{poem} figs

Sometimes life does mirror art (like road-tripping with a book on pies).

It's fig season here in Adelaide. Intoxicating...

(sorry, I don't manicure)

D.H. Lawrence nails some of the fig-eating essentials, along with a healthy dose of clichéd symbolism and a dubious measure of misogyny.

D.H. Lawrence: Figs

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,

Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,

And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

Then you throw away the skin

Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,

After you have taken off the blossom, with your lips.

But the vulgar way

Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

Every fruit has its secret.

The fig is a very secretive fruit.

As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:

And it seems male.

But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit:

The fissure, the yoni,

The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

Involved,

Inturned,

The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;

And but one orifice.

The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.

Symbols.

There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;

Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

It was always a secret.

That’s how it should be, the female should always be secret.

There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough

Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;

Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,

Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems

Openly pledging heaven:

Here’s to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!

The brave, adventurous rosaceae.

Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,

And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,

Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it;

Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,

Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,

One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light;

Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,

Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,

Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilization, and fruiting

In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see

Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.

Till the drop of ripeness exudes,

And the year is over.

And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.

So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.

And the fig is finished, the year is over.

That’s how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit

Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That’s how women die too.

The year is fallen over-ripe,

The year of our women.

The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

The secret is laid bare.

And rottenness soon sets in.

The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

When Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked

She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.

She’d been naked all her days before,

But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn’t had the fact on her mind.

She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig-leaves.

And women have been sewing ever since.

But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.

They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,

And they won’t let us forget it.

Now, the secret

Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips

That laugh at the Lord’s indignation.

What then, good Lord! cry the women.

We have kept our secret long enough.

We are a ripe fig.

Let us burst into affirmation.

They forget, ripe figs won’t keep.

Ripe figs won’t keep.

Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.

Ripe figs won’t keep, won’t keep in any clime.

What then, when women the world over have all bursten into affirmation?

And bursten figs won’t keep?

(There are some variant readings which I haven't noted here. Lazy. Ditto formatting).

{wishlist} manybooks.net

Some of the titles on manybooks.net (a great free source of older books in multiple e-formats including for Kindle) make me laugh so much. How about... 

• How She Felt in Her First Corset and other poems by Matt W. Alderson (1887)

• Miss Maitland Private Secretary by Geraldine Bonner (1919) [gutenberg offers some images]

 

 Sources: (1) (2)

One could so easily write one's own adventure using these titles.

And how did she feel? Apparently ""I feel just like bucking," the maiden replied."

Incidentally, manybooks.net has a useful RSS feed for tracking their latest additions.

{one book, two books... redux}

I loved Simon's quiz on Stuck in a Book the first time, back in May. Let's have another go:

1. The book I'm currently reading.

I have a lot of books on the go at once, but I'm closest to finishing (one in my study and one in the loo) these two rather different books: The Complete Book of Aunts by Rupert Christiansen (2006) and Pierre Frei's Berlin (2005).

They are different in genre (commonplace book/anthology vs. crime fiction) and other things (e.g., Berlin is a translation from German), but their biggest difference is quality: Berlin is a unputdownable story of a series of murders set in immediate post-war Berlin. It offers an interesting twist by tracing the lives of the victims from roughly ten years before the crime up to the circumstances that led to their being in that particular place at that specific time. It is an excellent and intelligent thriller.

The Complete Book of Aunts, which seemed so promisingly amusing when I saw it in a secondhand store, achieved the fate of relegation to the bathroom, where books go to die force me to finish them in the absence of anything else to read. It is superficial and pretty sloppy in content. It needed a good editor and it certainly is not "The Complete Book of Aunts", given that the author claims very early on that there is no adjectival equivalent of 'avuncular' for aunts. Um, yes there is: materteral. Wouldn't you at least Google if you were interested in auntly completeness? It also contains sentences that should never have made it into print, such as: "After she died, Virginia wrote a memoir of Caroline Emelia..." Clever woman, Virgina Woolf, writing from beyond the grave... As I said, s-l-o-p-p-y.

