Letters to the Editor
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another misspell. Jkalos
Han Shan, not Han Shin.
cummings? oscar wind?
Jkalos. No fall from trees.
You may feel head mumpish.
Plant mums for the Fall season.
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same damn it same
Stefan Zweig, a young writer from Vienna, sat in the audience at a movie theater in Tours, France, watching a newsreel. It was spring 1914.
An image of Wilhelm II, the Emperor of Germany, came on screen for a moment. At once the theater was in an uproar. "Everybody yelled and whistled, men, women, and children, as if they had been personally insulted," Zweig wrote. "The good-natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in their newspapers, had gone mad for an instant."
Zweig was frightened. "It had only been a second, but one that showed me how easily people anywhere could be aroused in a time of a crisis, despite all attempts at understanding."
from "Human Smoke"
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as it ever was
Stefan Zweig was at the eastern front, gathering Russian war proclamations for the Austrian archives. It was the spring of 1915.
Zweig boarded a freight car on a hospital train. "One crude stretcher stood next to the other," he wrote, "and all were occupied by moaning, sweating, deathly pale men, who were gasping for breath in the thick atmosphere of excrement and iodoform." There were several dead among the living. The doctor, in despair, asked Zweig to get water. He had no morphine and no clean bandages, and they were still twenty hours from Budapest.
When Zweig got back to Vienna, he began a pacifist play, Jeremiah. "I had recognized," Zweig wrote, "the foe I was to fight — false heroism that prefers to send others to suffering and death, the cheap optimism of the conscienceless prophets, both political and military who, boldly promising victory, prolong the war, and behind them the hired chorus, the 'word makers of war' as Werfel has pilloried them in his beautiful poem."
from Human Smoke
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did you catch those lines?
"the conscienceless prophets, both political and military who, boldly promising victory, prolong the war, and behind them the hired chorus, the 'word makers of war'"
does anyone else feel like howling in agony today?
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@ Jkalos -- fascinating stuff ...
The First World War -- the Great War -- I think really chilled "men's souls" in a profound way ... changed "hearts" ...
War was always awful and terrible and pointless and useless and tragic ... the Czech side of my American family tree originated from ancestors fleeing conscription in pointless semi-feudal wars at the turn of the last century...
World War One -- a horrible interminable slog, a demeaning war of attrition for many of its participants (like Iraq -- soldiers died being picked off, infinitely a matter more of "being unlucky" than from being in actual "glorious" combat. And then there was the disease and the cold and wet ...
I think Ken Burn's The War will probably "look" better in a few years ... certainly I had no idea that the Pacific Campaign was one disaster after another with such, apparently preventable, mass casualties ...
The use of gas created a nightmare -- people survived but just barely -- to be invalids and/or disfigured, for as long as they lived .. as long as they could bear it. Shell shock was named ... war which had previously involved the usual Weeks of boredom punctuated with terror became, with trench warfaring, days, weeks, months lived in unending mundane filth and horror ...
WWI was different and it terrified people ... The American experience is such a tiny, almost insignificant part of the story ... I remember that my mother's best friend's much older brother was gassed (I think in WWI but well before WWII) and lived a life of sobering disfigurement and suffering until he (mercifully) died quite young. Very much a "best and brightest" type, the poverty of his existence must have pained everyone who met him. Surviving became worse than dying ... Antibiotics became a modern miracle that kept people alive ...
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@ Bibblesnæð
Excellent post. Doubt you will get any reply. One quibble- the hippies have been right a lot more than once.
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for susan sunflower?
e.e. cummings - Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal
take it from me kiddo
believe me
my country, 'tis ofyou, land of the Cluett
Shirt Boston Garter and Spearmint
Girl With The Wrigley Eyes (of you
land of the Arrow Ide
and Earl &
Wilson
Collars) of you ising:land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E. Pinkham,
land above all of Just Add Hot Water And Serve--
from every B. V. D.let freedom ring
amen. i do however protest, anent the un
-spontaneous and otherwise scented merde which
greets one (Everywhere Why) as divine poesy per
that and this radically defunct periodical. i wouldsuggest that certain ideas gestures
rhymes, like Gillette Razor Blades
having been used and reused
to the mystical moment of dullness emphatically are
Not To Be Resharpened. (Case in pointif we are to believe these gently O sweetly
melancholy trillers amid the thrillers
these crepuscular violinists among my and your
skyscrapers-- Helen & Cleopatra were Just Too Lovely,The Snail's On The Thorn enter Morn and God's
In His andsoforthdo you get me?) according
to such supposedly indigenousthrostles Art is O World O Life
a formula: example, Turn Your Shirttails Into
Drawers and If It Isn't An Eastman It Isn't A
Kodak therefore my friends let
us now sing each and all fortissimo A-
mer
ica, I
love,
You. And there're a
hun-dred-mil-lion-oth-ers, like
all of you successfully if
delicately gelded (or spaded)
gentlemen (and ladies)-- prettylittleliverpil-
heated-Nujolneeding-There's-A-Reason
americans (who tensetendoned and with
upward vacant eyes, painfully
perpetually crouched, quivering, upon the
sternly allotted sandpile
--how silently
emit a tiny violetflavoured nuisance: Odor?ono.
comes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush -
I'm going to bed.
The muse is sure amusing today.
It's time to hush up for Glenn's sake.
He's like a bantam hen with baby chicks.
I love windy days too. Chinks hide under wings.
Poor Lawyers are wingers who is taking care of the peeps.
"How often the truth is spoken and sadly rejected." It's written
(read the biblio-books) Find a Yiddish bunny or a hoping Moslem.
If anyone attends early Morn Sunrise Worship of Nature Gatherings,
Try to refrain from stealing coins from the coffer plate. Oh, a coin. Ping! No Theft.
Play with Pink Play Doh. Have a happy Sunday. Don't promote nailing people to Trees.