Dover B****

Of course all great things need a little spoofing:

Here is Anthony Hecht's version:

The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life by Anthony Hecht

Saturday April 28, 2007
The Guardian

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc."
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come,
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d'Amour

November 21, 2004

APPRECIATION | ANTHONY HECHT

An Expert on Human Failings

By DAVID YEZZI

y turns stately or scathing, exquisite or stark, Anthony Hecht, who died last month at 81, wrote poems of indelible distinction. (click for the article)

Hecht also wrote:

LATE AFTERNOON: THE ONSLAUGHT OF LOVE

For William and Emily Maxwell

At this time of day
One could hear the caulking irons sound
Against the hulls in the dockyard.
Tar smoke rose between trees
And large oily patches floated on the water,
Undulating unevenly
In the purple sunlight
Like the surfaces of Florentine bronze.

At this time of day
Sounds carried clearly
Through hot silences of fading daylight.
The weedy fields lay drowned
In odors of creosote and salt.
Richer than double-colored taffeta,
Oil floated in the harbor,
Amoeboid, iridescent, limp.
It called to mind the slender limbs
Of Donatello's David.

It was lovely and she was in love.
They had taken a covered boat to one of the islands.
The city sounds were faint in the distance:
Rattling of carriages, tumult of voices,
Yelping of dogs on the decks of barges.

At this time of day
Sunlight empurpled the world.
The poplars darkened in ranks
Like imperial servants.
Water lapped and lisped
In its native and quiet tongue.
Oakum was in the air and the scent of grasses.
There would be fried smelts and cherries and cream.
Nothing designed by Italian artisans
Would match this evening's perfection.
The puddled oil was a miracle of colors.

from The Darkness & The Light

For more poems by Hecht, click
http://www.poemhunter.com/anthony-hecht/poems/

Dover Beach

A poem worth repeating and repeating:

Dover Beach

By Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

the Mormons

A Mormon (Mitt Romney) is a serious contender for President of the U.S. Just who are the Mormons and should we be concerned that one might become our leader?

Jesus with the native Mormons in America (click for concerned Christains view)

(Are those Mayan Temples? )












PBS produced the following show on Mormonism:
http://www.pbs.org/mormons/

Check out the TIMELINE (click)








Joseph Smith
from Wikipedia

Also,
The BBC has a good overview of Mormon beliefs:
God has a physical body, Jesus in America, etc. (click)


Another good start (critical of the PBS program) for examining Mormonism is:

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070514/howl

---

howl by Nicholas von Hoffman

Mormons, in a Flattering Light

[posted online on May 2, 2007]

Suddenly, there were The Mormons. Two hours of them in the past two nights on PBS primetime. Each night viewers were given a richly produced, gauzily photographed documentary in the Ken Burns style--lush music in the background and people in the foreground saying personal things.

Many of the things said sounded like testimonials of faith for the Church of Latter Day Saints. In our era of sensitivity and exposed, delicate nerves, a documentary about anyone's religion demands a lot of tiptoeing, especially if it is a religion whose beliefs are regarded by some as peculiar and many of whose members are rich, powerful and well connected.

Hence the gauze over the lens when it came to issues such as Mormons and women, Mormons and African-Americans, Mormons and free speech, Mormons and gays and Mormons and the Republican Party. It's not that the subjects were entirely avoided. They were addressed, but softened by soothing background music and four hours of very nice pictures.

This added up to a failure to convincingly address the questions about this organization and its adherents. You did not hear, for instance, a sharp description of Mormon ecclesiastic polity. Who are the apostles who govern the church? How are they selected? What are their powers? Where do their powers end--or, as one is led to wonder, do they claim and are they given something close to an absolute suzerainty over members in good standing?

Discussion of the founding of the LDS Church induces a condition of historical vertigo. True, one of the experts quoted declared, "If you want to think about the fertility of religion in the nineteenth century, think of mushroom soil--the richest stuff you can imagine, that will grow almost anything--and there you have what it was like to be a believer in the early nineteenth century."

Ignoring mycology, the great religious skeptic Mark Twain once called the Book of Mormon "chloroform in print." And Whitney Cross, a historian who studied the period of Joseph Smith's founding, shows that the Mormon faith was not part of the general nineteenth-century religious experience. Instead, it grew out of the social situation in northern New York State in the first half of the century, a time and place that also gave birth to parallel movements ranging from table-knocking, Shakerism, spiritualism, Sabbaterianism, prohibitionism, Seventh Day Adventism and so on.

Cross writes that Smith and his collaborators "crystallized and provided an apparently authoritative formulation for what had perhaps been from the beginning the most prominent legend in the region's folklore." All of this is hardly touched on in the documentary, leaving nonbelieving viewers with little to explain the birth of a religion based on the belief that 600 years before the Common Era, prophets from the Holy Land arrived in upstate New York.

Ignorance of a religion and its practitioners is risky business. And in the end, The Mormons shed little light on the questions that set Joseph Smith and his followers apart from other homegrown American religions. And yet there's plenty of evidence that over the years members of the LDS Church have made themselves a place in the political and cultural mainstream.

