Women Who Are Well-behaved
Women who are well-behaved
do not make history, and they
take second place to the depraved,
whom history gives right of way,
for though officially the word condemns
the women who’re considered lawless,
they’re given diamonds and gems
for being flexible, not flawless.
Kathryn Harrison reviews “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (“We’re No Angels, ” NYT, September 30,2007) :
Ulrich, a Harvard historian whose “Midwife’s Tale” won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for history, uses “three classic works in Western feminism” as a springboard for examining the theme of “bad” behavior. Could the popularity of her slogan, she wondered, be explained by “feminism, postfeminism or something much older? ” The answer emerges in Ulrich’s choice of texts: Christine de Pizan’s “Book of the City of Ladies, ” written in 1405; Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Eighty Years and More, ” published in 1898; and “A Room of One’s Own, ” based on two lectures Virginia Woolf gave in 1928 — all works by women who “turned to history as a way of making sense of their own lives.” History, Ulrich reminds us, “isn’t just what happens in the past, ” but what we choose to remember. As much invention as discovery, history attempts to make the chaotic present into a coherent picture by comparing it to images, equally artificial, fashioned from events long past. Pizan, Stanton, Woolf: three women with “intellectual fathers” and “domestic mothers, ” who were “raised in settings that simultaneously encouraged and thwarted their love of learning” and “married men who supported their intellectual ambitions.” For each, her “moment of illumination came through an encounter with an odious book” expressing man’s “disdain” for women. Pizan responded to a 15th- century satire containing “diatribes” against her sex, Stanton to law tomes that set forth the rights of husbands and fathers over their wives and daughters, Woolf to “The Mental, Moral and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex, ” an imagined history representing what she discovered in the reading room of the British Museum.
9/30/07
poem by Gershon Hepner
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150 Years
One hundred fifty years for Madoff
are surely an untimely trade-off
for billions that he ripped off traders,
abetted by his trading aiders
like Ezra Merkin, for example,
whose clients used to love to sample
the high returns they would earn,
invested Ponzily by Bern,
whom they believed to be a wizard
before their money in a blizzard
blew away without a trace
in the Wall Street marketplace.
Measuring his measured time,
those who’ve suffered from his crime
will find that such revenge is not
as sweet as they might hope. No knot
is tied around his neck, though they
might hope there would be one. Each day
that he survives they feel the pain
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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With My Imperfect Mind
With my imperfect mind I touch
her body, and she’s satisfied
because I love her very much,
and never ever tried to hide
my imperfections. Since she travels,
it appears to me, half blind,
when my state of mind unravels
she remains to me inclined,
leaning with her body to
my own which is less perfect than
the one her excercises hew
to make me of her flesh a fan,
and turn her place into a river
where I can steer her like a boat,
and, while I’m standing, can deliver
the love I in my poems wrote.
Inspired by Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
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Archer Fish
Archer fish can calculate
trajectories when spitting at
their prey. They are as great
at killing those whom they combat
with minute missiles made of spittle
as humans when they go ballistic.
which proves that we should not belittle
such little creatures as simplistic,
but praise the Lord who taught them trig
and calculus far better than
we know when we attempt to zig
and zag away from missile man.
God programmed them to spit while we
are programmed for much higher skills,
like science, art and poetry,
regarding anyone who kills
a fellow man as very wicked,
unless he's wearing uniform,
in which case he has won a ticket
to act as archer fish perform.
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Tale Of Violins
The Mongols used the hair of horses’ tails
to make the ancestors of bows of violins
which move across the strings when playing scales
like fish that skim through water with their fins.
Music that’s the food of love has forces
which move men with its airs, all made of Luft,
to love far more than any long-maned horses,
as I do, lucky Luftmensch who's not hoofed.
