Poetry foundation website
longish article by Cathy Park Hong that contextualizes aspects of Paul Celan’s work with other poets who spoke multiple languages, “How Words Fail“, 2006
John Felstiner, of Stanford (who I think of in relation to one of his more obscure subjects, Elizabeth Wiltsee, which Bill Rose made into “This Dust of Words”). Felstiner, a Harvard ’58, came to Stanford in 1965, and is emeritus and pretty focused on his environmental work, said to be traveling and making presentations at high schools across the land.
This book is not in Palo Alto Library collection, although a more recent Felstiner is (and other Celan collections per se are in deep storage, whilst we sling bricks around for kicks)
There is a 3-minute audio clip of Paul Celan reading his most famous poem “Todesfugue” (death fugue) which I can link to .
Mark Anderson
Diamanda Galas (play at your own risk)
In Germany, Gail Holst leans in on Celan.
this is a total red herring, but the search-injuns suggested a recent New York Times blog post by Dana Jennings about a 1950 comic book “Weird Fantasy” because, if I can pretend to comprehend the way this thing thinks, it has a PAUL Kast and the word CLEAN as in “clean prose”. “Clean” and “celan” and anagrams for each other. (Whereas Celan may be a pen name, picked as a version of his actual name Ancel, or a version that once had an “H” and a “ST” which were deleted)
edit to add, two hours later: aha, it occurs to me that I may have seen at SFMOMA a set of Anselm Kiefer paintings that reference Paul Celan and may have noted “Paul Celan” in a handheld device at the time. see also
edit to add, two hours and five minutes later: i struck out on my hunch to try feldman’s books, four blocks away for either celan or felstiner on celan, which reminds me i was gonna put in a good couple hours then retire to the giants game…and somewhere I did to go back and amend “Prince Hal” to the Tigers/Indians hurler Newhouser and not Norse in Jack Hirshman’s “baseball poem”…speaking of poetry projects, which in this space also goes thru Ginsburg, Van Buskirk and supposedly someday Palo Alto’s beat Lew Welch, Al Young poet laureate, but it mostly rather pedestrian stuff, “cowboy chords” as Roland Turner (John Goodman) dismissal of Llewyn Davis in the back of that car, driven by Johnny Five, and it will be five and fifth inning by the time I get to the boob tube.it’s already 2-0 giants top of the first bottom of the second I Knew that looked funny in pittsburgh, which is a mixed blessing.
Their eighth release. first single “bullet to brain”
speaking of brain I swear it was just yesterday I stood next to Black Keys wailing away in Austin at Billions party, circa 2004, although I have to admit I sometimes do not pull names from the aether as I once did.
My friend Lynne Tolman was instrumental in bringing to fruition a monument to honor Major Taylor, a famous bike race from the early 20th century. I met Lynne when I was summer reporter for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, in 1985, and she was staff per se.
For a minute there, I was trying to put together Lynne’s group with bluesman Otis Taylor, who wrote a song about Major Taylor, for a benefit concert. Not sure it ever came to pass.
Most of the heavy lifting for this project was done in 2008, yet my old friend sends word today, via electronic media, that there is a 24-hour window, in something called Greater Worcester Gives, in which likeminded people can optimize their respect for Major Taylor, Cycling, Worcester and related values by following the instructions here.
edit to add, an hour later: another electronic birdie tells me there is a local version of Worcester Gives, called Silicon Valley Gives, also holding a 24 hour event.
Local-like, this event is sponsored and fruit ionized by Razoo. I wonder if same in Worcester, good not goofy.
edit to add: hearing back from Lynne Tolman of the TAG had me unleashing a stream of consciousness piece about reporters and sources from 29 years ago, and I actually found what looks like a current cellphone from someone truly extraordinary I briefly interacted with for my biggest scoop at the time: wondering about ringing this source and seeing if the ensuing years makes him any more reachable (and having also just posted about Seymour Hersh being so more ballsy than me).
1. On my walk yesterday, I spied a flyer regarding an appearance today of cartoonist Ivan Brunetti at Stanford’s Levinthal Humanities Center; looks interesting; it says he’s born in Italy, based in Chicago, has six or seven covers for The New Yorker, and did cover art for the fourth album by one of my favorite bands, Tomahawk, “Oddfellows” (reviewed 53 times on Amazon).
