hoop and holler when little pig got under skirt

Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 106—

My father had a brother-in-law, Uncle Henry Hargis, who had married my Aunt Elizabeth. She had been long since dead and the only thing remembered about her was that she went on wearing hoopskirts years after they were given up, because her legs were too weak for skirts pressuring against them, and that a little pig had got under the hoop one day and the more she kicked and screamed the higher he jumped.

novelist jerzy kosinski / visage of a painted bird

The Embellished Bird

James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski. New York: Dutton, 1996, pp. 336-337—

On weekends he [the novelist Jerzy Kosinski] sometimes went with George and Freddie Plimpton and their crowd to Pimpton’s mother’s place in West Hills, where parlor games were the order of the day. They playing hiding games like “murder” and “sardines”…To Plimpton’s surprise, after all his talk about hiding, in his apartment and during the war, Kosinski was not particularly good at the hiding games…
On the other hand, he demonstrated his ability to fold himself neatly into a bureau drawer, and when the situation was under his control, he played his usual pranks. 

••• 

Gabrielle Selz, UnStill Life. W.W. Norton, 2014, p. 145—

In between her crying jags [in response to her husband’s departure], she [the author’s mother] dated. Once a man with thick black hair and the large beaked nose of a bird came to the front door to pick her up. He was introduced as Jerzy Kosinski, the author of a controversial book my mother had on her shelf, The Painted Bird, about a boy surviving the Holocaust. They didn’t go out for long. Kosinski was an eccentric who liked to disappear. Mom once discovered him curled up and hiding in a large bureau drawer. He was too strange for her tastes.

historical scholars / Gould in them there pillows

Joe Gould's Secret

Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962, p. 273—

Just when the troubles of Broom [magazine] were at their height, the eccentric little Joe Gould [aka Professor Seagull] fell upon me with demands for money—providing Shakespearean comic relief against the tension of our literary tragedy. We had published a few pages of his so-called History [An Oral History of our Time] in one of our last issues, but had announced at the same time that our magazine had no money to pay for contributions. Greatly excited at being put into print at last, Joe Gould refused to believe that he would not be paid an honorarium of some kind, and kept telephoning me at all hours. Beside myself with exasperation, I swore at him; whereupon this tiniest and most impecunious of historical scholars began to address me in a tone of severe formality, declaring that I had grossly insulted him and he was obliged to challenge me to a “duel”—a duel, with the midget Gould! Since it was he who issued the challenge, he requested that I name the weapons to be used.

“Pillows!” I roared into the telephone. “I’ll meet you with pillows at sunset tomorrow.” But he never came.

hide that typewriter and you go into the closet

Totoya Hokkei / Japanese Print

Henry Miller, in Robert Snyder, This is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974—

[When he was married but, as a writer, without an income] now and then my wife wasn't working maybe and, of course, I wasn’t selling anything—we’d have to separate, and I’d go home to live with my parents and she with her parents. That was frightful. When I’d go home to live with my parents my mother would say, “If anybody comes, a neighbor or one of our friends, y’know, hide that typewriter and you go in the closet, don’t let them know you’re here.” I used to stay in that closet sometimes over an hour, the camphor ball smell choking me to death, hidden among the clothes, hidden y’know, so that she wouldn’t have to tell her neighbors or relatives that her son is a writer. All her life she hated this, that I’m a writer. She wanted me to be a tailor and take over the tailor shop, y’know. It was a frightful thing—this is like a crime I'm committing. I’m a criminal, y’know. This standing in the closet… I'll never forget the smell of camphor, do y‘know. We used it plentifully.

Sancho Panza says Don Quixote off his rocker

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2022) with John Davis image

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art. 

always in the throes of a long drinking bout

photograph of Amedeo Modigliani

Anon, H. HODIGLIENI in New York Tribune, February 7, 1920, p. 4—

PARIS, Feb. 6—H. Hodglieni [sic] [Amedeo Modigliani], an artist, who claimed to have invented cubist painting, was found dead in a hovel in the Latin Quarter. He used to frequent Paris cafés dressed in trousers with legs of different colored materials.

•••

Ilya Ehrenburg, People and Life: memoirs of 1891-1917. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1961, p.143—

…no one now can give an exact description of how [artist Amedeo] Modigliani used to dress: when times were good he wore a coat of light velvet with a red silk scarf round his neck, but when he was in the throes of a long drinking bout, ill and penniless, he was enveloped in brightly colored rags.

booksartlanguagelogicambiguityscienceteaching

cover of issue 02 of BALLAST (1985)

actual frame from a silent film

Question: So how did BALLAST begin?  

