Rosemary's Baby's Birthday

Yeah, I plan to get back to Catullus next Wednesday.  Christmas comes six months from today, so Ira Levin made that Rosemary's baby's birthday.  March 25 (my grandmother's birthday) used to mark the new year since people considered it the day of Jesus's conception.  September 25 marks William Faulkner's birthday.

I watched Rosemary's Birthday on cable about fifteen years ago.  Joe Bob Briggs hosted, and he did a very thorough job discussing the production.  After each commercial he had more tidbits.  I've never seen a more thorough job.  The show lasted for hours.

Stephen King has a nice discussion of both the novel and the film in his wonderful Danse Macabre.  He comments on the amazing fidelity of the movie to the novel.  Robert Evans said he had to talk Mia Farrow into doing the film.  Frank Sinatra, Farrow's husband at the time, didn't want her to do it.  Evans told her the film would make her a star.  It did, and she got a divorce shortly thereafter.

John Lennon later lived in the apartment in the Dakota where they filmed it.

Delta Seventy

David Thomson seems to me to have a deeper understanding of media and its impact on humanity than Marshall McLuhan.  David Thomson wrote a book called Have You Seen? which consists of one thousand one page film reviews.  I decided to watch all the films in that book I had not seen before, and I decided to watch them mostly in chronological order.  I started in 1895, and I did a little background reading on each year as I moved forward.  1895 marked the height of Oscar Wilde's success as well as his downfall.  As I moved forward through the decades, I found myself getting caught up in the historical sweep.

I've now reached 1944.  As part of my background reading I read the chronologically arranged Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams.  In 1944 Williams published The Wedge, and Louis Zukofsky helped him with arranging and editing the poems.  Reading the poems and the notes, especially Williams' response to Wallace Stevens' notion of "anti-poetry," the vastness of literature struck me.  One can spend a lifetime studying an author and still have so much to learn about them.  "Remove infinity from it, and infinity still remains," as the Upanishads say.  I recall a story about someone introducing a scholar to Robert Frost as "a Hawthorne man."  Frost replied, "Why not be your own man?"  I think I see Frost's point, but I can also understand the yearning for scholarship, for understanding the contexts of literature.

William Snodgrass wrote,

"I haven't read one book about
a book"

but I love books about books.  I've devoted a fair chunk of my life to understanding Robert Anton Wilson, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, etc., but I've barely scratched the surface.  Oh well, I do look forward to 1945 and the end of the war.

Catullus 4

This poem deals with the retirement of a boat.  It contemplates the trees which gave the wood which made the boat (which docks by the house that Jack built).  It contemplates the whole process of life.  It reminds me of the scenes in Bull Durham which deal with aging, with Crash never achieving his dreams in the Show.  I read a bit of the Fusus al-Hikam by Ibn 'Arabi yesterday which echoed Heraclitus's notions that reality never repeats itself.  The patterns seem to, though.

Catullus 3

The father of one of my students speaks a number of languages, and he said that the more one studies them, the easier they get.  Researching Catullus 3 today, I reread the Zukofskys' version, read another English version, and for the hell of it looked at a German version.  Having just read two versions of the poem in English, and with my limited German, the German version made a little sense.  However, I couldn't say what I considered Catullus's true mood in the poem.  Parts of it sound sarcastic in one English version.

It would not surprise me if I end up teaching Latin for the next 23 years.  In that case, I suspect my Latin will greatly improve, which I look forward to.  I did find interesting how Catullus observed his girlfriend's great love for her pet two thousand years ago.  This theme recurs from culture to culture, from century to century.  It made me think of Chekhov's "Lady with a Lapdog."

Right now I have George Harrison's All Things Must Pass playing.  I had forgotten how much I love the "Apple Jam" section of that CD.

Catullus 2a

Poor Catullus 2a, it doesn't even get its own Wikipedia page.  Some have argued over the centuries that these three lines belong with Catullus 2, others that they constitute a separate poem.  I do find it interesting that folks have debated this questions for centuries.  Reading Dante it strikes me that
a.  He had a big idea for a long poem.
b.  He finished it.
c.  It still fascinates people almost 700 years later.
Tom Jackson over at rawillumination.net has written about his hope that Robert Anton Wilson's works enter the canon.  I find canon formation fascinating.

Many of us have grand ideas, but most of them don't come to fruition.  I notice how many writers mention books they plan to write but never get around to.  Six days ago marked the Sun Ra centennial, so I've listened to a bunch of Sun Ra this week.  He had some odd ideas, but he kept his large Arkestra together for decades and put out tons of recordings.

On another note, my wife and I watched the Kenneth Branagh film Conspiracy and found it fascinating.  It dealt with the Wannsee Conference where fifteen German man essentially planned the Final Solution in 1942.  I found especially disturbing the use of Schubert's Quintet in C at the end of the film.  Heydrich, who chaired the meeting, played violin and loved classical music.  I also found disturbing how little jail time most of these men did after the war.

Catullus 2

I found this Youtube video of an animated statue reciting Catullus 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFNPw46L1BQ .  This poem deals with the pet sparrow of Catullus's beloved.  This reminded me of Crowley's comment on the Empress card in The Book of Thoth: "Perching upon the flamelike uprights of her throne are two of her most sacred birds, the sparrow and the dove; the nub of this symbolism must be sought in the poems of Catullus and Martial."

I don't know whether I will teach Latin next year.  I need to resubmit my Latin I class to the University of California to get it approved as a college prep elective.  If they reject it for the third time, I probably won't teach Latin at the high school next year.  UC has gotten tougher on approving classes.  I will likely teach Latin the following year and thereafter, since I intend to eventually get it approved.  Perhaps the third time will prove a charm.

If I keep teaching Latin, I hope and pray my Latin will improve, perhaps so much so that I can really understand Catullus in Latin.

Catullus 1

Roman books of poetry tended to opening with an introductory poem, often dedicated to a patron.  This post marks the first of my Catullus posts.  I plan to do one a week for a few years, except for Decembers, when I plan to focus on "A".  Louis and Celia Zukofsky did a version of all of Catullus.

I first encountered Catullus in the fall of 1983 reading Ezra Pound's From Confucius to Cummings.  Back in college when I got a cold I would often buy a book and/or record and go home and read.  In the fall of '83 I read I mostly wanted to get Pound books.

Wikipedia provides this version of Catullus 1:

Line	Latin text	English translation
1	cui dono lepidum novum libellum	To whom do I dedicate this new, charming little book
2	arida modo pumice expolitum	just now polished with a dry pumice stone?
3	Corneli tibi namque tu solebas	To you, Cornelius, for you were accustomed
4	meas esse aliquid putare nugas	to think that my nonsense was something,
5	iam tum cum ausus es unus Italorum	then already when you alone of Italians
6	omne aevum tribus explicare cartis1	dared to unfold every age in three papyrus rolls,
7	doctis Iuppiter et laboriosis	learned, Jupiter, and full of labor.
8	quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli	Therefore have for yourself whatever this is of a little book,
9	qualecumque quod o2 patrona virgo3	of whatever sort; which, O patron maiden,
10	plus uno maneat perenne saeclo	may it remain everlasting, more than one lifetime.