Leroy en anglais and in English

(Here's an English version of the poem I posted a few days ago. Francophones are invited to note any mistakes. Like most things, it sounds better in French.)

The dead are not dead.

They rent hotel rooms by the week

In small towns, in winter.

The dead are not dead

They look out the window

On Main Street, covered with snow

The dead are not dead

They’ll live in the middling hotel

Room number 15

The dead are not dead.

They’re charmed by the wardrobe, the mirror

And the slightly dated bathroom

The dead are not dead

They’re surprised to catch a glimpse of themselves as they were,

when they were young

The dead are not dead

They calmly unpack their bags —

Light — just the necessities

The dead are not dead

They are finally

Without trinkets and red tape

The dead are not dead

Without newspapers piling up around them

Without the just-opened letters

The dead are not dead

They like the crispness

Of room number 15.

The dead are not dead

Soon, they’ll probably go down,

Take a walk in town

The dead are not dead

No one will recognize them

As their steps crunch in the snow

The dead are not dead

Like the rasp of catarrh

Maybe a drink in this bar

The dead are not dead

They note the difference

Between this and Dante’s Purgatory

The dead are not dead

The receptionist with the coal dark eyes

Reminds them of worn out loves

The dead are not dead

They like the soothing purity

Of a room arranged just so.

The dead are not dead

Unknown, and yet so friendly

They stretch out on the double bed

The dead are not dead

They read the single book

Chosen especially for the trip

The dead are not dead

They know every page

But finally they understand it

The dead are not dead

The snow still falls the snow falls again

They fall silent, smiling, say to themselves

The dead are not dead

They rent hotel rooms by the week

In small towns, in winter.

--Jérôme Leroy

Poem by Jerome Leroy

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils louent des chambres d'hôtel à la semaine

Dans des sous-préfectures hivernales

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils regardent par la fenêtre de la chambre

La Grand Rue sous la neige

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils vont vivre dans ce deux étoiles

Chambre numéro quinze

Les morts ne sont pas morts 

Ils s'amusent de l'armoire à glace

Et de la salle de bain un peu désuète

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils s'étonnent un instant de leur visage

Du temps qu'ils étaient jeunes

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils défont tranquillement leurs bagages

Légers juste l'indispensable

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils sont enfin tels qu'en eux-mêmes

Sans bibelots et sans paperasse

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Sans journaux qui s'entassent

Sans lettres à peine ouvertes

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils aiment la fraicheur nette

De la chambre numéro quinze

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils vont sans doute tout à l'heure

Se promener dans la sous préfecture

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils ne sont reconnus de personne

Leurs pas font craquer la neige 

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Comme le bruit d’une pleurésie

Un verre peut être dans cette brasserie

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils remarquent la différence

Avec le Purgatoire de Dante

Les morts ne sont pas morts

La réceptionniste aux yeux bistres

Leur rappelle des amours fatiguées

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils aiment la pureté reposante

De la chambre bien rangée

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Anonyme et pourtant si aimable

Ils s'allongent sur le lit double

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils lisent un livre unique

Celui choisi pour le voyage

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils en connaissent chaque page

Mais enfin ils le comprennent

Les morts ne sont pas morts

La neige tombe toujours la neige tombe encore

Ils s'étirent sourient et se disent

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils louent des chambres d'hôtel à la semaine

Dans des sous-préfectures hivernales.

