“I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.” ~ Duke Ellington
Lightning Hopkins is to my mind as close as you can get to the heart of the Blues. A single voice, an acoustic guitar, and enough real emotion to rescue even the most desperate soul.
On a Monday morning, I am feeling like listening to the Blues.
Enjoy!
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The feature Hugh’s Journals has appeared here on Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.
Hugh’s Notebooks
As a pastor and military chaplain, Hugh visited hospitals and homes, performed funerals and sat with grieving families and dying congregants. He prayed with them, he sat with them, he listened to them, he comforted them. In a word, he ministered to them.
One of Hugh’s journals is a very small notebook he could easily carry in his coat pocket to home visitations, to hospitals, and to gravesides. It is filled with prayers and poems and bible verses he typed-up. Today’s page comes from that notebook.
Hugh’s notebook indicates that he used this prayer at least three times: October 11, 1938; May 20, 1949; June 15, 1951. Today – almost 62 years later– I post them here.
Keep the faith!
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Osip Mandelstam is an artistic martyr, a saint of the imagination. No poet sacrificed as much for his art. No poet paid more dearly for believing in the power of language and beauty and the freedom of imagination.
Exiled and incarcerated often in Soviet Russia for what he wrote, Mandelstam reminds us that words do matter. That one of the first casualties of the demonic is beauty and pleasure.
While Mandelstam is probably read and admired by westerners more than any other Russian poet, I still do not think he is read enough.
On a bleak, wet May morning Mandelstam seems like just the thing.
Enjoy!
54 (trans. by W.S. Merwin)
Poison in the bread, the air drunk dry.
Hard to doctor the wounds.
Joseph sold into Egypt
grieved no more bitterly for home.
Bedouins under the stars
close their eyes, sitting their horses,
and improvise songs
out of the troubles of the day.
No lack of subject:
one lost a quiver in the sand,
one bartered away a stallion…
the mist of events drift away.
And if the song is sung truly,
from the whole heart, everything
at last vanishes: nothing is left
but space, the stars, the singer.
And if the song is sung truly,
from the whole heart, everything
at last vanishes: nothing is left
but space, the stars, the singer.
In these lines I hear echoes of Yeats’s Cuchulain Comforted, “They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.”
Here we have, in the Mandelstam’s own words (rendered beautifully by Merwin), his artistic credo, his faith in the ultimate power of poetry and imagination. And the best explanation for why evil will always try to destroy art.
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When you type, typos are inevitable. At least they are for me. In the digital world I can quickly fix them. They are also much easier to see if you have spell-check on.
In the typing world, that is not at all the case. And once a mistake is made, it remains forever like a bad tattoo.
Here is a “finished” draft of a newer poem with yet another typo, or two.
Enjoy!
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A committed… and commit-able… used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!
Here are some covers that would be hard to leave on a shelf.
Enjoy!
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It has been almost three years since I posted this video of one of my favorite George Jones covers, “Blues Man” by Hank Williams Jr. It is a song that contains the autobiographical elements that are in most of Hank Jr.s best songs. The autobiographical elements also, of course, fit Jones’ life as well.
This video features a version of the song by Jones and Dolly Parton. His duets with fellow country legends are always great. Dolly Parton is under appreciated as a singer and, sadly it seems now these days, even as a songwriter.
On a Monday morning, George and Dolly seem like just the thing.
Enjoy!
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Music Monday comes two days early this week with the announcement of George Jones’ passing. Here is a link to the excellent New York Times obituary.
As I have written here elsewhere:
George Jones’ voice has always seemed to me to be the perfect Country voice… the voice I would most want to have if I had any musical ability and could sing.
The first 70-degree day of the year and I sat outside on my deck, looking at the neighbor’s big bare cottonwood tree, drinking beer, and listening to “the voice.”
In the North Country the world is ready to renew itself at last, but still I could not help but feel just a bit melancholy as I wondered who is ever going to be able to fill his shoes.
requiescat in pace George Jones.
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Split Rock Lighthouse
Here in the North Country, April snowstorm after snowstorm had us doubting whether spring would be coming this year after all. But predictions of 60- and 70-degree days have us happy and hopeful at last.
From my writing desk I look over snow-free yards of grass yearning to turn green. I watch birds moving between feeders and the snow-free earth and the branches of still-bare trees.
Between snowstorms, I have walked along the edges of a few of the nearer ponds and heard the songs of redwing blackbirds… the surest sign of all to me that spring must truly be near.
We live indoors and act in so many ways as if we have conquered nature, but in the end, we are merely creatures of nature ourselves. At least that is what we are meant to be.
I continue a routine of writing in the morning before heading to work… newer poems as well as older ones that need a bit of dust shaken off of them. The small notebook of ”finished” drafts continues to grow. Soon it will be time to do something with them.
This poem is a new one.
