“Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.”

– Alexis de Tocqueville

 

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The noble horse with courage in his eye,
clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst:
away fly the images of the shires
but he puts the pipe back in his mouth.
Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88;
it took his leg away, he died in the ambulance.
I saw him crawling on the sand, he said
It’s most unfair, they’ve shot my foot off.

 

How can I live among this gentle
obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?
Unicorns, almost,
for they are fading into two legends
in which their stupidity and chivalry
are celebrated. Each, fool and hero, will be an immortal.
These plains were their cricket pitch
and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences
brought down some of the runners. Here then
under the stones and earth they dispose themselves,
I think with their famous unconcern.
It is not gunfire I hear, but a hunting horn.

 

 

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1. Archduke Francis Ferdinand assassinated
2. The Romanovs killed by the Bolsheviks
3. Princess Diana pursued unto death by frenzied media
4. Emperor Hirohito dies in his sleep, having seen Japan through most of the 20th century
5. Queen Victoria passes away after a record long reign

 

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David Yezzi, Karl Kirchwey, and Grace Schulman

 

Monday, February 12, 2007, 8:15pm

Unterberg Poetry Center

92nd Street Y

Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street

Buttenwieser Hall

 

Tickets: $18.00 / $10.00 Age 35 and Under

 

There will be a reception afterwards with lots of delicious food and drink. Hope to see you then!

 

Tickets can be purchased at: http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T-TP5MS21&blog=yezzi

 

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King Kong Lives (1986)

 

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“Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.” – G. K. Chesterton

 

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Homer and Queen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeyM6ac6sIk

 

Catherine Tate – Queen Birthday performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2rRevNdC20

 

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Charles I wore two shirts to his execution as it was a cold day and he did not want anyone to think that he was shivering because he was afraid.

 

Charles II was always accompanied to the lavatory by two attendants — one to hold the candle and the other to hold the lavatory paper. He was also an amateur physician and enjoyed dissecting bodies of both men and women.

 

Queen Anne grew so fat that she had to be raised and lowered through trapdoors at Windsor Castle by means of ropes and pulleys.

 

George III stopped his carriage in Windsor Park one day with the hearty cry: ‘Ah, there he is!’ then alighted from the vehicle to cordially shake hands with the branches of an oak tree under the impression that it was the King of Prussia. For the next few minutes, he discussed continental politics with the tree. He also fancied that he could see Hanover through his telescope from England. He once talked for sixteen hours without stopping. On one occasion he told his barber to shave only half his face. During his madness, Shakespeare’s King Lear was not played on the English stage out of respect for his condition.  

 

Queen Victoria’s first action on returning to the palace after her coronation in 1837 was to wash the dog, Dash, a King Charles spaniel.

 

Edward VII was known as ‘Tum Tum to his intimate friends because of his rotundity, which was brought about by his love of ten-course meals. When king, he measured four feet around the waist. He spoke with a guttural German ‘r’. A fussy dresser, he often changed his clothes up to six times a day. The idiotic habit that some men have of always leaving the bottom button on their waistcoat undone because it’s ‘the done thing’ stemmed from a fashion set by Edward, who, after his large meals, was simply unable to fasten it

 

Queen Elizabeth II was once a car mechanic. When she enrolled as a subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the war, she learned how to strip the engines of cars and lorries and was often to be seen crawling from under a vehicle with oily face and hands. She doesn’t have a passport. Once, when she was a little girl, she was spanked on the bottom. by a post office telephone engineer named Mr Albert Tippele for delving inquisitively into his bag of tools. She is known in her family as ‘Lilibet’ through her lisping attempts to pronounce her own name when a child. Among her all-time favourite television shows were Dad’s Army and Kojak.’

 

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“Well the idea is blindingly obvious, in hindsight. What you may be missing is the analogy to genes as well as viruses etc. The memetic competition is Darwinian, that is memes compete for a limited amount of human bandwidth and storage capacity. Some memes themselves are far better competitors than others, just like some genes are, in particular environments. For example many more people today would recognize the opening notes to an Elvis song than a Duane Eddy song, but in the 19th century neither might have out-competed a Stephen Foster tune. Various memetic features, not limited to rhyme, rhythm, harmony, meaning, and resonance, can give some the edge. Memetic theory, still very much under development can help explain such phenomenon as religion. Why did Christ overwhelm Mithras in the Roman empire? Why did Mohammed oust them both from the Levant and N. Africa? One possible explanation is memetic. Christianity was a better fit for the minds of Roman and Medieval European cultures. Islam fit in with the desert culture’s mindset. The advantage that memetic theory offers is that it allows us one more possible explanation for such phenomena. One that addresses the qualities of Ideas themselves, and examine their failures and successes in terms of a concept that we already understand (or do we?): Evolution by natural selection. It may in fact be pseudo-scientific. Ideas are at least partly epi-phenomenal, and difficult to scrutinize by a fully scientific method. The Darwinian/Memetic concept however can be a handy tool for understanding the rate of propagation of ideas both large and small. For more on Religions as Memes see Dan Dennett’s newest book Breaking the Spell, which is a far less hostile look at Religion then Dawkin’s.”