Answer: In the late 1960s, when I (of all people) was drafted into the US Marine Corps, I found that some of the officers, while cruel and unusual, could also be terribly funny. One of my favorites was a height-impaired captain, a George Gobel look-alike, who was the company adjutant when I was in Hawaii. He was hilarious—always. One day a top-ranking officer came to our company (a Marine general), and this adjutant sent word that I should report to his office immediately. As I stood frozen at attention (awed by the mere presence of such a distinguished warrior), the captain turned to him and said, “General, the sergeant here is a very curious specimen. He is college-educated, and, as a result, is completely unable to answer any question with a simple yes-or-no answer.” And then, turning to me, he asked, “Isn’t that true, Sergeant?” After a measured pause, I slowly and thoughtfully answered, “Well, not entirely, Sir. You see, there’s this and that and that and that…” and of course, to his delight, I droned on for a couple of minutes. more>>>

cover of issue 01 of BALLAST (1985)

and a handkerchief used for dusting my shoes

Henry L. Mencken, quoted by Huntington Cairns in John Dorsey, ed., On Mencken. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, pp. 53-54—

[As a youngster in Baltimore, one day, Mencken was "held up by two tough boys and relieved of"] all: five keys, a horse chestnut, the snapper of a buggy whip, a dried cockroach in a pill box, a small shell, six agate marbles, a top, and a handkerchief used mainly for dusting my shoes. I also had two cents, but the bandits, after a long debate, decided not to take them, it would be stealing.

Robert Frost / let what burrs will stick to them

Nature-Themed Poster © Roy R. Behrens 2019

Louis Untermeyer, FROM ANOTHER WORLD: The Autobiography of Louis Untermeyer. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939—

…[the poet Robert Frost] was the friend of [British poet and critic Lascelles] Abercrombie whom [American poet Ezra] Pound had challenged to a duel, the weapons to be unsold copies of their books at thirty paces. (p. 208)

[Frost] wrote to me: “There are two types of realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one, and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second kind. To me the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form.” (p. 209)

[Quoting from Frost’s preface to his own Collected Poems:] “Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ more importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.” (p. 210)

too late / sick, dried up, and have no strength

Vachel Lindsay album cover

Eleanor Ruggles, The West-Going Heart: A Life of Vachel Lindsay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1959—

From Cambridge, Massachusetts, the psychologist and philosopher William James acknowledged receipt of The Tramp’s Excuse and War Bulletin Number Three [which the poet Vachel Lindsay had sent him without asking]. Lindsay had read James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, pondering it in the light of his [own] visions, and James was touched that this unknown youth should turn for “comradeship” to an academic personage like himself.

Only it was, he said, “too late, too late!”

He [James] was writing in October 1909, ten months before his death. “I am sick, dried up, have no strength to read aught but the barely needful for my own tasks, have grown, moreover, positively to hate poetry in these last years. I can only stand old poems learned by heart in my childhood and adolescence. How then should I shoot the rapids and ride the whirlwind and tramp the wilderness with you?”

James was not at all sure that he understood the “Map of the Universe.” “I do think Bulletin No. 3 anarchistic; I do think it incoherent; but I do think it may represent an excellent personal religion. Don’t enter the Catholic priesthood, whatever you do! Your semi-automatic inspirations are very interesting, in conjunction with your free attitude toward them…

“Go in peace and God be with you, brilliant being that you are, and leave me to my decrepitude.” [pp. 160-161].

•••

[Sixteen years later] In Washington [DC], in the dining room of the Wardman Park Hotel, a brown-skinned bus boy in a white jacket ignored senators and oil magnates, sidled shyly up to the wall table at which the only poet in the crowded room sat opposite his wife and laid a slim manuscript by [Vachel] Lindsay’s plate, That evening Lindsay opened his recital in the little theater of the hotel by reading the poems the boy had given him. It was the beginning of fame for the young Negro poet Langston Hughes” [p. 353].

Vachel Lindsay | the fate of an unbroken colt

Index of American Design (Public Domain)

Eleanor Ruggles, The West-Going Heart: A Life of Vachel Lindsay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1959, pp. 185-186—

Though by day the sky was a bright Kansas blue and the sun descended on the prairie like the stroke of a golden hammer, there was darkness and death at the Weaver place. Both Frank and his brother Forrest, who worked with him, had a certain hard attractiveness—“but their cruelty,” pronounced Lindsay in his diary, “was bottomless.”

