
The MSBA prohibits discrimination against current or prospective members on the basis of race, color, gender, religion, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristics.


Peter Hartlaub Aug. 22, 2017 Updated: Aug. 22, 2017 12:29 p.m.
When Jim Hopkins launched the San Francisco Disco Preservation Society four years ago, not everyone took his history-focused endeavor seriously.
Nearly four decades after the genre's fast rise and faster demise, he learned on social media that there are still people who aren't cool with disco.
But the fact that San Francisco has a Disco Preservation Society should be little surprise. Disco icon Sylvester has been honored here by city proclamation, and the music never completely disappeared from the Castro nightclub scene.
Hopkins' dedication to honoring nightclub history is disarmingly heartfelt and free of irony. The Disco Preservation Society unearths music long abandoned by the record industry while paying studious tribute to DJs, many of whom died of AIDS-related illnesses before an Internet record of their work had started.
And it offers a new lens into underappreciated genres, with a collection of more than 600 clean DJ mixes from the 1970s, '80s and '90s — including an original recording from Studio 54 in New York and multiple recordings from disco party central Trocadero Transfer in San Francisco.
Hopkins moved to San Francisco as the rave scene exploded in the early 1990s, connected with a booking manager in New York and toured 48 states as a traveling DJ. He currently DJs at 440 Castro four nights a week.
The Disco Preservation Society started by accident, after Hopkins bought an old reel-to-reel player on a nostalgic whim and started looking on Craigslist for blank tapes. He found the daughter of the late 1970s disco DJ Michael Lee, who had placed an ad hoping to pay someone to convert more than 60 reel-to-reel recordings.
Michael Lee's sets became the seed for the collection that keeps growing online at www.sfdps.org, free for anyone who wants to discover or reminisce. Hopkins received another mammoth contribution from event producer Rod Roderick, now 87 years old, who contributed hundreds of DJ mixes from the era on reel-to-reel tape and cassettes.
The San Francisco Disco Preservation Society has since expanded to other decades of dance music, with 1980s and 1990s archives added to multiple pages on the audio sharing site Hearthis.
The 1990s mix collection received a boost from Chris Hynes, who worked in rave promotion and recorded hundreds of full DJ sets. The high-quality original copies were then stored in a cool place for 20 years. The Facebook group page "I Raved in the San Francisco Bay Area in the '90s" with close to 12,000 members, benefits greatly from Hynes' collection and Hopkins' production.
Hopkins is amicable but low key in person, operating in a tidy spare bedroom of his Twin Peaks apartment where old and new technologies work in concert to revive lost music.
Reel-to-reel tapes spin as music gets transferred to digital, and into a sophisticated editing program that includes a monitor to isolate audio impurities on a heat map. His floor is filled with plastic bins of carefully organized tapes — many dropped off at the Disco Preservation Society post office box in the Castro.
Hopkins can lecture on problems like "tape shed," an aging-related issue that can clog up stereo systems, which he solves by placing the frozen-waffle-size reel-to-reel tapes in a food dehydrator.
Hopkins also collects photos, advertisements and other minutiae to post on his Facebook pages, and researches long-gone DJs and clubs for his own tributes. A recent post eulogizes Jim Burgess, a New York DJ, producer and expert remixer of pop songs into disco tracks, who died at age 39 in 1993.
Among other finds, Hopkins recently discovered in Hynes' collection one of his own sets from the 1990s.
Mostly, he just wants to keep the beats going, one discovery at a time.


text:
UTC-09:30 je zkratka a identifikátor časového posunu o -9½ hodiny oproti koordinovanému světovému času. Tato zkratka je všeobecně užívána.

Výjimečně lze nalézt o zkratku V*.

Zkratka se často chápe ve významu časového pásma s tímto časovým posunem. Tento čas je neobvyklý a jeho řídícím poledníkem je 142°30′ západní délky; pásmo by teoreticky mělo rozsah mezi 135° a 150° západní délky.

Jiná pojmenování

Úředně stanovený čas
Tento čas je používán na následujících územích.

Celoročně platný čas
 Francouzská Polynésie (Francie) — standardní čas platný na části území (Markézy)

Odkazy

Poznámky

Reference

−09:30