excerpt from Ottoman Beachcombers

I have been working on converting a travelogue I wrote in 1983 into an eBook. This is not simply a matter of conversion into xhtml from standard word processor format. An eBook should be more than simply an electronic version of a physical book.

In the case of my travelogue, Ottoman Beachcombers, this means embedding links into the text, to explicate places with public knowledge and images. It also means digitizing drawings from my notebooks, to embed in the story, as well as digitizing my wife's prodigious collection of 35mm slides, many from our travels in 1983, again to illustrate the text.

While I have not yet digitized the slides, the following excerpt will give you a taste of the many virtues of eBooks. Clicking on the link-colored text will take you to explanatory or illustrative internet resources. Of particular pleasure to me is the drawing I did of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Skopje, which you can see below. Compare that to a photo I found in Wikipedia of that very same gallery, the "Ottoman bath" link in my text, taken recently!

I hope you enjoy the short excerpt below as much as I have enjoyed researching the places and times described.

IV. SALONIKI, ALMOST

Gevgelija.

My intention was to go from Prizren to Skopje to Saloniki, a city 70 k's inside the Greek border. It would be a very long day unless my connections were good.

I woke at 5:41 to catch a 7:00 AM bus, and it was easily done. I reached Skopje by 10:00. However, there was no bus leaving for Saloniki till 2:30. I could get a direct bus at that time, but it would be four times as expensive as taking a bus (or train) to the border, walking across, and getting another bus in Greece. That's the way it works in these here parts. So I walked to the train station and found that the next train to the border was at 3:30. In spite of the hour delay, I decided on the train. I had been told it was more convenient. I checked my bags at the very modern Skopje train station (the old one had been shaken down in a 1961 earthquake), and set out to explore. A tourist map showed an art gallery, 300 year old mosque, and a caravanserai clustered fairly closely together and about a 20 minute walk from the train station. The district I was exploring also had a wonderful, large, open air market. It consisted of a number of picturesque winding alleys built into some Ottoman ruins, filled with an unending assortment of shops and goods. I especially noticed some antique jewelry shops with exceptionally fine old filigree work. In fact, I had never seen anything nicer, but then again, I'm not a regular at Sotheby's. I drank little glasses of tea in two tiny, wood panelled 'chai' shops as I wandered around the antique alleys.

Just outside the market was the caravanserai. This was a treasure! It was fully intact and preserved, but even better, each little room (about 60 in all) was filled with archaeological finds, exclusively stone and tile. There were Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman architectural fragments, gravestones, statues, and who knows what else. It was free and I was the only person there for the whole time I spent poking around and sketching. But don't imagine this was some kind of modern museum. Most of the rooms were unlighted, and nothing was labelled. It was really something between a museum and a warehouse, and I liked it like that.

Then I found the art gallery, not 15 minutes walk away. It was an extremely beautiful and well preserved Ottoman bath with 4 main rooms, discreetly plastered inside so that interesting structural and decorative brickwork remained exposed. It was a wonderful environment displaying a small assortment of modern Yugoslavian paintings.

My latest eBook, Ottoman Beachcomber

Ottoman Beachcomber, Travels in the Balkans and Turkey, 1983.

The world was a very different place in 1983, at least in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. In Ottoman Beachcomber you will go on travels in a simpler time to places innocent and charming. Join me as I outrun demons that are chasing me, dance in morning dew with unknown women, walk across borders in the dead of night, find my estranged wife in a 15th century Ottoman marketplace, and explore delightful villages far off the beaten trail.

Here's the cover of the book:

Forgive my nostalgia

While working on xhtml and css coding, and latest excursions in the Atternen Jewz Talen, my screen slideshow-background made me stop and sigh...

These, 3 of my favorite pics, of Nancy Naomi and her boys:

NM's graduation day from U. Penn, PhD, mid 80's, and *I* get to hold the diploma!

On Gert's patio, late 80's, with that, already, amazing guy, Josh.

On the grandstands behind our Victoria house, mid 90's: that incredibly cute munchkin with his mom.

 

2 new ebooks of my writings

I have been working with a cloud-software package called Vook, now in beta (and very nice to use) to produce two short ebooks (about 30 pages each).

