Halcyon Daze

Here are two excerpts from poems that have been on my mind for a couple of days.

The first is from Upon Appleton House by Andrew Marvell:

So when the shadows laid asleep
From underneath these banks do creep,
And on the river as it flows
With eben shuts begin to close;
The modest halcyon comes in sight,
Flying betwixt the day and night;
And such an horror calm and dumb,
Admiring Nature does benumb.

The viscous air, wheres’e’er she fly,
Follows and sucks her azure dye;
The jellying stream compacts below,
If it might fix her shadow so;
The stupid fishes hang, as plain
As flies in crystal overta’en;
And men the silent scene assist,
Charmed with the sapphire-wingèd mist.

The halcyon is an old name for the riverside-dwelling bird we call the kingfisher.

This is from Humming-bird, by D. H. Lawrence:

I can imagine, in some otherworld 
Primeval-dumb, far back 
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed, 
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

Before anything had a soul, 
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate, 
This little bit chipped off in brilliance 
And went whizzing through the slow, vast succulent stems.

Where-oh-where...

...is Donellen Square?

Waitin' on the Robert E Lee!

In full voice here, in what I found to be a surprisingly appealing biopic, is Larry Parks as Al Jolson, in The Jolson Story (1946).

In fact, Jolson recorded all the songs for the movie of his life, which where then dubbed over Parks when required.

The technique works very well.

And Parks does have a fairly good resemblance to Jolson.

Parks was blacklisted in the early 1950s, and never found steady work in the movies again.

That Horse and Me Again

Thomas O'Neill is Ripe

It's Halloween time again. Are you scared? Only that it's Halloween time again.

See that Station Manager Thomas O'Neill? When it comes to stations and managing, he's ripe.

A woman got totally trashed on East 116th Street and Unpleasant Avenue, the other night.

Not happy near Central Park...

Self with textured brick...

Alien photo editors landed in Central Park.

Ass-sertive New Hat Style Spotted in Harlem

That pink Stetson has an unusual provenance.

'Dowtown'? Own Owe!!!

For all eternity, it seems, riders on the NYC subway have been unable to transfer from the B, D, F and M trains to the uptown 6 train, at the Broadway-Lafayette station. After some clever renovations, this is now possible, and so, some fine new signage accompanied the grand opening of the newly re-jigged station. Ooops! One sign, above, showed an enormous typo — 'Dowtown' instead of Downtown.

That Republican in Missouri

UPDATE: Separately from the matter below, the other day I found a book called Real Rape by law professor Susan Estrich, which explains in detail, the unique position that rape occupies in criminal law canon. The burden of proof alone, as current laws stand, is a tricky matter, as even the most enlightened codes are descendants of patriarchy. When rape is alleged, especially where the victim knows the attacker, there is the thought: ''as Peter cried wolf, is the victim crying rape?''

Estrich, who describes how she herself was raped in the book's introduction, cites the case of Goldberg v. State, in Maryland in 1979. A Mr. Goldberg told a sales clerk who worked for him that she had real potential as a model, so she accompanied him alone to a 'studio', where he forced her to have sex. His victim said she went along with him because Goldberg, to begin with, was physically much larger than his victim, and she said she was scared. Estrich points out that if Goldberg had used his 'come to my modelling studio' story to extract money, not sex, from his high school senior victim, this would have been an open-and-shut case of theft by deception: "The breadth of 'seduction' in the context of sexual relations is without parallel in criminal law."

This helps me understand a remark made some years ago by my friend Mary, an attorney and feminist, when discussing the career of the former Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, who had been criticized by some feminist commentators for not prosecuting more rape cases. Seeing how rape cases reside in such broad ranges of uncertainty, and how prosecutors go to trial when pretty certain of winning, Mary said that the number of cases brought by Morgenthau each year "made sense".

Representative Todd Akin is running for U.S. Senate in Missouri. This election year, the Republican platform for improving the economy, creating jobs and cheering up America is as usual, focused on banning abortion. Akin said the following, creating a media fire storm and, in fairness to the GOP, an attempt to force him out of their party.

It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.

Scarier, perhaps, is the fact that the New York Times ran this headline (below)...

The Times felt that experts were needed to dismiss this sort of nonsense? That's scary!

A Blast from the Past

As a slight crispness can be felt in the air, and Summer is falling away, I found this autumnal photo taken by an old friend, Alfred Galindo, of Highbridge Park in upper Manhattan. (In fact, he took the photo on Christmas Eve, 2006).

Thinking of Fall, some lines of Lord Byron's came to mind, a blast from another past:

My days are in the yellow leaf; 
The flowers and fruits of love are gone; 
The worm, the canker, and the grief, 
Are mine alone! 

The fire that on my bosom preys 
Is lone as some volcanic isle; 
No torch is kindled at its blaze - 
A funeral pile!

Lincoln Center Dogs and Saints

Some dogs

and some saints

which I saw

 

the other day

 

while trying a

new camera

near

Lincoln Center.

Shameless Electioneering

How quickly do Presidents go grey! Despite still looking good for his age, President Obama is noticeably greyer, four years after he became leader of the free world. Vanity Fair just came out with a long profile in which Obama speaks openly of the stresses of his job -- too openly for the record, in fact, because today's New York Times reports that journalist Michael Lewis (above left with O.) had to hand in his copy to the White House before publication, so that quotations could be approved. Lewis's access was apparently unprecedented:

Over an eight-month period, Mr. Lewis conducted multiple interviews with the president. He rode in the official presidential limousine. He was given a special lapel pin that identified him to the Secret Service as someone who was allowed to be in close proximity to the president.

