Re: A bunch of responses to jer

[harvard!topaz!jerpc.PE.UUCP]

At last! a love-hounds posting not written by me!  The last 5 or
6 were all by me, which, after today's fiasco in net.mail, was
more than I could take.  Anyhow...

> That's what I thought sounded like "Really see".  This is the part that
> if you play it backwards, it still sounds the same.  I don't know much
> French either, but I think "It's here" would be "C'est ici" and "I'm not
> here" would be "Juis suis ici"....

Oh... I thought maybe it was "Il ici", though that doesn't have
a verb in it.

> Maybe moonlight?  A white face in the black water.

Aside from my unkind interpretation yesterday, what *is* the
voice saying at the start of "Waking the Witch", about her
"little light"?  Most of the things on there are people saying
to wake up, but there are 2 or so that aren't: the first that I
can't hear clearly, and the second that says something like
"can't you see that little light up there? ... Where?  ... Over
there!"  The first one I just can't make out, though.

By the way... what is the 3rd goodbye?  I thought maybe it meant
Kate's name wasn't really Kate... because it doesn't sound like
Kate to me.

> [I don't trust poets that use the word "fruition".]

I don't understand what you mean.  Anyhow, my favorite hymn,
"Not Alone for Mighty Empires" (one of the only hymns around
that changes from a minor to a major key right in the middle),
ends "Till it finds its true fruition/In the Brotherhood of
Man."

(Well, maybe "Angels from the Realms of Glory" is my favorite.)

> The KBC says she's too busy to answer mail right now (she hasn't
> answered any of mine), so you might want to wait a year or so to write
> if you want an answer.  

I always have the delusion that if I write a careful enough
letter, someone will answer.  Often this fails.  You have to
catch someone's interest.

> I used to hate love songs.  Until I discovered the likes of Kate Bush
> and Roy Harper, because they are two of the very few people who can do
> them right.

No, I think only Jon Anderson writes "love songs" right, just
look at this brief excerpt, for example:

	Each and everyday, I time the waiting wind.
	All the stars that shine this evening
	Came to greet you now.
	At last! the way.  I'll protect you
	When you're lonely,
	By guiding you round.

	Tears won't ever leave you like the autumn leaves.
	Bearing fruit: that season's everything.
	It's everything to me
	That life will never end.

Notice how the last stanza is similar in meaning to "Jig of
Life"... see below.

Of course, his love songs like "Outside of This", now, are just
plain embarassing... and "Animation" is unlistenably stupid.

> You wouldn't
> want the whole genre to just be empty, would you?

A mathematician!

> She doesn't.  That's a character in a story she wrote.  Besides, "Though
> pigs can fly" is a really neat line because "a pig with wings" is a
> common expression.

I think "if pigs could fly" is also a common expression for
unattainable ideal conditions, sort of like the vulgar and
cynical "If a frog had wings..." saying.

> No sense of humor, huh?  I think it's hilarious.

I imagine they thought it was hilarious when they were recording
it.  Notice how, in the song, until the hounds are mentioned the
first time, the accompanying vocals that eventually become the
hounds baying don't sound like hounds; they say "doo doo doo doo
doo, doo doo" instead.

> All the artificial
> animal sounds in the song "The Dreaming" are great too, but they're not
> humorous.

What does that voice say at the end of "The Dreaming"?  The slow
one.

> But my speakers are not rock music speakers.  They're Bose 901s.
> Unfortunately, they are very sibilant.  This does not go well with
> Kate's voice, which is also over-sibilant (which the British media
> refuses to let us forget!).

I don't know what Bose 901s are! Sounds like a kind of "shrink
to fit" dungaree.

> I disagree.  Too much is made by some people of *meaning*.  (Just ask
> David Byrne!)

But, David Byrne is the "Diane" (of Sam&Diane fame) of rock
music!  I think meaning is an essential part of poetry (though I
am a realist by nature), if only because people make so much of
meaningless poetry.  However, I agree that

> Meaning is only one important aspect of poetry, and there
> are many others.

E.g., rhyme, which is too lacking in poetry these days (you'll
notice how Taeoum's poem had rhyme!).  I used to know a
newspaper writer who could write articles that had hidden rhyme
in them; I think more poetry should be like that.

> Saying that all poems must have a clear meaning is
> like saying that all paintings must represent something.

You mean, they don't have to represent something?  Actually I
sortof agree with you, some poems, and some paintings, and some
music don't represent something, but are OK anyhow.  Most of the
photographs Windham Hill uses on their album covers are this
way; I like their photographs eventhough they look like they
were made on Cibachrome, and never seem to represent anything.
Likewise, Brian Eno's "Discreet Music," which was made all
automatically, still is a nice piece of music, despite the fact
that it is in some sense monotonous.

> This is one of my very favorite poems.  (Perhaps the only one I have
> completely memorized....)  Does this stanza mean anything?  Does it have
> a "consistent interpretation"?  Lewis Carrol gives one, but I don't
> think one would come up with his explanation on their own.

Read "Semantics," by Anatol Rapoport!  It doesn't tell about
that poem, though, I don't think.  But look at this somewhat
favorite poem of mine...

	Through the unknown, remembered gate
	When the last of earth left to discover
	Is that which was the beginning;
	At the source of the longest river
	The voice of the hidden waterfall
	And the children in the apple-tree
	Not known, because not looked for
	But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
	Between two waves of the sea.
	Quick now, here, now, always--
	A condition of complete simplicity
	(Costing not less than everything)
	And all shall be well and
	All manner of thing shall be well
	When the tongues of flame are in-folded
	Into the crowned knot of fire
	And the fire and the rose are one.