The first is the opening scenes of The Atternen Jewz Talen, Era 1. The text is presented in both stevespell and normspell, stanza by stanza. Also, each stanza is followed by an embedded audio file, giving a reading of the stanza. If you hear it as you read along, I think you'll be amazed that the text is really quite accessible, in spite of appearances.

Here's the book's cover:

  

The second book is A Pilgrimmage Tu Jerusalem, Fragment of a letter from a pilgrim tu his rebbe. This is an amazing text I discovered many years ago. I won't say much about it here, except that it's a letter I found, and compared to my poetry, it's easy reading. Here's the cover image from the book:

Both books are also liberally, and dare I posit, attractively illustrated. I think they're very beautiful books to look at and to read. We are in the midst of a Gutenberg transition in the nature of books, and while I have heard many people bemoan the demise of the physical book -- its beauty, its art, its texture, its feel and smell -- and while I too am in love with physical books (having written, calligraphed, printed, bound, and conserved them over the years), the ebook is a great new adventure in books and reading. And I hope to keep my own ebooks at the forward edge of the art, rich in ideas, beauty and utility.

Contact me if you'd like an epub version, readable on iPads, Nooks, or with Calibre and other software packages on your computer. My email address is in the right margin of this blog, just below the "About Me" text.

Two psychological observations

These two pieces from my notebooks come nearly 35 years apart. One is from today, one from July, 1977.

1/26/12, 2 Shevat 5772, week of Bo
Four critical and fundamental errors in human analytical thinking:
1. The confusion of emotional attachment with ‘facticity’, truth; vis belief in God becomes dogma and supporting evidence (Bible) becomes incontrovertible; or, feelings of love can cause us to mis-see and misunderstand the person that is loved and the situation in which that love exists.
2. Confusion of emotional intensity for degree of certainty; vis the more comfort one derives from belief in God, the more certain one is of God’s existence; or, the more desperate our need for companionship, the more certain we may become that someone loves us.
3. The confusion that personal perspective is ‘true’ and co-equal with universal perspective; vis the certainty that whatever political beliefs one inclines towards, those beliefs are the correct (or better, CORRECT) way of understanding the situation.
4. The confusion that consciousness, observation, is an unmediated experience, and NOT an interpretive, filtered, and often profoundly limited or occulted experience; vis, the belief that what we see with our eyes is not merely real, but unimpeachable and unbiased ‘fact’.

Antidotes to ingest liberally:
1. facts all come with a point of view
2. observation and interpretation are co-equal
3. emotion is the carriage upon which all thought rides
4. there is no such thing as a single and pure emotion; all emotions resolve into other emotions

Trained philosophers and psychologists who reject or denigrate emotion and extol reason are equally subject to these four confusions. Emotion is a fact of consciousness, shaping and coloring it, whether it is obvious or not, whether it is intense or subtle, foregrounded or undertoned. It is there shaping, coloring, focusing, distorting, transforming, hiding the inputs of experience. Reason distinct from emotion is a conceptual illusion, a false ideal, a Newtonian distortion of the quantum mechanical nature of consciousness/reality. (I use ‘quantum mechanical’ here as a philosophical and psychological model of thought, and not merely as a way of studying matter and energy.)


7/3/77, Kayseri, Turkey
Symbolic thought:
Human consciousness is determined and constrained by density of thought. Density of thought means the number of conscious images and thoughts occurring in a given period. Even in highly exciting moments like the minutes before a race or curtain call, or the seconds before an auto-collision, there are only so many thoughts that consciously pass thru the mind. The actual number seems constrained by the normal activity of mental exertion The more one is able to concentrate, the more concentrated thoughts can be, ie, the denser the thoughts become. Like a thread or wire or beam that can hold so much tension [or transmit so much data - smb, 2012], so our consciousness can endure only so much stress. Beyond that limit it snaps, or blanks out; the system crashes. That limit can be extended by active practice of methods of concentration, however.

But this is the essential point: increased thought density does not work on a linear or algebraically continuous basis. At some point the many thoughts condense or merge into one or a few thoughts or images, like changing energy levels in an atom or molecule. One increases to a limit the number of thoughts per moment and then, remarkably, they condense into a symbol or archetype, and the working number of thoughts suddenly reduces [the ‘aha’ moment; epiphany] and the [potential] intensity of thought increases on an equivalent basis. This is a functional (phenomenological) description of the formation of symbols and symbolic thought.

