scifi

Drunkboat, Lenny Kaye, Patti and Cordwainer Smith, Rimbaud

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

OK, I warned you. It’s summer, this is where I get weird, maybe even self-indulgent, since the poetry audience consistently drops off for some reason during this season. We’re going to travel time and space a bit before we get to poetry – but we’ll get there.

This morning I saw that writer and musician Lenny Kaye was a recent guest on Aquarian Drunkard’s Transmissions podcast.  Kaye has a long career mixing writing about music as well as making it. When writer Patti Smith wanted to inject some rock’n’roll into her poetry back in the early 1970s, it was Rock Critic/Musician Kaye that she recruited. Their earliest performances as a duo were highly improvisational. He describes them as “fields:” where Smith would start off in some direction and he would then respond on guitar, and the interaction would go off wherever it seemed to want to go. The results are one of the inspirations for this Project.*

As a podcast guest, Kaye talked about the things that shaped his life, his approach to the arts. Within this conversation he brings out this historical point: the “Rock Press,” that strange spontaneous birth in the Sixties,™ was significantly an outgrowth of Science Fiction fanzines. Kaye himself started one before he was a Rock Critic, Paul Williams who founded the seminal Crawdaddy  was a SF fanzine veteran. Same for Greg Shaw, who founded Mojo Navigator and then Bomp,  all magazines writing seriously about Rock! These efforts proceeded the founding of Rolling Stone  by about a year.**

OK, a little digression. I promise I’ll keep it short. As a young person I read some SF, liked some of it, but couldn’t call myself a full-fledged fan. I never subscribed to the several monthly midcentury pulps that were publishing SciFi regularly back then. Never attended a Con of any form. Never wrote for an SF fanzine or even sent a letter to an editor. By my late teenage years, poetry and music was my thing. None-the-less, because I liked smart folks with interests, I had friends who were intelligent and committed SF enthusiasts.

I’m not sure of the Transmission interviewer’s SF interest level. The SF feeding into to the critical writers/rock-is-an-art-form case was made and then petered out in the discussion – but as the interviewer redirected, Kaye uttered the name of an SF author, “Cordwainer Smith.” He said nothing more than the name, then the conversation moved on.

Longtime readers here may sense what I thought at that moment: “What does Cordwainer Smith have to do with this Rock/Lenny Kaye connection?” Cordwainer Smith isn’t an obligatory big name, a bust carved into the SF pantheon, but he was a writer in the Midcentury SF scene whose name I recalled. I called up my friend and Parlando contributor Dave Moore (who is much more SF knowledgeable). “I don’t think he wrote all that much,” Dave said. “He wrote stuff about interplanetary diplomacy.”

Summary overviews I’ve now read backup Dave. A couple of novels, a few book-length collections of shorter pieces. Cordwainer Smith was not one of those prolific pot-always-boiling writers who made a living out of pennies-a-word publishing. The distinctive name I could remember was a pen name, and the author who used it closely guarded his identity. That man, Paul Linebarger had a Political Science doctorate from Johns Hopkins, had professorships at the college level, rose to the military rank of colonel in the reserves after serving in WWII, and had continued hard-to trace-ties with US government diplomacy and likely spycraft.

Looking at the list of his works I see this story “Drunkboat. ” Huh? Now we touch the Venn diagram edges of the poetry and music nerd writing this. Could this be connected to “Le Bateau ivre” (The Drunken Boat”) – the wild, visionary poem written by the teenage French poet Arthur Rimbaud? In 1976 I bought my first Rimbaud collection, which included that poem, partly because Patti Smith spoke highly of Rimbaud. Back to our other Smith, Cordwainer, and his SF story: a quick Internet search said there is a connection with the poem. Of course, many a story, SF or otherwise, might just steal a title or a quote from high lit to class-up the joint.

Drunkboat Cover

October 1963. John Kennedy was President, he was welcoming the original Mercury 7 astronauts at the White House to celebrate the wrap up of the first US Earth orbit flights. Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” was the top record on the pop charts. “Drunkboat” is published and I wonder how many readers of Amazing Stories knew who Arthur Rimbaud was. In the future this will all make sense.

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This afternoon I found a copy of “Drunkboat.”  As has happened to me before when I read Midcentury pulp magazine SF, I’m a little surprised by how clunkily it’s written. “Drunkboat”  is told in a roughly implemented sort-of-fairytale mode. The dialog, while plentiful, is as awkwardly bad as a midcentury SF B-movie script, and there’s barely any attempt at characterization. The hard-science aspect sometimes seems applied as mere decoration for the genre audience, but it involves a farrago of space-time continuum hand-waving within a medical setting that might be a choice taken by an author with lengthy connections to Johns Hopkins.***

So why am I expending our shared time if this is simply a crappy 1963 pulp story? Be patient, the connection isn’t just casual, it’s integral.

