Monday, 4 March 2024
Life
Thursday, 29 February 2024
“More Out-takes from Ol’ Ameriky” (The Uncollected Songbook Part One.) I know this girl is lyin’
I know this girl is lyin’ man
we know each other well
I know this girl is lyin’ man
she’s lyin’ in her throat
that’s right!
Lord you so right!
that’s right!
that’s right Lord!
men don’t trust the women man
WOMEN don’t trust the women man
NO ONE trusts a woman man
’cos women never tell the truth
NEVER man?
no never!
that’s right!
that’s right!
they NEVER tell the truth!
praise the Lord!
amen
and women man
Sunday, 25 February 2024
The Utility of Art as a Social Function according to Heinrich Böll
Or should that be The Utility of Art at a Social Function?
‘That art is non-utile is a self-conscious truism voiced oftenest by post-Marxian cynics.
‘As Oscar Wilde, a socialist manqué, makes clear: All art is quite useless.
‘This banality is no more absurdly pointed up than in the verses of a lofty poet who compares himself with his father digging the family cabbage patch – a spade wielded with evident utility – yet who claims a special dispensation for his own artist’s pen . . . “I’ll dig with it.” (Pause for involuntary cringe.)
‘Anthony Blunt – tarnished knight of the realm, professed communist, and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures – was unequivocal when a young man in expressing his utopian sympathy for the cultural worthiness of Social Realism: “The culture of the revolution will be evolved by the proletariat to produce its own culture . . . If an art is not contributing to the common good, it is bad art.” ’
Friday, 23 February 2024
Moon. Mirror. Moon.
from grief and trace the moon’s bright shaft which cleaves
the curtain’s arrow-slit to find your throat.
This moonlight is a snake that undeceives.’
apart the folds; beheld the moon, half-hewn,
yet burdened, too, in growth; salvation saw
in her dark mirror, a phantom waning moon;
whereas the gibbous moon’s a maiden’s shame
that waxes to its gravid burdensomeness.
Moonlight beckons: ‘Now pinch the candle flame.’
She plunges into floodtide, gasps for breath.
The mill stood like a church till its great wheel
grants at last that immemorial death.
a decrescent moon in fullness grows,
avowal of a circumstantial lie.
Affinities the glass does not deny.
Catherine Eisner
Photo credit: Alexandra Georgieva |
Sunday, 7 January 2024
An Émigré Childhood. Opus 42. Southern England 1942.
The dancer stumbles.
A minute later I lifted the lid to the keyboard and adjusted my piano stool.
I have since read that seers believe that to dream of playing a piano is a favourable omen and means the discovery of something of great value in a surprising place; so I resolved to realise my dream of the night before.
I experienced a feeling of equipoise I had not known since I last rode Dinah ... a balanced seat, hands-free, independent of the reins.
In my opinion it is actually more difficult to run into bar 210 of Valse in A-flat Opus 42 where the waltz ‘stumbles’ than emerge from it – one runs the risk of sounding as if one has simply walked into a wall, rather than suspending the breath for a moment – hence, this artifice of ineptitude is not easy to achieve and, even though Chopin intended to simulate a clumsy dancer’s imbalance before her lost rhythm is regained, the player’s assumed clumsiness must be diligently practiced over and over again.
So, creating this suspension requires exceptional finesse in timing and shades of dynamics and balance, which, to my way of thinking, is the more difficult task.
In my father’s case, alas, the task was performed never with consummate success, as though the passage was a nagging regret and he had to return again and again to pick a sore. (Father would tune his piano himself by feeding a reference note into an oscilloscope an army pal of his had once used for reading radar; he’d then retune the fifths until they were slightly flat. Those dancing waveforms on a monitor screen, as I told the doctors, I always associate with Chopin’s waltzes.)
For my own part, my effortless arpeggiation on the evening I returned from Boy’s funeral, and my faultless span at bar 255 – which had once made such demands on the extensive stretch of my Father’s left hand – meant I rode the home-straight cooly through the flurry of that passionate coda, and reached the winning post at last, luckily without a fall ... until pent up grief all at once welled up and burst my heart.
Extract from Dispossession
Part 11 of Sister Morphine (Salt 2008)
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/circo-perfuso-fato-sanguinis.html
Sunday, 31 December 2023
Her Left Shoe . . . E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Terrible Projectile of Semiotics
Norse god Vídar, son of Odin, famed for killing the wolf Fenrir by crushing the monster’s lower jaw with his great shoe and grabbing its upper jaw in one hand to tear its mouth apart. |
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
Friday, 15 December 2023
Suddenly I Heard Someone Say
from literature; a stranger’s voice who speaks
offstage: He passed with his friendly word through
familiar as the classics, tell of
a life’s unforeseeable salvation:
Someone shouts. A hand grabs me by the collar
addresses no one in particular.
Jaunty, the voice is baroquely perverse.
I run, compelled by an animal fear.
do not know our own voice or whence this plea
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html