Marriner Eccles, a Republican Mormon who, before Keynes had invented Keynesian economics, advocated for deficit spending as a way to end the Great Depression, was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve Board by Franklin Roosevelt. George Romney, an outstanding automobile executive, was governor of non-Mormon Michigan and might have made it to the White House in 1972. His son Mitt, former governor of equally non-Mormon Massachusetts, may make it there yet. Mormon Democrat Harry Reid, from intensely non-Mormon Nevada, is Senate majority leader.

As a general rule, it pays to be leery of people who declare themselves saints. But obviously, some saints are as regular as the rest of us.

Hmmm...

JAMESON

Singing in the Rain

Silly Sonny Perdue, Governor of Georgia; he's praying to the wrong god for water. Forget Jehovah, who hangs out in the Jerusalem area, it's time to pray to Tlaloc, Rain God of the Americas.

Here's what Tlaloc can do:

Tlaloc is the Aztec god of rain, fertility, and water. He was greatly feared among the Aztecs, who drowned children to appease him. They believed that Tlaloc was responsible for both floods and droughts, and that he had been created by the other gods. He is commonly depicted as a goggle-eyed blue being with fangs. Although, people have had several ways of picturing this god, it was more often pictured as a man wearing a net of clouds, a crown of heron feathers, foam sandals and carrying rattles to make thunder.

It was believed he often used his lightning bolts to make the people sick. Legends says that he had four different jugs of water in his possession. When he emptied the first one, it brought life to plants, to Earth. The second would cause blight, the third brought on frost, and the fourth would bring total destruction.

Human sacrifices were often made in his honor, usually children. Before the victims were sacrificed, their tears were collected in a ceremonial bowl, to serve as an offering. Priests sometimes made children cry before the ritual sacrifice by tearing off their nails.^[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlaloc

After twenty months of drought, Georgia's in the market for a miracle.

Gov. Perdue: "GOD WE NEED YOU. WE NEED RAIN."

Sonny Purdue, Georgia's GOVERNOR, today became the state's chief pastor. He led a prayer for rain, right on the front lawn of the State House.

http://wdef.com/news/governor_sonny_perdue_prays_for_rain_in_georgia/11/2007

Tlaloc is getting downright pissed with all this Jehovah and Jesus worship. Better get the kids ready and the bowls for their tears, if we ever hope to quench our thirst again.

Praise Tlaloc.

Jameson

Norman Mailer 1923-2007

Some tributes to Norman Mailer:

1) NPR's marvelous Mailer commentary (click)

2) Arianna Huffington

Heaven Just Got A Lot More Interesting

Posted November 12, 2007 | 04:22 PM (EST)

3) From the Guardian:

Search Books

Norman Mailer, 1923-2007 The pugilist who wrote the story of America He fought in the second world war, stabbed one of his six wives in the neck and wrote some of the most acclaimed literature and journalism of the 20th century. As tributes flow for the man who led a new generation of writers, we chart an extraordinary and full-blooded life News: Norman Mailer dies at 84 Norman Mailer Obituary: Giant of American literature - novelist, journalist, film director and two-time Pulitzer prize-winner - dies, aged 84 Farewell to Norman Mailer, a sexist, homophobic reactionary Joan Smith characterises the late Norman Mailer as an arch-conservative who pulled off a stunning confidence trick

Farewell to a literary great, with chutzpah

Christopher Hitchens

4) Read the Village Voice on Mailer's achievements (click)

Photo by Christina Pabst Mailer in the early Voice: "Quickly: A Column for Slow Reade

Burr

He hosted Talleyrand during the Rein of Terror in France; but the favor was not returned when, after his duel with Alexander Hamilton, he sought refuge from the U.S. He was the only sitting Vice President charged with murder while still in office. Later, President Jefferson had him tried for treason. Some claimed he wanted to become the Emperor of Mexico, though his land dealings in Texas might well have been a road to power had he not died a year before the Texas fight for independence. There is no one quite as chameleon as Aaron Burr.

Today, I asked author Edward Larson to comment on Burr's role in the election of 1800. Without his remarkable manipulation, Jefferson never would have become President at all...



From the Atlanta History Center:

Elson Lecture: Edward J. Larson

Elson Lecture: Edward J. Larson
Lectures
November 11, 2007 1:00 PM–3:00 PM

A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, Americas First Presidential Campaign

Many people believe that the election of 2000 was the most controversial and extraordinary in American history. However, the struggle for the presidency at the dawn of the 19^th century was even more contentious, and much more significant, being pivotal to the future of the fledgling republic. In his newest book, acclaimed author Edward J. Larson tells the fascinating story behind the fierce election battle between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the first true campaign for the presidency and one that almost broke the back of our democracy. The election of 1800 ushered in the party system, drawing the lines of partisan battle that would reshape our politics, while also preserving the institution of democracy. Edward J. Larson is University Professor of History and holds the Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University and is the Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia. He is the recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History for his book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and Americas Continuing Debate over Science and Religion.

