roses in december

(One of Vera's first hits -- the beguiling girlishness in her voice is a charming contrast to her indomitable War performances.)

ROSES IN DECEMBER
(George Jessel, Herbert Magidson, Ben Oakland, 1937.)

Roses in December, for you.
Shall I take the stars from the blue?
Or would you like the moon upon a platter?
It doesn't matter. What can I do, for you?

If you'd like the spring in the fall,
It would be no trouble at all.
Give me your love and I can make the most impossible things come true:

Blue shadows never, sunshine forever,
Roses in December for you.

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"God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December"

-- James M. Barrie 1

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1807

.山吹に大宮人の薄着哉
yamabuki ni ômiyabito no usugi kana

in yellow roses
a great courtier's
thin kimono

1810

.古郷やよるも障るも茨の花
furusato ya yoru mo sawa[ru]
mo bara no hana

the closer I get
to my village, the more pain...
wild roses

In a pre- script to this haiku Issa reports that he entered his home village on the morning of Fifth Month, 19th day, 1810. First, he paid his respects at his father's gravesite, and then he met with the village headman.

While the content of their meeting is not revealed, it plainly had to do with the matter of the poet's inheritance that his stepmother and half brother had withheld from him for years.

He goes on to write, tersely, "After seeing the village elder, entered my house. As I expected they offered me not even a cup of tea so I left there soon." In another text dated that same year, he recopies this "wild roses" haiku and signs it, mamako issa: "Issa the Stepchild."

See Issa zenshû (Nagano: Shinano Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1976-79) 3.61; 1.424. Shinji Ogawa assisted with the above translation. 2

evolution of a rose

we have looked at roses before, mackintosh, hunter, but the 20s saw some strange new develop- ments in the portrayal of flowers. they went all crazy, all wiggley, and more abstracted than ever! trace the change to mackintosh, to poiret (both of whom had stylistic ties to vienna), or the new guys, ruhlmann, brandt, or dufet? why did this happen??!!

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Loveliness extreme.
Extra gaiters,
Loveliness extreme.
Sweetest ice-cream.
Pages ages page ages page ages.

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Do we suppose that all she knows is that a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

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...she would carve on the tree Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose until it went all the way around.

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A rose tree may be a rose tree may be a rosy rose tree if watered.

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Indeed a rose is a rose makes a pretty plate.

collected from gertrude stein 1

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JULIET:
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

What's Montague?
it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face,
nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

WASTEFUL GESTURE ONLY NOT

Ruth visits her mother’s grave in
the California hills.
She knows her mother isn’t there but the rectangle of grass
marks off the place where the memories are kept,

like a library book named Dorothy.
Some of the chapters might be: Dorothy:
Better Bird-Watcher Than Cook;

Dorothy, Wife and Atheist;
Passionate Recycler Dorothy,
Here Lies But Not.
In the summer hills,
where the tall tough grass

reminds you of persistence
and the endless wind
reminds you of indifference,

Ruth brings batches of
white roses,
extravagant gesture
not entirely wasteful
because as soon as she is gone she knows
the deer come out of the woods to eat them.

What was made for the eye
goes into the mouth,
thinks Ruth to herself as she drives away,
and in bed when she tries to remember her mother,

she drifts instead to the roses,
and when she thinks about
the roses she
sees instead the deer
chewing them—

pale petals of the roses in the dark
warm bellies
of the sleeping deer—
that’s what going to sleep is like.

Tony Hoagland

from What Narcissism Means to Me.
Copyright © 2003 by Tony Hoagland.

reading the past

we've looked at magazines here several times, but rarely looked into. often the people we've seen on the covers wear japanese clothes, or carry parasols, or lean against a painted screen. these all feature all japanese people. why are they on these particular covers? and what being talked about inside. i can answer a bit of that, here and there....