Although the story references a multi-lightyear multi-planetary universe set thousands of years into the future – world-building Cordwainer Smith utilized for many of his SF pieces – one could easily see this story being intended as a prose rhapsody on the themes of Rimbaud’s poem. Given the elevated education and “day job” positions Smith/Linebarger held, I can suspect that he’s making a conscious choice to tell his story the way he does. Is he speaking down to some limited supposition of his pulp magazine audience, academically code-switching so to speak? Or does he like the artifice of telling a fantastic story in a way that subverts any chance of it portraying mundane reality? Was the writer reaching for an Orwell parable? Smith/Linebarger was fluent in German, and in places story elements remind me a little of Bertolt Brecht. The story drops in a number of Dada-level children’s rhymes as asides, and he’s constantly having fun with degraded homonyms. Our story’s hero is “Artyr Rambo.” The Earth location is “Meeya Meefla,” (say that last one aloud). And here’s another thing you might not expect (I can’t even fully explain its effect on me after reading it): the story, despite its flagrantly bad prose and poorly drawn plot, can still work.   There’s a section when a doctor trying to understand our comatose hero orders both of them to be covered with a wire mesh “pain net” that dispenses agony to those beneath it, believing the shared pain will allow them to communicate. It’s not told in vivid prose, but the image is unforgettable.

Finally, at story’s end, our hero, at last given back his ability to speak, has a longish speech in which he extensively paraphrases or quotes Rimbaud’s wild and fantastic poem as if it’s his own spontaneous account. I looked at a couple of English translation of “Le Batteau ivre”  and they aren’t exact matches to the speech in the story, but Smith/Linebarger was multilingual, it’s even possible he did his own translation. The story still accretes at that moment – as a furious and mysterious energy arises, it justifies itself, for it gives a context to Rimbaud’s wild poetry. And there it is: the moment of plausible connection that I hope you stuck around for: Lenny Kaye, the guy that Patti (not Cordwainer) Smith chose for her to weave her “Sea’s the possibility…go Rimbaud!” verse performances with, just said the name “Cordwainer Smith” – and I wondered.

Want some poetry and some music today too? Here’s a performance of a translation I did of Rimbaud’s poem “Eternity” a few years back. The music in this one, in tribute to Lenny Kaye and company, intentionally references the Patti Smith Group kind of vibe. Audio player gadget to hear it below. Has any such player disappeared into Space3? No net of pain required, I supply this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own player.

 

 

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*Patti Smith was also writing some for the Rock press at the time, and I think both were working day jobs in retail in NYC: Smith at the Strand bookstore, Kaye at the Village Oldies record store. On a visit to NYC in the late Seventies I once saw Kaye behind the counter at Village Oldies. I was too starstruck to embarrass myself by saying anything. Besides the Patti Smith connection, the Kaye-curated 1972 compilation LP Nuggets was a formative influence on the Farfisa and fuzz-tone guitar sound of the initial electric version of the LYL Band.

**Williams’ intelligent Rock criticism helped set the format for those that followed. His SF connections never went away, and he became the executor of Phillip K. Dick’s literary estate. Later Shaw also worked in artist management and A&R roles. In the Seventies he was an important force in bringing forward Punk and New Wave aligned acts.

It’s also true that Jazz and folk-music magazines proceeded these Rock publications, and contributed some folks to Rock journalism, but the rise between late 1965 and 1967 of serious consideration of this new “Rock” music that was taking from and supplanting those genres was a new idea.

***”Drunkboat’s”  hospital setting doesn’t seem all that richly observed to me, one who spent many midcentury years working in hospitals – but the discussion and dissention on medical treatments between doctors in this story may be some “inside baseball” that Smith had picked up.

R. A. Lafferty. An Irish-American writer walks into a bar and it’s a SciFi story

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’ve made note that I didn’t do a piece from Dave Moore for St. Patrick’s Day, but I’m about to deal with that. Readers of earlier posts this month know that I was writing about falling in with a group of Irish-American writers almost 50 years ago. The group in its last decade or so was just four of us, and you’ve heard my performance of words from the two of them who died a few years ago. Dave’s not in that group — well, he was in the group, but he isn’t dead — and I don’t know if Dave ever considered himself an Irish-American writer either. At the other pole, we have Ethna McKiernan who spent time living in Ireland, whose father was a figure in the Irish cultural renaissance, who ran an Irish-arts focused store for many years, and some of her poetry was published by an Irish publisher. That’s more Irish than green beer.

