New Blues Dialog, Take 2

Where's the Dialog, You Ask?
The hungry Caterpillars are crunching tons of dirt in their one-jawed big steel bucket mouths--they started this morning at 7 am, the earliest they've ever started--they didn't finish until 4:45 pm yesterday, the latest they've ever worked.

The noise they make brings blues up in my head. A new blues. A modern blues. And I'm a modernist alright. "Ralph's New Blues" led me into the Bop Blues from out of the Delta Blues and the Chicago Electric Blues--"Ralph's New Blues" appeared on the Modern Jazz Quartets's great album Concorde, on Prestige, 1955. I first heard it at my brother's house. My brother had bought it.

With whom am I having a dialog?

Dia=day/log=logos. Isn't this post a dialog? Isn't blogging dialogging? Even if your dialog is simply with yourself--or the back portions of your mind--or perhaps with your barbarian ancestors!

Like: "So why are you listening to Liszt this morning?" "God-damn it's cold this morning." "What's that got to do with why you're listening to Liszt?" "Make a list: that's a good one, 'Listening to Liszt.' Let's see, what kind of novel does that inspire: Listening to Liszt--sounds like something 'heartbreaking,' something Danielle Steele might write. I gag. I'm listening to the cliche-riddled Hungarian Rhapsodies. They are babe-grabbers, I'm telling you. Liszt was a babe-grabber deluxe. Really great individualists men become babe grabbers. The magnitude of their individual fame and their great shaggy showmanship causes women to want them to possess them. From reading C. Wright Mills and Thorstein Veblen, especially Veblen, I now see how women have been OWNED by men since time began--even the legendary women, like the Lesbian Aphrodite, were owned by men--ah, Dianna--and did I mention that there is a great sexy statue of Dianna the Huntress at the entrance to Chapultepec Park in Mexico City? As you come into the park going down the Reforma from downtown, there it is; and what a babe the sculptor has made of the Lesbian Dianna--she hunted men--her enslavers. And that amused me to think, yes, that even the women of the Power Elite are slaves to their men. The Power Elite have their own WOMEN--the daughters and wives or mistresses of the Big Daddy Power Elite families. Like Warren Buffett's wife--she's his slave--and is happy being his slave. Like John 'Nutjob' McCain's wife. Like Jackie O was a slave to JFK--and boy, when she got released from that slavery after his assassination, she went hog wild. As the world's richest woman suddenly, she had a ball playing the field, fucking her way eventually to the majestic stance of kicking Maria Callas's old-wearing-out ass off Ari Onassis's yacht--then bedding down with greasy, sleazy, bad-breath Aristotle Onassis, willingly becoming his slave--for what?--for power, for wealth, for security, all that women really want from their patron men. There's no proof that Ari was better in bed than JFK. JFK did knock Jackie O up at least three times we know of. Jackie O certainly could have had an abortion or two in her life. I wonder about Hillary, too. Wonder if she's ever had an abortion? Chelsea? Certainly Billy Jeff Clinton has paid for a couple of abortions I'll bet you. I readily admit that in the free-sex heydays of the 1970s in this great land, I contributed to many abortions--they cost $250 at a TLC clinic in those days. The women thought highly of you if you went to the TLC clinics with them as they had their abortions. Ooooooooooooh, evil. I'm a murderer; an accomplice to murder at least. It's OK when these fetuses turn 18 to send them off perhaps to their deaths and certainly to mind-boggling traumatic experiences in the armed forces. That's okay. It's okay to kill them after they're ripe, not yet mature, but ripe physically. We assign these poor powerless birds the legendary title of "heroes" and we love our heroes and turn them into legends, which is all they are, too, legends, which are mostly lies. History is full of lies based on legends. You never read much about George 'I Cannot Tell a Lie' Washington being a bigot, a bastard, a liar--oh no--like we know now George's chopping down his father's cherry tree and then admitting he did it so bravely and honestly is a legend--no truth to it at all. In fact, George Washington was a fop of a phony aristocrat--the son of a Virginia farmer and not a planter, like Old Tom Jefferson. White aristocrats made legends in our history. George Washington was a bigot; a slaveholder; using blacks in the Revolutionary Army--'cause you know honkeys could force blacks to serve their military service for them--and did you know that over 100,000 (Henrietta Buckmaster (that's her name--no pun) says over 200,000 in her book Freedom Bound) freedmen blacks served in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, signing up because great white fathers like George Washington, Tom Jefferson, Benny Franklin promised them their freedom and property and shit if they'd serve--after these wars, these old white geezers forgot all about these promises. In fact, the white royalty (the Power Elite) put a lot of these blacks back into slavery--trick bagged them! And the Power Elite are great trickbaggers. 'Hey, Rocky,' said Bullwinkle Moose to Rocket J. Squirrel, 'Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.' He reaches into a huge tophat and instead of a rabbit pulls out a roaring lion. 'I must'a got the wrong hat,' he confesses to Rocket J.

"Yep, these birds have to be magicians, but they're magicians like Bullwinkle Moose--with hats and sleeves full of tricks that they don't know they have--they just haphazardly pull 'em out of the hat--if it's a dove or a rabbit, fine, but if it's a lion, it's gonna eat the dove, the rabbit, and hopefully the magician, too.