                                    --Jerome Leroy

Reverdy: Outre mesure

Outre mesure

Le monde est ma prison

Si je suis loin de ce que j'aime

Vous n'êtes pas trop loin barreaux de l'horizon

L'amour la liberté dans le ciel trop vide

Sur la terre gercée de douleurs

Un visage éclaire et réchauffe les choses dures

Qui faisaient partie de la mort

À partir de cette figure

De ces gestes de cette voix

Ce n'est que moi-même qui parle

Mon cœur qui résonne et qui bat

Un écran de feu abat-jour tendre

Entre les murs familiers de la nuit

Cercle enchanté des fausses solitudes

Faisceaux de reflets lumineux

Regrets

Tous ces débris du temps crépitent au foyer

Encore un plan qui se déchire

Un acte qui manque à l'appel

Il reste peu de chose à prendre

Dans un homme qui va mourir

© Gallimard

We’re creating a culture of distraction

Joe Kraus, a Silicon Valley dude on a very high level, angel investor, serial entrepreneur, decries our culture of distraction. (You can read a transcript of his talk here).

The entire speech is worthwhile, but particularly the point he makes at the end:

Imagine the world 10 years from now. My third grader will be graduating high school. What does that world look like? I’d guess that it’s going to be more fast paced than ever. That people are going to be even more distracted, even more unable to pay attention to things for any length of time. Even less able to tolerate boredom. Even less able to pay attention to one another.
Now imagine your own child in stark contrast to that culture of distraction. Technically literate, but also balanced. A calmer presence. Not distracted. Not constantly seeking out mindless stimulation. An ability to make real human connection by not signaling that there might be something better on his smartphone to look at. An ability to pay attention to a problem for a long time.
I believe that the biggest gift we can impart on our kids is the ability to be mindful – to pay attention to the things and to the people that are actually around them. In 10 years, that’s going to feel VERY VERY different than the norm.

Have you noticed that it's no longer only Humanities majors and Luddites that are worried about the mental and emotional world we've made for ourselves? Lately, the techies and the engineers are warning us, too. The New York Times a few months back ran this article about how Silicon Valley honchos are educating their children.

No computers allowed. An elite that's closest to the tools and structure of the media environment who, when it comes to their own children, ensure that their kids aren't overexposed to its toxic effects.

For me, the realization that I needed to address my need to suck on the big electronic tit has been building for a long time. My attention span is shredded. I tend to fall into a new state, that of boredom and restlessness quite easily. It takes real effort to read actual books with 19th century sentences. Work that I don't remember having to devote before when I seemed to simply read.

I've lost a lot. I notice it most painfully when my attention drifts away from people I care about.

I'm not alone. People, mostly over 25, fret about this or joke about it a lot. They worry about their twitchiness, about the nagging impulse to Check On Something. A few practice media Sabbaths, a whole day away from electronic media.

Unfortunately, you can't just give it up, in the way you could -- theoretically, at least -- smoking or sugar or alcohol. Unless you're rich or a celebrity, you can't hire a cyber serf to do you online chores and connecting for you. You have to be online. People need to reach you on a cell. And, I like my mobile phone. I love that it can take pictures and 1080p HD video and tell me the weather and so on.

But, as the man said, you pay for what you get. I've paid in hours of time lost to . . . what? I can't tell you. I can hardly tell you what I read online last week. A few things stick with you, but the rest?  So, time lost and attention wasted, two of the more precious elements of life, drained away.

My plan is to follow up on some advice that I keep seeing repeated by some smart people. I'll start with the media Sabbath practice. That seems practical and appealing. I'll keep the computer off in the evenings and devote the time to reading some challenging books instead. If I go online, I'm going to practice staying on task, and I'll use the app Freedom when I'm writing or cutting video or messing around in Photoshop. I'm also going to get back on the mat and start meditating again, even though I feel like a New Age fool for saying so.

I have a feeling that this will be a struggle for the rest of my life, sort of like staying off tobacco, but it's time. It's past time.

From Epitaphs of the War

Kipling lost his son in World War I. Then he wrote a series of epitaphs, each one scorching.

Here are a few:

 An Only Son 
I have slain none except my mother. She
(Blessing her slayer) died of grief for me.

 Raped and Revenged 
 One used and butchered me: another spied
Me broken -- for which thing an hundred died.
So it was learned among the heathen hosts
How much a freeborn woman's favor costs.