 

 

 

“I believe Dawkins see memes as possibly replacing genes as a primary unit of selection. Remember, he put forth the theory in the book The Selfish Gene, which was all about how genes, as opposed to specific organisms, are the fundamental unit of natural selection. He put in the seeming throwaway final chapter about memes in part to explain why people seemed to be doing things that would not maximize the propagation of their genes–it was because they focused on memes, instead. So while one might not have any children, one might live on through one’s memes.  I do find this model to be useful at times. For example, just as there are certain very hardy, virulent genes that spread throughout the world, you can see how certain meme are particularly powerful, and grow and spread even in the seeming absence of fuel to feed them. Hence you’ll find anti-semitism in places with no Jews. Memes of hatred seem most powerful and difficult to eradicate. In fact, you could perhaps look at memes as genes that have jumped from the biological to the philosophical, but that continue to support the propagation of one’s genes. The idea of eugenics is perhaps the most obvious example of this, but it works for all racism, really.”

 

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God save the queen
She ain’t no human being
There is no future
In England’s dreaming

 

Don’t be told what you want
Don’t be told what you need
There’s no future, no future,
No future for you

 

– Sex Pistols

 

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“Sorry, I’m sure you get quibblers and addenders all the time, but I’ve got to petition you to add John Hillcoat’s The Proposition to your Aussie film list (perhaps in place of the unextraordinary Rabbit Proof Fence?). It made a handful of year’s best lists last month and should certainly be a contender here. Ebert nails it — as he so often does – by likening it to Cormac McCarthy down under: brutal, awful (in all its senses), strangely beautiful. And I’ll start a list of great Aussie novels, though I might need some help finishing:

 

1. Richard Flannegan – Gould’s Book of Fish
2. Peter Carey – True History of the Kelly Gang
3. Julia Leigh – The Hunter
4. Patrick White – Voss

 

And can I get a critter shoutout for the Tasmanian Tiger?  See video and story here: http://www.naturalworlds..org/thylacine/“

 

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“As much as I hate to disagree with the facial-hair field-guide, based on experience at Universities the ‘Amish’ gets a 60/40 ‘Amish’ vs ‘Capt. Ahab’ in my case.”

 

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Tuesday, February 6, 7:00pm
BRANCHING OUT NYC: Robert Pinsky on Robert Frost & William Carlos Williams 

 

The former U.S. Poet Laureate explores the shared territory of two major 20 th century poets, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, whose distinct voices are unified by a common interest in the American idiom and the construction of the American memory.

 

Co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Funded by the New York Council for the Humanities.

 

@ Tribeca Performing Arts Center
Borough of Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street (1,2,3 to Chambers St. and walk west to BMCC)
$10, Half-price to Lower Manhattan residents
Free to students, Poets House & PSA Members

 

 

 

Brenda Iijima, Jill Magi, Sawako Nakayasu and Srikanth Reddy share work that resonates with the renowned Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) in the exquisite museum and rock garden dedicated to his art.

 

Co-sponsored by The Noguchi Museum.

 

@ The Noguchi Museum
9-01 33 rd Road at Vernon Blvd., Long Island City
(N to Broadway in Queens, walk west on Broadway to Vernon Blvd.
For information about shuttle buses to the Museum, visit www.noguchi.org)
$10, $5 for seniors and students, Free to Poets House & Noguchi Museum Members

 

 

Poets House  is a 45,000-volume poetry library and literary center that invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry. Poets House’s ever-expanding archive of books, journals, chapbooks, audiotapes, videos and electronic media is one of the most comprehensive open-access collections of poetry in the United States. The Reading Room is free and open to the public.

 

Poets House, 72 Spring Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012
Reading Room Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 11:00 am-7:00 pm & Saturday, 1:00 pm-6:00 pm
Children’s Hours: Saturday, 11:00 am-1:00 pm
Phone: (212) 431-7920
Website: http://www.poetshouse.org

 

 

 

Unanswered Prayers by Penny Richards — “Can anyone really feel romantic when framed by some guy’s crotch.”

 

 

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“A fully equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, and dukes are just as great a terror — and they last longer.” – David Lloyd George

 

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Cut-Off, Louisiana

 

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“I am trying to compile a comprehensive list of novels about characters whose storylines depend heavily on the loss or acquisition of funds. I’m thinking of: Madame Bovary, House of Mirth, The Great Gatsby, Dreiser . . . But I’m interested in coming up with some more recent titles. Any help is much appreciated.”

 

[Let’s help her out, everyone. Here are a few from the past fifty years to start: Bonfire of the Vanities and You Shall Know Our Velocity. – E]

 

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A tumbrilful of aristocrats

 

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“There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” – Thomas Jefferson

 

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“Most opera libretti are near to silly; singers don’t look right for parts and generally can’t act. Yes, opera is weird, except for the music”:

 

 

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Bad habits and superstitions! Please send in top five lists, quotes, poems, anything you like related to those nasty habits and superstitions that refuse to die.

 

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