נפטר המשורר רומן באימבאיב

ביום (ה') המשורר רומן באימבאיב נפטר באופן פתאומי בגיל 55, עקב זיהום בגופו. באימבאיב אושפז בבית החולים איכילוב בתל אביב לפני מספר ימים כאשר חש ברע, ונפטר היום בשעות הבוקר המוקדמות. הלווייתו תתקיים היום ב-16:00 בבית העלמין קרית שאול.

באימבאיב נולד בצ'רנוביץ', אוקראינה, ב-1956. בתחילת שנות ה-70 עלה לישראל. בבגרותו למד הנדסת מכונות בטכניון, אך מעולם לא עסק בתחום זה, אלא בשירה ובאמנות פלסטית.

בתחילת שנות ה-90 שיתף פעולה עם האמן מיכאל רפופורט, ועבודות אמנות של השניים הוצגו במוזיאונים בישראל וברחבי העולם. בהמשך חייו החל להתמקד באמנות השירה, וב-98 פרסם את ספרו הראשון, "רומן באימבאיב מסכם את נסיונו" (הוצאת קונטרסט לשירה) אותו ערך המשורר נתן זך. בתקופה זו פרסם באימבאיב משירתו בכתבי עת שונים. ב-2006 פרסם את ספרו השני, "הלוואי וגודביי" (הוצאת אוריס מדיה) שלווה בתקליטור מוזיקלי בשיתוף עם האמן דני צוקרמן.

Андре́й Андре́евич Вознесе́нский (12 мая 1933, Москва — 1 июня 2010)

Ни славы, и ни коровы,
Ни тяжкой короны земной -
Пошли мне, Господь, второго,
Чтоб вытянул петь со мной.
Прошу не любви ворованной,
Не милости на денек -
Пошли мне, Господь, второго,
Чтоб не был так одинок;

Чтоб было с кем пасоваться,
Аукаться через степь,
Для сердца - не для оваций,-
На два голоса спеть;
Чтоб кто-нибудь меня понял,-
Не часто, но хоть разок,-
И с раненых губ моих поднял
Царапнутый пулей рожок.

И пусть мой напарник певчий,
Забыв, что мы сила вдвоем,
Меня, побледнев от соперничества,
Прирежет за общим столом.
Прости ему - он до гроба
Одиночеством окружен.
Пошли ему, бог, второго -
Такого, как я и как он...

Музыка Высоцкого на стихи Андрея Вознесенского для спектакля "Антимиры"
Andrey Andreyevich Voznesensky (Russian: Андре́й Андре́евич Вознесе́нский) (May 12, 1933, Moscow, USSR – 1 June 1, 2010, Moscow, Russia) was a Soviet and Russian poet and writer who has been referred to by Robert Lowell as "one of the greatest living poets in any language". He was one of Russia's "children of the 60s".

Isidore Block or Poet-O

Isidore Block, better known to himself as Poet-O, lived on the streets for 20+ years after his release from a home for the criminally insane, until he was rousted.from his Central Park bedroll at 2 a.m. by some well-meaning nuns who didn't want him to be bitten by the rats they saw crawling over him. "They don't bother me," he says, "they know my smell." (The rats, that is.
Now he divides his time between his room at the Woodstock and hustling in the streets, trading wishes for meals and recitations of his own poetry for money. He still sleeps in the Park occasionally "to keep in touch."
Izzy knows all the squirrels by name and once shared a joint with John Lennon in the rain, the two of them huddled under an umbrella. Celebrities, Poet-O explained, can come out only when it rains. Lennon wouldn't ring O's bell for fear of reprisals from the bell-ringers' union but Yoko in a bid for better karma gave it a mighty jangle.
update:
Mr. Block passed away. (read more...)
12 min. video

an intimate portrait of new yorker isidore block, aka "poet-o", a self-described "mendicant poet," and "genuine nut-case" whose life was changed when albert einstein planted 397 theories in his brain

Shamba Boo and Zurich Deserters

Igor Satanovsky (b.1969, Kiev, Ukraine) is a bilingual Russian-American poet/translator/visual artist who moved to the United States in 1989. Satanovsky's work in both the visual arts and poetry has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic: his Russian poetry, as well as translations of Allen Ginsberg, E. E. Cummings and Antonen Artaud appeared in Zerkalo magazine (Israel, 1996-2000). Other works have appeared in Koja, Blackbox, Riverrun, and Urban Spaghetti. He also edited the Rush-ins Poetry Reader (Koja Press, 2000) and contributed notes to the Dictionary of the Avant-Garde (Schirmer, 1999).

