rediscovered music, undiscovered countries

Rainer Maria, which I haven't listened to in for more than a year. 

I played all the songs, and I still know every sigh, every gasp and note. 

The Queen is Dead, specifically "cemetry gates" (sic) which I'm listening to right now, in a live track from Rank.  this is maybe my favorite Smiths song of all time, due to the lyrics. 

A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
While Wilde is on mine

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives
Where are they now ?
With loves, and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived
And then they died
It seems so unfair
I want to cry


You say : "'Ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn"
And you claim these words as your own
But I've read well, and I've heard them said
A hundred times (maybe less, maybe more)
If you must write prose/poems
The words you use should be your own
Don't plagiarise or take "on loan"
'Cause there's always someone, somewhere
With a big nose, who knows
And who trips you up and laughs
When you fall
Who'll trip you up and laugh
When you fall


You say : "'Ere long done do does did"
Words which could only be your own
And then produce the text
From whence was ripped
(Some dizzy whore, 1804)


A dreaded sunny day
So let's go where we're happy
And I meet you at the cemetry gates
Oh, Keats and Yeats are on your side
A dreaded sunny day
So let's go where we're wanted
And I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
But you lose
'Cause weird lover Wilde is on mine


Sure !

I just finished my Chaucer paper, and I'm feeling light and happy and woozy.  Not induced by anything other than the satisfaction of finishing a hard paper.  how weird is that. 

anyway, invisible xanga readers, much love to you from prophetmargin, and may your days be as happy as mine is. 

not true

There were once two guys and a girl.  The guys were close friends.  They had known each other for about four years, and had passed through many ugly haircuts and disastrous relationships and rained out camping trips.  There were many times when they woke up curled up in a ball on someone else's floor and had to walk home shivering and sharing a cigarette.  In many different cities.  As happens sometimes with friends, they got into arguments and fights.  They fought about which version of Sweet Jane was better.  They fought when they owed each other money, they fought about what movie to watch.  But they had never really, really, fought, until Adelle. 

After Adelle, they were no longer friends, but negotiating parties who weren't sure whether there was any point in negotiating.  They became like UN delegates from countries who are at war.  Civil, but distant.  Always armed. 

And Adelle? Not interested, really, in either of them.  Just a passing, fleeting dalliance.  She was amused by them, thought both of them very attractive, and in the end found their pathetic war very touching.  She moved on quickly when the drugs ran out.  Ray and James contemplated gouging each other's eyes out, thought about knives and baseball bats, and ended up exchanging half-hearted insults late at night through a protective fog of beer and feigned aloofness. 

Would it have been the same had she not had elf ears, one strand of blonde hair which was always in her mouth, and liquid blue eyes? Would it have been the same if her eyelids were not like moth wings through which you could see the veins and the briefly shrouded blue eyes underneath? Perhaps.  But we cannot know. 

She still, wherever she is, has a half-smile and hair in her mouth. 

Ray still misses James.  James still curses Ray, when he thinks about him, which is about every two days. 

But what of it? It's only friendship, and courtship, and someone said something once about All's Fair, and they were right, bastard that they were. 

Jack Kerouac says:

   So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

the end of On the Road

finnegan's wake is not only our local pub, but a book!

James Joyce worked on this baby for seventeen years.  I've worked about ten to read it.  Here's a bit near the beginning that I really like.       The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later
on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the
offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan,
erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends
an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:
and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-
linsfirst loved livvy.