Cover to my new ebook, The Atternen Jewz Talen, Era 1

And here's a brief summary:

This book contains the opening pages of the diaries of the Eternal Jew (aka the Wandering Jew). In the opening scene he describes Jerusalem in his youth, as it was in 30 CE. He then recounts his meeting with a revolutionary named Jesus. Realizing he has left out some critical information, he turns back to the origins of humanity, telling what he knows about those early days.

This is not the Eternal Jew you might have heard about from unreliable or hate-mongering sources. He is a wise and engaging fellow, proudly Jewish, with a biting wit, and a wry but mystical view of worldly events and his place in them.

The story is told in two versions. The original text is an altered English where words and ideas morph, one into another, using a strictly phonetic spelling. To help the reader, however, a translation into standard English follows each stanza. As a further help, each stanza is followed by an embedded reading, so one can listen to the story, and read along at the same time.

The story is further enriched by beautiful graphics, and selected scans taken directly from the author's notebooks. The final chapter of the book is a collection of useful source material and links for further study and exploration.

Copyright info:
Text Copyright © 2012 for Stephen M. Berer
Audio Copyright © 2012 for Stephen M. Berer
Colorized images Copyright © 2012 for Stephen M. Berer

Back to the Crossroads. An Istanbul Journal.

“...And I went to the crossroad, momma.
I looked east and west...”
– Robt. Johnson

We sank into a cloudbank. Couldn’t see a thing till we touched down. Mid afternoon and thick gray skies scowled like the grizzled faces of Turkish men. No reason to be intimidated. Got some bozuk para, literally “broken money”, Turkish for change, for our 100 lira bills, and bought 2 jetons each, one to enter the subway, one to transfer to the tramway. Thus we began to break the rust off our Turkish, lain dormant for years, and let ourselves get swept into the undertow of Istanbul.

Uncharacteristically, we were traveling heavy, a bag and a suitcase each. School. Writing. Work. The various boulders on our shoulders. We clambered onto the tram which was empty – not for long – taking up far more than our fair share of space. Now the visuals of Istanbul began to pour down on us, all the little shops, restaurants, vendors, narrow alleys, crisscrossing pedestrians packing the sidewalks and slithering through insane traffic.
The neon signs;
The half dressed women on posters and newspapers; fruit piled elegantly on vendor carts and at the entrance to fresh grocers;


the steaming buffets showing off orange lentil soup, cooked beans, various kinds of stuffed eggplant and zucchini (dolmas), lamb stews, roasted chicken, and, of course, the donar (gyro) grill sizzling and dripping its hot juices.
The textile district, revealing and concealing, looking west and looking east;
the jewelry district, bangles piled high, glinting gold and false gold;
the plumbing supply district, with toilets lining the streets, then faucets, then pipes and tools;
cables and electronics, candy, toys, borek; shop after little shop; flashing signs, electronic and neon; hand-painted signs hanging a-kilter from their mounts; placards and graffiti; all densely layered, as we coiled thru this city, often seedy, sometimes seeming to be put together, but just barely.
Then as we approached historic Istanbul, the ancient buildings began to appear;
walls of brick and stone rubble, sagging or disappearing into crumbling poured concrete structures;
gaping ruins; 
ornate 19th century apartments, 4 and 5 stories tall as if we were in Warsaw or Budapest;
mosques, built in consecutive layers of stone and brick, their wide domes plated in lead, their single minarets with steep conical tops.



And finally, finally, with the tram totally dolmastir (stuffed, like a dolma), we began to descend to the Sultanahmet district, tourist haven with all its stunning Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman landmarks: Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, Beyazit Mosque, covered bazaar, hippodrome, Basilica cistern
where, back in the 70's all the hippies would meet at the Pudding Shop and room at the Hotel Gungor, with its dorm-style rooms, now long gone after multiple facelifts have miraculously converted funky Sultanahmet into the destination of choice for the well-heeled and the chichi set.


Unconcerned with our musings and sensory overload, the tram descended further, all the way down to the Bosporus (the Bos) and the Golden Horn, to Eminonu station and then across the Galata Bridge. Just beyond the bridge we pushed, shoved and bumbled our way off the tram at Karakoy.