Tally-ho

Talleyrand

Portraits from Wikipedia


Womanizer, bribe-taker, statesman—the cynically brilliant Talleyrand inspired an equally colorful biographer.

by Benjamin Schwarz

Charm Offensive

He is one of history’s great survivors— and opportunists. Born into the high aristocracy, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838) was by 34 a worldly, womanizing bishop. With the overthrow of the ancien régime, he adjusted to the new realities and embraced the revolution, rising fast and high in the new order even though it meant his excommunication. He fled the Terror, first to England and then to America. But Citizen Talleyrand soon returned,

ingratiating himself with the Directoire and slithering into the remunerative post of foreign minister. He nicely timed his transfer of allegiance to Napoleon, who bade him to continue his brilliant, subtle conduct of French foreign relations. By 1808, having long since decided that Bonaparte had embarked on a ruinous course, Talleyrand was conniving with the emperor’s enemies Tsar Alexander and Metternich, Austria’s foreign-policy master. In 1814, with the armies that had fought Napoleon across the Continent at the gates of Paris, Talleyrand machinated to restore Bourbon rule. Reinstated as foreign minister (this time serving the dynasty the revolution had overthrown a quarter century earlier), he performed one of the great feats in the annals of dip-lomacy when, at the Congress of Vienna, he played perfectly his country’s exceedingly weak hand, nimbly exploiting the rifts in the coalition that had been ar-rayed against France and gaining for it an equal status among the great powers.

Eight years before his death, Talleyrand schemed to bring the Bourbons’ rivals, the Orleanists, to power. The new regime appointed him ambassador to Great Britain, a country that had expelled him as an agent of the revolution 36 years earlier. To those aghast at such a career, he could very well respond with one of the countless cynical bons mots attributed to him: “Treason is a matter of dates.”

Arguably a turncoat, possibly a degenerate (his last mistress was his niece by marriage and the daughter of a former lover), certainly a shameless flatterer and world-class bribe-taker, Talleyrand was also the most skillful and farsighted diplomat of his age and a man of arresting grace, wit, and style. No wonder that during his American sojourn he developed an intense friendship with that most glamorous, coolly intelligent, and winning of the Founders, Alexander Hamilton (years after his return to France, Talleyrand kept Hamilton’s portrait over his mantelpiece). Like Hamilton, he had a rare rapport with and understanding of women—he counted many of the most intelligent, attractive, and influential of them as his friends or lovers, though one suspects they often adored him despite themselves. A French noblewoman recalled her entirely chaste surrender to his beguilement:

One couldn’t help regretting that there were so many reasons for not thinking well of him, and after listening to him for an hour one was compelled to banish the recollection of everything one had heard against him.

Indeed, to men as well as women, to his intimates, his masters, and his diplomatic opponents, this smooth and delightful aristocrat highlighted the dark side of charm: He was as seductive as he was obviously dangerous.

Talleyrand’s ambiguity extends from his contemporary and personal reputation to his grand historical one. He consistently profited from his renegadism, but was he also following the dictates of France’s interests? Is there, as his (reluctant) admirer Henry Kissinger—a man whose own antennae have always been exquisitely attuned to the winning side—suggested in A World Restored, “a certain consistency in this behaviour, an effort to balance by his changes of side the excess of his contemporaries … a sincere attempt to remain in a position to moderate events”?

No surprise, then, that this protean figure has attracted (and often revolted) historians and biographers. Talleyrand himself wrote multiple volumes of delectable but tendentious (even by the low standards of the genre) Memoirs. Since they were published, 60 years after his death, French writers have regularly condemned—and less regularly elevated—his character and achievements. In 1870, Sainte-Beuve famously and eccentrically devoted his unrivaled literary talents to a lacerating indictment of Talleyrand. (Georges Lacour-Gayet’s biography, completed in the 1930s, is at four volumes the most exhaustive study; Jean Orieux’s mannered one, translated into baroque English in 1974, is probably the most reliable.) Until now, the last important Anglophone book was Talleyrand, an elegant masterpiece published in 1932 by Duff Cooper, the English diplomat, soldier, statesmen, bon viveur, and Francophile. This year, however, two British journalists—David Lawday, the former chief Paris and Washington correspondent for The Economist (and a contributor to this magazine), and Robin Harris, a historian, a Conservative Party official, and the ghostwriter of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs—each published a biography. Harris’s is the more authoritative and better written of the two, but, alas, it has been published only in the U.K. Neither it nor Lawday’s intelligent and breezy book, which has just been published here, can approach Cooper’s achievement, a book still in print. But both, drawing on more recent scholarship, correct a number of Cooper’s errors and misapprehensions.