truth is, there's more i don't know, or even understand, than i do. i'll just set out some stuff i found. the magazine success (below) is summed up by the magazine reviewer in the craftsman. "Success contains many good things, chief of which is Hosmer Whitfield's 'Why Japan Must Win.' There is a graphic picture of the Mikado and his influence, showing him to be an enlightened and progressive monarch, in the very front rank of the world's rulers. 2

also in that issue one would find this quote from, in a piece about child labor. "Juliet Wilbor Tomkins writes, 'A great deal has been said about the immorality resulting from factory life. Perhaps there has been more or less exaggeration on this point, or, rather, a failure to make honest comparison with the morality of these same people when not employed in factories. Yet there is no denying that the indiscriminate herding of men and girls does not prompt modesty and virtue. I know a ramshackle old building in New York in which the top floor is used by a manufacturer of electrical shoes. On the floor beneath is a laundry, separated from the street by three long flights of stairs, which are utterly dark except for the gas jets insisted on by the authorities.

At half-past five, every afternoon, the shoe men come trooping down just as the laundry girls are let out. tired with the hardest kind of work, and flushed and warm with the long day in a steaming, enervating atmosphere. And night after night the gas jets are mysteriously put out, so that all flock down together in pitch blackness. When you are tempted to believe that the evils of child labor are exaggerated, think what they are to a girl when she is too young to protect or even to understand herself. Terrible things have been begun on those stairs, yes, and happened there: and they are not the only dark flights of stairs in the New York factories. No one knows who turns the lights out: it may be, — heaven help them! — the girls themselves.

The managers could easily find a way to prevent it, and they give glib promises; but they do not really care. It is the public at large that has to care, to demand better protection for its children. I have seen other conditions so wrong and so openly offensive to decency that they could scarcely be believed; and they persisted until an inspector, in righteous rage, stood on the spot while reform was inaugurated. Filth, with not even a pretense of privacy.— how long can immature modesty stand that unharmed?'" 3

wondering about the illustration on the cover: does that cover both subjects, or just the one on japan? is this a father teaching a child -- to work? to know? or is child labor slightly different when you're talking about asians? what about these other covers? why was an asian woman chosen for an easter issue? (eastern issue?) we see two covers with japanese women with children on their backs, at a time when i'm sure that was never even imagined here. we then have women working, and playing; at least readers were given images that passed docility.

a description of the issue of fortune reads: "July 1933 complete issue of Fortune magazine, profusely illustrated in color and black and white, 124 pages, 14 x 11 1/2 inches, color pictorial paper wrappers as issued. Light soiling to cover (including spot at lower left) otherwise very good condition. Interesting articles include: "The Reign of Meiji ...forty-five amazing years during which Japan jumped out of the feudal age into the industrial present"; article on silver with double page decorative color map by C. H. Appleton "Silver World Production and Consumption." The article on the Owens-Illinois company includes a black and white diagram by Richard Edes Harrison showing the bottle making process. The color cover illustration of a Japanese weaver is by Bertha Lum, whose Japanese woodblock prints are most sought after." 4

1 in his book on the actress margaret anglin, john levay writes (click to read):

i'm left with the predictable it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. like all times. seeing those things that haven't changed is balanced by learning of some things that have. and i'll repeat: i can understand the contents, meanings, contexts, and nuances, to the same degree as understanding literature in translation. not that that stops me from reading them.

many of these great scans can be found on a very cool new(ish) site: Galactic Central!

reviewing the reviewer: Peter Schjeldahl

schjeldahl's way with a word every bit equals matisse's with a brush. one ogles, awed. as i amble through his 2005 review of hilary spurling's “Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954” in the new yorker, maybe you'll agree.

"[His] art, whose glory was maintained and renewed in many phases until the artist’s death, in 1954: preternatural color, yielding line, boldness and subtlety, incessant surprise. Anyone who doesn’t love it must have a low opinion of joy. "

"this book completes the job of giving us a living individual, as familiar as someone we have long known, who regularly touched the spiritual core of Western modernity with a paintbrush.... I don’t think it is possible to be more intelligent in any pursuit, or more serious and original, and with such suddenness, than Matisse was when he represented a reaching arm in “Dance I” (1909), or the goldfish that he painted as slivers of redness in a series of still-lifes in 1912. How can intellectual potency be claimed for an artist whose specialty, by his own declared ambition, was easeful visual bliss?"