 

2. The last book I finished:

The last book I finished was very enjoyable: Tess Gerritsen's The Silent Girl (2011). It was a crime novel too (I seem to be wallowing in crime at the moment) and the current last in the Rizzoli/Isles police procedurals by Tess Gerritsen. I had read none of her books before I read the other Simon's review of Keeping the Dead. Next thing I knew I had consumed the entire series in two weeks and was living in fear that even locked doors and windows won't keep out a serial killer who wanted nothing more than to mummify me for posterity. OK, I exaggerate a little, but these books are totally addictive, well-written and full of moments that are so frightening you will need to go and turn on all the lights and hide under the bed. For some reason there was always a gruesome autopsy scene just when I wanted to have dinner. I haven't read much along these lines since I gave up with Patricia Cornwell when her plots and characters got so ridiculous they made me laugh instead of tremble in fear, but I thoroughly recommend Gerritsen if you want to be scared out of your wits. My only quibble is that why is it generally women who meet gruesome and graphically described ends (and from women writers)? This article gave me pause for thought (and somewhere recently I've read something else about book jackets on these books always featuring anonymous chunks of naked women, but I can't find the link; I don't think it was this). Of course, Gerritsen does provide balance with her strong female protagonists who defy victimization.

3. The next book(s) I want to read:

Non-fiction? Rosemary Auchmuty's A World of Women: Growing Up in the Girls' School Story (1999). Why? I enjoyed her first book on this theme, about the elaborate worlds created in girls' stories set in schools.

Fiction?  Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn (1984). Why? Love books set in the 1930s/Second World War.

Crime-fiction? Imogen Robertson's Anatomy of Murder (2011) - I enjoyed the first one in the series.

4. The last book I bought:

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (2008). Yes, I'm about two (and the rest) years behind on what everyone else has read. I like it that way.

5. The last book I was given:

As I was leaving work one day, a lady in the lobby was handing out the Friendly Street Poetry Reader 26 (eds. Ioana Petrescu and David Adès, 2002). Many passersby looked a little suspicious that someone was giving away (a) anything and (b) poetry and (c) something not involving enrolment in a religious cult or pyramid selling scheme. There was a lot of Don't Make Eye Contact going on. But the Friendly Street Poets are an Adelaide institution: a poetry collective established way back in 1975. They hold poetry readings, open mike nights and so on, and publish anthologies of their members' work. Poetry is food for the soul, so here's a taste:

To be a moth, once more, at the lamp
of a woman's eyes; seeking that flame
in the knowledge of cinders; and the
darkness when the lamp is turned away...
(excerpt from David Adès, 'To Hazard This')

{lit link} a few bookish links

Image source: via library_mistress via letterology

Curtis White "The Late Word" (Laphams Quarterly - as Arts & Letters Daily summarizes: "Take a clear-eyed look at the book biz. Only two major players, Amazon and Google, are still standing. Everyone else is looking for the best way to go bankrupt..."):

Even allowing for the possibility that Amazon will be a benign monopoly and will encourage or at least tolerate the continued unruly flowering of this thing we have known as literature, if you thought it was hard to find a book spine out at a superstore, try finding that book of poetry that changes your life and that you didn’t know you were looking for in the web’s ether, “in the cloud,” as the techno-hip say. You’d have better luck finding a speck of gold in a bucket of sand.

Now, through word of mouth and blog site recommendations, some will find that book of poetry, although those folk will be, I suspect, mostly poets themselves... But the population of people interested in finding that transforming book will become ever smaller. Literature requires a culture, a book culture, and the ebook and the web, for all of their wizardry, will forever be solipsistic.

Hitchbock Blonde (Molly Flatt): "Should Authors be Shadows or Stars?" (BookDiva):

Might it actually be more effective, in terms of both word count and book sales, to defy our current craving for ‘transparency’? Writers that are reclusive, anti-social or simply unwilling to play the personal branding game do intrigue us; especially when, like J.D. Salinger, John Fowles or Cormac McCarthy, their reticence chimes so well with the spirit of their books. Perhaps the idea that the true artist prefers the ivory tower still carries cultural currency. Perhaps knowing that our favourite author loves Katy Perry makes us suspect their depth of insight into the human condition. Or perhaps the lone wolves are simply cool.

Jeri's Organising & Decluttering News ("It's OK to give up on a book") would like us to give up on "bad books", whether they be bad because the font is awful or bad because, for instance, someone's lent it to you because they know you read books and you'll LOVE this one...

"Will the E-Book kill the Footnote?" by Alexandra Horowitz (New York Times 7/10/11) contains my favourite quotation of the week:

Noël Coward reputedly said that “having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.”

{weekend words}

Absence

I visited the place where we last met.