Why, after a prolonged drought (despite a perpetual interest in war, power, sex, and Parisian salon life), this relative flood of Talleyrand titles? These books betray a nostalgic admiration for a diplomatic style long out of favor, a style encapsulated in Talleyrand’s admonition to his junior diplomats: “Above all, gentlemen, not too much zeal.” With foresight and not inconsiderable courage, Talleyrand opposed Napoleon’s ceaseless and destructive pursuit of la gloire, and instead urged a foreign policy of restraint and moderation. The emperor sought to transcend international politics by crushing his enemies; Talleyrand wanted to use them to help maintain the balance of power. Of course, all Talleyrand’s efforts to modulate Napoleon’s overweening ambition failed, and Talleyrand could be faulted for helping attach France in the first place to a force so inevitably dangerous. (Only after the punitive Peace of Pressburg, at the end of 1805, was Talleyrand convinced that Napoleon’s ambitions were unlimited and perilous. But, as the historian Paul Schroeder argues, “All efforts to find some point in Napoleon’s career at which he turned wrong or went too far are misguided. His whole character and career were fundamentally wrong; he always went too far.”) Nevertheless, Lawday rightly praises Talleyrand’s “epic struggle against Napoleon’s imperial overreach,” and he anachronistically tips his hand by adding, “If only our world’s lone superpower … were to lend him an ear.”

It’s safe to assume that Lawday isn’t limiting his opprobrium to the current administration (after all, the United States has described itself as the sole superpower since the early 1990s), and neither would the archpragmatist Tal­leyrand. He would have found discomfiting the tenor of much of the last hundred years of American diplomacy—including the Clinton administration’s hubristic proposition that America, “the indispensable nation,” should not conduct its foreign policy as if it were “simply … another great power,” and JFK’s stirring but rather hazardous notion that “to assure the survival and the success of liberty” throughout the globe, the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden.” Adept at adroit maneuvering and tactical fine-tuning on a grand scale rather than at laying out the sort of ambitious doctrines and grandiloquent rhetoric that have largely defined American foreign policy, Talleyrand subscribed to the idea that statecraft’s modest but arduous task is to enable one’s country to survive and prosper in the world as it exists—not to transform international relations and not to further the alleged cause of mankind. Ever since Woodrow Wilson, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans have zealously embraced the at-once earnest and breathtakingly extravagant foreign-policy style of his “New Diplomacy.” Here’s two cheers for Talleyrand’s long-despised Old Diplomacy—cool, even cynical; flexible, even inconsistent; restrained, even pedestrian.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/editors-choice

Haiku Friday

At the invitation of Ariana Huffington,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/,

following the Atlantic Magazine Idea,

I submitted the following Haiku on the American Idea: (17 syllables)

Deist Franklin loved
Science. With Tom
the idea was
Enlightenment.

Someone named Timothy wrote this:

Oval office prick
Devil spawn vice president
Money is their God

timothyi

Speaking of Art...

Added: From the Dec. 10, 2007 issue of the Nation:

Love By a Thousand Cuts
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071210/schwabsky/2

And here is the latest review from Slate of the stirring work of my former student and friend's art:

Great slides and commentary!

http://www.slate.com/id/2177536/fr/rss/

art: The big picture.

The Anti-Oprah

The violent, abject, sometimes disconcertingly tender art of Kara Walker.

By Mia Fineman
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007, at 7:25 AM ET

Click here to read a slide-show essay about Kara Walker.

Jack

.

.

.

Pablo

The greatest artist of the 20th Century? There's no (legitimate) denying it, Picasso.

Yes, he invented (with friend Braque) cubism. Yes, his Blue and Rose periods were revolutionary. Yes, his drawings and lithographs are superb.

Le guitariste by Pablo Picasso (1910)

His range of talent and creativity is unrivaled, though Matisse certainly reaches the same heights of beauty and color. Gertrude and Leo Stein were brilliant in their early recognition of the genius of both Picasso and Matisse.

Even in the realm of Surrealism, Picasso exceeded Dali in bringing us the landscapes of the unconscious, the realm of dreams.

Newsweek's Peter Plagens gives us a good overview of how Picasso's life and art made him the consummate artist of the 20th Century:


Here's Newsweek's evaluation:

AFP-Getty Images

The Master: Picasso at one of his exhibitions

THE ARTS

Picasso: No. 1 With a Palette

We all know who's the most celebrated artist of the century. The question is: why him?

By Peter Plagens | NEWSWEEK

Nov 5, 2007 Issue

Related:

• Pablo Picasso
• John Richardson

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By the mid-1920s, Pablo Picasso was one of the most celebrated men in Paris, and he liked people to know it. He rode around town in a chauffeur-driven Panhard. He relished greeting important visitors while wearing white silk pajamas, accompanied by a big Pyrenean sheepdog. He loved to throw dinner parties after an opening night at the opera. His wife, the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova, did the cooking, but the meals were served by a butler in white gloves. When an art collector named Christian Zervos visited him one day in his Paris studio, Picasso asked if he'd like to see another couple of rooms. To Zervos's surprise, the rooms contained not art but a Scrooge-McDuck-like pile of large-denomination French bank notes bundled in newspaper. "Everything Picasso did," writes John Richardson in "A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932," the new, penultimate volume of his four-part biography, "would be news."

