In Arcadia

Tomorrow we’ll boil acorns instead of cabbage

to treat our hangovers.

—Nikocharēs (Old Comedy playwright and poet, Athens, d. 345 BCE)

Upon the road from Megalopolis

—big city—in Arcadia, we paused

awhile at Mount Mainalo (depicted)

where anciently the good spirit

Agathodaimon was worshipped

by humble acorn eaters, who

—as a Delphic oracle'd predicted—

once stopped the macho Spartans

dead in their ferocious tracks.

But what of the daimon back

cover hovering in the blinding dark

that writes what seems to be poetry

—though all too often in phrases

so indistinct that I can barely see!

—does it actually, for real, exist [he, she?],

in some hyper "quantum" superconscious

cloud? I wonder . . . hung over yet again

by images off the Web, whose poignant

speech impinges on the heart

with its electronic hook or crook.

The only hangover cure there is, I fear,

is not from any online thing or book

or source in a bubbling Chinese spring:

it's boiling acorns, as Nikocharēs

recommended, when Hell's confounded demons sing.

Jing'an Temple and West Nanjing Road, formerly known as Bubbling

Spring Road, in Shanghai's International Settlement

Note: Aristotle says in his Poetics (ca. 335 BCE) that Nikocharēs wrote a parody of Homer's Iliad titled the Diliad, or Deiliad (Δειλιάς < δειλία: “cowardice”), now unfortunately lost.

Saturday, January 18, 2025

Lost Cities

I saw in my dream.

the great lost cities, Macchu Picchu, Cambridge Mass, Angkor . . .

—John Berryman, The Dream Songs, No. 197

Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.—Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

My own lost cities are many! Here are a few for those who haven’t any:

Cape Town, where, in Khayelitsha,

four hundred thousand people make new homes

and some on occasion stone a passing car.

London, where the undeserving poor revile the undeserving rich

Though both alike lust for the same undeserving bitch.

Athens, where the weight of history often groans

So loud Greeks cannot hear their phones.

Berkeley, where I copyedited a myriad academic tomes,

Only in the end to be drop-kicked by gnomes.

(If this handful don't in themselves suffice,

add the lost city where you are right now for spice.)

Friday, January 17, 2025

In the Crush Bar

Poster for the premiere of the Brecht-Weill Dreigroschenoper at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin, August 1928.

"What think you, of a Newgate pastoral among the thieves and whores there?” Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope in 1716, an exchange that inspired their mutual friend John Gay's satirical musical The Beggar's Opera.

In 1928, Berthold Brecht appropriated a German translation of Gay's play by his lover Elisabeth Hauptmann, claiming it as his own, and turned it into the Dreigroschenoper, with music by Kurt Weill.

Hauptmann reportedly wrote a lot of the great Brecht-Weill opera Mahagonny, too, and—credited this time—was also the main author, with Weill and Brecht, of the musical Happy End, which Paul McCartney and I saw at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1965.

We sat side by side in the crush bar during an interval, drinking our lagers and studiously ignoring the semicircle of his admirers behind us. Neither of us said a word—he clearly didn't recognize me.

I had another such narrow brush with celebrity at a performance of Mahagonny at Sadler's Wells, where I exchanged sympathetic looks with Kurt Weill's widow Lotte Lenya, who was being harassed by paparazzi, having recently married the American painter Russell Detwiler, who was twenty-six years younger.

What next, I wonder, has fame in mind to brandish at me in the years to come!

Costume design for the role of the Nurse in Richard Strauss's opera The Woman without a Shadow (Die Frau ohne Schatten), premiere at the Vienna State Opera, 1919.

Tuesday, January 14, 2025