On Sunday, July 7, he was in the sitting room writing letters when he heard a fearful row out beyond the barn. Frank and Forrest were exciting themselves by disciplining Dick, a frisky broncho colt, whom they had tied up and were beating over the head—one with a doubletree [a harnessing cross bar], the other with a pitchfork handle—while Forrest plied himself with swigs of whisky so that he could be as mean as Frank.

Lindsay heard the roars, oaths, thuds of the bar and stick, whinnies of pain and tattoo of hoofs all the long afternoon till at six o’clock Frank's fat and patient wife May ran over to the barn and protested, reminding the men it was Sunday and warning them they wouldn’t be blest and would lose a day’s harvest.

On Monday morning the little broncho Dick was hitched to the reaper along with three large mules. He went dancing out to the field, looking devilish, defiantly objecting to keeping his head on a line with the others and hauling the great load almost by himself. That night he came dancing home. On Tuesday he went out again dancing for battle, but returned at night dragging and panting.

On Wednesday, just past the hottest hour, Lindsay was working in the field with Forrest. About three o’clock the pony, who till then had been feebly dancing, went mad. He strained against his halter. His eyes were distended. Blood oozed from his mouth. His hide—a mass of wounds from Sunday’s torture—was clustered thick as fly paper with thirstily sucking flies.

Lindsay, who had never quite overcome his childhood terror of horses, put fear behind him and between them he and Forrest managed to pull the lunging animal away from the mules and restrain him by two halter ropes while Frank, the more savage brother, was sent for. Frank, cursing, tried to lead Dick back to the barn, but when they reached the pasture of long uncut prairie grass the pony sank down into it and kicked the air convulsively with all four feet. Then his heart broke and he died.

“If God gives me grace,” Lindsay pledged, alone with his diary, “some day I shall write his memorial—THE BRONCHO THAT WOULD NOT BE BROKEN.”

•••

NOTE In the decades following World War I, Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was among the best-known poets in the US. His most popular poems include “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” and “The Congo.” He traveled across the country, by walking, surviving in part by “singing” his poems and working as a short-term farm worker. Overcome by financial difficulties and depression, he took his own life on December 5, 1931, by drinking a bottle of lye. 

The aesthetic value of rhymes, alliteration, and other language patterns, not unlike those that Lindsay used, are discussed in a 30-minute video here (free, with online access).

the world's prettiest girls live in Des Moines IA

Roy R. Behrens, "Allen Ginsberg in Cedar Falls" in The Iowa Source, Vol 39 No. 3 (March 2022), pp. 13ff— 

In the 1960s, as a high school student in Iowa, I was an avid follower of MAD Magazine. I also subscribed to the Village Voice. Concerned about my waywardness, my mother arranged for me to meet with a religious elder for an advisory conversation. I was a youthful artist then, and during that meeting the subject turned to visual art. The sagacious elder said to me that, only that morning, he had read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that claimed that “Modern Art is a dung heap.”

Moments later, I was somewhat put at ease when he laughed goodnaturedly and said that it was his opinion that there was no reason for anyone to worry about me—I was simply going through a phase. Most likely, the source of my problem, he said, was that I was reading “too much MAD Magazine.” Out of politeness, I didn’t respond. But in my mind I wondered if the source of his problem was that he was reading “too much Wall Street Journal.”

I recall that a further concern at the time was my new-found interest in the Beat Generation and in writers referred to as “beatniks.” A few years earlier, a former football player from Lowell, Mass., named Jack Kerouac (one of whose high school classmates had been Ray Goulding of the hilarious Bob and Ray radio comedy team) had published a rambling, unorthodox novel called On the Road. Among my chief interests was literature, controversial or not. I had first read Kerouac’s book around 1962, including that now-famous passage in which he lamented having traveled through Iowa too quickly—“past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.”

When On the Road was first released in 1957, reactions from critics were radically mixed. As its notability spread, so did the fame of its author, who soon became referred to as the King of the Beats. His book was a pivotal influence on a generation of writers, musicians, and others, among them the Beatles, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and Jim Morrison.… more>>>

in which William Bailey meets Albers at Yale

Josef Albers at Yale

American artist William H. Bailey, excerpted from an Oral History Interview conducted during October 10 through December 5, 2012. Available online at the Archives of American Art—

[While attending Cooper Union in 1953, and looking for an alternative school, someone] told me about Josef Albers and Yale. He said, "You might try going up there, because this man Albers has just arrived, and he’s changed everything there. And it should be a really interesting place.”