 R.A.F (Aged Eighteen) 
 Laughing through clouds, his milk-teeth still unshed,
Cities and men he smote from overhead.
His deaths delivered, he turned to play,
Childlike, with childish things now put away.

Common Form
If any questions why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

If

If


If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son! 


-- Rudyard Kipling


  via the greatest blog in the great white North


 See also Hopper quoting Kipling again at about 3:19

 

Pound

CANTO 120

I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
let the wind speak
that is paradise

Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made

You want a social life, with friends

Death's Warning

Death's Warning by Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (Yvor Winters translation)

I looked upon the old walls of my land —

Once they were strong, and now they fall away.

Tired with the march of age, thy may not stay —

Their strength has vanished, and they scarcely stand.

I went out to the fields, and from the sand

The sun drank up the brooks that broke to play

And drank the crying flocks that stole the day

From off the mountain with their shadowy band.

I went into my house, and there I found

The rotted leavings of an ancient race:

I found my staff more twisted and less sound,

I felt my sword that crumbled in the breath

Of age, and saw no thing in all the place

That did not seem a harbinger of death.

via

Walking Through a Wall

Walking Through a Wall, by Louis Jenkins


Unlike flying or astral projection, walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft, but a lot more interesting than pot making or driftwood lamps. I got started at a picnic up in Bowstring in the northern part of the state. A fellow walked through a brick wall right there in the park. I said, 'Say, I want to try that.' Stone walls are best, then brick and wood. Wooden walls with fiberglass insulation and steel doors aren't so good. They won't hurt you. If your wall walking is done properly, both you and the wall are left intact. It is just that they aren't pleasant somehow. The worst things are wire fences, maybe it's the molecular structure of the alloy or just the amount of give in a fence, I don't know, but I've torn my jacket and lost my hat in a lot of fences. The best approach to a wall is, first, two hands placed flat against the surface; it's a matter of concentration and just the right pressure. You will feel the dry, cool inner wall with your fingers, then there is a moment of total darkness before you step through on the other side. 




When he won the Tony, Mark Rylance recited this poem instead of offering up the usual banalities:

 

Old men

Little boys chase the fire trucks

The ambulances

As they scream by.

Emergency, they cry, emergency

Dizzied by the lights, the siren's wails.

Old men don't bother. 

They merely sigh,

sink

a little deeper in the couch,

Turn up the volume on the TV.

- TR

Well, who wouldn't be in love with her?

Cycles

photo by Brad Johnson, via

The widespread appeal of the Hell's Angel's is worth pondering. Unlike most mother rebels, the Angels have given up hope that the world is going to change for them. The assume, on good evidence, that the people who run the social machinery have little use for outlaw motorcyclists, and they are reconciled to being losers. But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded tighter with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill. They many not have an answer, but at least they are still on their feet. . . .  

There is an important difference between the words "loser" and "outlaw." One is passive and the other is active and the main reasons the Angels are such good copy is that they are acting out the day-dreams of millions of losers who don't wear any defiant isignia and who don't know how to be outlaws. he freest of every city are thronged with men who would pay all the money they could get their hands on  to be transferred -- even for  a day -- into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk over cops, exert free drinks from terrified bartenders and thurden out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker's daughter.

Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

From the last entries in Mayakovsky's notebook

She loves me? She loves me not?

I wring 

My hands and scatter the broken-off fingers.

LIke petals you pluck from some 

White little flower along your way.

You hold them up to the breeze,

They’ve told your fortune,

They drift off into May.

Though

Now a haircut

Lays bare thorns of gray,

Though my morning shave shows me

On the bib the salt of age,

I hope, I believe

I will never weaken.

Never be caught

Showing good sense.

                       - Vladimir Mayakovsky                         

                          (adapted by Frederick Seidel)

Lazy eye

via Things We Already Know

Gilgamesh

why do you grieve because of a mortal father?


How long does a building stand before it falls?
How long does a contract last? How long will brothers


share the inheritance before they quarrel?
How long does hatred, for that matter, last?