This poem (By T. S. Eliot) not only has meaning, but has very
powerful rhythmic and tonal qualities as well.  I think good
poetry should have all these things.

> Why do you say that the old lady in the mirror is her mother?  Why not
> herself?  KB doesn't say the old lady is in her mirror -- she says the
> old lady comes to her and says "I'll be sitting in your mirror".

Well, because Kate Bush (despite what someone recently said,
reading from an old biography) is the same age as me, and that
is the same experience I have sometimes.  The face in the mirror
is Kate Bush (or the narrator); but she looks there and sees
that this face is very much like the face of her mother when she
was born: that is what the line "Now is the place where the
crossroads meet" means, I think.  But this causes the identity
of the two generations to be somewhat mixed and confused, and
the similarities and differences become apparent.  I think "My
part of your life" is the part having to do with the
continuation of life across generations.  Thus the person
speaking in the song sees that she is the same age as her mother
was, and so she has come around to the beginning of a sort of
short cycle again, but now it is her turn, and "This moment in
time" belongs not to her for her own ends, but to all three
generations at once.

I like the idea of it simultaneously relating to a reason not to
drown, however.

Incidentally, talking of birth and drowning, I noticed in the
narrative by [WHO IS?] John Carter Bush, that there is an
allusion to the poem someone quoted in here recently.

> 		       And the one hand clapping

See, I think this is a key line.

> 		  Where on your palm is my little line
> 	     When you're written in mine as an old memory"

However, I don't fully understand the above two lines at
present.

> Why do you say this?  The yo-yo is exactly as described in "A Book of
> Dreams".  What do you think is wrong with it?  Did the message I posted
> about Peter and Wilhelm Reich go off the end of your floppy too?

No, I got that one, but now I will have to try to find that book
somewhere, if I can remember its title long enough.

The problem with the Yo-Yo is something else I can relate to
from when I was young, which I relate to when Kate Bush was
young: this was sometime after radium in watch faces had been
banned; people thought that glow-in-the-dark things were all
radioactive.  In fact, I can remember my grandmother thinking
some gizmo I had was radioactive.  Years later, I read that
things like that had been outlawed a long time before, so
obviously the device (whatever I had) was not radioactive at
all, anymore than the other things nowadays that glow in the
dark are.

Incidentally, the other day I was just thinking... if you could
see infrared radiation, wouldn't it look and behave a lot like
these glow-in-the-dark devices do?  Then EVERYTHING would glow
in the dark for a time.

> > Meanwhile, I sent my SO, the Stanford biochemist who discovered
> > Primase, one of the pink albums.
> 
> What's Primase?  And how come you get pink ones?  The ones around here
> are all grey with swirls or purpleish-grey with swirls.

Primase is the enzyme that initiates the replication of DNA.

I don't know, this pink annoys me (by the way, they still had
about 6 or 7 of them at the Belz Factory Outlet when I was there
buying my "Cat Stevens' Greatest Hits" CD this weekend).  Mine
is definitely pink, with only traces of black and purple in some
places... does yours have really high contrast between the
various colors?  Mine is fairly muddy looking.  Maybe it is a
later one, and the plastic had gotten all mixed together.

> Well, he's a yotch!  Everybody I've ever met who likes early KB, but not
> "The Dreaming" is a yotch.  They're all more interested in photos of her
> and lust after her, rather than being into the music.  They always say
> things like, "But before her voice was *so* sexy, and now it's like her
> boyfriend dumped her or something and she's inflicting it on me."
> They're yotches!

But my SO is not a "yotch"!  Also, Kate Bush just looks too
artificial, somehow, to "lust after".  People worthy of lusting
after look more like "Melanie" (what was her last name? 
Something like Safka, I think), and "Martha" who I mentioned the
other day from MTV.  (I guess I shouldn't of said that, now one
will get to experience the meaning of "RUTH" firsthand, when a
female-type person takes offense.) Musicians nowadays... I guess
they are all influenced by punk rock or something.

> Listen, music is more important than SOs any day.  Dump her and keep
> the KB albums.

Shucks, no!  There aren't any other SOs like my SO... she has 2
PhDs!  She is a "paradox".  I will have to give up Kate Bush
first, I am afraid...  Also, she can read both Latin and Greek,
and is the only female person I know who I can speak to in words
of many syllables without her looking at me in a strange way. 
When Kate Bush works words like "recidivist" into her "love
songs", then I will reconsider.

> Well, I was driving her
> and my cousin around in Manhattan, so I plopped into the stereo a
> cassete of "The Dreaming".  The girl soon said, "This isn't art!  This
> is Pat Benetar backwards!"  This was not good thing to say to me while I
> was driving in Manhatten if she valued any of our lives....

Well, you should have gone down to the end of "The Bowery", to
the restaurant "Four Five Six", and ordered Pork and Salted
Cabbage for everyone!

> Later she admitted that she doesn't *really* like Peter Gabriel because
> he is too "artsy fartsy".  But Kate Bush isn't even "artsy fartsy" --
> she's Pat Benetar backwards....  This from an art major!

I wouldn't believe an art major who used the phrase "artsy
fartsy", either... I'll bet she was one of these what Tom
Robbins calls "I went to college but it didn't do anything for
me" people!  (Well, not meaning to insult her or anything, I'm
sure she's a nice person and all.)  I mean, how can a true
artist make derogatory comments out of a person's association
with art?  It would be like me saying, "s/he's too much into
computers".

> You know, jer, you are getting weirder all the time....  Maybe KB is
> having a beneficial effct on you....

No, I have always been "wierd", I just have to maintain my
"academic dignity" and stuff...

If anybody besides Doug has read this far, they deserve a
brownie point!

						-- jer

PS - you mean the KT *isn't* in her ear?