“Yet see in the uncertain sky above your uncertain station– the sign she left you…”

Eastman Kodak Company, “How to make good movies…” (1938)

The many faces of defeat
Invite you home:
They offer you such silence
As has no truck with time.
The face of horrid purpose,
The train of circumstance
There, the door is closed upon;
They shall no more advance.
Yet see in the uncertain sky
Above your uncertain station–
The sign she left you, passing,
Persists in affirmation.

— Ray Smith, “The Sign”

Bad Time

To His Coy Mistress

Warren K. Leffler, “New York Scenes” (1969)

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may…

— Andrew Marvell

Love Machine

Quote

“the oxford companion to modern poetry”

the oxford companion to modern poetry

…the major part of his verse is published on his very sparsely visited WordPress blog.
He is still part of the Romantic school even though this mode has long been repudiated.
His work lumbers through the same recurring themes over and over again —
the failed (or failing) romance, the ever popular carpe diem trope and a kind of bitter melancholic nostalgia that this reviewer, for one, finds distasteful.
An early instructive example is “Astrophysics (Halley’s Poem)”.
Here the lover is unflatteringly compared to Halley’s Comet.
She left the poet in 1986 traveling at high rate of speed and the grandiose Galileo quotation would only gild the lily if there was a lily to gild.
His more recent work such as “And the operator said, ‘May I help you please?’” again finds the poet au fait with loving and losing.
Poems such as these have this reviewer wondering whether Tennyson’s famous aphorism is generally applicable.
Providentially his verse is interlarded with songs from the 1970s (the poet’s salad days) and occasionally (and regrettably) some hair metal classics.
We do not expect a volume of his collected works at this time but anticipate further elaboration of these leitmotifs on his blog.

— J.S.

I’m in love with the other woman

Two Women (ca. 1915)

‘For further I could say “This man’s untrue,”
And knew the patterns of his foul beguiling;
Heard where his plants in others’ orchards grew…

A Lover’s Complaint

The Other Woman

Morning Announcements

cf. Screen Magazine (2003)

BENEDICK:
Come, come, we are friends. Let’s have a
dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our
own hearts and our wives’ heels.

LEONATO:
We’ll have dancing afterward.

BENEDICK:
First, of my word! Therefore play, music.—
Prince, thou art sad. Get thee a wife, get thee a wife…

Much Ado About Nothing

Small Talk

Delia 53: Unhappy pen and ill accepted papers

cf. Handy (Jam) Organization, “American Look” (1958)

UNHAPPY pen! and ill accepted papers!
That intimate, in vain, my chaste desires:
My chaste desires, the ever-burning tapers,
Enkindled by her eyes’ celestial fires.
Celestial fires! and unrespecting powers,
That deign not view the glory of your might!
In humble lines, the work of careful hours,
The sacrifice I offer to her sight…

— Samuel Daniel, “Delia 53: Unhappy pen and ill accepted papers”

Cut The Cake

Baby Loves To Rock

cf. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1”, also called “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother” (1871) and Maxell advertisement (1980) (edited and rearranged collage)

Baby Loves to Rock

“Santayana wants me, Lord, I can’t go back there!”

“PHILOSOPHICAL” DIALOGUES BETWEEN SOCRATES (S) AND AN IMAGINARY INTERLOCUTOR (ii):

 

S: Wittgenstein at a restaurant or we can dine at home.

ii: Bertrand, can you Russell up some dinner for me?

S: Francis, Bacon sure smells great when it’s cooking doesn’t it?

ii: That hits Lamarck.

S: I Goethe go.

ii: Rousseau long!

 

S: Let’s play Heidegger seek!

ii: I Kant find you!

 

S: Hegel, what’s going on?

ii: We were supposed to go Schopenhauers ago!

S: Don’t put Descartes before the horse! We’ve Spinoza this many times before.

ii: John, Locke the front door and we’ll get going.

 

S: Foucault? I didn’t hear the phone ring.

ii: Hume are you referring to?

S: Camus come over to visit today?

ii: I’m Newton town so I’m not sure where to go.

S: I’ll Nietzsche in front of my house. Drive Pascal and then take the next left. Husserl can you get here?

ii: Is your house Nietzsche and clean?

S: Rousseau it is. I really Fichte this place up. It looks great. Kierkegaard-en I told you about with lots of flowers.

ii: If that’s Sartre than I’m a Hottentot.