2. Terry and I caught remarks by Connie Wolf at Stanford’s Cantor Museum last night, regarding Carleton Watkins show, of old photographs of Yosemite. Connie mentioned that Kenneth Baker of the Chron had already reviewed the show, which impressed me. But when I read the actual review, here at Palo Alto College Terrace library (where I still occassionally use the shared computer terminals), I was struck by how omenous Baker’s review was, compared to Wolf’s characterization of it. He noted that when there was a show in SF at MOMA a few years back, more was made of how much encroachment there has been on our natural resources in the ensuing years. Also, he notes some of the tragedy in the photographer’s life, such as ending his days in a mental hospital in Napa.
I believe Connie Wolf also mischaracterized what Kenneth Baker said about the catalog: it is a bargain, relatively, at $40, but “deal of the year” not deal of the century.
3. I recognized Janet Duca Norton, the society columnist for The Daily News, by her nametag, and was tempted to speak with her about Eve Ensler, but decided it wasn’t much of an opening. When Duca Norton wrote about Ensler appearing at Castilleja School, a few years ago, I thought it odd she did not mention Ensler’s most famous work. Flash forward, so to speak, to 2013 and the Paly High Principal, according to the Palo Alto Weekly, is basically undone for telling students not to miss the Ensler appearance there. And I’m doing a Duca Norton by not mentioning the taboo words herein.
edit to add, moments later: I’m also flashing to my Pulitzer-Prize winning former colleague at The daily Dartmouth Dan Fagin and his comments about Swiss physician Paracelsus about the difference between a potion and a poison is the dose: quotes from the Chron, white wine, the chemicals inherent in producing history-making large format photo-prints or industrial dyes, and that word that Duca Norton and I cannot udder.
4. or back to brunetti, I could not find the comics insert featuring Brunetti’s work of the McSweeney newspaper, but I did find this comment I posted four years ago, i.e. pre-dating “Plastic Alto” the blog:
This thing rocks. I bought it yesterday — looking for the Chron at Keplers in Menlo Park, then decided to upgrade. Spent about an hour with it, while doing my laundry. Off to Coupa to keep digging into it, keep digging it. I hope they do version 2.0. I want to do something like that here in Palo Alto, maybe under the name PLASTIC ALTO. Or PAPER ALTO??? Mark W, worked on high school and college papers
I have not seen or heard in a while Rupa & The April Fishes, yet am thinking about her and them, this 29th day of April, 2014.
I rescued if that’s the word, these 900 words that I had posted on some other site:
I have a scant hour today to post my tribute to Palo Altan Rupa Marya, of Rupa and The April Fishes. I trust that the story itself will compensate for my telling of it.
Rupa and her band were driving across Tennessee and looking for a place to eat lunch Tuesday while our futuristic communications devices let us exchange ideas, on behalf of (unnamed other site, we’ll call it PLASTIC ALTO). While awaiting the chance to speak with her, I had fantasized about flying (via my airlines “rewards” program) to catch up with her in Austin, Texas, Thursday — tomorrow — at a quaint club I know well called MoMos.
Previously, I had dreamed of checking out her show at the Millenium Park in Chicago, near the famous public art monument “Clouds” by Anish Kapoor; my initial plan for this post was to use it as in indirect preview of Palo Alto’s World Music Day, back in June; Rupa and her band were actually in Mendocino that weekend, for the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival.
She confirmed my suspicion that although she has performed in twenty countries or so and thirty of the top festivals in the world, she has not had a proper public show in Palo Alto, her hometown. (Actually, she’s from Los Altos Hills and attended Castilleja, but her brother went to Gunn so we’ll claim her).
When then-mayor Peter Drekmeir invited me to help plan the first Palo Alto World Music Day in 2009, my very first thought was to get Rupa and The April Fishes as a headliner. Her agent held the date for us, but it was decided to keep our version of Fete De La Musique without a main stage or focal point, to keep the emphasis on amateurs (“for the love of it”) making street music.
Rupa said she is touring behind new material for a planned third album. Her previous two sets, both available on the excellent Cumbancha Records, of Charlotte, Vermont, near Burlington, are called “Extraordinary Rendition” (2008)and “Este Mundo” (2009).
Rupa is in what could be called Rupa 3.0. Rupa 1.0 was when she was known as the singing-physician who wrote songs in French, Spanish, English and Hindi. Exemplary songs from that era include “Une Americaine a Paris” and “Wishful Thinking”.