Picasso stayed news for the rest of the 20th century and into this one. Which prompts the question: Why? Why has Picasso—with his endless variations on disjointed and unpretty cubism—become the quintessential modern artist? Why isn't it Henri Matisse, whose brightly colored fauvist pictures shocked viewers years before cubism came along, and who was still producing remarkable work on his deathbed in 1954? Why not Marcel Duchamp, the chess champ who cut right to the end-game of modern art with his "readymade" bottle rack way back in 1914 and set the standard in modern-art ballsiness by submitting a urinal to an important sculpture exhibition three years later? Or why not Salvador Dalí, with his astonishingly real-looking, groovily weird surrealist paintings, and a talent for publicity that makes Paris Hilton seem like a hermit? Picasso's pre-eminence is the result of a lot of things, including paying some dues, being in the right place at the right time, making avant-garde art sexy, finessing politics—and, of course, being a genius.

Not that he started out that way. In 1900, at age 19, Picasso did what revolutionary artists were supposed to do for career openers: he went to Paris and almost starved. It took him seven years before he'd painted "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," the world's most influential painting, and (along with his buddy Georges Braque) invented cubism, the style that turned art upside down. Being a Spaniard in Paris—an outsider—helped Picasso immensely. He was able to see through surface appearances in a way the natives could not. As his patron, Gertrude Stein, put it, in France "the houses move with the landscape, with the river, here they all agree together, it is not at all Spanish … Spaniards know there is no agreement, neither the landscape with the houses, neither the round with the cube … It was natural that a Spaniard should express this in the painting of the 20th century, the century where nothing is in agreement." Like no other artist, Picasso captured the twin impetuses of modern times—fracture and invention. Everything in "Painter and Model" (1928), for example, has been broken up and reassembled in a witty visual rebus. The face of the model sports a vertical row of three eyes—or two eyes and a mouth, depending. The artist, on the right, is a busy stick figure with one hilariously long arm holding his brush and a shorter arm—sticking out suggestively just below belt level—holding a genital-shaped palette. Sex sells, and it didn't hurt Picasso's career any, either.

He certainly had plenty of—shall we say material—to draw on. When we join Picasso at the beginning of Richardson's third volume, that artist is designing sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev's modern-dance extravaganza "Parade," and resisting pressure from his overbearing mother, Doña María, to marry. He tries mightily to land Olga, but she won't sleep with him until he marries her, so Picasso goes off to brothels. Olga finally gets her man—on her terms—in 1917, but it isn't long before Picasso chafes at much of the respectability Olga courted. In 1923, he sells "Demoiselles" to pay for a hideaway studio floor in the building where he and Olga live. In 1927, the 45-year-old, still-married artist spots 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter outside a Paris department store. She is, Richardson says, "the femme-enfant of his dreams: an adolescent blonde with piercing, cobalt blue eyes and a precociously voluptuous body—big breasts, sturdy thighs, well-cushioned knees, and buttocks like the Callipygian Venus." Picasso tells her, "You have an interesting face. I would like to do a portrait of you. I feel we are going to do great things together." Less than a week later, they're doing that you-know thing together. Picasso required Walter—as he did all his lovers—to read the Marquis de Sade. She also dutifully trailed behind Picasso, just out of Olga's sight, for nine years and bore him a daughter. Picasso didn't flaunt his copious couplings to the paparazzi of the day; in fact, he stayed home from the opening of his first museum retrospective, lest Olga see so many paintings of Maria-Thérèse and cause a scene. But he still seemed like a real stud, which, not surprisingly, made him much more of an influence on younger artists than his competitors.

No less tricky than juggling women, Picasso also managed to negotiate the politics of Europe during a century featuring two charnel-house world wars and a cold war fraught with the threat of nuclear annihilation. The huge monochrome "Guernica" (1937) is an antifascist masterpiece, turning the horror of a bombing raid on a civilian town into a brutally beautiful fugue of cubist forms, and semiabstracting a disemboweled horse into an unforgettable icon of suffering and injustice. In spite of the picture, Picasso managed to get himself treated with kid gloves by the Nazis in occupied Paris during World War II. (Richardson won't weigh in on the details of that gambit until volume four.) After the war, Picasso showily declared himself a communist—to which Dalí supposedly quipped, "Picasso is a communist; neither am I." From the mid-1950s on, Picasso stuck apolitically to the studio and to sunbathing.

However interesting his biography, Picasso's pre-eminence still derives mostly from his work. The man created fine art's equivalent of rock and roll and then put in seven decades producing some of modernism's greatest hits. It's as if Chuck Berry and Elvis were one person who made it to age 91. For doubters who think Picasso couldn't "really" draw, there are his early rose and blue periods, the neoclassical paintings of the 1920s and '30s, and tons of exquisitely drawn etchings and lithographs. Richardson even credits Picasso with originating the whole mode of welded sculpture (culminating with works such as the 1967 giant "baboon" public sculpture in Chicago). Compared to Picasso's output, Dalí's "hand-painted dream photographs" are Freudian indulgences, Duchamp's dada objects are sophomore frolics and Matisse's painting—which Matisse himself said he wanted to be "an armchair for the weary businessman"—is, well, an armchair. Picasso wasn't shy about touting his accomplishments, either. Quotation dictionaries are filled with his aphorisms ("Good artists copy, great artists steal," "Art is a lie that reveals the truth," etc.). Richardson quotes this bragging—but accurate—self-summation: "To put eyes between the legs, or sex organs on the face," said Picasso about the tricks of his trade. "To contradict. To show one eye full face and one in profile. Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them." By the time we leave Picasso at the end of "The Triumphant Years," he's been creating one "monumental" painting every single day for six weeks. And he's still got 40 years to go. If that isn't No. 1 with a bullet, we don't know what is.