"George Washington, in his favor, did warn us, same as old Ike Eisenhower did later, about giving the military too much power--the military is a major source of Power Elite players in this country. High-level military officers (Generals of the Army; Admirals of the Navy; Generals of the Air Force, Commandants of the Marines) are a big part of the Power Elite. George Washington got his key to the Power Elite's executive outhouse through the military. Jefferson got it through landholding and slave labor."
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Meet Henrietta Buckmaster--Unfortunately It's Her 1983 Obituary in the NYTimes

Henrietta Buckmaster, a popular novelist, historian and editor best known for her portrayal of the underground railroad and the abolition movement in the novel ''Let My People Go,'' died Tuesday after a short illness at a convalescent home in Chestnut Hill, Mass. She was 74 years old and lived in Boston.

At the time of her death, she was editor of the Home Forum and the fine arts and literary page of The Christian Science Monitor, where she had worked since 1973.

A prolific writer of children's stories as well as historical novels, Miss Buckmaster was known also for her wide humanitarian interests, which included participation in the civil-rights movement and other causes, such as those of American Indians and prisoners' rights.

Among Miss Buckmaster's other works were the novel ''And Walk in Love,'' published in 1956; ''All the Living'' (1962), and ''A Lion in the Stone'' (1968).

Miss Buckmaster was born Henrietta Henkle in Cleveland. She had once been married to Peter John Stephens, and wrote at one time as Henrietta Henkle Stephens.

Miss Buckmaster had no immediate survivors.

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No mention of Freedom Bound in her obit, but she wrote it anyway. Albert Murray has a review of the book in his Briarpatch book of lectures on the blues idiom.

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It's nearing noon now and I have friend coming in from Atlantic City any minute now to spend a couple'a days in New York City with me. I have to prepare for a guest. I gotta clean the joint with unfettered ablution--a mop and a bucket full of Clorox water! I gotta put the dirty towels I've left draped all over my bath room and put the in the laundry bag. I've gotta get the clean bedding out. I've got housework to do. And since I don't own a woman, I've got to do this barbarian inferior-class labor myself. Oh how I am not a member of any Power Elite.

I'm listening to George Gershwin's 2nd Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra. I'm back to American classical music--just listened to Leroy Anderson's Piano Concerto. This is fun music even though you can easily put it down with pro-European criticism. I've quit listening to European classical music--and I once loved Beethoven, especially his last string quartets, the ones he wrote when he was both deaf and blind--I admire amazing musicians--amazing writers--amazing painters--amazing poets...

And speaking of poets, L Hat's post yesterday (Nov. 19) was all about a Website on which you could listen to old Louis Zufkovsky reading his poetry. You gotta love Louis if you're a admirer of good old pure-dee New York City abstractionism--what do you call it--I'm not a literary critic--I don't know the language of criticism. One of my brother's first published pieces, it was published in what was then called The Atlantic Monthly, and it was my brother's satirical formula for becoming a successful critic of any kind. I'd d'rather listen to poets reading their work than read their work. Is that an offensive statement? I read poetry--currently reading Ted Joans and Ezra Pound--I still write poetry, and though I once posed as a poet (in college; and oh the babe's I got with my poet pose. Remember, Percy Dovetonsils?), I never considered myself a poet or even a grand understander of poetry. The first poet I found interesting enough to read with much gusto was Samuel Coleridge. I loved that man. Alexander Pope, too. And Cowper, the Englishman who came and lived on Long Island, New York, for a spell--and, yes, I know these are Brit poets and I'm a big Anglophobe--fuck it, I can't stand Brits--I find them pretentious fops--superficial--avoid of their own culture--living with stolen cultures--even the Beatles weren't originals--they stole all their musics from around the world--and what makes them so obnoxious to me is not their sincerity or musical talents (though I saw no talent in any of the Fab Fops) but the British-Church-Mode foundation of their shit. Even their imitations of black American music is so childish and naive to me. But, I have to break down and admit I did dig Coleridge--The Ancient Mariner is cool as hell--and Alexander Pope--he can be pretty witty--and Cowper--and what about Blake--crazy as a loon, and that makes him a renegade Brit to me, like D.H. Lawrence, who I admire, was a renegade Brit--who came to the USA and lived in New Mexico where I lived and loved--and D.H. loved New Mexico and Mexico same as me--and read Witter Bynner's (a poet) great book A Journey With Genius, about having D.H. Lawrence come down to Witter and his lover, Spud Johnson's Chiapa, Mexico, adobe home and spend a summer there writing (Lawrence wrote his wonderful The Plumed Serpent while there) (Spud Johnson was a poet/author and a big Ezra Pound friend, champion, and devotee--and Ezra Pound, thanks to Spud, wrote a column for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper called "Ez Sez" for a while in the 1920s and '30s. Witter Bynner was connected to Ez because Witter Bynner lived in China and translated many Chinese poems like Ez).

Left to right: Witter Bynner; Spud Johnson; D.H. Lawrence standing outside Witter Bynner's house in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

D.H., by the way, believed it was OK, in fact very manly, for men to love each other; to wrestle a lot--to wrestle naked--to admire each other's body. D.H. was admired by women--he had offers of sex all the time with some of the great literary-hanger-on women of England--Dorothy York, an English poet who was also a Lady, was madly in love with D.H. She even moved to New Mexico to offer herself to him--I've read several of her letters to him where she's obviously wanting to bed down with him. Mabel Dodge Luhan, a sex maniac to be honest, had the hots for D.H. and wrote a book about him, Lorenz in Taos. So, you see, there are Brits I at least can tolerate. Lawrence's Women in Love; Rainbow; Etruscan Places; The Plumed Serpent--I think these are superbooks. I even like D.H.'s poems. [D.H. called the male organ a John Thomas.]

Morton Gould's Interplay (American Concertette for Piano and Orchestra) is taking me off into the rest of this day. Look at all the music you've never heard of before! You don't know what you're missing.

Now missing in action, I remain,

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler