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

Brazil

Brazil? He twirled a Button -- Without a glance my way -- "But -- Madam -- is there nothing else -- That We can show -- Today?"

—Emily Dickenson, "I asked no other thing"

Brazil is the country of the future and always will be.

—Charles de Gaulle

This phone's too strong for me

It's like a backhoe steered by an ape

A toddler in the cockpit of a jet

Brain surgery performed by ants

The desert of my bedroom by analogy

Would be full of Brazilian women poets now:

Clarise Lispector, Cecília Meireles, Gilka Machado, Ana C . . .

I can't read their poems, though—I'll have to leave them be.

But why this urge to poetry

That's better stilled, perhaps—

Silence being preferable to romantic doubt?

The ladies who surround my bed are for the present dead.

They cannot at the moment see or hear,

Deferring conversation to another life. Next year?

Monday, January 13, 2O25

Cosmology

Hanuman showing Rama and Sita within his heart. Ravi Varma Press, Bombay.

I read in Science News that in searching for dark matter,

which makes up something like five-sixths of all that is,

though no one’s ever seen a scrap of it,

cosmologists are seeking proof of WIMPs,

“weakly interacting massive particles,” and

MACHOs, “massive compact halo objects,”*

neither of which have as yet turned up—

but didn’t we just elect one of these to be our leader?

I can’t recall which, but perhaps they are of dual nature.

The world, it seems, sprang from nothing ±fourteen

billion years ago, and in a trillionth of a trillionth

of a trillionth of a second, “a period known as inflation,”

assumed, give or take a little, its present size

but is expanding at an alarming rate.

Xolotl as depicted in the Codex Borgia (Vatican, Bibl. Vat., Borg.mess. 1)

For my part, I credit creation to the pagan gods on Mount Olympus,

Although when in a wishy-washy post-postcolonial mood I like to think

that Ganesh, the elephant god, and Hanuman, that Hindu Hercules,

god of Wisdom, Strength, Courage, Devotion, and Self-Discipline

(all qualities to which I aspire),

had something to do with it,

while Elijah rose in his fiery chariot to heaven’s veritable gate

and Eve was plucked from Adam’s side to be his date

but was seduced by a feathered snake, Quetzalcōātl,

backed by his psychopomp, dog-headed Xolotl.

My late great-uncle Mr. G., however, attributed the universe to Beelzebub,

and reckoned sapient suffering to be food for the Moon

—if not caviar for the unsated stars,

which they consumed with loyal toasts

in flutes of vintage ichor, blanc de blancs.

Perhaps we’ll get a better sense of all this junk

when Elon Musk has had his way with Mars!

*Elizabeth Quill, “Black Holes May Have Been Born Just After the Big Bang—and Might Explain Dark Matter,” Science News 207, 5 (January 2025): 33–41.

Sunday, January 12, 2925