In 2.0, Rupa, consistant with her work performing and advocating for border populations, were songs written and sung mostly in Spanish. When I asked her about her shift towards Spanish she informed me that her five most recent new compositions are all in English, including something called “Build” which is about farming and the implications of our post-agricultural world (which reminds me of my one-time client Helena Norberg-Hodge of the International Society of Ecology and Culture).
Rupa says she is on sabbatical from her second career, as an attending pediatric oncologist at UCSF Hospital. She corrected my phrasing and said he has one career and that her work as a scientist and care-giver is integrated to her work as a band-leader, song-writer performer and activist.
She bemoaned the role of pharmaceutical companies and lauded Healthy San Francisco, which provides all citizens of that “tiny island nation” (her phrasing), where she resides, a modicum of preventative medicine.
Disclosure: I was briefly an unpaid member of the artist management team, based in Oakland, that sought to introduce Rupa and The April Fishes to the music business operative and entities. Today I am one of her biggest fans and an unpaid contributor to this website.
Who else I think of a propos Rupa Marya: Mother Theresa, Vaclav Havel, Michael Franti, Manu Chau, Patti Smith, Jocelyn Elders, Mona Caron, Sunaura Taylor, John McRea (of Cake, she said she met him recently), Ani DiFranco, Tommy Jordan of Palo Alto who also makes world music and speaks some French; Victor Jara, John Lennon.
Margaret Meade said “never underestimate the ability of a small group of people to change the world.” If she had met Rupa Marya she might have said never underestimate what one person can do.
We left our conversation with not so idle talk of bringing The April Fishes to Palo Alto, perhaps to Mitchell Park bowl, maybe Cubberley Theater or (and I’m adding this part ex parte) Lytton Plaza for some impromptu busking.
She is playing quasi-locally August 25 a free show for SFJazz at Union Square and and Saturday, Aug. 27 at The Independent nightclub on Divisidero in San Francisco, with her Cumbancha label-mates Sergent Garcia.
I had fantasized of Rupa, perhaps wearing an Oakland Raiders jersey, performing “Wishful Thinking” at the half-time memorial I had organized for The Danny McCallister Fund at Gunn High. Her song, referencing “an unsavory crew” of pirates but actually about the medical demise of a loved one, is a slow minor-chord waltz, but for me presages Johnny Depp’s pirates franchise (and I’m stealing this bit from Rebecca Solnit’s “Infinite City”) and is descendent from Robert Louis Stevenson’s stepson’s drawing of a mythical “treasure island.” Rupa Marya is the 50th treasure of San Francisco and we should nurture her roots in our little town.
I’m also just now realizing, about a year late, that Rupa collaborated with Todd Sickafoose on a studio project called “Build” and also with Mark Orton on some other project. Will update as I can.
Rupa is super-overdue for a proper Palo Alto play.
Edit to add: and this probably doesn’t belong here, but I am the only person in the world who noticed that when members of Pussy Riot were interviewed on Charlie Rose, the sponsor of the show was a website owned by a large packaged goods company COMING TO GET HER DOT COM. Really. Follow this link.
edit to adder: Andrew Gilbert, apropos of the recent Todd Sickafoose band show at Yoshi’s earlier this very April, has a run-down about the Rupa-Sickafoose, nexus and that Todd also produced a session for Rob Reich (the accordion-player, not the Inequality-Guru):
Reich recalls hearing about the bassist a few years ago after Sickafoose produced Rupa and the April Fishes’ latest album Build “and Rupa was raving about him,” says Reich, who also performs in the Gypsy jazz combo Gaucho, which celebrates the release of the new album Thinking of You at Yoshi’s on April 17. “The first time I played with him was with Rupa in a trio at the Red Poppy Art House doing her music, and was blown away by how good and strong his grooves were. It’s rare to find such a strong, rhythmic player who’s also a super sweet and mellow guy.”
And not to further take credit for the rain when I’m only a Weather Man (or the guy who runs the blue screen), but I had to dredge up from my email something about comparing Rupa and Ani in an internal memo, in 2007 (when Chris Cuevas was her manager and I was somewhere between co-manager and intern):
In previous message I said I talked with Ani DiFranco’s radio guy — I hope that’s okay, I’m a little off strategy…I somehow can picture Rupa on Righteous Babe, she’s more righteous and babe-ish than Ani DiFranco!!!