and from 1916
Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huselbeck, Tristan Tzara - "L'amiral Cherche Une Maison a Louer"

"L'amiral Cherche Une Maison à Louer" is one of the best known examples of Dada tonal poetry, in which several voices speak, sing, whistle, etc. simultaneously in such a way that the resulting combinations account for the total effect of the work. The simultaneous poem demonstrates the value of the human voice and is a powerful illustration of the fact that an organic work of art has a will of its own. The piece was written in 1916 as a performance piece for the Caberet Voltaire by Tristan Tzara, Richard Hulsenbeck and Marcel Janco.
Janco (1895-1985), a Romanian painter and engraver, had become acquainted with Tzara in 1912, working with him on the magazine "Simbolul." Whilst studying architecture in Zurich in 1915, he met Tzara again and became involved in the Cabaret Voltaire, for which he made woodcuts and abstract reliefs, posters, costumes and masks.
The version featured here is not an original recording but one made by the Italian Trio Excoco: Hanna Aurbacher, Theophil Maier and Ewald Liska.
Some verses of Tristan Tzara, for example "nfoünta mbaah mbaah nfoünta", inspired by African singsong, seem to be analogous to Hugo Ball's work, but in general Tzara's poems consisted of absurd encounters of meanings, and not of sounds, such as the famous "La première aventure céleste de M.Anitpryine" (1916) and the poem that he composed in collaboration with Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck "L'amiral cherche une maison à louer" (The admiral looks for a house to rent). Tzara's dadaism is not phonic but semantic.
Tristan Tzara, pseudonym of Sami Rosenstok, born at Moinesti, Rumania, in 1896, died in Paris in 1963. Poet and writer in the French language. Took part in the foundation of the dadaist movement at Zurich. In 1917 he published the magazine "Dada" and, in the third numbe, the first dadaist manifesto. At the end of 1919 he moved to Paris. Contributed to almost all the dadaist publications in Zurich, New York, Paris, Berlin, Hanover and Cologne.

(from UBU)

The Ballad of Eskimo Nell

There are multiple variations to the poem and some stanzas are left out of certain versions but the basic narrative structure remains constant. It details the adventures of the generously-endowed Deadeye Dick and his gunslinging sidekick, Mexican Pete. Fed up with their sex life at Dead Man's Creek, they travel to the Rio Grande. There they visit a whore-house, but before Dick has finished with two out of the 40 whores, they are confronted by Eskimo Nell. She is described as something of a sexual champion, and challenges Dick to satisfy her. Dick accepts but Nell's skill and power soon gets the better of him and he climaxes prematurely. Pete attempts to avenge his mate's affront by sticking his gun up Nell and firing all six rounds but all this achieves is to bring Nell to her own orgasm. Disappointed, Eskimo Nell chides the pair for their poor performance. She expresses nostalgia for her home in the frozen North, where the men apparently have better staying power. Dick and Pete return to Dead Man's Creek, their pride severely dented.(more from wikipedia)

When a man rows old, & his balls grow cold
And the tip of his prick turns blue,
It bends in the middle like a 1 string fiddle
He can tell you a tale or two.

So pull up a chair, and stand me a drink
And a tale to you I'll tell
Of Dead-eye Dick and Mexican Pete,
And a harlot called Eskimo Nell.

When Dead-eye Dick and Mexican Pete
Go forth in search of fun
It's Dead-eye Dick that slings the prick
And Mexican Pete the gun.

When Dead-eye Dick and Mexican Pete
Are sore, depressed and sad
It's always a cunt that bears the brunt
But the shooting ain't so bad.

Now Dead-eye Dick and Mexican Pete
Live down by Dead Man's Creek
And such was their luck they'd had no fuck
For nigh on half a week.

Just a moose or two and a caribou,
And a bison cow or so,
And for Dead-eye Dick with his kingly prick
This fucking was mighty slow.

So do or dare this horny pair
Set forth for the Rio Grande,
Dead-eye Dick with his mighty prick
And Pete with his gun in his hand.

And as they blazed their noisy trail
No man their path withstood,
And many a bride, her husband's pride
A pregnant widow stood.

