Homer's world

Book 18 of Homer's Iliad contains a remarkable description of the surface of Achilles' shield. Made by the god Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith, the shield offers an enigmatic picture of life in its totality: sun and moon, war and peace, city and country, the seasonal endeavors of agriculture and pastoralism and vintage, all encircled by the River Ocean. I like to think of the shield as the god's silent, somber celebration of all the possibilities of life beyond the Iliad: the city at war (i.e., life as it's lived in the Iliad) represents only a small part of the whole.

Above, a remarkable visualization not of Achilles' shield but of the geography of the Homeric world, creator unknown. (Click for a larger view.) If this picture were a real snowglobe, I'd buy it in a second. More via the links:

Homer’s Snowdome (Strange Maps)
Homer's view of the earth (henry-davis.com)
An explanation (henry-davis.com)

(Thanks, TRH!)

Armstrong and Arlen, blues and weather

Singer Ethel Waters famously described songwriter Harold Arlen (1905–1986) as "the Negro-est white man I ever knew." Such songs as "Blues in the Night" (lyrics by Johnny Mercer), "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," and "Ill Wind" (lyrics by Ted Koehler) suggest Arlen's strong affinity with African-American musical tradition.

And then there's "Stormy Weather" (also with Koehler), which Waters introduced at the Cotton Club in 1933. I woke up yesterday morning realizing that the song's first three notes — "Don't know why" — are the first three notes of the opening ensemble chorus of the 1928 recording by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five of King Oliver's "West End Blues." "West End Blues" is in E flat. Here's the start of "Stormy Weather," with the same intervals in G:

Armstrong's version of Oliver's tune adds a two-note pickup (the "Don't know" of the lyric) not found in Oliver's own 1928 recording. The three notes are then repeated (with different time values) in both "West End Blues" and "Stormy Weather" ("Don't know why," "there's no sun"). Was Arlen paying conscious homage to Armstrong? I doubt it. But unconscious homage is the best homage of all.

In 1929, Oliver recorded a remake of "West End Blues" that follows the contours of the Hot Five recording, with Louis Metcalf approximating Armstrong's trumpet. Oliver, Armstrong's mentor, was now emulating his former student.

Will Friedwald's Stardust Melodies: A Biography of Twelve of America's Most Popular Songs (New York: Pantheon, 2002) has a chapter on "Stormy Weather" (the source of the Waters quotation) that makes no mention of a "West End Blues" connection. So it may be that you heard it here first (though Elaine says that she thought of it a long time ago). What made me think of the connection? Stormy weather, perhaps.

(Thanks, Elaine, for the musical notation!)

Related posts
All Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

"[A]n aspirate more or less"

A remarkable passage from Anne Thackeray Ritchie, quoted by Allen Shawn, prompted me to look up Chapters from Some Memoirs (1894). My university library has an 1895 edition, which I borrowed this afternoon, after waiting for twenty-five minutes or so in the "safe area" of the library basement during a thunderstorm and tornado warning. It was quite a thunderstorm, leaving trees and parts of trees scattered about, and at least one telephone pole listing badly. I saw the top of a birch tree resting upside down in a driveway, with no birch tree nearby.

But here is a passage from Anne Thackeray Ritchie. Watch as the writer's youthful judgment of others turns into mature self-judgment and, finally, into a celebration of beauty in which all judgments become irrelevant. It's as wonderful as I think it is, isn't it?

A great many of my earliest recollections seem to consist of old ladies, — regiments of old ladies, so they appear to me, as I look back through the larger end of my glasses to the time when my sister and I were two little girls living at Paris. I remember once that after a long stay in England with our father, the old ladies seemed changed somehow to our more experienced eyes. They were the same, but with more variety; not all alike as they had seemed before, not all the same age; some were younger, some were older than we had remembered them — one was actually married! Our grandmother looked older to us this time when we came back to Paris. We were used to seeing our father's gray hair, but that hers should turn white too seemed almost unnatural. The very first day we walked out with her after our return, we met the bride of whose marriage we had heard while we were away. She was a little, dumpy, good-natured woman of about forty-five, I suppose, — shall I ever forget the thrill with which we watched her approach, hanging with careless grace upon her husband's arm? She wore light, tight kid gloves upon her little fat hands, and a bonnet like a bride's-cake. Marriage had not made her proud as it does some people; she recognised us at once and introduced us to the gentleman. "Very 'appy to make your acquaintance, miss," said he. "Mrs. C. 'ave often mentioned you at our place."

