Poem for Halloween Day: "The Cat and the Moon"

THE CAT AND THE MOON

THE CAT AND THE MOON

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

HE cat went here and there

And the moon spun round like a top,

And the nearest kin of the moon,

The creeping cat, looked up.

Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,

For, wander and wail as he would,

The pure cold light in the sky

Troubled his animal blood.

Minnaloushe runs in the grass

Lifting his delicate feet.

Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?

When two close kindred meet,

What better than call a dance?

Maybe the moon may learn,

Tired of that courtly fashion,

A new dance turn.

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

From moonlit place to place,

The sacred moon overhead

Has taken a new phase.

Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils

Will pass from change to change,

And that from round to crescent,

From crescent to round they range?

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

Alone, important and wise,

And lifts to the changing moon

His changing eyes.

Yeats's cat is creepy, roaming in the night and wailing to the moon, that changing globe we know also as luna, for lunacy. If the poem appeals to you on any level, please read it aloud, twice. The rhythm, including the changes in rhythm, make the scene more haunting.

Tomorrow I might add some slightly more academic blather about the poem, but for now, just read, listen, and . . . sleep well.

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Sentimental Autumn

What kind of tree and nut?















Blueberries? Galway Kinnell's blackberries?










































What's left of Tennessee pumpkin.





















Bambi as glutton?

Banjo Postcards from Michigan

Red Wheelbarrow re: Football

If anything at all depends upon a Red Wheelbarrow, we need to talk about awful football uniforms. In the NFL, I know everyone hates as much as I do the NASCAR jumble of colors and stripes and drunken shoulder patches on the Buffalo Bills at home. Or were they away? Who could tell?

The Bengals, this close to something snazzy, have the fashionotsomuch to put a white stripe down the sides of the black jerseys when every other trim color is orange or orange and black. What the hell is the white stripe supposed to connect to? After all, the command is, "Only connect." Years ago, when the Bengals put those fake tiger stripes on the helmets, I knew it would lead to no good. I knew the denouement would be a long downhill slide, an ordained, epic, downward gurgle in the bathtub drain, a black hole to taste and common sense.

In college ball, surely we’d all agree that Oregon’s damned dumb Ducks—oddly representing a progressive state and good team—have a lock on the worst-dressed title. Yesterday they donned fashionable black and wore no green, their principal color. Is it so extreme that it's camp? Do we care about camp?

On the subject of black, can it be true that there's no law against black socks? Black shoes demonstrate kinship with the cosmos, an appropriate sense of tradition. Black socks indicate a black hole in IQ.

I wonder, too, who is paying for all the Duck uniforms. Can it be that alums are giving their money for polka dots on shoulder pads instead of financial aid or faculty salaries? Or white socks?

In addition to their ducklings, the Ducks are followed in offensiveness by Texas Tech, the Red Raiders who wear nothing but black except for an anorexic red stripe here and there. Another sell-out, and I don't mean season tickets.

Please assure me that Tennessee’s Volunteers will never again wear their pumpkin orange jerseys and pumpkin orange pants all at once, at home, or anywhere. Just a little pumpkin goes a long way.

Should I explore Division 3 in this context? Do I dare to eat a peach? Maybe Oregon's next helmet color will be peach.

In case I don’t get back this week (papers to grade), Happy Halloween, the dumbest holiday on the planet. Anyone who likes it can bite my pumpkin.

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PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: MOVIE REVIEW

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: GPA: 2.9

I’m not a fan of horror movies, but the appealing story about the making of this movie, plus the lure of popcorn, drew me to it. Apparently it cost only $15,000 to film Paranormal Activity, and with two little-known actors, it was shot at the director’s house in a week. Yet it appears to be a significant box office success.

As for technique, Paranormal Activity should almost be obliged to footnote Blair Witch Project and the handheld camera, the supposedly homemade movie, the accidental horror film. Ditto a debt to Cloverfield. I was more impressed by both of those earlier trials with the premise of accidental movie-making.

But Paranormal Activity brings a couple of new twists and turns, and I especially applaud the absence of disembowelments and other Wish I Were in Med School slicing and dicing, as well as the au courant requirement of vomit as a principal means of character revelation.

In a similar vein, the characters look like real people rather than Hollywood mannequins—the six-pack and his stick girl. The rising action takes a little too long, but that’s partly because we’re seeing the proverbial young couple next door. We need to know and like them even as their flaws unfold and they become less proverbial.

Paranormal Activity did scare me to yelping a couple of times, and I guess that’s important in a horror movie. Maybe it’s downright remarkable without innards and regurgitation.