Nothing has changed, the gardens were well-tended,

The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;

There was no sign that anything had ended

And nothing to instruct me to forget.

The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,

Singing an ecstasy I could not share,

Played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these

Pleasures there could not be a pain to bear

Or any discord shake the level breeze.

It was because the place was just the same

That made your absence seem a savage force,

For under all the gentleness there came

An earthquake tremor: fountain, birds and grass

Were shaken by my thinking of your name.

Elizabeth Jennings (2002)

New Collected Poems

{review} paris in july: apollinaire's calligrammes

This is a post for Paris in July, hosted by BookBath and Thyme for Tea.

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 Rome - 1918 Paris) wrote the most gorgeous 'concrete' or 'visual' poems - that is, poems in which the shape or typographic setting of the poem on the page is integral to its meaning as a text.

Source

Part of the appeal for me is that, since my 'reading' French is of a standard where I can generally bluff out the meaning, a pictogram is really helpful. That is very shallow, I know! I'm not going to say anything smart about these poems, but rather reproduce some of the loveliest. All are taken from his Calligrammes (printed posthumously in 1918). Sadly, Apollinaire died young, taken by the influenza pandemic at the end of the First World War. He is buried in Paris' Père Lachaise cemetery and has a most appropriate monument on which is carved a heart-shape made from letters which spell out Mon coeur pareil à une flamme renversée ("My heart, like an inverted/upsidedown flame"). My photo isn't great, unfortunately, but I've bleached the colour out in the second shot to show the heart a little better:

 Source: taken by me in February 2010.

This is how it appears in Calligrammes:

Here is his famous "Il Pleut" (It's raining) [source]:

I think we can recognise this one [source]:

This is 'Paysage' (there's a nice explanation here. 

I love the running man and the cigar): 

Apollinaire also drew some other poems in a more free form, 

including this horse and portrait [source]:

Lovely, aren't they? (Even if, like me, you only have about a third of a clue about what they mean).

{poem} frank o'hara

 

I love poetry, but - shamefully - until I had the luck in the 90s to share a house with someone studying post-war American poetry, I rarely read anything later than the 1930s. My lovely housemate happily took me in hand and now I'm a convert. She worked primarily on Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). 

 Jasper Johns 'In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara',1961 (source)

I cannot read any of his poetry without wanting to get straight on a 'plane to New York, preferably via a time-machine to transport me to the late 1950s. 'The Day Lady Died' (1959; from Lunch Poems, 1964) is one of my favourites. It is about - at least, superficially - the death of the astonishing jazz singer/songwriter Billie Holiday. 

The Day Lady Died
FRANK O’HARA


It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me


I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
                                             I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness


and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with 
                                                                   her face on it


and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

 

 Billie Holiday (source)

{weekend words}

I was reminded of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's gorgeous, sexy poem 'Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal' while reading (the excellent) The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark:

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font;
The firefly wakens, waken thou with me.
Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts, in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake.
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Titian's Danaë (1553: Prado, Madrid)

{weekend words}

Odd how one wants to touch not simply stare,

To run one's finger over the flanks and arms,

Not to possess, rather to be possessed. 

Bronze is bright to the eye but under the hands

Is cool and calming. Gods into silent metal.

from Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), 'Greek Statues' in Song for a Birth or a Death (1961).

Colossal bronze hand (?Constantine; 4th century AD), 

Capitoline Museums, Rome. Source: author 2010.

{weekend words}

And there's a hall in Bloomsbury

No more I dare to tread,

For all the stone men shout at me

And swear they are not dead;

And once I touched a broken girl

And knew that marble bled.

from James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915), 'Oak and Olive' in The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913).

'Iris' from the Parthenon pediment (447-432 BC). 

Source: British Museum.

{lit link}

Via the always interesting 

war poetry:

Cambridge University Library

has an exhibition on its

Siegfried Sassoon archive.

{weekend words}

If "compression is the first grace for style",

you have it. Contractility is a virtue

as modesty is a virtue.

It is not the acquisition of any on thing

that is able to adorn,

or the incidental quality that occurs

as a concomitant of something well said,

that we value in style,

but the principle that is hid:

in the absence of feet, "a method of conclusions";

"a knowledge of principles",

in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

Marianne Moore (1887-1972), 'To a Snail' (1924) in Complete Poems (Penguin).

{lit link}

The New Criterion (April 2010)

on the revival of

Dorothy Parker's poetry

(& what happens when editors sue)