The Glass Bead Game: Issa's Sunday Service, #96

Today's featured song is only the second instrumental so far in this ongoing literature meets rock and roll project - the first actually did have a few words, but was largely instrumental.  Today's selection is courtesy of The Thievery Corporation.

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, the inspiration for today's selection, is one of my favorite novels by one of my favorite authors.  Largely overlooked by fans and readers in general, it is certainly one of the finest novels of the 20th century, well deserving of the Nobel Prize that it garnered for its author.  It reprises all the great themes of Hesse's career, from duality through transcendence.  There are bits of all of his great books here, if in slightly disguised forms: Siddharta, Demian, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Journey to the East, as well as many of his early student novels.

Narrated by a fictional biographer, with introductory and supplementary material, the larger part of the book passes for a partial biography of Joseph Knecht, a great Masters of the Bead Game or Magister Ludi.   Set in the 25th century, it relates the story of the intellectual province of Castalia, where the students all learn the glass bead game, a sort of interdisciplinary exercise of connections among all the great fields (literature, music, science etc.).

The folly of such an exercise, removed as it is from "the real world," slowly and steadily becomes apparent, no matter how attractive the concept.  And attractive it is; witness the proliferation of exercises online attempting to recreate its chief philosophical premise (& that's just a handful).

Some have gone so far as to suggest that the internet itself is the glass bead game manifest.  We won't go down that road but we will take some time to chill to the groove of The Thievery Corporation, a dance-acid jazz-trip hop band, that knows the ins and outs of the outs and ins.  I just learned of them last week and I'm already listening to third of four albums I could rustle up from the library and, well, they make me relax and smile.

So there you go.   The cut may have nothing more to do with The Glass Bead Game than a shared title, but if it made me mellow, well there will be no argument from me.

Sticking with the theme of the unusual, here is a composition performed by Jacques Burtin performed on the kora, entitled "La Lumiere Matin (Morning Light)," a piece the composer describes as a prelude to The Glass Bead Game.








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This week's featured poems come from Lilliput Review, #102.   It is a triad of pieces that all appeared together on a single page, the stitch just tight enough to pull us through ...

Our hearts are empty for the Beloved,
and streetlamps are endless in the night.

W. T. Ranney

Dangerous kisses
pull us closer to heaven
Nowhere left to go

Kate Isaacson

The Goddess's Sweethearts

All those guys
holding hands with Kali are
already rotting away

Tom Riley

even the heavenly gods
crowd 'round...
plum blossoms

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 96 songs
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Don't Stand So Close to Me: Issa's Sunday Service, #74

Nabokov via www.hrono.info

Running up as we are on Halloween, it's creep week on the Sunday Service.  This week's selection comes from The Police, is one of the more affected tunes on the Jukebox: "Don't Stand So Close to Me." A tip of the hat to Humbert Humbert:

It's no use, he sees her
He starts to shake and cough
Just like the old man in
That book by Nabakov

Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me

The Nabokov reference has the right feel considering the teacher's "dilemma:" 

Temptation, frustration
So bad it makes him cry
Wet bus stop, she's waiting
His car is warm and dry

Though perhaps not as explicit as in the totally repulsive "Every Breath You Take," this song broke ground by talking about something that is in the headlines regularly.  These songs, put to catchy pop melodies, run counter expectation, to the point that some have used the stalker tune "Every Breath" for their wedding.  Mr. Sumner is perhaps to be congratulated for expanding the narrative boundaries of pop (as a former teacher, he draws from some sort of experience), yet still, to me, they have more than a bit of an exploitative feel (the accompanying background vocal to the chorus, with Sting accompanying himself, has got ambivalence all over of it).

Of course, I'm talking about rock being exploitative as if this was some sort of news. 

Well, if you're going to sing about creeps, maybe this is the way to go:

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Next Tuesday, I will be talking to a group of lifelong learners about haiku.   Sketching in the background, I'll be talking a bit about Japanese history, culture and concepts, such as wabi-sabi.  Here's a great illustration of that very concept by the great upper New York state poet, W. T. Ranney, from Lilliput Review #110, April 2000:

Old men

in stiff white shirts

moving from room to room,

placing a hand

on a worn spot.

W. T. Ranney

in lightning's flash
faces in a row...
old men

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue 

best,
Don

PS  Get 2 free issues     Get 2 more free issues     Lillie poem archive

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 74 songs
Hear all 74 at once on the the LitRock Jukebox

Subscribe to Lilliput Review

Lilliput Review in Your Pocket Day

Art by the incomparable Wayne Hogan

Poets. org, from the Academy of American Poets, has some interesting ideas, actually 30 of them, for celebrating National Poetry month. Two are of particular interest, I think. The first is something that Lillie has been promoting, by its very nature, since its inception: Poem in Your Pocket Day. And so AAP is advocating for April 17th to be Poem in Your Pocket Day and, if your at a loss of which poem to choose (there is a nice selection at the Poem in Your Pocket page that you can actually print out to fit in your pocket), why not choose an issue of Lilliput Review, which fits neatly in the pocket and, on average, has around 25 to 30 poems per issue.


Shameless self-promotion or national celebration? You decide.

It's always a pleasure to pass along new information concerning the work of Albert Huffstickler and there are two bits. First, at her librarian blog Speed of Light, Keddy Ann Outlaw has published a lovely collage entitled Retablo of Huff, along with the beautiful Huff poem entitled "Nostrum." This Huff post is a beauty, folded in as it is into an ongoing library project dealing with things Web 2.0.

In addition, on the Lillie homepage there are two new mp3 related Huff items. One is to a link at indieonestop.com to Huff reading "Intimacy", the other of Huff reading a poem entitled "Education". Hope you enjoy them.

There are two fine short poems worth a peak in the April 14th issue of the New Yorker : Michael Longley's powerfully ambivalent "In the New York Public Library" and Emily Moore's raucous "Auld Lang Syne." Great work if you can get it ... where to send can be found here.

This week's Lilliput poems come from issue #98, July 1998, pictured above. Let's start out with one of M. Kettner's always fresh and startling highkus:

#739

high
toenails with yellow polish
only buoy on the lake.

M. Kettner

What is Silence that I Fear It

When sound darkens into silence
I am drawn inward,
until trapped
as if between two mirrors.

Bruce Miller

Silence
is the haunting
voice of father,

what he didn't say,
how I keep hearing it.

Louis McKee

And this little nugget of wisdom, which perhaps might just as soon have seen its subjects switch places; though that most certainly would have been a different poem, different, too, is good:

Apologies to Mr. Shelton

Meditation will get you through
times of no bebop
better than bebop
will get you through
times of no meditation

W. T. Ranney

Until next week,
Don