They reached the strand of the Rio Grande
At the height of a blazing noon,
And to slack their thirst and do their worst
They sought Black Mike's Saloon.

And as they pushed the great doors wide
Both prick and gun flashed free.
According to sex, you bleeding wrecks,
You drink or fuck with me."

They'd heard of Dead-eye Dick,
From Maine to Panama
So with scarcely worse than a muttered cur
Those dagos sought the bar.

The girls too knew his playful ways
Down on the Rio Grande,
And forty whores pulled down their drawer
At Dead-eye Dick's command.

They saw the fingers of Mexican Pete
Itch on the trigger grip
And they didn't wait, at fearful rate
Those whores began to strip.

Now Dead-eye Dick was breathing quick
With lecherous snorts and grunts
So forty arses were bared to view
And likewise forty cunts.

Now forty cunts and forty arses
If you can use your wits,
And if you're slick at arithmetic,
Makes exactly eighty tits.

Now eighty tits are a gladsome sight
For a man with a raging stand
It may be rare in Berkeley Square
But not on the Rio Grande.

Now Dead-eye Dick had fucked a few
On the last preceding night,
This he had done just to show his fun
And to wet his appetite.

His phallic limb was in fucking trim,
As he backed and took a run
He made a dart at the nearest tart
And scored a hole in one.

He bore her to the sandy floor
And there he fucked her fine
And though she grinned
It put the wind up the other thirty-nine.

When Dead-eye Dick lets loose his prick
He's got no time to spare,
For speed & length combined with strength
He fairly singes hair.

He made a dart at the next spare tart,
When into that harlot's hell
Strode a gentle maid who was unafraid,
And her name it was Eskimo Nell.

By this time Dick had got his prick
Well into number two
When Eskimo Nell let out a yell,
She bawled to him, "Hey you."

He gave a flick of his muscular prick
And the girl flew over his head,
And he wheeled about with an angry shout.
His face and his prick were red.

She glanced our hero up and down,
His looks she seemed to decry,
With utter scorn she glimpsed the horn
That rose from his hairy thigh.

She blew the smoke from her cigarette
Over his steaming knob
So utterly beat was Mexican Pete
He failed to do his job.

It was Eskimo Nell who broke the spell
In accents clear and cool,
"You cunt struck shrimp of a Yankee pimp.
You call that thing a tool?"

"If this here town can't take that down,"
She sneered to those cowering whores,
"There's one little cunt can do the stunt,
It's Eskimo Nell's, not yours."

She stripped her garments one by one
With an air of conscious pride
And as she stood in her womanhood
They saw the great divide.

She seated herself on a table top
Where someone had left his glass,
With a twitch of her tits she crushed it to bits
Between the cheeks of her arse.

She flexed her knees with supple ease,
And spread her legs apart,
With a friendly nod to the mangy sod
She gave him the cue to start.

But Dead-eye Dick knew a trick or two,
He meant to take his time,
And a girl like this was fucking bliss
So he played the pantomime.

He flexed his arse hole to and fro
And made his balls inflate
Until they looked like granite knobs
Up on a garden gate.

He blew his anus inside out,
His balls increased in size,
His mighty prick grew twice as thick
Till it almost reached his eyes.

He polished it up with alcohol,
And made it steaming hot
To finish the job he sprinkled the knob
With a cayenne pepperpot.

Then neither did he take a run
Nor did he take a leap,
Nor did he stoop, but took a swoop
And a steady forward creep.

With piercing eye he took a sight
Along his mighty tool,
And the steady grin as he pushed it in
Was calculatedly cool.

Have you seen the giant pistons
On the mighty C.P.R.
With the driving force of a thousand horse.
Well, you know what pistons are.

Or you think you do. But you've yet to learn
The ins and outs of the trick
Of the work that's done on a non-stop run
By a guy like Dead-eye Dick.

But Eskimo Nell was no infidel,
As good as whole harem
With the strength of ten in her abdomen
And the rock of ages between.

Amid stops she could take the stream
Like the flush of a watercloset,
And she gripped his cock like a Yale Lock
On the National Safe Deposit.

But Dead-eye Dick could not come quick,
He meant to conserve his powers,
If he'd a mind he'd grind and grind
For a couple of solid hours.

Nell lay for a while with a subtle smile,
The grip of her cunt grew keener,
Squeezing her thigh she sucked him dry
With the ease of a vacuum cleaner.