© Newsweek, Inc.

Jung, Joyce, and the Hindu Temple

From Ireland's finest music, I went on Saturday to the new Hindu temple in Lilburn.

Cecile inspired the visit, which provided aesthetic and sacred awareness:

The Temple
Photo: Jameson










Later Saturday I Joined the Jung Society (click),




Emory Professor Donald Verene presented a talk on Jung and Joyce and the I Ching,

(see Essays in Honor of Donald Phillip Verene)

After the lecture and discussion, Verene, Cecile, a few friends and I relaxed at the James Joyce pub-cafe in Decatur.

The visit to the new Hindu Temple in Lilburn with Cecile Tougas
(click)

(see also the

Journal of Analytical Psychology)

Another Jameson view




Here's the NPR account of the Temple:

Gleaming Hindu Temple to Open in Atlanta Suburb

Kathy Lohr, NPR

The Hindu temple, or mandir, in Lilburn, Ga., is a traditional structure made of stone and marble, constructed in 18 months. It will be dedicated by the spiritual leader, Pramukh Swami Maharaj, on Aug. 26, 2007.

Enlarge

Kathy Lohr, NPR

The outside of the temple is Turkish limestone. The interior and carved pillars are made of Italian marble, and the foundation is built from Indian pink sandstone, symbolizing that the culture and roots of the temple are in India.

A Closer Look

• Height: 72 feet
  
• Land: 29 acres
  
• Domes (ghumat): 12 small, one large
  
• Spires (shikhars): 5, with red and white flags flying on top to represent the battle of good and evil
• Interior: 27,000 square feet
• Materials: 106,000 cubic feet of stone, including Turkish limestone, Italian marble and Indian pink sandstone

Enlarge

Kathy Lohr, NPR

This close-up of the outside railings shows the detailed carving. All of the stone was hand-carved in India and imported to the United States.

Enlarge

Kathy Lohr, NPR

Workers finish construction on the stairs and the entrance to the temple. When completed, it will be the largest in the United States.

All Things Considered, August 15, 2007 · The city of Lilburn, Ga., looks like an ordinary Atlanta suburb. Modest homes give way to commercial plazas with a barber shop, a sporting goods store and a large supermarket chain.

But down the road, rising out of a cloud of dust, is a spectacular vision — a gleaming white Hindu temple, one of the largest of its kind in the world.

Made of Turkish limestone, Italian marble and Indian pink sandstone, the temple rises 72 feet into the sky and looks a bit like the Taj Mahal, with its soft white spires and 13 domes.

The $19 million temple has been under construction for a year and a half, and this month it will be completed and dedicated in a ceremony expected to draw thousands of people from Georgia and across the U.S.

Lilburn is known for its good schools and affordable housing. Mayor Jack Bolton says that the Indian community approached the city about five years ago with plans to build the giant structure, a reflection of the city's changing demographics: The community is predominantly white, but the Hispanic and Indian populations are growing.

"Lilburn has become a very diverse community, very international. As community leaders, we've embraced that diversity, and so we welcome it and see it as a very positive sign," Bolton says.

The temple is an engineering marvel. No steel or metals have been used in the construction, and each piece, hand-carved and imported from India, was numbered, divided into sections and eventually set in place. The whole structure fits together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

The effort to build the temple involved hundreds of volunteers, among them Manish Patel, who gave up his job as an engineer to work as the site manager, administrator and secretary.

"When they come inside, we want them to feel the atmosphere," Patel says. "When they come out, they'll have some kind of message in their life."

Ritesh Desai, a volunteer in Atlanta with the global Hindu organization BAPS, hopes the temple will draw together an increasingly diverse community.

"Many of us have assimilated into the mainstream American culture. Yet the mainstream American culture does not know about India per se, or they might not have been to India. We're bringing a little bit of India to you," Desai says.

Related NPR Stories

• May 1, 2007
  Indian Buffet: A Centuries-Old Tradition

What a weekend plenitude.


Jack

It was All Good...

Last night, Dar and I enjoyed Ireland's best:

Sinead O'Connor and Damien Dempsey.

The latter, a strapping 32 year old with grand voice, belted out the song I've liked for years, one which Sinead sang backup voice for on her Collaborations disc,

It's All Good.




His newest CD, To Hell or Barbados, he signed for me, and we talked of Ireland, briefly. His love of music and of Ireland come through clearly on this new work.

Sinead O'Connor gave us a broad sample of her songs, rousing the crowd to a frenzy at times. We managed to get quite close, noting how, with her short hair, she looked like Elijah Wood-- Frodo Baggins fresh from Hobbit Dale. Amazing that such a petite and fragile lady could pierce the night with a voice powerful enough to make the full moon shimmer.