Now the hard part. Our apartment was half way up Yuksek Kaldirim, an incredibly steep, narrow road winding its way from the water up to the heights of Istiklal Caddesi (pronounced Jahdessee), passing the Galata Tower along the way. But surprise! Reinforcements. Our son Josh and his girlfriend Rachael met us at the tram stop, and helped us drag our millstone baggage up the hill, and then up the 5 stories of our walk-up apartment building, 19 steps per story, 95 steps in all. Breathless, and certain of us perhaps a wee bit cranky, we arrived at the dingy landing of our apartment, our home for the next 11 days.

This is at least the 7th time I’ve been to Istanbul. The first time was in 1970. I cruised in on a motorcycle that time, on my way to Afghanistan (don’t ask why; you don’t want to know). Well, that first night in Istanbul I met up with a very friendly Turk who offered me all kinds of inducements and imbibements, (“yu, me brutherz, yu, me frenz; yu sleep me bed, yu eat me food, yu smoke...”) which, some hours later, resulted in me fleeing his apartment in not the best of conditions, while he staggered around waving a gun. Careening down innumerable stairs, banging on doors till I found the exit, and out to the street, I was now lost in the back alleys of Sultanahmet, out of the frying pan into the fire, because now 3 thugs in the alley began to chase me, loping, then running as they closed in on me, finally impossibly finding my way to the hippodrome, the Hotel Gungor just 200 yards away. I jumped into a group of 4 old gomers who were coming out of a tea house, but that didn’t deter the 3 thugs, who grabbed me, flashed their badges, and shouted “gimme the money, Lebowski” oops, wrong channel, “gimme yu hashish; now!; gimme, gimme!” and they rifled thru my pants, wallet, shirt, hippy headscarf, but surprise, I wasn’t holding, so they knocked me down (didn’t take much, the condition I was in), waved their guns at me, and threatened, “we gonna gech yu; we gonna gech yu!” Four hours of sleep, and I fled Istanbul at sunrise on my BSA 250, tail between my legs, back to Europe. Oh blissful, oh joyous, oh thankful, I crossed the border and was met by leering Greek soldiers, who asked me where I was hiding my hashish. And me grinning right back – I wanted to kiss those guys I was so happy to be outa Turkey – I said, “Me?? You think I’m crazy.”

Really!

The whole, unexpurgated version of that story was recorded in the following days, as “The Live Adventures of Paranoid Pete.” Sadly that manuscript has been lost. Three years later I hitched across Europe, making it to Istanbul in November, 1973. I was on my way to India and around the world. I didn’t turn back that time.

Nancy has been here well over a dozen times, including living here for about 10 months in 1982-83 while she did research for her dissertation. I joined her for about 4 months of that time, glorious travels they were, recorded in my book Ottoman Beachcombings (which you can find, read, download for free at my website, http://www.shivvetee.com/reading_room/toc_reading_room.html)

Josh, our older son, has been to Istanbul a fair few times, and studied for a semester at Bogazici (Bo-ozzachee, Turkish for “Bosporus”) University here. But for an ill-starred trip with his researching mother when he was 3, this was Cal’s maiden voyage to Bos-town. Josh was joined by his girlfriend Rachael, herself no stranger here, along with Rachael’s parents, Vic and Geri, rookies.


Our days were spent wandering the streets and alleys, going to important architectural sites and museums, seeking out classic and exotic places to eat, shopping in the covered bazaar (the Kapili Carsisi, pronounced koppala charshissa), taking a ferry ride up the Bos and back.  (see my slideshow, https://picasaweb.google.com/109059116932561087569/IstanbulDecember2011)
I did a lot of writing, as did Cal. Josh and Nancy logged in a fair few hours working and meeting with professionals in their fields.

to be continued, maybe, 
exploring the following topics, maybe:
Ara Café, a drink in the Para with Hemmingway, breakfast at Savoy
Ferry trip and Ortakoy
latkes and nightly hanukiah lighting
Istiklal at night
Explorations: Rustepasha, Pantokrator, Kucuk Hagia Sophia, Sulimaniya
Museum Shows: Osmanli Bankasi - Osman Hamdi Bey; Istanbul Modern, Jewish Museum
sweets from carts, incl door of our apartment building, halka tatlisi (the people’s sweet; circle dessert)

Narrow places, the world, and Rumi

Here’s an interesting excerpt from Jalal u’din Rumi’s Mathnawi (Mesnavi), Nicholson translation, beginning of Book 3. While I might argue with Jally concerning his utter disdain, if not revulsion, for this world, this is a great analogy to open into his visions and open our eyes.