What makes one an Irish or Irish-American writer? I’m just an observer here, but I suppose opinions differ. It never crossed my mind to consider Edna St. Vincent Millay an Irish-American writer, but there’s Irish heritage there, and while her most well-known poems don’t explicitly speak of Irish themes or history, I eventually found and performed this poem of hers that’s quite Irish. Shortly after I discovered Joseph Campbell and was in my first burst of enthusiasm for him, I asked Kevin and Ethna if Campbell was counted in the realms of Irish culture. He was as unknown to them as he remains generally, but he was deeply embedded in Irish culture in his writing and life in both Ireland and the United States, and even his downfall was largely due to ending up on the losing side in the Irish Civil War. Campbell’s clearly an Irish writer who lived in the U.S., but he’s just so little-known. Let me add one more: does anyone consider Frank O’Hara an Irish-American writer? I once did a web search looking for anything written along those lines. If I didn’t come up dry, what I found wasn’t enough to dampen the leather above my bootsoles. If I was asked to find such a connection, I’d point to O’Hara’s manifest sense of mischief and his greater interest than most mid-century Americans in poets who weren’t British.

Perhaps it’s somewhat a coincidence if one is an Irish-American writer or one isn’t. You don’t have to write one way or the other, and it may not have to do with where your parents or grandparents were born. And by coincidence too long to interject here, I came to see that this Tuesday, the day after St. Patrick’s Day, is the anniversary of SciFi writer R. A. Lafferty’s death. I saw this and — ta-da — I remembered that I have a recording of Dave Moore singing his song about that writer. Recalling that, I found that recording and worked today on spiffing it up a bit sonically since it was 10-years-old and reflects some older recording tech. And sure enough, right in the lyrics Dave claims Lafferty as an Irish writer. So, an easy job to complete today’s musical piece and post?

Sort of. I didn’t plan this enough ahead of time to give Dave time to say anything about Lafferty and his writing. I had memories of his telling me, or trying to tell me, about Lafferty’s writing, which had a brief flowering in the 1960s-80s — but what was that he said back then? I thrashed about this afternoon finding a copy of his 1972 short-story collection Strange Doings.  I rapidly read a half-a-dozen of his stories just trying to get a flavor, and I got some sense of why Dave had a hard time encapsulating Lafferty’s virtues. At least in this collection, his prose style is somewhat creaky pulp, yet with that instrument he sets out to tell rather strange metafictions in even stranger ways, often ending in a shaggy dog joke. The image I got was I’m at a dive bar, and there’s this man sitting on one stool. He wants to tell me a story. As he goes on, I try to get a read on who he is. Is he some kind of scientist on a weekend bender, or an in-his-cups academic from a nearby Catholic college? Or maybe he’s a man who’s watched too many episodes of Ancient Astronauts, and takes Neil Oliver and Graham Hancock as his vademecum? Are the beverages why the story started to twist, or are you just not ready to understand the essence of the fractal he’s generating? I ask him what he does for a living, and he tells me he’s an electrician.

One thing’s certain: he needs just one more drink  to finish his story.

“So why are you so interested in all this you’re telling me?” I ask.

“Oh, I’m also a writer. You said you’re a writer. I thought you might be interested in this.” He looks at me, expecting reply.

“If you write like you talk, you’re more like how I play electric guitar. I run off in some direction until I hit something, then I bounce off in another direction.”

strange doings cover

This 1972 collection of Lafferty short-stories credits the cover design to “ONI”

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There should be a graphical audio player gadget below to hear Dave and I playing Dave’s song “R. A. Lafferty”  back in 2015. At the very start of the Parlando Project I set this recording in a folder of possible pieces to use for it, but I never did because I feared the audience for literary poetry might not find much relevance in Lafferty. Well, the imp of the perverse convinced me otherwise. No audio player? You see, Lafferty has documented that the audio player gadget was invented by Higgston Rainbird and — oh never mind, you can use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player if you don’t see the gadget.

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The Mote: a 19th century SciFi prose poem

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

So, what else did our two young late-19th century North Americans Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey put in their 1894 Songs from Vagabondia  book? How about this one: a SF prose poem adrift in wine and the universe?

I’ve already mentioned that Hovey’s poetry is easy to link to the French language poets* that were a strong influence on English language Modernism that was just over the horizon in 1894, but perhaps pioneering Canadian poet Carman had obtained a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations  when it was issued just a few years before the pair’s Vagabondia book. The form of the prose poem was still fairly novel, but this experiment in that form adds another, fantastic, element too.