She performed this trick in a way so slick
As to set in complete defiance
The basic cause and primary laws
That govern sexual science.

She calmly rode through the phallic code
Which for years had stood the test,
And the ancient rules of the classic schools
In a second or two went West.

And so my friends we come to the end
Of copulation's classic
The effect on Dick was sudden and quick
And akin to an anesthetic.

He fell to the floor, and knew no more
His passions extinct and dead
And he did not shout as his prick fell out
Though 'twas stripped right down to a thread

Then Mexican Pete jumped to his feet
To avenge his pal's affront,
With jarring jolt of his blue-nosed
Colt He rammed it up her cunt.

He rammed it up to the trigger grip
And fired three times three
But to his surprise she closed her eyes
And smiled in ecstasy.

She jumped to her feet with a smile so sweet
"Bully", she said, "for you.
Though I had guessed that was the best
That you two poor cocks could do."

"When next, my friend, that you intend
To sally forth for fun
Buy Dead-eye Dick a sugar stick
And yourself an elephant gun.

"I'm going back to the frozen North,
Where the pricks are hard and strong.
Back to the land of the frozen stand
Where the nights are six months long.

"It's hard as tin when they put it in
In the land where spunk is spunk
Not a trickling stream of lukewarm cream
But a solid frozen chunk.

"Back to the land where they understand
What it means to fornicate,
Where even the dead sleep two in a bed
And the babies masturbate.

"Back to the land of the grinding gland,
Where the walrus plays with his prong,
Where the polar bear wanks off in his lair
That's where they'll sing this song.

"They'll tell this tale on the Arctic Trail
Where the nights are sixty below,
Where it's so damn cold that the Johnnies are sold
Wrapped up in a ball of snow.

"In the valley of death with baited breath
That's where they'll sing it too,
Where the skeletons rattle in sexual battle,
And the rotting corpses screw.

"Back to the land where men are men,
Terra Bellicum,
And there I'll spend my worthy end
For the North is calling: 'Come.'"

So Dead-eye Dick and Mexican Pete
Slunk out of the Rio Grande,
Dead-eye Dick with his useless prick
And Pete with no gun in his hand.

My Unwritten Books

George Steiner interviewed by Alan Macfarlane

Steiner was born in Paris in 1929, delivered - according to family lore - by an American doctor who then returned to Louisiana to assassinate Huey Long. His parents, Frederick and Else Steiner, were Austrian Jews who had taken French citizenship, and the children were brought up speaking English, French and German, to which Steiner later added Italian. His father, an investment banker, was "an agnostic, a Voltairean", Steiner says. But he "had deeply the Jewish sense that there is no higher vocation than teaching" and encouraged his son's classical studies. When rumours of war came, "Mamam was indignant. She said, 'They will die on the Maginot Line if they dare attack.' My father, bless him under the name of God, saw more clearly." Tipped off by a German former colleague while visiting New York on behalf of the French government, Frederick Steiner arranged for his wife and children to join him there in 1940.(more...)

Every Day Blind To Reality

Raul Midon brings a vibrant sound steeped in classic soul to the pop arena, because pop is where a singer and a song can have the biggest and most widespread impact. When an envelope-pushing song becomes a pop hit, it shifts the entire musical landscape, forcing out the shopworn and clich?d while opening the windows of change to let in fresh ideas. The notion of shifting the landscape is this artist's passion; the wide-ranging skill sets he brings to bear on his mission provide him with the tools to pull it off.
Midon was born in Embudo, N.M., to an Argentinean father and an African-American mother. A passionate music lover for as long as he can remember, Midon started playing drums at age 4 before shifting his focus to the guitar. He turned down a scholarship in creative writing offered by the University of New Mexico after being selected by the University of Miami for its highly regarded jazz program. Staying in Miami after graduating, Midon became an in-demand backup singer, working primarily on Latin projects for artists like Julio Iglesias, Shakira and Alejandro Sanz, while moonlighting as a club performer, sprinkling the requisite cover songs with the original tunes he was starting to write(read more>>)

TO THE MEMBERS OF EIN HOD AS THEY "CELEBRATE",WITH BITTERNESS,THE 10TH YEAR OF THE FOUNDING OF THEIR VILLAGE

It: cannot last. This desecration.
You shame the mountains. Their ribs corrode.
The valley thirsts for decency.
This land was gifted. You despoil it.
The wells are poisoned. The birds will die.
The trees are wasted. You don't belong.
The land shall be taken from you.