If anyone were to say to the embryo in the womb,
“Outside is a world exceedingly well-ordered,
A pleasant earth, broad and long,
Wherein are a hundred delights
And so many things to eat.
Mountains and seas and plains,
Fragrant orchards, gardens and sown fields.
A sky very lofty and full of light,
Sun and moonbeams and a hundred stars.
From the south-wind
And from the north-wind
And from the west-wind
The gardens have wedding-feasts and banquets.
Its marvels are beyond description:
Why art thou in tribulation in this darkness?
(Why) dost thou drink blood
On the gibbet of this narrow place (the womb)
In the midst of confinement and filth and pain?”

The embryo, in virtue of its present state,
Would be incredulous, and would turn away
From this message and would disbelieve it,
Saying, “This is absurd and is a deceit and delusion,”
Because the judgement of the blind has no imagination....

Just as in this world the elevated speak of that world
To the common folk, saying,
“This world is an exceedingly dark and narrow pit;
Outside is a world without scent or color.”
Naught entered into the ear of a single one of them
For desire is a barrier, huge and stout...
Debarred... it (the embryo) knows no breakfast but blood.

Atternen Jew, a fragment

I haven't been posting much poetry lately because, sadly, if I post it here, most poetry journals consider it "published" and won't accept it as a submission. I consider that kind of policy objectionable and archaic, since, except for the very few, and I do mean VERY few widely read personal poetry blogs (that's an oxymoron, eh?), being published in a peer-reviewed journal is a completely different thing than posting to a personal blog. For all you journal editors reading this post, you need to change your policies today!

Ecchh (to quote Gurdjieff).

Anyway, here's an excerpt from something I'm editing right now, both in stevespell and below that, in normspell!!

The setting is 70 CE, Jerusalem is burning, and our hero is trapped by the Roman siege.

So thaer I wer, a messij a the Lor

Fleeyen frum the bernen Howzez a God.

Like Addom, az he stumbel thru the gaets ov Aden

Benum with exxess ov pannek an reproech;

Not aenjelz but annammel hedded men

Garden the gaets bak tu my Aden.

I heerz that the saje Zakkiy eskapen,

Hid in a koffen. That touk a plan.

Me, in the frenzeeyen aro an flame,

I goez tu leep frum a parappet,

A killen mysellz an dun with it.

An thaer! a bernen seej towwer.

I thro myselv intu the krumblen hulk,

Kliem down its ladderz an leep az it kollaps.

I muss hav loukt like a flamen demen

Flyen owt ov a piller a fiyer.

Soeljerz skatter. Sinjd an soutee

Az a blaksmiths help, I stumbel an tumbel

Down the skorcht Jerrusallem hilz.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So there I were, a messenger of the Lord

Fleeing from the burning House of God.

Like Adam, as he stumbled thru the gates of Eden

Benumbed with excess of panic and reproach.

Not angels but animal headed men

Guarding the gates back to my Eden.

I heard that the sage Zakkai escaped,

Hid in a coffin. That took a plan.

Me, in the frenzy of arrow and flame,

I goes to leap from a parapet,

To kill myself and done with it.

And there! a burning siege tower.

I throw myself into the crumbling hulk,

Climb down its ladders and leap as it collapses.

I must have looked like a flaming demon

Flying out of a pillar a fire.

Soldiers scatter. Singed and sooty

As a blacksmiths helper, I stumble and tumble

Down the scorched Jerusalem hills.

Jacob on the road

Reading Zohar, Vayekhee 423

... Rav Yehuda said, “... Also, each of us is worthy that the Shekhinah will not depart from us.”...Rav Yosi said, “We have learned that a man should not rely on a miracle...” It is written that Ya’akov said, “If God will be with me,” referring to the union with the Shekhinah, “and will keep me in this way...”

I have always feared that I am alone.
Looking back, always at my side, You were there.
I am awlway feerz, I will be abbandon.
Loukeengz bak, side tu side, Yu ar thaer.