Today she performs at the VooDoo festival in City Park
New Orleans. Dar and Starr and I will ring in the new year 2008 there.


'Tis time now to meet Cecile and visit the new Hindu Temple.


Love Yourself Today...

Jameson

American Idea

Georgia O'Keeffe:
Red Canna, 1923
University of Arizona Art Museum








Atlantic Magazine is having a contest:

http://www.theatlantic.com/a/americanideacontest.mhtml

Yes, I wrote an essay: 200 words exactly.

In a word, the American Idea is enterprise. As our nation formed, enterprise meant adventure: settling a new world, facing new races, boldly going where none had gone before, as in the expedition of Lewis and Clark. This creative urge informed exploration of all sorts, culminating in an American on the Moon. It spilled over into the arts-- Jackson Pollock's drips, Georgia O'Keeffe's erotic flowers, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West and John Coltrane's sax. The American enterprise is, a la Shakespeare, of great pith and moment.

Enterprise, though, is a two-edged sword. Melville's Moby Dick has Ahab. For each instance of American innovation, revolution, zeal, or progress, there is aggression, intolerance, greed, or religious superstition. In the eyes of the world, the American idea is as likely to be arrogance or imperialism, as it is to be enlightened leadership or the beacon of Democracy.

The ultimate test of the American idea, our ideal, rests on inspiration. The deism of founders Franklin and Jefferson offers a guide for future enterprises. By serving a spirit of benevolence and of goodness, overcoming fears, we might meet the challenges of global conflict, global warming, and global health. As never before, our enterprises need wisdom.

Jameson

More Buddha

The Dalai Lama writes:

ajc.com > Opinion

Embrace world with compassion
Practice nonviolence, change lives for good

By The DALAI LAMA
Published on: 10/24/07

Brute force can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom. The thousands of people who marched in the cities of Eastern Europe in recent decades, the unwavering determination of the people in my homeland of Tibet and the recent demonstrations in Burma are powerful reminders of this truth. Freedom is the very source of creativity and human development. It is not enough, as communist systems assumed, to provide people food, shelter and clothing. If we have these things but lack the precious air of liberty to sustain our deeper nature, we remain only half human.

In the past, oppressed peoples often resorted to violence in their struggle to be free. But visionaries such as Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. have shown us that successful changes can be brought about nonviolently. I believe that, at the basic human level, most of us wish to be peaceful. Deep down, we desire constructive, fruitful growth and dislike destruction.

Vino Wong/Staff (ENLARGE)

The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is the spiritual leader of Tibet. Since 1959, he has been living in Dharamsala, in northern India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile.

Many people today agree that we need to reduce violence in our society. If we are truly serious about this, we must deal with the roots of violence, particularly those that exist within each of us. We need to embrace "inner disarmament," reducing our own emotions of suspicion, hatred and hostility toward our brothers and sisters.

Furthermore, we must re-examine how we relate to the very question of the use of violence in today's profoundly interconnected world. One may sometimes feel that one can solve a problem quickly with force, but such success is often achieved at the expense of the rights and welfare of others. One problem may have been solved, but the seed of another is planted, thus opening a new chapter in a cycle of violence and counterviolence.

From the Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia to the popular pro-democracy movement in the Philippines, the world has seen how a nonviolent approach can lead to positive political changes. But the genuine practice of nonviolence is still at an experimental stage. If this experiment succeeds, it can open the way to a far more peaceful world. We need to embrace a more realistic approach to dealing with human conflicts, an approach that is in tune with a new reality of heavy interdependence in which the old concepts of "we" and "they" are no longer relevant. The very idea of total victory for one's own side and the total defeat of one's enemy is untenable. In violent conflicts, the innocent are often the first casualties, as the war in Iraq and Sudan's Darfur crisis painfully remind us. Today, the only viable solution to human conflicts will come through dialogue and reconciliation based on the spirit of compromise.

Many truths, religions
Many of the problems we confront today are our own creation. I believe that one of the root causes of these man-made problems is the inability of humans to control their agitated minds and hearts — an area in which the teachings of the world's great religions have much to offer.

A scientist from Chile once told me that it is inappropriate for a scientist to be attached to his particular field of study, because that would undermine his objectivity. I am a Buddhist practitioner, but if I mix up my devotion for Buddhism with an attachment to it, my mind will be biased toward it. A biased mind never sees the complete picture, and any action that results will not be in tune with reality. If religious practitioners can heed this scientist's advice and refrain from being attached to their own faith traditions, it could prevent the growth of fundamentalism. It also could enable such followers to genuinely respect faith traditions other than their own. I often say that while one can adhere to the principle of "one truth, one religion" at the level of one's personal faith, we should embrace at the same time the principle of "many truths, many religions" in the context of wider society. I see no contradiction between these two.