And so, I took a train up to Yale—to New Haven. I was told that I couldn't see Albers because I didn't have an appointment. Just then Albers opened the door to his office and said, “Do you want to see me, boy?” I said, “Yes.”…

I had this same little envelope of drawings, and a few black and white photographs of paintings that I had done. He showed me into his office, which was a spartan room with a door for the desk, and sawhorses holding the door up. Plain straight chairs, a huge plant by the window, glorious light coming in through the window, and this little man dressed [in] various grays, I remember. A gray suit, another kind of woven gray tie—probably woven by [his wife] Anni [Albers]—and a white shirt. Silver hair coming sort of Hitler-like across his brow. He looked at the things, and he proceeded to give me the most ferocious critique I'd ever had in my life. I was stunned, because people had always been very nice to me. They’d all agreed—whatever other things that were against me, yes, I was talented. He wouldn't grant me even talent! He just ripped into things! And then, here and there, he'd say, “But this is—here you see something! And here.”

So I was in this stunned state, when things calmed down. And he asked me about my life, and about the war, and what I’d been doing, and my ambitions and so on. And finally he said, “Okay, I take you!” I hadn't been applying. I mean, I just was there to find out about things. He said, “I take you.” I said, “Wait a minute! How much does it cost?” He said, “I don't know—ask the secretary!”

her broken cuckoo clock hoots at a stranger

So sorry. I have never understood the appeal of Madame Blavatsky (my interpretive portrait above), Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (18312-1891), Russian author and co-founder of the Theosophical Society. The British poet William Butler Yeats recalls his various meetings with her in his autobiography. In the excerpts below, he describes their initial meeting, and various later encounters as well.

•••

William Butler Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats: Consisting of reveries over childhood and youth, the trembling of the veil, and dramatic personae. New York: Macmillan, 1953, pp. 106ff—

I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she said, three followers left…and as one of the three followers sat in an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time kicking my heels. Presently I was admitted and found an old woman in a plain lose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humor and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, but she was deep in conversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding doors into the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon the ground, and yet, as I stood there the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say, “Your clock has hooted at me.” “It often hoots at a stranger,” she replied. “Is there a spirit in it?” I asked. “I should have to be alone to know what is in it.” I went back to the clock and began examining it and heard her say: “Do not break my clock.” I wondered if there was some hidden mechanism and I should have been put out, I suppose, had I found any, though [a friend, William Ernest] Henley had said to me, “Of course she gets up fradulent miracles, but a person of genius has to do something: Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her coffin.” Presently the visitor went away and Madame Blavatsky explained that she [the visitor] was a propagandist for women’s rights who had called to find out “why men were so bad.” “What explanation did you give her?” I said. “That men were born bad, but women made themselves so,” and then she explained that I had been kept waiting because she had mistaken me for some man, whose name resembled mine and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness of the earth.…

A great passionate nature, a sort of female Dr. Johnson, impressive I think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness, she seemed impatient of the formalism and the shrill abstract idealism of those about her, and this impatience broke out in railing and many nicknames: “oh, you are a flap-doodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother.” The most devout and learned of all her followers said to me, “[She] has just told me that there is another globe stuck on to this at the north pole, so that the earth has really a shape something like a dumbbell.”…

One American said to me, “She has become the most famous woman in the world by sitting in a big chair and permitting us to talk.” They talked and she played patience, and totted up her score on the green baise, and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no more. There was a women who talked perpetually of “the divine spark” within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with—“Yes, my dear, you have a divine spark within you and if you are not very careful you will hear it snore.”…

i can always remember the place on a page…

Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948, pp. 54-55—

I never remember anything without remembering its position. I can always predict the place on a page where I will find a missing quotation, even when I cannot remember the book that contained it. I can recall now the exact position in which I sat, and the position in which another person sat in relation to me, when he or she threw a cigarette stub and burned a hole in my sweater, but I cannot remember who it was, or where it was, or when it was, or what color the sweater was, or how I felt about it. This keen sense of spatial relation has something to do, I suppose, with my pleasure in putting things in order whether in a room, an essay, or an argument. I am not overconfident of my taste in colors or sounds, but I am always ready to state categorically whether a composition is good. Sometimes in a hotel room I feel so crisscross that I move the bed and bureau into their places before I can go happily to sleep.