Children begin by being Philistines. As we parted I said to my grandmother that I had always known people dropped their h's, but that I didn't know one ever married them. My grandmother seemed trying not to laugh, but she answered gravely that Mr. and Mrs. C. looked very happy, h's or no h's. And so they did, walking off among those illuminated Elysian fields gay with the echoes of Paris in May, while the children capered to itinerant music, and flags were flying and penny trumpets ringing, and strollers and spectators were lining the way, and the long interminable procession of carriages in the centre of the road went rolling steadily towards the Bois de Boulogne. As we walked homewards evening after evening the sun used to set splendidly in the very centre of the great triumphal arch at the far end of the avenue, and flood everything in a glorious tide of light. What, indeed, did an aspirate more or less matter at such a moment!

Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Chapters from Some Memoirs (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1895), 26–28

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Anne Thackeray Ritchie in Google Book Search
Anne Thackeray Ritchie on the past
One more passage from Anne Thackeray Ritchie

Faulty sources

From the local paper:

Here once again is the difficulty of deciding whether the comedy is in the headline writer's head or mine.

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Technorati, broken

Here is the top story on Technorati right now. Technorati, alas, is broken. Is anyone noticing?

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Technorati is broken

"[O]ur past inside us"

Freud's insight that we carry our past inside us as a permanent present seems completely, physiologically factual. The distant past accrues innumerable new meanings and connections through the experiences of intervening years, but inside us the past is still there, as it if were occurring now. As memoirist Anne Thackeray Ritchie wrote in 1894, "There is often a great deal more of the past in the future than there was in the past itself at the time … one learns little by little that a thing is not over because it is not happening with noise and shape and outward sign." No matter how old and jaded we have become, how long our parents have been dead, or how far we have traveled from their world, inside we are still waiting for our mother to come in and kiss us good night, holding our ears from angry outbursts, cowering from being struck, or are hoping to be rewarded for eating our vegetables with a warm hug.

Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life (New York: Penguin, 2007), 174–75

Very Proustian. Reminsicent too of what Wallace Shawn says at the end of My Dinner with André.

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[The source for the Anne Thackeray Ritchie quotation: Chapters from Some Memoirs (1894).]

Weegee in Indianapolis

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has acquired several hundred Weegee photographs, found in a trunk at a Kentucky yard sale.

Above, "Martian Woman on the Telephone," circa 1955. Can anyone make out the exchange name on the dial? ELgin?

Kentucky Yard Sale Yields a Trove of Weegee Images (New York Times)

Obama!

CNN and MSNBC just called it.

It's been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come.

(Thanks, Sam Cooke.)

Serendipitous searching at Big Lots

David Pescovitz posted to Boing Boing yesterday concerning a dissertation by ethnologist Erik Ottoson on "serendipitous searching," which Ottoson defines as "open browsing for anything that awakens the person's interest." "Serendipitous searching" seems to be what explains my attraction to Big Lots — a store that I visit in the hope of finding something surprising and worthwhile. Where else am I going to find pocket packs of Kleenex tissues printed in Thai? Without going to Thailand, that is. (88¢ for six packs, ten tissues each.)

If you like tea and live near a Big Lots, you might seek out two excellent bargains of the moment: Good Strong Tea and Hedley's Tea. I'd never seen either, anywhere. The Big Lots price is $2 for a box or tin of fifty teabags. Good Strong Tea is a product of The East India Company, a Sri Lankan company that appears to be related to the original East India Company in name alone. Good Strong Tea lives up to its name: it's a black tea with a full-bodied, winey flavor. It comes in two varieties, for drinking with or without milk. I've tried without, and I would suspect that with is stronger still, to stand up to the white stuff. Hedley's (from Tea Masters Ceylon, also a Sri Lankan company) is available at Big Lots in a number of varieties. I can vouch for Black Currant, which tastes good hot or iced, and has a less artificial flavor than Twinings Black Currant. Founder and chairman Saman Kasthurirathne guarantees every tin.

[Correction: The address on the box is Sri Lankan, but the East India Company is British, as a friendly e-mail from the company tells me.]

Metaphor of the day

YouTube has the context.

[Calendar page made with iWork '08's Pages.]

All "metaphor" posts (via Pinboard)