Issa's Untidy Hut

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Piktor's Metamorphosis: Issa's Sunday Service #156

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This week's selection, by David Sancious and Tone, Piktor's Metamorphosis, looks to the title short story of Hermann Hesse's Pictor's Metamorphosis and Other Fantasies. (interested in the original story - a pdf may be found here). Not sure about the spelling variation, but I've got my theories.

Hesse was an author who frequently wrote in the great romantic German tradition. In particular, the marchen, which roughly translates as fairy or folk tale, was a favorite form, and he was greatly influenced by Novalis and E. T. A Hoffmann in this. Of course, dark and surreal elements also surfaced in his more mainstream novels, including Demain and Steppenwolf.

Today's band, David Sancious and Tone, has quite a history. The album from which this song comes, Transformation (The Speed of Love), has been long out of print and is one that I believe many folks would love to see reissued. David Sancious, keyboard and guitar player extraordinaire, first came to public attention with the initial iteration of Springsteen's E-Street band. His solo work, after leaving the band, was incredible. I saw him perform live in the late 70s and was completely blown away. He was an in demand player during jazz fusion's infancy and left his mark on some of the most seminal albums of the time.

Piktor's Metamorphosis is one of only a handful of instrumentals that have been featured on the Sunday Service. Sit back and relax ... it begins quietly, and slowly, and then ...

Finally, to give you an idea of the range of Sancious, first a live rendition of his famous keyboard composition, The Bridge, and next, a 2010 video of him playing 'straight' blues guitar:

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the butterfly I passed
two miles back
is ahead now

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 156 songs

Friday, February 1, 2013

Robert Bly: Old Man Rubbing His Eyes - Small Press Friday

Artwork by Allbert Richter

I feel as if, over the years, over the decades, my mind and spirit have grown with the words of Robert Bly. Sometimes, I didn't understand them, sometimes they infuriated me, sometimes there was transference.

What an odd, beautiful way reading is to find a friend.

Dating all the way back to 1974 (Unicorn Press), though my copy is a 1987 reprint (Ally Press), the words of Old Man Rubbing His Eyes speak to me as powerfully as any other Bly collection, perhaps most powerfully of all.

There is an obliqueness, a slight off-centered quality to Bly's magic, an almost constant worrying over details, juxtaposed, not always related, striving for something beyond reach, something not even, or perhaps ever, known.

Which explains his late in life attraction to the ghazel form.

But this work has something of an Old World flavor, distinctly Western, yet mysterious as Eastern European poetry, and as forcefully real. Let's listen, let's see:

Writing Again

Oval
faces crowding to the window!
I turn away,
disturbed—

When I write of moral things,
the clouds boil
blackly!
By day's end
a room of restless people,
lifting and putting down small things.

Well that is how I have spent this day.
And what good will it do me in the grave?

What good, indeed, in the grave; but it does do some good now, no?

A Cricket In The Wainscoting

The song of his is like a boat with black sails
Or a widow under a redwood tree, warning
passersby that the tree is about to fall.
Or a bell made of black tin in a Mexican village.
Or the hair in the ear of a hundred-year-old man.

We've all heard that cricket in the wainscoting with its many songs and their singular message; cricket in the wainscoting, cricket in the wainscoting.

Old Man Rubbing His Eyes is one of those poetry books that it is as impossible to describe as it is to excerpt. What is the point really? It is a book, and that book has a message. If forced to put it into words I might say -

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Pick it up and read it. Get it at the library (it's in 364, there must be one nearby you), buy it in an independent shop. It has something of the tincture of winter, the flavor of rich soil, the taste of ever-present death.

It is poetry.

Listen: there's an old man in the wainscoting.

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