Last nite in the Hevvenlee Akkaddammee
I see, an the jujmenz ov this werl
Hav no vallewz. Thay ar shaddoez an illuezhen.
When I re-enter my Addomz
The shaddo taken solid form,
Illuezhen fule the empteeness a thot.
My eyes and my feelz, thay konvins me
The jujmenz ov this werlen
Ar the truth and the Werd.

My writing career, briefly

My writing career spans forty years. From one perspective I am developing a Jewish and kabbalistic vision of the world, the mind, and the soul. From another perspective, I am composing long narrative poems that explore the clash between the real and the ideal, in the lives of historical figures and people I have known. From yet a third perspective, I am developing a new, more versatile language in which the complexity and multi-dimensionality of quantum mechanics is carved into the lens of language itself.

Or let me put it this way: I have spent the last 40 years writing poetry that re-visions and re-models not just the world we live in, but the language with which we see, describe, and understand that world. In the process I have created a new grammar to represent the fundamental indeterminacies at the horizons of thought. This has been a slow process requiring much persistence, not only because of its own inherent difficulties, but because of the difficulties it creates for readers, who have a challenging enough job deciphering the experiments and non-linearities of modern and post-modern writing. The result, though a challenge to many readers, allows my work to achieve layered and faceted perspectives that a traditional use of language inherently prohibits.

It seems that I am almost alone in spearheading the development of a language that can reflect and express the nature of quantum mechanics, both in physics and in consciousness. But I am not entirely alone. In 1980 David Bohm, the renowned physicist, published his last book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order. It is about the need to develop a new language in response to quantum mechanics! In 1980 I was already six years into my project to recreate English.

Contra Eliot and Pound, 2

On August 15, 2008 I posted a response to some comments related to my poem Europa, Europa. I entitled that response "Contra Eliot and Pound", in which I condemned both authors, but especially Eliot for their anti-Semitism.  That article can be found at:

http://shivvetee.blogspot.com/2008/08/contra-eliot-and-pound.html

Of the many things I didn't mention in that article was the poem by Emanuel Litvinoff, To T. S. Eliot, in which he takes Eliot to task for his anti-Semitism. Litvinoff died in early October of this year, and the New York Times published an article, eulogizing him. However, the article primarily focused on his poem To T. S. Eliot, and his criticism of Eliot. Here's a link to the article, and following the link, a few noteworthy excerpts from it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/books/emanuel-litvinoff-poet-dies-at-96.html?_r=1

The article begins:

Emanuel Litvinoff, an English-born Jewish poet known for his scathing verse indictment of T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism — and for reading it before an audience that happened to include Eliot — died on Sept. 24 at his home in London. He was 96. ...

But it was for his poem “To T. S. Eliot” that he was best remembered. Written after World War II and widely anthologized, it was a response to work by Eliot that contained unapologetic anti-Semitic elements. One such poem, “Burbank With a Baedeker: Bleistein With a Cigar,”...

This poem (Burbank ...) was first published in 1920. Before World War II, Mr. Litvinoff, who otherwise admired Eliot’s work, was prepared to dismiss it as simply another link in the venerable chain of British literary anti-Semitism.

Eliot chose to reprint the poem in his anthology “Selected Poems,” published in 1948. That, in the post-Holocaust world, struck Mr. Litvinoff as inexcusable. ...

In early 1951, Mr. Litvinoff was invited to take part in an illustrious public poetry reading at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He brought the poem with him.

He had no idea, though, that just before he began reading it aloud, its subject would walk through the door. ...

By the time it was Mr. Litvinoff’s turn to read, he said afterward, he was keenly aware that the target of the corrosive lines he was about to utter was sitting in the audience. ...

When Mr. Litvinoff finished, as was widely reported, pandemonium ensued. The poet Stephen Spender stood up and denounced him for insulting Eliot, prompting others in the crowd to cry “Hear, hear” in assent. [And here I denounce Stephen Spender -- smb]

There was, however, a dissenting voice. Amid the tumult, a man in the back of the room was heard to mutter: “It’s a good poem. It’s a very good poem.”

The speaker was Thomas Stearns Eliot.

