Eccentric Flower:199903/clio helen and gretchen
From Eccentric Flower
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twenty-one march clio, helen, and gretchen Well, it seems like Clio is becoming a weekend thing. This is three weekends in a row that I've written something for that section. This week's is about Veteran's Day and Memorial Day and how they've lost what made them important. Of course, now that I've established a trend, I'll break it. I'll either end up writing a Clio in the middle of the week, or I'll miss my window next weekend. I've disabled all the links that aren't done yet, by the by, so if you go to Clio's top page, you can see at a glance that there are only three working links now, which is as it should be. Which one should I fill in next? - - - Shmuel wrote about the good Dr. Faustus this week. He speculates (obliquely) whether the "was this the face that launched a thousand ships" speech has an oral sex reference in it. It is not out of the realm of possibility. To Shmuel, Faust means Marlowe, who might very well have slipped such a thing in there; to me, Faust means Goethe, where the line does not exist. I suspect, though, that it's just the dirty mind of Shmuel and his classmate. I also heard the theory once that when Mephistopheles summons Helen, she is old and has lost her famed beauty - and thus the "was this the face" comment is Faust reacting in sadness/irony/disbelief [pick and choose]. I favor that interpretation. Beauty is so ephemeral, even for those who didn't get cheated out of it by genetics in the first place. On the other hand, Helen is supposed to be immortal (sometimes she is the daughter of Zeus and Leda, sometimes of Zeus and Nemesis). So I'm probably just being cynical. - - - The last time I deliberately set out to write a series of poems, it was a cycle about the Trojan War myths, concentrating on the weird bits around the edges ... like the part where Achilles dresses as a female to avoid being recruited, but is found out by Odysseus (himself a reluctant recruit). Most of the poems were unsalvageable - but one of the better ones asked the question: What happened after Helen went back to Menelaus? HELEN AND MENELAUS You lie in your bed snoring There were three great men who I lie in your bed hearing And when you die - - - But back to Faust. Willard Espy, in Another Almanac of Words at Play, quotes a 1925 book by Kurt Stein called Die Schöniste Lengevitch, where several famous German operas - among them Faust - are retold in verse that mixes bad German, bad English, and something in between. If you like that kind of thing, they're hilarious; if not, down you go to the next section break. Since this book is quite unavailable, I feel no shame in quoting the same excerpt Espy does. Aside from the pun on "hell" (hell = light, Hell = Hell), you will need very little German to make out what's going on here. Trotzdem sie ihre Mind verlor'n Auf ei'mal rattelts an der Thür - Die Churchbell ringt, und mit Gebimmel This kind of verse isn't for everyone. When I was writing Columbinas Inferno in the same way, so few people got the joke that I never wrote more than the first octave. The first two stanzas of those eight, just to give you an idea, were: Columbina, jungen Schreiber, Ein Hum electrisch von Komputer Oh, well. It was trickier than it looked to write anyway. I'd have probably succumbed to brain meltdown before I got more than a couple of octaves along. - - - One final comment about Faust and Espy. Espy is also the person who introduced me to the game of "Bouts Rimes," where you take the first line of a famous poem and write a second one, with the same meter and as a couplet rhyme for the first, for humorous effect. They are sometimes very easy to do, and sometimes quite hard. Shmuel would probably excel at them. At any rate, Marlowe's lovely speech was ruined for me forever because of one of the couplets Espy chose to provide as an example: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
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