Vagabondia Front Piece

The front piece in Carman & Hovey’s “Songs from Vagabondia.” Here’s a link to the text of “The Mote” included in it.

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The first time I read “The Mote”  I thought it the story of a short slightly tipsy conversation between two young men in a bar. For young men with loosened tongues to talk of the universe, its unfathomable scope and mysterious connections, is a comic commonplace after all.

As the mote flies into the wine cup of one of the young tavern drinkers and the conversation starts, it’s easy to overlook the way Carman set the scene: the pair entering the tavern are of “august bearing, seraph tall.” Are Rudy Gobert and Karl Anthony-Towns having a post-game libation? “Seraph” isn’t the most common form of an esoteric word, “seraphim,” but it’s a name for the highest order of angels.

If one reads it again, taking that seraph literally rather than figuratively, then the mote which is called “Earth” isn’t a parable, but the plaything of two indolent angels! This ambiguity seems cleverly designed-in by Carman.

You can hear me perform Bliss Carman’s “The Mote”  with the audio player below. The guitar part was played with my Squier Jazzmaster, an affordable rendition of a once unsuccessful Fender electric guitar design. One of the knocks against the Jazzmaster was that it had too much open string-length between the tailpiece and the bridge, a fault that could generate extraneous noises when one uses the vibrato bar. Some modern players see this and figure: “Feature, not a bug!” So, in that manner, some of what I recorded here has me intentionally playing the outside noises that a Jazzmaster can make.

If you don’t see the audio player gadget, I provide this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Here’s an odd thing: the 19th century French poets that were stretching the subject matter, outlook, and prosody in advance of their contemporaries in England took influences from American poets like Whitman and Poe. Carman and Hovey wouldn’t have needed to go across the ocean to France to read those Americans — but still, there’s a field of echoes going on in this pre-Modernist era. There’s another cosmic joke here too: Brits may have needed to hear some American-originated poetic ideas spoken in French before they could recognize their value!

Summer 2018 Parlando Top Ten, Part Two

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing on with our countdown of the most liked and listened to audio pieces during this past summer here at the Parlando Project, today we’ll look at the pieces that came in 7 through 5 as we move up the list to the most popular piece.

7. The Hunter. Maybe, with Internet audiences, it’s the cats? I’ve playfully included pictures of William Carlos Williams with said cats in a few posts, and Williams, who sometimes thought he was overlooked as an American Modernist while he was alive, seems to be holding an audience, even though his poetry doesn’t present itself with open, easily accessible sentiments. His even more difficult “St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils”  almost gave Williams two appearances here this summer, falling just a couple of places back from the top ten. Or maybe it’s the informal American language that he uses? Other American Modernist contemporaries of Williams: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Wallace Stevens often liked to drop leaves from a Word of the Day calendar into their poems, while the New Jersey doctor generally didn’t. Maybe there’s something here with Williams like the cats: familiar and domestic, intriguing, but not seeking to please? After all he once said: “I didn’t ask you to understand anything, only to listen.”

 

6. The Apotheosis of Harlan Ellison. I’ve warned readers already that this summer’s top ten has too many pieces where I wrote the words, and that’s not representative of what this project is about—and so, here we have the second of three pieces in this summer’s top ten where I wrote the words I perform. Well, at least this one is about someone else, the long-time critic, writer and SciFi anthologist Harlan Ellison.

 

James the imagined author vs Jimi the reader of SF

I talked about how Ellison helped encourage Octavia Butler, but what if avid SF reader Jimi Hendrix had decided to go the literary route?

 

5. Beloved. My words again, although as I tried to explain in the original post here including it, I was inspired by a statement Bobby McFerrin once made about music, how it touches you inside on that sensitive flap of skin named the eardrum. Given that news this past week has included stories about unwelcome touches, that metaphor goes both ways.

 

WCW with a baby

Excuse me, while I kiss this baby. If cats and William Carlos Williams brings in readers, how about W.C.W. and babies?

 

Back soon with numbers 4 through 2 in our look back at Summer 2018’s most liked and listened to combinations of words and music.

Jimi Hendrix 2018

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Even though music takes half the time and focus of this project, I find myself talking about it hardly at all, which is probably unfair here “Where Music and Words Meet.” So, today I’m going to talk more about music. If that’s not your interest, I’m still going to ask you to keep reading, as beside the music nerditry, I’m going to touch on other things.