 

S: Santayana wants me, Lord, I can’t go back there!

ii: Don’t Thoreau your life away!

Indiana Wants Me

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.

National Geographic, 1969

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny, nonny.

Much Ado About Nothing

ACT I, SCENE III. [Enter POLONIUS]

Business Screen Magazine, 1973

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man…

Hamlet


I Got Ants In My Pants (And I Want To Dance) (Remix) by James Brown

Chapter X. Wherein is related the crafty device Sancho adopted to enchant The Lady Dulcinea…

cf. TV Commercial

PART II, Chapter X. Wherein is related the crafty device Sancho adopted to enchant The Lady Dulcinea, and other incidents as ludicrous as they are true.

— Cervantes, Don Quixote (Tr. Ormsby)

Train Kept On Rollin by The Yardbirds

I sing the body electric

Educational Screen And AudioVisual Guide, 1959

I SING the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the
soul.

Leaves of Grass


Blow My Fuse by Kix

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

Bell Telephone Magazine, 1965

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

— Sonnet XXIX

I Think I Love You

“Sonata Allegro Form (a love story)”

Arthur S. Siegel, “…National music camp…” (1942)

Sonata Allegro Form (a love story)

I tried moving to the relative major
but there was no development — only the same theme
I tried adding a coda but all you said was
V-I

— J.S.

Goodbye To You

Please Mr. Postman

cf. Horace Bundy, Vermont Lawyer (1841)

Study our manuscripts, those myriads
Of letters, which have past twixt thee and me,
Thence write our annals, and in them will be
To all whom love’s subliming fire invades,
Rule and example found;
There, the faith of any ground
No schismatic will dare to wound,
That sees, how Love this grace to us affords,
To make, to keep, to use, to be these his records.

— John Donne, A Valediction of the Book (excerpt)
 

Please Mr. Postman by Carpenters

Who Goes with Fergus?

cf. London Stereoscopic Company, “Jeames at Home!” (ca. 1860-1870)

Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.

— W. B. Yeats, Who Goes with Fergus?
 

Return Of The Mack (C&J Extended Mix) by Mark Morrison

Memory

Business Screen magazine, 1973

The evening, blue, voluptuous, of June
Settled slowly on the beach with pulsating wings,
Like a sea-gull come to rest: far, far-off twinkled
Gold lights from the towers of a city and a passing ship.
The dark sea rolled its body at the end of the beach,
The warm soft beach which it was too tired to climb,
And we two walked together there
Arm in arm, having nothing in our souls but love.

— John Gould Fletcher, Memory: The Walk on the Beach (excerpt)
 

Julie, Do Ya Love Me by Bobby Sherman

Modern Love

Ladies’ Home Journal, 1948

And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up
For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
Divine by loving, and so goes on
Yawning and doting a whole summer long…

— Keats, Modern Love (excerpt)

Marionette

Enough; no more. ‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state,
Make thy self flutt’ring wings of thy fast flying
Thought, and fly forth unto my love, wheresoever she be:
Whether lying restless in heavy bed, or else
Sitting so cheerless at the cheerful board, or else
Playing alone careless on her heavenly virginals.
If in bed, tell her, that my eyes can take no rest:
If at board, tell her, that my mouth can eat no meat:
If at her virginals, tell her, I can hear no mirth.
Asked why? say: waking love suffereth no sleep:
Say that raging love doth appal the weak stomach:
Say, that lamenting love marreth the musical.

— Edmund Spenser, Iambicum Trimetrum (excerpt)

Don’t Rock the Jukebox

Astrophil and Stella 71: Bad Time

LIFE, 1970

Who will in fairest book of nature know
How virtue may best lodg’d in beauty be,
Let him but learn of love to read in thee,
Stella, those fair lines which true goodness show.
There shall he find all vices’ overthrow,
Not by rude force, but sweetest sovereignty
Of reason, from whose light those night-birds fly;
That inward sun in thine eyes shineth so.
And, not content to be perfection’s heir
Thyself, dost strive all minds that way to move,
Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair.
So while thy beauty draws thy heart to love,
As fast thy virtue bends that love to good:
But “Ah,” Desire still cries, “Give me some food!”

— Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 71: “Who will in fairest book of nature know”

“Bad Time” — Grand Funk