Still, I learned little, except for the technique, which promises more than it delivers in terms of insight into Everywoman and her man. I didn’t find important human conflicts illuminated, and in the end, I didn’t care as much about the characters as I did in the more realistic first half-hour.

But I’m glad that a truly “little” and superficially interesting movie is doing well. The popcorn was good, I wouldn’t have done anything more constructive in that hour and a half, and a week later that young couple is visually clear in my memory, if not especially important to my heart or psyche.

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BACH, POETRY: BANALITIES FROM THE PROVINCES

I don’t know enough about classical music to declare much about it, but the power of all music intrigues me. So from my cultural outpost in the Midwest, I wonder: if Bach were composing today, would he be considered a wildly experimental guy—and at the same time a subtle, complicated genius? He feels remarkably modern to me.

I’ve heard that his method lies partly in the fact of his being confined to the harpsichord, before the booming pianoforte and its sustaining pedals were developed. Therefore, more notes are required, and variety arises from unexpected movements among the notes, rather than the big changes in volume and passion we know in Beethoven and the Romantics.

Whatever the case, I feel as if I’m hearing things from Bach that are as unpredictable as I would expect from Prokofiev or some avant-garde, starving composer who was writing just yesterday in Greenwich Village. But I like Bach better. I don’t enjoy him as much as some others—for example, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, or the rollicking Johann Strauss. I suppose that means I prefer Romantic boom-boom; I need a bigger spoon to stir my soup.

My limitations concerning classical music (and the visual arts) remind me that a lot of people feel the same kind of unease about contemporary poetry. Usually lacking rhyme and regular meter, and with leaps of thought that might be more demanding than, say, nineteenth century poetry, contemporary verse causes many readers to feel adrift, baffled, bamboozled, alienated. (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, and Emily Dickinson are often considered more modern than nineteenth-century because of the complexities of their perceptions and language, but getting into that now might lead to an eternal digression).

But I think what I’m hearing in Bach, without being alienated by it, is an understated complexity of the unexpected. To my unschooled ear and soul, it's rarely or never emotionally stirring, but it makes my brain shift around in my skull. I cannot listen to Bach, or any classical music, as a soporific or as background—it’s too interesting; it keeps me awake. But the written word, spoken aloud? Puts me right to sleep.

Poem of the Day: "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams

The Red Wheelbarrow (1923)

by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

At last count, 247,822,409 American students have been driven crazy by the stature of this poem in the literary world. Many of them, in good faith, have offered that it celebrates farm life. While I don't find that wrong, I don't see why so many American teens don't think it's enough for a poem to say, "Look." Or, more elaborately: see? These ordinary objects, these items and creatures are in the world. What do you see in the world? How might it matter? Can rain or light transform them? Can you?

I recently assigned my college freshmen a descriptive sketch in prose, explaining that they need to be aware of their obligation simply to see--to witness--all they can of what's around them before they start trying highfalutin stuff like comparing and contrasting or defining or classifying. One more time, youth was baffled. "What are we supposed to see?" Or, "My world's boring." Or, "The picture frame on my desk is brown. So what?"

They don't seem to agree, or care about, Williams's and the Imagists' notion of "no ideas but in things," though it surely makes some important sense, no matter how limited or limiting it might seem compared to fancy endeavors like transcendentalism or ethics. If you don't perceive the material world, who cares whether you think you've transcended it or moralized about it effectively?

On Bill Moyers' Journal today, guest and journalist Mark Danner said that countries like the U.S. repeatedly become entangled in wars and other messes because they don't realize how much they don't know about Country X until they're already embroiled in a situation from which it would be embarrassing if not impossible to extricate oneself "honorably." And of course, embarrassment and dishonor are more critical than death. Once troops are physically there, palpably in the realities of a place, its people and terrain and objects and situations seize policy makers by the throat; new strategies have to be implemented--despite the inconvenience of moving corpses out of the way.

I don't see how it's far-fetched to say this amounts to a failure of imagination, which in turn is a failure to see, touch, hear, and smell what was there all along, but was inconvenient and inconsistent with preconceived notions--what we thought was there, what we needed to be there.

Is it really absurd to posit that this begins with noticing red wheelbarrows? And caves, really, really deep caves where people can hide? Wheelbarrow, cave, wheelbarrow, cave . . . . That stone wall and the path to it--are they glazed prettily with rainwater or merely slick enough to slip on?

There might be ideas in addition to things, but if ideas ignore things, details, as the ideas are getting born, I have a strong opinion on how much they're worth.

(By the way, I found Wikipedia's information on "The Red Wheelbarrow" interesting and helpful. It's brief and I have an eyebrow raised about some of it, but it's a beginning).

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