You : you who bribe the taxi-drivers,
who pre-fix awards, decaying scare-crows,
public relations artists, you
who bend the knee before The Tourist,
care more for comfort than for craft,
who lie while shaking hands, whose word
is garbage, you have not earned these hills.

You : is not the other fellow.
Is you : Aleph neged Beth,
Daled neged Gimmel, Samach
neged Shin, Lamed neged
Nun, Mem neged all,
all neged all ... in malice, slander,
envy, hatred , , , How can birds sing ?

Perhaps the hills are to blame. Perhaps
delusions of grandeur derive from real grandeur.
But what fuels appetite for endless quarrel ?
Why expel the young like lepers ?
Why freeze in cliques, when warmth is pie ?
Why squeeze pennies to be gaped at ?
The generous gesture is absent here.

So I shall pack my mule and move.
And build my tower on a distant hill.
Small birds will perch on my swing. The hawk
will hover. And bless. My garden, yield.
Eve, return. The cat will hum
in gratitude. And we shall feed
on memory of could-have-been.

Norman Lewis 1963, Ein Hod

Rodney Carrington: If you love your country!

Well it seems to me that this whole worlds gone crazy
theres to much hate and killin goin on
but when i see the bare chest of a woman
my worrys and my problems are all gone
no one thinks of fightin, when they see a topless girl
baby if you would show yours to, we could save the world
show them to me, show them to me
unclasp your bras and set those puppy free
they'd look a whole lot better without that sweater baby I'm sure you'll agree
if you got, two fun bags,
show them to me
I don't care if they don't match or if ones bigger then the other
you could show me one, and ill imagine the other
even if your really old, theres nothing wrong
don't be sad your boobs ain't bad, there just a little long
show them to me, show them to me
lift up your shirt and let the whole world see
just this row, show your globes and a happy man I'll be
if you got, those chi chi's,
show them to me
I've met a lot of them, but never one I hated
even if you had thirteen kids and you think they look deflated
theres no such thing as a bad breast, i belive this much is true
if your a big fat man im a titty fan and id love to see yours toooo
show them to me, show them to me
just like the girls gone wild on T.V.
just lean back and show your back and ill be in ecstasy
if you got two casabas
show them to me
all the world will live in harmony
it'al do yea good, it'al give me wood, we'll make history
if you love your country, I'm gonna say it one more time,
i said if you love your country yea
then stand up and show them big old boobies to me
(more songs by Rodney)

Daniil Kharms: Mad, chaotic, frightening

Let us consider Daniil Kharms, the Russian writer often described as an absurdist, largely unpublished in his lifetime except for his children’s books, who starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad, having been put there by the Stalinist government for, among other reasons, his general strangeness. Kharms gave flamboyant poetry readings from the top of an armoire, did performance art on the Nevsky Prospect by, for example, lying down on it, sometimes dressed as Sherlock Holmes and was a founder of the Union of Real Art, an avant-garde group also known as Oberiu. His brilliant, hilarious, violent little stories, written “for the drawer,” are now being discovered in the West through translations by Neil Cornwell (collected in “Incidences”) and by Matvei Yankelevich, whose anthology “Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms” has just been published.(more from NYtimes)
You can get english translations of Kharms works HERE

Noah Zacharin : Raw and Rare

Veteran accompanist, solo performer, and guitar whiz, Noah Zacharin has been playing guitar for nearly a million years and writing songs for slightly less than that. Gathering influences from the blues, folk, jazz, country, bluegrass and r&b realms and tossing em all in a blender, Zacharin's songs are an eclectic mix. For all that, his true intention is to touch the listener's soul. Five CD's, hundreds of published poems, translations, and reviews later, Zacharin is hard at work on a couple of new records, a couple of children's books, and a volume of poetry. Zacharin has a remarkable gift for juxtaposing words in his songs which move and soothe by their sound and meaning, so it’s not surprising to learn that a literary history as a poet precedes the troubadour. Combine that with a very engaging and bluesy fingerstyle ability on guitar, and you’ll see why Zacharin deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with names such as James Taylor and David Wilcox, whom he resembles stylisticallyZacharin says of the melancholy tone of his songs: "The songs might seem sad, but I don’t feel sad when I’m playing. I feel like the ability to make something out of it, to make some order from this chaos, is positive". If making order of chaos is truly the essence of the purpose of music and people, Zacharin is one musician and person who is fulfilling his purpose
Noah Zacharin is visiting Israel this week,
and he will be performing live in Jerusalem on Sunday, December 16th with some surprise guests(?!) (thanks to Eli Marcus)

Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986

Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986
William S. Burroughs
For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts
thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison
thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot
thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes
thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through
thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces
thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers
thanks for laboratory AIDS
thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs
thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business thanks for a nation of finks yes,
thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your arms… you always were a headache and you always were a bore
thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

“Thanksgiving Prayer” was a poem first included in the chapbook Tornado Alley. Director Gus Van Sant then put together this montage whose power derives almost solely from Burroughs’ reading and, perhaps, the strange sad-old-man expression of his staring eyes at the end.
One of the many things that make William S. Burroughs unique among writers is the fact that he spent a lot of his creative energy not writing, presumably as a way to accomplish his mission of “rubbing out the word.” Burroughs painted, experimented with collage, manipulated tape recordings, collaborated on film projects, toyed with weird contraptions like the orgone accumulator and Brion Gysin’s dream machine. His interest in technology ran from the sophisticated down to the homely, as his usage of scissors and guns can attest. Contemplating the extraliterary range of Burroughs’ work, you can’t help but get the sense that he accomplished in aesthetics what Malcolm X sought to accomplish in politics with the slogan “by any means necessary.” Burroughs may have been a writer, but for him the tools of the trade were not confined to typewriters or pens. He wrote with anything that could make a mark or leave a trace, a tape effect or a shotgun blast.(via RealityStudio)

The quest for the superlative American ham

Maryland Ham Ne Plus Ultra (1858)

Take a single pound of Pepper, four times as much of Salt:
Two ounces of good Allspice, and a quart of Barley Malt;
Potash, about two ounces, Salt Petre twice as much;
One pound of good White sugar, which feels sandy to the touch;
A little common Soda, (to make the lean more mellow,)
And prevent the fatty part of meat, from becoming yellow.
Put these in filtered water, (five gallons is enough)
And boil them altogether—what a precious mess of stuff!
Skim off the foreign matter as it is not fit to eat,
When you will have the brine, for one hundred pounds of meat.
You need not stop to cool it, it is all the better hot,
But pour it, sans ceremonie, directly from the pot;
There let the meat for thirty days, lie soaking in this brine,
(but just add a small nutmeg, and a pint of Glycerine.)—
Then take it from the pickling tub, and wash it in cold water.
Next hang it up to smoke ten days, "leastwise" I think you ought to;
Burn Maple, Oak, Corn-Cobs or Tan, most any wood will do;
The old fogy song, 'bout Hickory wood, I don't believe is true;
Don't smoke whilst wind comes from the east, or southeast or the south;
For take my word that meat will taste quite bitter in the mouth;
But choose it north, north west or west, your meat will then smoke right,
And not present, as t'other would, a very ugly plight;
You then will have an article, that will the palate tickle;
I'm sure you will agree with me, that 'tis a pretty pickle.
You think the next thing to be told is how to keep it good;
That surely is not difficult, if once 'tis understood—
Sew up in canvas and suspend, but not quite to the skies,
You'll keep it thus secure against, the Rats, Mice, Bugs, and Flies.
Now don't you think this last is plain, as plain as plain need be,
I think it is so very plain, a blind man it would see.
by the Maryland farmwife, Mrs. D. Brown, who won contests throughout the Chesapeake region(for much more on ham)

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (also transliterated as Boulat Okudjava/Okoudjava/Okoudzhava; Russian: Булат Шалвович Окуджава, Georgian: ბულატ ოკუჯავა) (May 9, 1924 – June 12, 1997) was one of the founders of the Russian genre called "author's song" (авторская песня, avtorskaya pesnya). He was of Georgian origin, born in Moscow and died in Paris. He was the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folksong traditions and the French chansonnier style represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as Georges Brassens. Though his songs were never overtly political (in contrast to those of some of his fellow "bards"), the freshness and independence of Okudzhava's artistic voice presented a subtle challenge to Soviet cultural authorities, who were thus hesitant for many years to give official sanction to Okudzhava as a singer-songwriter.