Edward Rothstein writes about horses in the NYT, May 16,2008 (“Man’s Best Friend, Hoofed Division”) :
Without horses, where would we be? Trousers might never have become fashionable. The violin might never have come into existence. The Aztecs might have thrived another few centuries. The Industrial Revolution might have sputtered out before its time. No one would have to get off his high horse, and no political race would have a dark horse candidate. And the American Museum of Natural History would have had to find another subject for its sprawling, charming and illuminating exhibition that is opening on Saturday: “The Horse.” The opening festivities will include demonstrations of horseshoeing and horse grooming; an appearance by Thumbelina, a creature billed as the world’s smallest horse (17 1/2 inches tall) : and a visit by a vintage horse-drawn ambulance. But the exhibition itself relies far less on country fair spectacle and far more on a provocative history of the ways in which humans and horses became, as the show says, “powerfully linked.” Those links may be as slight as fashions in clothing (trousers, we are told, developed specifically for the riding of horses) and as important as the fate of empires (“Next to God, ” Cortés is supposed to have said about the conquest of Mexico, “we owed our victory to the horses”) . The exhibition is suggestive about the evolution of the arts. (The 13th- and 14th-century Mongols, who held their immense empire together with the aid of the horse, also used hair from its tail to create the ancestor of the modern violin bow.) And it invites speculation about the course of technology. (The Industrial Revolution ultimately displaced horse power with horsepower, but not before horses shared the burden with machines: on display is a horse-drawn, steam-powered firetruck from 19th-century Pennsylvania.)
5/16/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Aught
Azriel of Gerona taught
that if you look beyond the yesh
which is the aught you’ll find the naught,
the spirit that’s behind the flesh,
the truth that lies within the kernel,
hidden from the mortal eyes
of man by ayin that’s eternal,
enveloped by man’s lethal lies,
because Reality must be
eclipsed, however hard it’s sought
by I’s that lie between the Thee
which is the Naught beyond the Aught.
In Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2008) , Michael Fishbane writes about Azriel of Gerona (36–7) :
R. Azriel pondered the mystery and depth of infinite Being, and even tried to imagine the very borderline between the knowable realm of Absolute Reality and all that might be humanly conceived or known by human minds. In his discourse he calls the first realm Naught (or ayin) , because it is wholly beyond thought and thus virtually Nothing; and the second he deems Aught (or yesh) , because it is the realm where knowable (or discernable) reality becomes and is. But the point of transition is truly neither the one nor the other, but both: it is neither wholly naught, insofar as there is a gathering towards existence (where things are nameable and determinate) , nor is it wholly aught, since this domain is still characterized by the naught (where no thing is named or differentiated.) At this borderline we have something else. What we have is an imaginable sense of aught grounded in naught; that is, a sense that the all-unfolding reality and being of existence, whose source is God, is ultimately effaced in the depths of God’s Godhood. And though we may not follow R. Azriel in his particular mystical ontology of divine emanations, we may nevertheless strain to understand his teaching as a great truth of theology––still pertinent for our lives. For what he conveys through this meditation is that whatever may be humanly sayable about God and existence is ultimately grounded in and a manifestation of the Naught. To bring our minds towards this realization is the tsk of theology. This holds as much for our common view of everyday reality, where the Aught rightly prevails and predominates, as for our sense of God, where the Naught is the ultimate reality wherein all mindfulness is eclipsed.
10/24/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Playing Music Is Like Making Love
PLAYING MUSIC IS LIKE MAKING LOVE
Many people who insist that they enjoy
music known as classical merely say
they do, pretending. Far more serious is the ploy
planned by LSO, who'll just pretend to play.
There is surely nothing wrong with those who fake
enjoyment, like a woman faking an orgasm,
but pretense of playing music's a mistake,
since music needs not only sound, but ectoplasm.
Orchestras and lovemakers should never mimic:
they should always show their skin when they perform,
and should not be, although poetic, metonymic:
the use of any substitute is rotten form.
Denis Bartel reported the news about the London Symphony Orchestra's decision to mimic their playing while a performance is broadcast to visits at the Olympic Games. David Ng writes in the LA Times:
Musicians with the London Symphony Orchestra are reportedly going to have to pull a Milli Vanilli when they appear at the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games in London. Reports from Britain state that the orchestra will mimic playing to prerecorded music due to concerns about the weather and the shape of the performing venue - a large, oval-shaped arena whose scale would apparently make a live-music performance tricky….