It was my first concert, and so of course it must be memorable. It was at the big amphitheater in Des Moines, a place where about two decades later Ozzy Osbourne would have a memorable encounter with a bat. I was a young teenager, it was the Sixties, and my dad was going along for the concert with me, driving the two-lane roads from our little farm town, just the two of us in the usually crowded Plymouth station wagon with fighter plane wings and sparkle-threaded upholstery that was already tearing in places. I believe he asked me if I wanted to go.

Perhaps this was meant to be a father-son bonding experience. Maybe he’d noticed that I had this somewhat solitary interest in music, but I have my doubts. I had no demonstrable musical talents, and the only music I made was singing, which I did off-key. My father had a pleasant voice—my mother said it was as good as Perry Como’s—and I had heard him singing occasional solos or leading a congregation in church. I don’t think we talked much about it before, after, or during the nearly two hour drive that day.

Like I said, he asked me if I wanted to go. I was warned, or perhaps it was a stipulation if I accepted, that the concert would be long, and I’d have to be patient.

We went to our seats, far back from the stage, and I remember the slope of the seating and our height in the building as being oddly scary to me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I leaned forward in my seat I might tumble over the rows in front of me all the way down to the floor hundreds of feet below.

I came to see why I’d been warned about the concert’s length. It was perhaps two to three hours long, more than twice the length of a church service. I fidgeted some, but I also wanted to listen and understand the music, a performance by a massed choir and an accumulated orchestra of Handel’s Messiah.

In 1970 Jimi Hendrix died in someone else’s flat in the early morning hours of September 18th London time, of an accidental overdose of unfamiliar sleeping pills and wine. That’s a long time ago and stories differ, but it’s likely that a contributing factor was the ignorance, intoxication, or uncaring nature of that someone else. Like Handel, Hendrix had emigrated to England in his twenties to find success there. How complicated this was for Handel I don’t know, but I can speculate a bit with Hendrix.

When David Bowie died, a good deal was made of his ability to reinvent himself as a performer and artist multiple times. Of course artists invent themselves, at least most of the good ones do, but it is rarer to do that more than once or twice. But then in our twenties, artists or not, we all invent ourselves and find some accommodation in the world that we live in. To pull that change off even once should be remarkable, though some inventions are more striking and original than others.

Jimi Hendrix didn’t invent himself into moving to London, a couple of British citizens colluded to offer this to him. At the time Hendrix was having trouble with his invention of himself as a musician. His musical ideas were developing rapidly, and he had experience with the showmanship side of entertainment, if for no other reason than a short stint working in the band behind Little Richard, one of the most outrageous performers ever to tread the boards. Putting those two things together would be an invention, one he probably intended.

Britain poured gasoline on that fire, and I’ve always found some of that gasoline offensive. How much did the sideshow “Wild Man of Borneo” exotic-negro thing figure into his rise there? I’ll refrain from judging too much. After all Hendrix’s stage show at the time was not subtle, and the scene at the time expected spectacle not so much from elaborate stage sets and technical tricks as we see today, but from human movement and actions. My personal reading is that he wanted not so much the attention his act and stage persona invoked, but the safety of that ceremonial mask that would hide the fragility of its inventor. In off-stage interviews, even in his between song-patter, that inventor, still somewhat unsure of the work, would emerge.

In less than a year he took that still forming invention back to the US: the uninhibited, no-boundaries performer combined with the flash guitarist, and it sort of worked there too after the alchemy of his London sojourn. Not everyone was convinced state-side however. Early rock critic Robert Christgau capped off an often-perceptive report from the Monterey Pop Festival with this review of Jimi Hendrix’s American debut:

Hendrix is a psychedelic Uncle Tom. Don’t believe me, believe Sam Silver of The East Village Other: “Jimi did a beautiful Spade routine.” Hendrix earned that capital S. Dressed in English fop mod, with a ruffled orange shirt and red pants that outlined his crotch to the thirtieth row, Jimi really, as Silver phrased it, “socked it to them.” Grunting and groaning on the brink of sham orgasm, he made his way through five or six almost indistinguishable songs, occasionally flicking an anteater tongue at that great crotch in the sky. He also played what everybody seems to call “heavy” guitar; in this case, that means he was loud. He was loud with his teeth and behind his back and between his legs, and in case anyone still remembered The Who, Hendrix had a capper. With his back to the audience, Hendrix humped the amplifier and jacked the guitar around his midsection, then turned and sat astride his instrument so that its neck extended like a third leg. For a few tender moments he caressed the strings. Then, in a sacrifice that couldn’t have satisfied him more than it did me, he squirted it with lighter fluid from a can held near his crotch and set the cursed thing afire. The audience scrambled for the chunks he tossed into the front rows. He had tailored a caricature to their mythic standards and apparently didn’t even overdo it a shade. The destructiveness of The Who is consistent theater, deriving directly from the group’s defiant, lower-class stance. I suppose Hendrix’s act can be seen as a consistently vulgar parody of rock theatrics, but I don’t feel I have to like it. Anyhow, he can’t sing.”

