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William Blake

Image and Memory

by Sid Parham on September 25, 2009 · Comments

in Personal

Tuli Kupferberg
Image via Wikipedia

I have been tweeting recently with someone calling herself  Slum Goddess.  I immediately asked if she was an East Village Fugs fan. As it turns out she is an expat American, living in London, whom some juvenile judge had banned from Greenwich  Village when she was fourteen. Her screen name is drawn from a Tuli Kupferberg song, the chorus of which is:

Slum Goddess put away that knife

Slum Goddess come and be my wife.

Slum Goddess of the lower East Side

For those of you too young to remember even parts of the sixties.  The Fugs, led by Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, were the original underground rock band. They took their name from the euphemism that Norman Mailer’s publisher had forced on him when he published The Naked and the Dead, in the days before the fuck barrier had been broken.  In those days when obscenity was still a challenge to the establishment, their name and some of their lyrics issued a clarion call.  They were also interested in poetry and their rendition of William Blake’s “A Sunflower Weary of Time” still remains one of my favorite interpretations of Blake.

This twitter exchange sent my mind spinning and sent me back to my last night in New York before I went to Botswana in the Peace Corps. I and several of my compatriots went pub crawling through the East Village and ended in up in the offices of the East Village Other where we duly made “southern African correspondents.” I don’t think any of us ever filed a story.

I remembered people I hadn’t thought about in years and wondered what had happened to them, but not enough to google them and find out.I remember the brash, confident, and fairly foolish young man I had been with more fondness than chagrin. But mostly I marveled at how memory can serve up images that seem really fresh, even though I know they are over 40 years old. I regret nothing have done, but know that too many of my days have not rendered up images that will sustain me.  I was happy to discover this one still does.

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Twitter Wit

by Sid Parham on April 22, 2009 · Comments

in social media

Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clo...
Image via Wikipedia

My wife complains that she’s not enjoying twitter because she does do wit.  The 140 character limit of twitter seems to lend itself to proverbs, epigrams, and smart remarks.  Consider how many famous epigrams are tweeted every day. Having grown up in a family that valued the snappy comeback and the witty remark, I’ve read and been aware of this style all my life.  My father collected 18th century literature and at a very early age I was exposed to Pope, Swift and Dr. Johnson.  As a teenager I discovered restoration drama.  Many 16 year old boys want to act like Restoration Rakes.  I actually had the term and the model.

Literary history tends to attribute the invention of the epigram to the Latin Poet Martial(Marcus Valerus Martial 43-104).  I am not a good enough Latinist to appreciate him in Latin and none of the translations I’ve read have made him a favorite. “Fortune gives too much to many, enough to none,” is a thought worth saving.  My third year of college French delivered Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld as a new favorite of this genre–His maxims are wonderful in French and he has inspired many good English translators, beginning with Jonathan Swift.  The good Duc is a cynic who sees self interest everywhere. “The refusal of praise is the desire to be praised twice.”  “If we resist or passions, it is more from their weakness than our stregth.”  ” Hipocracy is the homage vice renders to virtue,” or his most famous saying “In the adversity of even our best friends thaere is something that does not displease us.”

Early on in high school I discovered Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary and the work of Oscar Wilde.  Both are popular enough I will not quote them here. My life long favorites have been William Blake and Bernard Shaw and I will just a couple to give you a flavor of them

Willam Blake

Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

Every harlot was a virgin once.

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

George Bernard Shaw

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

So what does all this have to do with us and with Twiteer?  I would argue that like any writing we can become better by studying examples.  I leave it to my followers to decide if I’m witty. Twitter and epigrams require us to trust our audience because we have limited means by which we can fence meaning in.  These and other examples show us how a concentration of language can create an explosion of meaning.  If  you have a favorite epigram or proverb, add it in my comments.

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