 What the White House censored was an account by Obama of how the job stress got to him one evening, and:

after a particularly trying day, he sat down to watch a movie and surprised himself by suddenly tearing up.

Found on an iPad

These photos were found on an iPad at the Apple store on Broadway at West 68th Street.

Too school for cool

Too cool for school 

Too school

Vidal, So Soon?

This is old news, but as I haven't written anything in a while, let this be my warm-up: Gore Vidal died on July 31st. Rest in peace, you old "gentleman-bitch" as he described himself. For as long as I've known about him, Vidal, 'aristocratic' left-wing big gay aircraft carrier writer, looked like this, (left). 

                                                                        As a young man, Vidal looked like this, (right). 

In its obituary of Vidal, there came a telling moment from the New York Times, telling more about the Times than about Vidal, I feel.  
In the 1960s, Vidal and his arch enemy William Hitler F. Buckley Jr. had a famous fight on TV, during a debate on Buckley's chat show. The Times describes it thus: 

Captured in a vintage black-and-white YouTube clip, the two can be seen and heard engaging in a nasty word brawl. Mr. Vidal pins the label “crypto-Nazi” on Buckley, who testily responds by calling Mr. Vidal a “queer.” The epithets were ugly then, as they are today. But what is most striking to the contemporary viewer is how much the combatants resemble each other, beginning with their languidly patrician tones. The phrases come from the gutter, but plainly Mr. Vidal and Buckley do not. They exude the princely confidence once associated with well-born Americans of a certain pedigree.

 As a friend from my school days would put it: I'm sorry, I don't want to be offensive, but... "crypto-Nazi" is not an ugly epithet. It is quite accurate. Buckley was as vile an old fascist pig as you could ever find in America. This is a good example of the conservative New York Times weakly trying to tread the middle road as usual, without taking sides -- and this is the newspaper that right-wing morons claim is one of the pillars of the liberal media. And neither 'epithet' comes from the gutter. This being America, I thought we all, in some way, 'come from the gutter'?


By the way,  that photo of  Vidal as a young man was taken by Carl van Vechten.

Scenes From Another Summer

This strange, massive blossom spotted on a blazing hot Sunday in Queens, turned out to be a very ordinary umbrella.

 

Ever feel like you're being watched?

If the answer is yes, just look implacable.

 

This poor, unloved fire hydrant was not invited to the Headless Ball.

 

"Darling...what were you thinking?"

Pulp Fiction

"The taxi took a sudden right turn off the boulevard..."

"The empty subway train raced downtown through dark tunnels into the darker night..."

"The mysterious car sped towards the Holland Tunnel..."

A Recent Run Through Chelsea Galleries

"Are you here for the Doctor Zizmor class action law suit pre-trial hearing too?"

Hors Hooves or...

I wanted to share something odd with you, dear readers, after a considerable hiatus in writing. But first, courtesy of somewhere in the West Village (above),...would you like a pup pie?

Somewhere in the bleary smear of fast-changing years and events between 2001 and 2006, I coined the name of my blog -- Dungannistan -- by taking my home town name, Dungannon, and radicalizing it with a dash of the leading bogeyman state of the day, Afghanistan (or indeed, Pakistan), into Dungannistan.

If you knew (as some do) Dungannon, you'd understand that today, few places in the world are more placid and dismal (perhaps Aughnacloy or Fintona). It was not always so.

Recently, a random Google search for something else brought me to this web site, and the following:

Tunganistan, or Dunganistan, a name coined by Western scholars and travellers (W. Heissig, Ella Maillart) for an ephemeral régime, hardly to be called a state, in the southern part of Chinese Turkestan or Sinkiang [q.v.] 1934-7. The name stems from the Dungan or Tungan troops, Hui, i.e. ethnic Chinese, Muslims who formed the military backing of Ma Hu-shan, styled “Commander-in-Chief of the 36th Division of the Kuomintang” and brother-in-law of Ma Chung-ying.

There is truly nothing new under the sun (but did they blog about it?).  

Venus Crossing the Face of the Sun...

...is called a Transit of Venus. From Earth,  only Mercury and Venus may be seen crossing the face of the Sun. If one were able to stand on Jupiter, one could see Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, making transits ('trips'; 'voyages', 'crossings'), across the Sun, at certain points in time.

Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable celestial phenomena and occur in pairs, eight years apart, which are themselves separated by more than a century...

The last Transit of Venus was June 8, 2004. The previous two Transits were in 1874 and 1882...!

No Chance to say Goodbye

The terrible news I mentioned in my previous post came like a hideous slap to the face, although that kind of physical pain is far too inadequate to describe the sense of sudden, ghastly loss.

My dear, dear friend Rashed Omar Davison, died suddenly, during the first week of May. He was 34. He was dead and buried before I heard the news.

I will never forget him. I loved him.

The Trees So High

A tree stump in Central Park's North Wood, about 15 feet tall, puts forth bright green shoots (above, below).

Little did I know when taking these photos that something awful had happened and that last Sunday morning I would hear some terrible, terrible, heart-breaking news.

I cannot yet bring myself to write about what has happened -- I can barely believe it is true, but it is -- I suppose in time I will be able to say more. 

Irvin Kelly, Self, in Upper West Side Apple Store

Old Jokes Home

If a hipster falls in the forest...

you probably haven't heard it anyway.