That paragraph should hang next to the reviews of John Keats’ poetry in the all-time bone-head review hall of infamy, and yet Christgau has so much honesty that he makes it available on his website to this day, along with his later opinions. But it does point out a problem, that combining extreme showmanship with musicianship is an unstable combination. Music may be inherent to humanity, but for most audiences (including most music reviewers) the eyes ace out the ears in the race to the mind.

Hendrix himself was troubled by his invention and its reception. He may have wanted the mask of the showman at first, but that need seemed to fade as he asked himself what Jimi Hendrix 2.0 should be. It may have been presumptuous for Christgau to call him a “Psychedelic Uncle Tom,” but Hendrix’s Afro-American audience was slow to build. What seemed to be the forefront of his invention, the combination of the flamboyant showmanship with striking musicianship wasn’t entirely new, even if for most white audiences of his time it had stopped with Chuck Berry, who had never risked expressing the sexuality in Hendrix’s version—but there was something else there. Hendrix was inventing modern Afro-Futurism.

In saying that I’m going to (unfairly) ignore Sun Ra, and some of the occult religions and Rosicrucian-like beliefs that preceded Hendrix. That’s a big subject, but one I’ll ignore here not just for length, but because I don’t know how much Hendrix knew of these predecessors as he developed his next invention. Hendrix was living and intermittently performing in New York in the mid-Sixties during Sun Ra’s New York residency period, so I would think Hendrix might well have known something of Sun Ra, even seen him perform, but that’s not for certain. I’ve never seen Sun Ra mentioned by Hendrix, and none of the inconsistently available Sun Ra recordings are included in Hendrix’s known record collection. It’s also a reasonable belief that more of you may be reading this because I have Jimi Hendrix in the title than Sun Ra, and that says something about Hendrix’s eventual impact compared to the incomparable Sun Ra.

It’s likely that Hendrix’s source, besides his own imagination, was Science Fiction of the Fifties and Sixties. In order to be an Afro-Futurist you have to be intrigued with the future and other worlds, worlds like the vision in that rare barely-ironic Steely Dan song that says, “Any world that I’m welcome to, is better than the one that I came from.” Unlike Sun Ra or later Afro-Futurists, Hendrix didn’t express this vision with costumes; or with meaningful stage props as George Clinton would. Instead he expressed it with his least understood and appreciated talent, as a songwriter and lyricist—and that’s why Hendrix’s Afro-Futurism could be news to you, decades after his death. The cult of “Jimi Hendrix, the greatest rock guitarist ever” has a side-effect, it obscured his lyrics, which were often buried in the mix per Hendrix’s wishes (he shared Christgau’s opinion of his own singing voice).

What if James Marshall (Jimi) Hendrix had expressed his SciFi interests with an electric typewriter instead of an electric guitar?
Here the LYL Band unmasks Hendrix’s lyrics to a song from his first LP.

One obsession in the Cult of Jimi is the question of “What would have happened if he had survived the night of misadventure 48 years ago?” He could have become a mid-level act beloved by other electric guitarists or those who appreciate musical originality like unto Jeff Beck, or he could have easily succumbed to the Seventies’ decent into poly-drug abuse and contractual obligation albums hammered out between hits on the pipe. Many guitar-nerds see Hendrix moving to the jazz-fusion genre that was forming at the time of his death, and speak longingly of the collaborations with Miles Davis and Gill Evans that were being mooted in 1970. But on the evidence of his last recordings, he seemed to be doubling down on the Afro-Futurism with his great lost album First Rays of the New Rising Sun.

Last night I watched Black Panther  with my son, who had seen it on release and who wanted to show the movie to me. During the scene near the end, when the two warring kings are watching the sun over Wakanda my own soundtrack in the back of my head was still playing Hendrix’s “New Rising Sun.”

More than fifty years after taking the drive to Des Moines to see Handel’s Messiah, I was visiting London and went to Mayfair and a block of flats there. You enter and pay your admission at a desk in a somewhat cramped entryway, but upstairs is the expansive apartment that George Frideric Handel used as his home as well as his composition and rehearsal studio in the 18th Century.