I do not mean to suggest that religion is indispensable to a sound ethical way of life, or for that matter to genuine happiness. In the end, whether one is a believer or a nonbeliever, what matters is that one be a good, kind and a warmhearted person. A deep sense of caring for others, based on a profound sense of interconnection, is the essence of the teachings of all great religions of the world. In my travels, I always consider my foremost mission to be the promotion of basic human qualities of goodness — the need for and appreciation of the value of love, our natural capacity for compassion and the need for genuine fellow feeling. No matter how new the face or how different the dress and behavior, there is no significant division between us and other people.

Our basic oneness
When I first saw a photograph of Earth taken from outer space, it powerfully brought home to me how small and fragile the planet is and how petty our squabbles are. Amid our perceived differences, we tend to forget how the world's different religions, ideologies and political systems were meant to serve humans, not to destroy them. When I traveled to the former Soviet Union in the late 1970s, I encountered widespread paranoia, even among ordinary people who feared that the West hated them so much that it was ready to invade their country. Of course, I knew this was mere projection.

Today, more than ever, we need to make this fundamental recognition of the basic oneness of humanity the foundation of our perspective on the world and its challenges. From the dangerous rate of global warming to the widening gap between rich and poor, from the rise of global terrorism to regional conflicts, we need a fundamental shift in our attitudes and our consciousness — a wider, more holistic outlook.

As a society, we need to shift our basic attitude about how we educate our younger generation. Something is fundamentally lacking in our modern education when it comes to educating the human heart. As people begin to explore this important question, it is my hope that we will be able to redress the current imbalance between the development of our brains and the development of our hearts.

To promote greater compassion, we must pay special attention to the role of women. Given that mothers carry the fetus for months within their own bodies, from a biological point of view, women in general may possess greater sensitivity of heart and capacity for empathy. My first teacher of love and compassion was my own mother, who provided me with maximum love. By speaking of mothers' role in teaching compassion, I do not mean to reinforce in any way the traditional view that a woman's place is confined to the home. I believe that the time has come for women to take more active roles in all domains of human society, in an age in which education and the capacities of the mind, not physical strength, define leadership. This could help create a more equitable and compassionate society.

In general, I feel optimistic about the future. As late as the 1950s and '60s, people believed that war was an inevitable condition of mankind and that conflicts must be solved through the use of force. Today, despite ongoing conflicts and the threat of terrorism, most people are genuinely concerned about world peace, far less interested in propounding ideology and far more committed to coexistence.

Mother Nature's lessons
The rapid changes in our attitude toward the Earth are also a source of hope. Until recently, we thoughtlessly consumed its resources as if there were no end to them. Now not only individuals but also governments are seeking a new ecological order. I often joke that the moon and stars look beautiful, but if any of us tried to live on them, we would be miserable. This blue planet of ours is the most delightful habitat we know. Its life is our life, its future our future. Now Mother Nature is telling us to cooperate. In the face of such global problems as the greenhouse effect and the deterioration of the ozone layer, individual organizations and single nations are helpless. Our mother is teaching us a lesson in universal responsibility.

The 20th century became a century of bloodshed; despite its faltering start, the 21st century could become one of dialogue, one in which compassion, the seed of nonviolence, will be able to flourish. But good wishes are not enough. We must seriously address the urgent question of the proliferation of weapons and make worldwide efforts toward greater external disarmament.

Large human movements spring from individual human initiatives. If you feel that you cannot have much of an effect, the next person may also become discouraged, and a great opportunity will have been lost. On the other hand, each of us can inspire others simply by working to develop our own altruistic motivations — and engaging the world with a compassion-tempered heart and mind.

More on ajc.com

• Appreciative crowd greets Dalai Lama

East meets West

Today, I attended the Dalai Lama's address to Atlanta in Centennial Olympic Park. Thousands gathered in the fog to hear his words of wisdom. I managed to get fairly close to the Emory stage. Civil Rights hero and my Representative to Congress, John Lewis welcomed the Buddhist leader. Of course, the president of Emory where the Dalai Lama has become a visiting professor gave the introduction.

The Dalai Lama spoke for over an hour, emphasizing compassion, positive emotions, and the rising above our differences of religion and culture. We must disarm individually, if we hope to disarm on the global scale, he said, promoting a message of world peace along the lines of Martin Luther King, whom he praised, and Mahatma Gandhi.

Thousands of Atlantans applauded his message through the fog.

Message of Compassion (click)

From the AJC:

CRUSADERS MEET

Rich Addicks / AJC

The Dalai Lama reaches over to U.S. Rep. John Lewis as Lewis is introduced as a civil rights crusader during a talk at Centennial Olympic Park.

Wisdom of the Dalai Lama:
(from http://www.dalailama.com/)

Training the Mind

The first seven verses of the Eight Verses for Training the Mind deal with the practices associated with cultivating the method aspect of the path such as compassion, altruism, aspiration to attain buddhahood, and so on. The eighth verse deals with the practices that are directed toward cultivating the wisdom aspect of the path.

• Verse 1
• Verse 2
• Verse 3

These are the first three verses from the Eight Verses of Training the Mind, and commentary by His Holiness the Dalai Lama that was given on November 8, 1998 in Washington D.C.

With Empathy,


Jameson