Ripley's ghost illustrator / Believe It or Not!

Above Article in the current issue (October 2021) of The Iowa Source about American illustrator Clemens Gretter. Until recently, I had never heard his name, but (although I didn't realize it) I was familiar with his work. Why? Because in the 1940s, he was the "ghost illustrator" (not unlike a "ghost writer") for Robert Ripley's syndicated newspaper cartoon panel, famously known as Believe It or Not! As part of his contract, he was not allowed to sign his name, since the credit was given to Ripley instead. But Gretter was also responsible for a wide range of other cartoons, illustrations, and book designs, for which he did receive credit. Here's the whole story more>>>

salutations / tipping the hat mere semantics

In John Pollack’s The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More than Some Antics (New York: Gotham Books, 2011), there is an account of a famous French gourmand named Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière (1758-1837). According to Pollack—

As a young man, Grimod was known around Paris for wearing a mechanical wig that would tip politely, and apparently automatically, as ladies passed.

In reading that, I was reminded of a US patent (shown above), No. 556,248, titled Saluting Device, that was filed in 1896 by someone named J.C. Boyle. It seems to be more or less comparable to Grimod’s “saluting wig,” but in this case of course it’s a tip of the hat.

Here is a newspaper account of  Boyle's invention from The Democrat (Scotland Neck NC) on April 9, 1896, p. 1—

A patent has been granted J.C. Boyle of Spokane WA, for a "saluting device." It is a machine worn in the top of the hat. All you have to do is to slightly incline the head, and as the head starts forward the machine lefts the hat a little, holds it just long enough and in a graceful curve lets it back on your head.

Later that year, the following note was published in the Spokane Chronicle on September 30, p. 4—

J.C. Boyle, a member of the Drumheller Packing Company, but whose chief claim to notoriety rests in the fact that he invented the patent hat lift that removes the old labor of lifting the hat by hand, arrived home last evening after a prolonged visit to Kansas City and other portions of the east, where he has been for his health.

standing straddle-legged, balancing as it rattled

from a plant photograph by Karl Blossfeldt

OIL PAINT AND GREASE PAINT: Autobiography of Laura Knight. New York: MacMillan, 1936. p. 173—

Sally Hicks the fish-buyer, Mrs. Porritt's friend, was big, red-faced and as strong as a man. She always drove her cart at a furious pace, standing straddle-legged and balancing it as it rattled and bumped over the cobbles. One night Sally was driving home along the cliff road with the money from the sale of her fish in her pocket. Suddenly two men sprang out of the hedge, one seizing the horse's head and one hanging on the tail of the cart. Sally had the whip in her hand and with it slashed the man off in front, then she dived back at the other with her fishgutting knife, and drove on as fast as she could lick.

When she went to clean her cart in the morning she found four fingers lying inside.

the chess piece could no longer be moved—

Man Ray, Self-Portrait (Boston: Llttle Brown, 1963), p. 237—

After dinner, [Marcel] Duchamp would take the bus to Nice to play at a chess circle and return late with Lydie [his first wife] lying awake waiting for him. Even so, he did not go up to bed immediately, but set up the chess pieces to study the position of a game he had been playing. First thing in the morning when he arose, he went to the chessboard to make a move he had thought out during the night. But the piece could not be moved—during the night Lydie had arisen and glued down all the pieces...A few days later Duchamp and Lydie divorced, and he returned to the States.

Artwork by Marcel Duchamp with Man Ray (1921)

 

Bill Styron | ah'm goin' home to grow pee-nuts

Peter Matthiessen in Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr, ed., George, Being George: George Plimpton’s Life. New York: Random House, 2008, p. 89—

[In 1952 American novelist] Bill Styron showed up on the dingy fourth-floor landing of our apartment [in Paris] at 14, rue Perceval, with no French and a thick Tidewater accent…Patsy and I gave him a drink, and then took him to…a little Breton café…[During dinner] We were all…sloshing up a good deal of rough vin de table, and at a certain point, overcome by dire homesickness, he fell face forward into his platter and lay lachrymose amongst the oysters, uttering the immortal Styronian words: "Ah ain' got no mo ree-sistance to change than a snow-flake." But by this time, we were were already fond of this well-read, humorous, and very intelligent man. We became fast friends on that first evening and from that time on.

Roy R. Behrens, rice bowl collage (detail), c1992