And further on, you come into a second, smaller 20th Century apartment, decorated in a way I could remember from my youth, with inexpensive gee-gaws and accessories, a hi-fi given its special place, a home altar to the music it played.

This is the place Hendrix lived in for a little over a year while based out of London, the place that must have been even more precious to him that it does to any visitor grasping at their nostalgia for “Swinging London.” Many of you have a place like that in your own memories. Your first apartment, or the first place you lived in with a partner, that place where you invented yourself, or some first version of yourself. But Hendrix had an extraordinarily unsettled childhood, passed from relative to relative, a half a step from foster homes, maybe a single step from homelessness. He’d washed out of the army, couch-surfed a life as an unnoticed musician. Not only was this his first place of his own, it may have been a first candidate for “home” in his life, perhaps the only such place.

As it turned out, being an Afro-American big-deal in the small world of Sixties pop music could not supply that home, but his lyrics and the Afro-Futurism that he helped engender are rich with the dreams and visions of it.

From Queen Mab Canto II

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It’s not often that we think of English Romantic poets along with science. We tend to think of them as pure examples, an engraved picture of an enraptured youth subject to the throws of inspiration, to be found next to the words “poet” or “fool” in a dictionary.

Percy Bysshe Shelley is no exception to this. In my mid-20th Century American school-days he was seated with the Romantics, and biographically some mention would be made of his notoriety during his lifetime, the matter of which would be ascribed with a summary of libertine sexual behavior in the Byron and Shelley households. I suspect many of those descriptions, brief and bloodless as they might have been, were attempts to woo additional interest in poetry from otherwise little-interested adolescents.

Part of the joy of this project is finding surprising things in poetry among the accidents and intents of looking for material. At the end of last week, I read of the memorial service held for physicist Stephen Hawking at Westminster Abbey.

Vangelis is going to stream a musical piece with Hawking’s famously synthesized voice out to the galaxies! Somewhere out there, the odds say, a curious alien will detect this light-years from now; though probabilities also say they will have likely forgotten to bring earbuds along on their saucer-ride.

And there were celebrities! Elgar, Stravinsky and Holst got played! The ticket application form allowed future birthdates, in case time-travelers wanted to apply to attend!

But reading on I find that astronaut Tim Peake read a bit of, what, Shelley. From “Queen Mab”  accounts said.

I find a copy of “Queen Mab.”  Turns out it’s another kind of Shelley from the school-book aesthete. “Queen Mab”  is a fairly long blank-verse epic, but I didn’t have to read far to find the parts you’d want to read for a cosmological tie-in. Right there in Canto II, Mab, the queen of the fairies, has Uber’ed up a human soul to her palace, which is more or less an atheist’s heaven, which is to say a philosophical location above the cosmos—and there, the human soul gets to observe the wonder of this perspective. Mind-blowingness ensues.

This is the kind of thing which visionary poets and scientists share, and that thing is wonder. Stacks of SciFi books would lift one nearly that high; but why couldn’t poetry, the literary artform best-suited to grasp tiny pieces of the un-graspable do that too?

percy_shelley

What if instead of sitting at a cave entrance, I was at a place of immense gravity, where even light falls into it? If I ever go back to England that’ll make a good bedtime story for little Ada, who’s always too busy using her wooden blocks to solve equations.

 

Here’s something else I found remarkable, a series of notes on the issues in the poem, written by Shelly, a young man of 18 in the early 19th Century. Here’s a portion of the first one:

Light consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body. Its velocity greatly exceeds that of any substance with which we are acquainted: observations on the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites have demonstrated that light takes up no more than 8′ 7″ in passing from the sun to the earth, a distance of 95,000,000 miles.—Some idea may be gained of the immense distance of the fixed stars when it is computed that many years would elapse before light could reach this earth from the nearest of them; yet in one year light travels 5,422,400,000,000 miles, which is a distance 5,707,600 times greater than that of the sun from the earth.

I was an English major, I had to look this up. Shelley, or early 19th century science, was off several billion miles on the length of a light-year, and a couple of million miles off on earth-sun distance—hey, I knew that last measurement, though from an early-childhood advertising jingle. However, ask yourself, how likely would it be that the most facile poet in any first-year college creative-writing class be conversant in those measurements, and how they are empirically proved?

So, thanks Stephen Hawking, Tim Peake, and whoever planned that part of the Westminster Abbey internment service. I now think of Percy Bysshe Shelly differently.