Time after time the river has risen and flooded.
The insect leaves the cocoon to live but a minute.


How long is the eye able to look at the sun?
From the very beginning nothing at all has lasted.


See how the dead and the sleeping resemble each other.
Seen together, they are the imaged of death.


The simple man and the ruler resemble each other.
The face of one will darken like that of the other.


The Annunaki gathered in assembly:
Mammetum, Mother Goddess, she was with them.


There they established that there is life and death.
The day of death is set, though not made known.


Gilgamesh, translated by David Ferry




The epic dates from about 3000 BC and was inscribed on tablets.
Its theme is the mortality of man.
Nothing changes very much.

When we championed trash culture, we had no idea it would become the only culture

Celebrities are not appendages of our society anymore; they are the basis of our communal lives. Literature and architecture, art and politics, are at most sidelights—small, ancient alleyways down which fewer and fewer minds wander. Pop culture has long since left the word culture behind to become the primary way we understand the world. Just before she died, the film critic Pauline Kael told a friend, “When we championed trash culture, we had no idea it would become the only culture,” and she was right. The average American household now watches eight hours and twenty-one minutes of television a day. If we want to understand ourselves, if we want to understand the civilization to which we belong, we have to understand celebrities, because the modern world of freedom and loneliness has produced them as the primary communal experience. (I know more about Tom Cruise’s sexual history than I do about my cousins’.) We confront the mysteries and the terrors of life through them.

Via

"Say Good-bye to Big Daddy" by Randall Jarrell

   

     Big Daddy Lipscomb, who used to help them up

    After he'd pulled them down, so that ''the children

    Won't think Big Daddy's mean''; Big Daddy Lipscomb,

    Who stood unmoved among the blockers, like the Rock

    Of Gibraltar in a life insurance ad,

    Until the ball carrier came, and Daddy got him;

    Big Daddy Lipscomb, being carried down an aisle

    Of women by Night Train Lane, John Henry Johnson,

    And Lenny Moore; Big Daddy, his three ex-wives,

    His fiancee, and the grandfather who raised him

    Going to his grave in five big Cadillacs;

    Big Daddy, who found football easy enough, life hard enough

    To -- after his last night cruising Baltimore

    In his yellow Cadillac -- to die of heroin;

    Big Daddy, who was scared, he said: ''I've been scared

    Most of my life. You wouldn't think so to look at me.

    It gets so bad I cry myself to sleep -- '' his size

    Embarrassed him, so that he was helped by smaller men

    And hurt by smaller men; Big Daddy Lipscomb

    Has helped to his feet the last ball carrier, Death.

    The big black man in the television set

    Whom the viewers stared at -- sometimes, almost were --

    Is a blur now; when we get up to adjust the set,

    It's not the set, but a NETWORK DIFFICULTY.

    The world won't be the same without Big Daddy.

    Or else it will be.

Piazza Piece by John Crowe Ransom

photo by jean-loup sieff

Piazza Piece

I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying
To make you hear. Your ears are soft and small
And listen to an old man not at all,
They want the young men's whispering and sighing.
But see the roses on your trellis dying
And hear the spectral singing of the moon;
For I must have my lovely lady soon,
I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying.

-- I am a lady young in beauty waiting
Until my true love comes, and then we kiss.
But what grey man among the vines is this
Whose words are dry and faint as in a dream?
Back from my trellis, Sir, before I scream !
I am a lady young in beauty waiting.

John Crowe Ransom

Poem, James Joyce

POEM
Tutto è Sciolto

by James Joyce

A birdless heaven, sea-dusk and a star
Sad in the west;
And thou, poor heart, love’s image, fond and far,
Rememberest:

Her silent eyes and her soft foam-white brow
And fragrant hair,
Falling as in the silence falleth now
Dusk from the air.

Ah, why wilt thou remember these, or why,
Poor heart, repine,
If the sweet love she yielded with a sigh
Was never thine?