Enjoy!
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Still Life: My Cup and My Smith-Corona Super-Speed
I have been doing a little research on my Smith-Corona Super-Speed. Research in the digital age is much easier than it was in the pre-digital age. At least it is much more convenient. From the comfort of your own home, you can research rainfall averages in Botswana, what movies are currently playing in San Juan, P.R., and when your typewriter was manufactured.
According to the serial number, my Smith-Corona Super-Speed was manufactured in Syracuse, New York, in 1946, a year after the end of WWII.
In late 1942, the Smith-Corona Company put typewriter manufacturing on hold so it could could produce M1903A3 rifles for the war effort. Rifles which are apparently still quite prized by collectors. Solid American steel and solid American workers were needed for more important things.
My Super-Speed then was manufactured in the first year after the factory had been re-tooled again to start making typewriters… swords turned back into plowshares.
Sometimes I wonder if anyone who built my Super-Speed is still alive. I picture men back from the war, spending their days making typewriters and their nights drinking beer and bowling and dating pretty girls.
Were any of those who worked on my typewriter D-Day veterans or had any of them seen action at the Battle of the Bulge? Were any of them Marines who hit the beaches at places like Iwo Jima, or flown bombing runs over Europe?
Time has a way of distilling what is important, of revealing what should be forgotten and what should always be remembered.
Time has been kind to my Smith-Corona Super-Speed. The years are visible in small nicks and in faded and worn paint. But it still works as well as it originally did on the day it was made 67 years ago!
The Greatest Generation is now all but gone, but much of what they made still endures. I wonder if it will be the same with what our generation makes… and those that follow us.
Still Life: My Writing Desk and My Smith-Corona Super-Speed
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some cover art
For the past six weeks I have been re-reading the original six Mike Hammer novels beginning with his second novel, My Gun is Quick. Today I take a look at his very first novel, I, the Jury.
From the beginning of MontanaWriter – over three years ago now– I have tried to think and write about books and poetry here always in the light of Auden’s six characteristics of a critic. (See the introduction to Book Reviews at MonatanaWriter.)
Auden, his prologue to Dyers Hand, wrote that a critic should:
I undertook re-reading and “reviewing” Mickey Spillane for the same reason that I have chosen to write about most of the poems or books that have been reviewed here: because they are works of art worth thinking and writing about.
There is an irony, of course, to quoting Auden in a review of Mickey Spillane. While Auden enjoyed reading mysteries and even wrote one of the best essays ever written about the genre, he clearly doubted the “literary merit” of the books he viewed merely as enjoyable reading for winding down at the end of a day.
Auden was a lover of “cozy” mysteries, the British kind… not the hardboiled American kind. He was most certainly not one of the many millions who made Mickey Spillane the best selling writer in the world.
Yet it needs to be said, while Auden was as great a poet and critic as any in the 20th Century, he was dead wrong in one thing: mysteries can be true literature.
Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Mickey Spillane are not merely great genre-writers, they are true artists… certainly some of the most significant literary stylists of the 20th Century.
While Chandler’s literary reputation has grown now over the years, and Ross MacDonald’s to a lesser extent, Spillane remains an artistic pariah… a greatly under-appreciated hardboiled genius.
In a five year period between 1947 and 1952, Mickey Spillane wrote six Mike Hammer novels:
Based on a character that Spillane had in mind for a comic book, Mike Hammer and Mike Hammer’s voice must have been inhabiting the dark streets of Spillane’s imagination for some time before he finally sat down in front of his Smith-Corona Super-Speed and cranked out this pulp classic.
While I, The Jury was written in just 19 days, it is clear in the opening sentences of the book that the fully-formed character of Mike Hammer that comes into the room shaking rain off of his hat is already a force of nature, one of the great literary archetypes to ever step out of the pages of a book and into the world. In language and tone, writer and detective hit us hard immediately like a punch in the gut.
Returning now to I, The Jury after having spent the last month and a half reading the other five initial Hammer books made me appreciate this literary classic all the more.
Here are the opening lines of I, the Jury.
Enjoy!
I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me. Pat Chambers was standing by the door to the bedroom trying to steady Myrna. The girl’s body was racking with dry sobs. I walked over and put my arms around her.
“Take it easy, kid,” I told her. “Come on over here and lie down.” I led her to a studio couch that was against the far wall and sat her down. She was in pretty bad shape. One of the uniformed cops put a pillow down for her and she stretched out.
Pat motioned me over to him and pointed to the bedroom. “In there, Mike,” he said. In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. Jack, the guy who said he’d give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.
Pat didn’t say a word. He let me uncover the body and feel the cold face. For the first time in my life I felt like crying. “Where did he get it, Pat?”
[Spillane, Mickey (2001-06-01). The Mike Hammer Collection: Volume I: 1 (p. 5). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.]
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