Musically, I started by noting in Shelley’s poem the description of deep-space orbs “in mazy motion.” I thought immediately of Mazzy Star, that late 20th Century indie band. Does mazzy/mazy go back that far? Turns out that the word mazy was something of a English Romantic poet favorite. Wordsworth, Southey, and Keats all used the word. Coleridge used it in “Kubla Kahn.”  Mazzy Star is a band with a predominate sound, and though they have some great cuts with wild electric guitar, there’s more often a strummed acoustic guitar, a droning organ, and some occasional violin, all the songs are taken at a slow tempo and modest volume. The band’s lead singer,  Hope Sandoval, has a style that superficially sounds easy to do, but in practice isn’t, and so my singing skills deferred trying.

So, it’s spoken word, not sung, but here are those words of Shelley’s used this month to memorialize Stephen Hawking. Use the player below to hear it.

 

I Have Fallen in Love with American Names

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Anyone remember those sentry questions that would be used in to determine if some straggler in the soldier’s darkness was an American or foreign foe? “Who plays first base for the New York Yankees?” they’d ask.

Native Iowans have a similar method to catch those from out of state. They might start right off with asking about the state capital. “Dezz Moynens.” Wrong! Not an Iowan. “Day Moyne.” Native. Poweshiek, that fine county with a Brooklyn no one knows. “Poe’s He Eck.” Nope. “Powa Sheek.” How about that nice small town founded by lost Swedes in Boone County, Madrid. “Ma Drid?” Outsider, it’s “Mad Rid!”

While overseas in France in the early 1920’s Stephen Vincent Benet wrote his own catalog of place names that I have adapted for today’s piece “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names.”  In it, Benet contrasts American place names with European ones, perhaps to staunch a little homesickness on his part, but also as part of his claim to something he and Carl Sandburg helped to define in the first half of the 20th Century, something that’s now used to label a musical genre: “Americana.”
 
To briefly define Americana, it’s the featuring of things that are distinctive to our country, most often things that are in the past tense, things that we are asked to pay attention to as our heritage. If these things seem a little odd, old-fashioned or provincial to us, that’s the tang the artist wants us to taste.

I came upon Benet’s poem after reading a Phillip Roth memoir in the New Yorker last month, where Roth takes off from Benet’s poem to discuss how a literary sense of a greater America he did not yet know expanded his horizons westward from his childhood neighborhood in Newark New Jersey. Roth remembered how, in the 1940s, even though one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world was a river and a marsh away from his town, New York City was a world away, perhaps as far away as America seemed to Benet in Paris.
 
Roth doesn’t mention it, but as I read Roth’s piece, I thought of Benet’s story “By the Rivers of Babylon,”  were a future neo-indigenous youth ventures across that same river into the ruins of New York on a vision quest.

The original title

This was “By the Waters of Babylon’s” original title

In the nearly 100 years since it was written, Benet’s “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names”  has not fallen to ruins, but it has gained some tarnish or patina. I’ve cut a stanza because the notables referenced are now obscure, and I modified another line in it, not out gentility, but because it frankly stuck in my craw. By chance, one of the obscure and colorfully named towns in Benet’s catalog, French Lick, now is slightly better known as the hometown of basketball great Larry Bird—but that’s the not the greatest resonance the poem has picked up over the years.

As the poem builds to its ending, Benet uses something like the thought used by Rupert Brooke in his famous war poem “The Soldier”,  the idea where even if Brooke was to die and his body was buried overseas, that his Englishness would remain. Benet sets up a series of places he might be interred in England or Europe, and ends with a line that later became the title of a landmark book about the cruel and unjust treatment of indigenous Americans. Did Benet choose to end his poem with the evocative place name of Wounded Knee because of the massacre that occurred there a bit more than 30 years before he wrote his poem, or because of legends that Crazy Horse was secretly buried there, or was it only something that caught his eye on the page of an atlas? I don’t know enough about Benet to say. His litany of American places does include “a Salem tree” which sounds to me like a reference to the Massachusetts witch trials and executions. If we are to remind ourselves of the greatness in our heritage, we are likewise obligated to remind ourselves of the sins there too.

I Married A Witch Poster

Fall in love with a Salem tree? I have a tenuous connection to the story made into this film.

In my performance, I made the choice that, author’s intention or not, modern audiences will hear it as intentional, so I should perform it that way.  The American name of my home state, Iowa, comes somehow from it’s indigenous people, but over 400 years passing, we no longer know what it’s meaning is. How strange to say that I come from a place of no meaning, knowing the pass-word to tell the magic ghosts of native sentries, but knowing not what I’m saying.

To hear “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names” use the player below.