The London Symphony has reportedly recorded the music that is scheduled to be played during the July 27 ceremony. The Daily Mail reports that Boyle wanted the orchestra to perform live, but that he was overruled by the organizing committee for the Games. When viewers around the world tune in for the ceremony, they can expect to see the conductor and musicians from the renowned orchestra going through the motions while a soundtrack plays.
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Nine Billion Names Of God
Once nine billion names of God were known
the world would end, the monks declared.
When scientists transferred them from a stone
on which He’d written them, they then compared
these names to those of all the stars astronomers
had managed to discover, and thus found
a proof their names were all eponymous,
based on a God, who out of sight and sound,
left traces in the starry sky that He
exists, the Founder of the universe.
Once this was known, they could no longer see
the stars, which He extinguished with a curse,
because although He challenges us to know
His names, He does not want us to find out
precisely where the trees of knowledge grow,
because His universe is based on doubt.
Dennis Overbye (“A Boy’s Life, Guided by the Cosmic Wonder, ” NYT, March 25,2007) writes about the science fiction writer and space visionary, the co-creator with Stanley Kubrick of the classic 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Overbye, who was greatly influenced by Clarke’s writings which he describes as the ultimate reason why he ended up becoming an MIT graduate, reports that a supernova exploded in the constellation Boötes on the day of Clarke’s death:
It was the remains of a cataclysmic explosion, a gamma-ray burst, that must have torched a galaxy seven billion light-years away, around the curve of the cosmos, as Clarke might have put it. Nobody knows if there could have been somebody or something living there, when the universe was half its present age. When I heard about it I couldn’t help thinking about Clarke’s Jesuit and the star of Bethlehem. Whoever or whatever was there now belongs to the ages. Darkness has now reclaimed that spot in the sky.
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Red, White, Blue, Black and Naked
If you want to make a point,
highlight it in red;
even if you disappoint
you’ll inspire dread.
If you’ve haven’t much to say,
say it wearing white;
even those you lead astray
will declare you’re right.
If your mood is up and down,
you’ll be safe in blue;
adding to your smile a frown
proves your point of view.
If you’re out to win my heart,
please be wearing black;
I can never keep apart
from a black attack.
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Burning In The Bush
Widowed recently, the lady said:
“I mustn’t rush back to the world, ”
but took him to her marriage bed
to show him hairs that all were curled.
“It seems that she’s not thinking straight, ”
he thought, and very soon began to push
where it was clear she couldn’t wait,
since she was burning in her bush.
Whenever we are feeling lonely
the truth longer seems clear-cut,
and words we say are never only
the truth, the whole truth, nothing but.
Inspired by Robert Pinsky’s review of Elmore Leonard’s “Road Dogs” in the NYT Book Review, May 31,2009 (“Playing Dirty: Elmore Leonard’s latest novel stars three familiar voices in a twisting tale of seduction and betrayal”:
The virtuoso storyteller Elmore Leonard has been rightly praised for his technique: hot, fast narrative, tasty dialogue, strokes of character so quick they’re invisible, never a detail that doesn’t move things ahead. It’s wonderful how much Leonard can do with a five-¬syllable sentence like “She left with the check.” But a good book should also be about something. Although it isn’t always mentioned, Leonard’s books have subjects. “Road Dogs” is about the varying degrees of truth and baloney in human relationships. Sometimes the truth or the baloney is lethal. Droll and exciting, enriched by the self-aware, what-the-hell-why-not insouciance of a master now in his mid-80s, “Road Dogs” — underlying its material of sex, violence and money, and beyond its cast of cons and thugs and movie stars — presents interesting questions….
In a similar way, Jack’s thoughts when he’s about to have sex with a recently widowed movie star, or not, resemble those of a screenwriter. At poolside, after a dip, about to change clothes, she has said, “I’ve been thinking. I might be rushing my return to the world”: “He turned to look at her and said, ‘I know, ’ nodding, showing he was wise as well as patient. He thought he might as well continue once he started, get it all out, and said, ‘I understand.’ He said there was no reason to hurry, it would work out or it wouldn’t. They liked each other and they’d get to it one day. The way he said it was, ‘We’ll express our love one day, ’ and thought he should have said ‘show our love, ’ but didn’t like that either. He should’ve said, they’d get to it, with a grin, and let it go at that.”
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