Todd and Rupa played a duo show at Yoshi’s not long ago, around that time. And Mark Orton’s music was featured prominently in the film “Nebraska”.
And I’m outro-ing with something that hardly belongs here, Suprina Kenney’s sculpture that some may mis-label as “The Catch” but is actually called “Willie” that depicts Willie Mays in 1954 running down that blast by Vic Wertz, depicted as kinda cubist and abstracted, that was originally a commission for MLB Fancave but ended up either procured or on loan to Giants, and John King of the Chron says it is the only art in the stadium or park that alludes, by color, to the Golden Gate Bridge:
catch suprina or rupa or vic wirtz, depending on your build
rescued 900 words than added another 400 for better or worse, a little like retrieving a foul ball versus catching a home run blast, but something.
Namaste, Rupa Marya
Namaste, Todd Sickafoose
Namaste, Mark Orton
Namaste, Andrew Gilbert
Namaste, Suprina Kenney
Namaste, Willie Mays
“Namaste” in this case means the little Juan Marichal inside me waves above his head in enthusiastic and artistic manner the wand of God’s best tooled-Adirondack ash but does not harm or even scare the little John Roseboro in the others. It’s just a dance, people, peepli.
I met Anand Patwardhan at Stanford, at a screening of his film “Jai Bhim Comrade” and then at a lunch round-table the next day. This was November, 2012, the week before the elections (and I first posted this shot, above, to my campaign journal, which incidentally, has a Sanskit name). I wanted to learn more about the music in his film. I haven’t really followed up with the task. I do have a “India” file going on here, at Plastic Alto. Here is a poster from an Anand Patwardhan film that screened at Berkeley PFA in 2004:
See also a deliberately meandering post here about Anusha Rizvi “Serendipity Farmers” I wrote last fall, at a discussion and dinner that did not include a screening of her film. (Type her name into the search function to get to the essay). Her film “Peepli (Live)” deals with suicide among farmers, and is viewable at Stanford library.
Here is a song from “Peepli Live” — besides what’s at the Stanford library, there may be a youtube post of the entire film:
I’m not sure if including here links to Mindy Kaling or Rupa Marya are indicated, although some other cue made me think of them all at once, recently.
What has the aesthetic of popular culture to do with formidable postwar writers of such enormous variety as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, William Styron, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, James Baldwin, Wallace Stegner, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Penn Warren, John Updike, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Robert Stone, Evan Connell, Louis Auchincloss, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, Russell Banks, William Kennedy, John Barth, Louis Begley, William Gaddis, Norman Rush, John Edgar Wideman, David Plante, Richard Ford, William Gass, Joseph Heller, Raymond Carver, Edmund White, Oscar Hijuelos, Peter Matthiessen, Paul Theroux, John Irving, Norman Mailer, Reynolds Price, James Salter, Denis Johnson, J. F. Powers, Paul Auster, William Vollmann, Richard Stern, Alison Lurie, Flannery O’Connor, Paula Fox, Marilynne Robinson, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Hortense Calisher, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Jamaica Kincaid, Cynthia Ozick, Ann Beattie, Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore, Mary Gordon, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty (and I have by no means exhausted the list) or with serious younger writers as wonderfully gifted as Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Nicole Krauss, Maile Meloy, Jonathan Lethem, Nathan Englander, Claire Messud, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer (to name but a handful)?
I got to this reading Anita Felicelli in the Weekly, a commenter mentioned Roth’s interview in March, 2014 in the Book Review of The Times. Roth was making an eloquent and not easily reducible statement about myth-making — Felicelli et al were discussing what I think of as a brilliant satirist Mike Judge of “Silicon Valley” (HBO) fame. Of those 71 writers, I would say I’m familiar with most of them but not well-read if the litmus test is would I mention them to an interviewer, and ready to field a follow up question about a specific work and not being exposed as a name-dropper, whereas obviously in my usage here at Plastic Alto, at this point I am name-dropping, or name-uploading, but maybe I can make this prescriptive and actually make progress with them.
How many have I heard of? 58 of 71, as in there are 13 in this list that I cannot identify at all.
How many can I name a title? 22, as in there are 49 that I cannot name even one of their works.