"His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by “Le Bonheur de Vivre,” a fractured fantasia that seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse, was regularly exciting near-riots of derision in the public. (“My Arcadia,” Matisse called the picture, which established his career’s dizzying keynote: calm intensity or, perhaps, intense calm.) His huge-hipped, sinuous “Blue Nude,” of 1907, discomfited even Picasso, who complained, “If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design. This is between the two.”

"Matisse told his students, One must always search for the desire of the line, where it wishes to enter, where to die away.... Colors enter the world through Matisse like harmonies through Mozart. Gertrude Stein (unlike her sister-in-law Sarah Stein, Matisse’s first major collector) enjoyed ridiculing him, reporting with satisfaction, Spurling says, that her French cook served M. Matisse fried eggs for dinner instead of an omelette because, as a Frenchman, he would understand that it showed less respect."

"[Matisse] shielded his art from politics under all circumstances—he created the reverberant domestic idyll “The Piano Lesson” (my favorite twentieth-century painting) in the summer of 1916, while death swaggered at Verdun. But there seems to be no gainsaying his at least passive solidarity with the Resistance."

"Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style,... Spurling writes, She personified the pride, courage and resilience that he responded to all his life at the deepest instinctual level in his female models. She also epitomized a period type of 'self-reliant single girl,' an obsessive subject for Matisse in those years, which Spurling locates between the earlier heroines of Henry James and the later solitaries of Jean Rhys. Matisse’s 1911 portrait of Meerson shows a primly dressed and posed, tremblingly sensitive woman slashed with two fierce black arcs—plunging from neck to thigh, and from armpit to buttock,” which resist any explanation aside from their sheerly formal éclat."

"The Nice odalisques, who loll on chairs or chaises amid flowers, fruits, and sumptuous fabrics. Indubitably erotic, the pictures diffuse arousal. Their sensuality never fixates on a breast or a thigh but dilates to every square inch of canvas. Such is the character of Matisse’s formal radicalism, early and late: distributed energy, suspended gesture, deferred climax. Might the tension have been so precious to him, as the engine of what gave his life meaning, that its only end could be exhaustion? It may count that, according to Matisse, he never ate even the fresh food that he used for still-lifes—including oysters, from a restaurant in Nice, that were returned in time for the lunch crowd." I

both evan in his comments and thomas in his discussion of brunellleschi suggest various bits of evidence of the japanese influence's journey taking the next steps to modernism -- saying more and more with less and less. cubism (a name allegedly coined by matisse), art deco, bauhaus: simplify, simplify, simplify. in matisse's work we see his plunge into shape, and color, and even abstraction.

don't miss his lovely green triangles across from each other above.

connect the dots

how do you choose what to wear? are garments always costumes, assuring that you will be taken by others as the role you wish to fill? there are those who suggest that every single item of clothing is a choice communicated, down to the last nuance, and a statement made, down to the last whisper.

me, i am driven by color. and cotton. and though i believe i have no consciousness of what is fashionable whatsoever, there remains something of great importance about it all.

i can remember the white empire-waisted sheath that i wore for high- school graduation. it had a black cummerbund with white polka dots. i was, and still am, quite delighted that i could find an enameled bracelet that was white with black polka dots to match.

several times here we've discussed the volumes of identity revealed in various cultures by hairdo, or costume, detail, or grand gesture. if it was true then, it must be true now. something as 'simple' as a woman's fingernails might immediately brand her as 'one of us' or not.

do you want it to be true for you? do you communicate through appearances consciously? might you be kidding yourself, telling a different story entirely than the one you believe you're telling? how is your identity spelled out by your clothes?

i have come to believe that identity, appearance, opinion are, for most of us, invisibly malleable -- we think what we think, wear what we wear, even know ourselves to be who we think we are... to fit into the group of our life. it could be dangerous not to.

to be born 'outside the box' changes the perception of this, but does not wholly negate its pull. we like to think we create ourselves out of free will, but if that were true best friends wouldn't dress alike, nobody would call to ask what to wear to the party.

that old song, 'you've got to be taught how to hate,' well, you've got to be taught everything else too. how can something so unimportant be the most important thing of all?