More on that public reading can be found by clicking the links in the excerpts above, at least one of which will take you here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot1VZD6b14U

Frederick Turner's "Let Be"

If you don’t know of the brilliant poetry and philosophy of Frederick Turner, let me say a brief word here. He is author of, among many books, two stunning epic poems, The New World, and Genesis, and a philosophical/theological tour de force, Natural Religion. He is one of the great thinkers of our age, and after the dour and accusing voices of Eliot and Pound have long since been washed away, Turner’s visionary work will continue to stand as a towering beacon of knowledge and light.

His blog is: http://frederickturnerpoet.com/

While I seem to default to philosophizing with a hammer (to steal a beautiful image) Fred enlightens with delicate veils moved and removed. For example:

Let Be

Weeding, I disturb a bee
That is bumbling in the sages,
But she has forgiven me,
Goes off to the saxifrages.

There I will just let her be,
And, since bee-ing is her being,
She will go on being free,
She-ing while I go on me-ing.

“Let it be” was how the king
In that strange old myth or story
Gave the bee its sweet and sting,
Set the heavens in their glory:

Was it permit or command?
Do we own, or was he letting,
Are we in or out of hand?
Was he making or just betting?

So he gave himself away,
Changed from he-ing into she-ing,
Where his “shall” became her “may”,
Time born out of unforeseeing.

If I weed around the sage,
Letting it achieve its flower,
Do I make a kind of cage?
Do I claim a godlike power?

But the weeds are weeding me,
Cells that are, in acting, dying;
Sage-flowers fertilize the bee,
Every selling is a buying.

So creation is a cross,
“Let” and “be” in intersection,
Where the gain is in the loss,
And the death’s the resurrection.

© Frederick Turner; posted here with permission by the author

Aternen Jew: reading 2 video, redone

On Sept 5 I posted my latest video montage of me reading from my poem The Atternen Jewz Talen. In this post I am embedding a revised version of the video, in which I used more professional video editing software to sharpen and clean up the effects.

About the video:

The visual component of the video is composed of classic art (which I have manipulated) to represent the story. It seems the use of historic art to tell, or retell a story, has rarely been done. Odd, eh? Jon Avnet, in The Uprising uses some important historical photos of the Warsaw Ghetto to construct some scenes. I'm sure other films have done the same, but I'm not privy. And then there's my favorite Simpsons episode, which integrates some impressionist paintings into Bart's deportation to France. Can you think of any other examples?

Here's the new version of The Atternen Jewz Talen, Reading 2, Take 2.

Is it possible? Turkey is moving towards war with Israel.

Yes, it is possible!! The gears are already in motion, and the Turkish government has made statements (especially concerning warships to Gaza) that will make Erdogan and his party look cowardly or foolish if they back down.

I sent the following letter to my former senator and representative (since we, of DC, are unrepresented in Congress):

I am writing to you, hoping you are already taking serious and comprehensive action to counter the rogue behavior that Turkey is pursuing vis a vis Israel. Some of the obvious markers of that behavior are:
1. Erdogan has aligned his nation with a terrorist organization, Hamas.
2. He has broken full relations with Israel.
3. He has publicly declared that he will send Turkish warships to confront the Israeli blockade of Gaza, in the guise of accompanying "aid" ships.
4. He is meeting with Egyptian officials, as Egypt itself is driven by public and internal government pressure towards conflict with Israel. The likely intent of Erdogan's meeting is for the sake of creating an axis of aggression against Israel from north and south, and likely, with full Iranian and Syrian support.

We must not look on in disbelief or dismay as Erdogan actively moves towards war with Israel. He must be countered by forceful and unambiguous American and NATO pressure. Steps need to be taken immediately, and not merely cautionary pronouncements. We must begin plans to strip Turkey of its place in NATO and replace it with viable alternatives; solicit the help of the Turkish military, whose authority will be greatly diminished by downgrading Turkey in NATO; begin publicly arranging sanctions on trade against Turkey; move Europe forward on closing the door to Turkey's membership in the European Union; and expose the Turkish public to the severe and irresponsible consequences of their government's policies, urging them to exert public pressure to turn those policies around. Naturally, as a Congressperson you are aware of other, and likely better steps the US can and must take to turn Turkey from a path that, if not countered forcefully, may well lead to war with Israel.

I am counting on you to act with prescience and authority to respond to this rogue direction Turkish policy has taken. In my eyes, this is the most serious foreign policy issue the US and Israel face.