How many can I say I’ve read one or more titles? 17, as in, there are 54 important authors, according to Roth, that I have not even read, although with 5 more I can name a title (or maybe I saw the movie) and 41 more I claim I can identify, or say something about: like Robert Stone, I know he studied at Stanford, with Wallace Stegner, or John Edgar Wideman, I know he taught at Harvard, and his daughter played basketball at Stanford – -maybe I’ve clipped articles about him or cited something he once said, but I cannot name his work or claim “I’ve read him”.
How many have I met or can claim to know or have known personally? From readings (author appearances), just two. Vollman, when he spoke at Booksmith and then led a bunch of people across the street to drink whiskey, and Stegner, who lived down the hill from my parents’ house for about half my life, and I met a couple times,, I’ve described below. I saw Paley speak at Dartmouth, at the adaptation of the screening of one of her works to film, but didn’t meet.
I would say the book that had the most palpable effect on me, associated with these authors is “Motherless Brooklyn” by Lethem, which I guess is like Groucho Marx calling a woman beautiful and then saying “that does not say much for you“. (Capt. Spaulding to Mrs. Rittenhouse– Margaret Dumont — in Animal Crackers, 1930).
1964 Orlando Cepeda Topps trading card, although the Cal Tjader song, featuring Vince Guaraldi, was recorded live in San Francisco, in fall, 1958, the slugger’s rookie season.
b/w
Tribelines by Eric Hanson (Nina Simone’s former agent), annotated by The Editor, with a little help from Who’s Who in Baseball, 2014
Tribe not swept since late last summer
Happens here, would be a bummer*
Hopes that we, instead, might sweep
Faded fast when Morse^1 went deep
Sunday it was much the same
For our team, a one-score game
Salazar^2, a healthy start
Offense would not do its part
Cody Allen,^3 ne’er a run
Before this, a trusted gun
Buster P^4, a leadoff double
That would bring us fatal trouble
Walked their Crawford^5 to face Hicks
Wields one of their lighter sticks
But he caught up with one high
Throwing it back in our eye
1. Michael John Morse, of Ft. Lauderdale, FL, born March 22, age 32, R/R, 6’4” 230, 10th year in MLB, .281 lifetime percentage;
2. Daniel Dariel Salazar, of Santa Domingo, Domincan Republic, born January 11, age 24, R/R, 2nd year in MLB, struck out 7 Giants in 7 innings Sunday.
3. Cody Edward Allen, of Orlando FL, born November 20, age 25, R/R, 6’1” 210, 3rd year in the bigs, had 115 Ks in first 100 innings.
4. 2010 NL Rookie of the Year, 2012 NL MVP, Gerald Demp “Buster” Posey, of Leesburg, GA, born March 27, age 27, .308 lifetime b.a.
5. Brandon Michael Crawford, of Mountain View, CA, born January 21, Aquarius, played 149 games at shortstop for Giants in his third year. He had a leadoff double and was driven in my Pedro Sandoval, plus had a walk-off of his own a week before, setting up the decision to pitch to Hicks, who is relatively unknown and unheralded, or was. My original concept was to play on the word “hick” as in Cody went soft on a fellow Southerner, but am not sure if someone born in Orlando is country or not.
* Yet less a bummer than the 1954 World Series, also a Giants sweep over Indians.
(We last saw Herb Wong at Sam Smidt’s birthday party. They were neighbors. Terry knows or knew Sam well, while I have only met him a few times. I reminded Herb who I was and gave him a not too inappropriately intense rundown of how I saw the jazz scene, and especially the lack of a venue here, as he and his wife were leaving the party the same time as we were. He gave me his card. I only heard of his passing as I was searching for more info on the Guaraldi tribute tonight, April 25, 2014, at Community School of Music and Art – editor The link above is to article in Thursday’s Chron)
“Errol Morris Dancing” >> play both of these short films simultaneously, and vary the effect by muting one or the other for sound
self-reference to Errol Morris Dancing, at 4:06 in each film
Cohen is noted for developing a mathematical technique called forcing, which he used to prove that neither the continuum hypothesis (CH), nor the axiom of choice, can be proved from the standard Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms (ZF) of set theory. In conjunction with the earlier work of Gödel, this showed that both of these statements are logically independent of the ZF axioms: these statements can be neither proved nor disproved from these axioms. In this sense, the continuum hypothesis is undecidable, and it is probably the most widely-known example of a natural statement that is independent from the standard ZF axioms of set theory.>>
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line. —Mandelbrot, in his introduction to The Fractal Geometry of Nature
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 