A bread without salt and a new translation of the Paradiso

If you haven’t yet read the Divine Comedy you know who you are—now is the time, because Robert and Jean Hollander have just completed a beautiful translation of the astonishing fourteenth-century poem. The Hollanders’ Inferno was published in 2000, their Purgatorio in 2003. Now their Paradiso is out. Jean Hollander, a poet, was in charge of the verse; Robert Hollander, her husband, oversaw its accuracy. The notes are by Robert, who is a Dante scholar and a professor emeritus at Princeton, where he taught the Divine Comedy for forty-two years.
The entire Comedy is an allegory, a symbolic representation of the highly systematized theology that St. Thomas Aquinas and other Scholastic philosophers distilled from the Bible, the Church Fathers, and Aristotle in the late Middle Ages. But in the Paradiso the allegory is far more naked than in the Inferno or the Purgatorio. In Dante’s time, and for a few centuries afterward, readers of poetry (learned people, mostly priests) were accustomed to allegory, and thought it was a good teaching tool, because it made you work. As Boccaccio said in his “Life of Dante” (1374), “Everything that is acquired with toil has more sweetness in it.” But since the early eighteenth century that is, since Europeans began questioning the faith that is Dante’s subject there has been a tradition of discussing the Comedy in terms of a “duality” between its allegory and its “poetry.” What is suggested here is that the allegory is anti-poetical, and that what is acquired with toil is mostly toil. The best-known modern statement of this position is a 1921 book, “The Poetry of Dante,” by the philosopher Benedetto Croce. The allegory that is so great a part of the Divine Comedy, Croce declares, is non-poesia, “not poetry,” and he makes fun of it.Croce’s book fell like a bomb on the Italian literary world Luigi Pirandello wrote a wrathful review of it and still today it is regarded by some as an irresponsible document.
When he wrote the Divine Comedy, Dante, because his political party had been routed, was in exile from his native city, Florence, and was living with friends, sometimes in Verona, sometimes in Romagna or Ravenna. The Comedy takes place in 1300, two years before he was expelled from Florence, but in Heaven his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida predicts his banishment: he will learn how salty is another man’s bread, Cacciaguida says, and how hard it is to go up and down another man’s staircase. What could be simpler or more concrete than this a staircase that seems long, bread that tastes peculiar? (Hollander informs us that, to this day, Florentine bakers make their bread without salt.) Critics exclaim over how much of our world there is in the supposedly otherworldly Comedy. In Paradise, there’s less of it, but it’s still there. Snow falls; the sun burns off the morning mist. Clocks chime (the first reference in European literature to mechanical timepieces). Babies nurse; pigs and dogs do what they do. A pilgrim arrives at a shrine the place he has vowed to travel to and greedily stares here and there in the church, knowing that the minute he gets home his neighbors are going to want to know everything. This last is more than an image; it’s a little story.(much more from New Yorker by Joan Acocella )

...only I could write for myself

Yale University will host an international conference on October 20 and 21 celebrating the life and work of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

"If there is a common theme in my poems beside their authentic connection to my life, my times and my place, it is the desire to make my poems healing and comforting without lying and without pretending to be either happy on the one hand or suffering on the other. I want to conclude by emphasizing that all the poems were written entirely for my own personal use. I began writing out of love for many poets before I started writing myself. But after two wars and loves I felt that only I could respond to my most pressing needs and only I could write for myself. Writing allows me to feel my life as one space that has no early and no late. Writing allows me to reach emotionally, distant points in my childhood without the feeling that I broke barriers of time and space.”

Amichai, considered one of the great poets of modern times, has been praised for the depth and complexity of his language as well as its accessibility, even in translation from the original Hebrew. His books were best sellers in Israel, and in the years before his death, he enjoyed the status of a celebrity.
Benjamin Harshav, the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Yale, will deliver the keynote address, “Political Discourse and Situational Cognition in Amichai’s Poetry,” on October 20 at 8:30 p.m. Harshav, one of Amichai’s chief translators, was also a close friend of the poet’s for 50 years. According to Harshav, “Amichai is the most universal Israeli poet, expressing the human condition… In an age of ideology, he celebrated the individual’s private moments and existential situation; in an age of war, he celebrated love and love-making.”
Amichai (1924–2000) was born in Würzburg, Germany, and immigrated to Palestine with his family at the age of 12. After high school, he served in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade during World War II and then joined the Palmach, an underground Jewish military organization in Palestine. When the State of Israel was established in 1948, he fought in the Israeli army during the War of Independence.
Amichai first considered becoming a writer while he was stationed in Egypt with the British Army. There he was inspired by an anthology of modern British poetry, including work by Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. His first book of poetry, “Now and in Other Days,” was published in 1955. His published writings, which include plays, stories, a novel, essays and three children’s books as well as several volumes of poetry, have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Shortly before his death, Amichai arranged for Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to receive his extensive personal papers and literary archive. The Amichai papers were the first archive of a major writer in Hebrew to be added to the Beinecke, where they join an extensive international gathering of 20th-century literary archives, including the papers of the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch and poets Ezra Pound, F.T. Marinetti, William Carlos Williams and Czeslaw Milosz.
(more from web wire via rare books)
audio (hebrew and english)

Halloa old girl!

Philadelphia has landmarks galore. The most unusual is this stuffed bird recently declared a "Literary Landmark" by a national library association. Certainly no bird in history contributed more to literature then this chatty raven who inspired the prose of both Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe.Grip was a beloved pet of Dickens. The author inserted the blabbing raven as a character in his 1841 serialized mystery novel, Barnaby Rudge. We know that Poe reviewed Barnaby Rudge and commented on the use of the talking raven, feeling the bird should have loomed larger in the plot. Literary experts surmise that the talking raven of Barnaby Rudge inspired Poe's most famous poem, The Raven, published in 1845.When Grip died in 1841, Dickens had the bird mounted. After Dickens death, Grip was sold at auction. The mounted raven was eventually purchased by Philadelphia's Col. Richard Gimbel, a collector of all things Poe. In 1971, Gimbel's Poe collection was donated to the Free Library on Logan Circle where Grip holds a place of honor in the third-floor Rare Book Department. The Gimbel collection also includes the only known copy of The Raven in Poe's hand, manuscripts of Annabel Lee and Murders in the Rue Morgue and first editions of all Poe's works.Dickens wrote an amusing tongue-in-cheek account of Grip's death in a letter to a friend. Grip's last words, according to the author, included instructions for disposal of his property. "On the clock striking twelve he appeared slightly agitated, but he soon recovered, walked twice or thrice along the coach house, stopped to bark, staggered, exclaimed `Halloa old girl!' (his favorite expression) and died."(from UShistory)

The the impotence of proofreading

Has this ever happened to you?
You work very, very horde on a paper for English clash
And still get a very glow raid (like a D or even a D=)
and all because you are the liverwurst spoiler in the whale wide word
Yes, Proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence.
This is a problem that affects manly, manly students all over the word.
I myself was such a bed spiller once upon a term
that my English torturer in my sophomoric year,
Mrs. Myth, she said I would never get into a good colleague.
And that¹s all I wanted, that's all any kid wants at that age
just to get into a good colleague.
Not just anal community colleague,
because I wouldn¹t be happy at just anal community colleague.
I really need to be challenged, challenged menstrually
I needed a place that would offer me intellectual simulation,
I know this makes me sound like a stereo,
but I really wanted to go to an ivory legal colleague.
So if I did not improvement
or gone would be my dream of going to Harvard, Jail, or Prison
(in Prison, New Jersey).
So I got myself a spell checker
and figured I was on Sleazy Street.
But there are several missed aches
that a spell chukker can¹t can¹t catch catch.
For instant, if you accidentally leave out word
your spell exchequer won¹t put it in you.
And God for billing purposes only
you should have serial problems with Tori Spelling
your spell Chekhov might replace a word
with one you had absolutely no detention of using.
Because what do you want it to douch?
It only does what you tell it to douche.
You¹re the one with your hand on the mouth going clit, clit, clit.
It just goes to show you how embargo
one careless little clit of the mouth can be.
Which reminds me of this one time during my Junior Mint.
The teacher took the paper that I had written on A Sale of Two Titties
No I'm cereal, I am cereal
she read it out loud in front of all of my assmates.
It was the most humidifying experience of my life,
being laughed at pubically.
So do yourself a flavor and follow these two Pisces of advice:
One: There is no prostitute for careful editing.
And three: When it comes to proofreading,
the red penis your friend.
Spank you
By Taylor Mali

Henry Charles Bukowski

Via: VideoSift
Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California on March 9,1994 at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel. He published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose in his lifetime