Lady Maisry

     In language, theme, and style, “Lady Maisry” is representative of the ballad tradition. Though much literary criticism, even of oral materials, privileges innovation and individuality while minimizing the value of similarities between a text and others, such common elements may be centrally important, particularly in the case of popular genres. This may be exemplified by a consideration of this classic song, in many ways a typical border ballad.
     Since the text was first transcribed from oral performance in 1799 “for his own amusement” by a Greek professor with antiquarian tastes, it has proven quite popular. It appears not only as Childs ballad 65 and in Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1910 Oxford Book of Ballads, but in such non-scholarly journals as Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. [1] In academic circles it has acquired variations, sources, and influences while, ever since the sixties, it has never lacked interpreters among modern folk-style performers. [2]
     The emotional focus is one of the most popular world-wide, evoking an exceedingly old gender stereotype: the persecuted lady, familiar from Greek tragedy, Yuan dynasty plays, and The Perils of Pauline. Just as the favorite theme of lyric is romantic love, commonly obstructed or unrequited, in the sentimental and melodramatic ballad genre, love frequently inspires a tragedy marked by a loss of sexual purity. In the classic dodge used by Andreas Capellanus and the Pearl-Poet (in Cleanness) as well as by many exploitation filmmakers, one can describe every sort of immorality if one simply concludes by drawing a cautionary moral. Thus the listener is free to savor Lady Maisry’s grand affair and then to shiver in horror at the violence that follows.
     A certain ambiguity is established at the outset as the Lady spurns the honorable suits of her fellow-countrymen who approached in a respectable manner through her family and gave her gifts. While her rejection of the “young lords o’ the north country” could signify arrogance, it might also be construed as indicating the purity of her love, independent of family or local ties. It is, at any rate, tempting fate, as the sequel demonstrates.
     Indeed, she not only has chosen an English lover; she openly declares as much to the local lads, and this ill-advised candor sets the narrative in motion. A low menial, a “kitchy-boy,” relays the information that she is pregnant to her brother to whom the news is an intolerable disgrace requiring immediate and extreme action, an “honor killing” much like that expected of families in some contemporary Muslim cultures. He confronts his sister, threatening her with death unless she forsakes her lover.
     In this dilemma, she calls on the aid of her lover Lord William through the agency of a loyal servant, but he arrives too late. She has been burned to death, and he resolves to burn her kin in revenge, and finally, unable to go on without her, to cast himself into the flames. The song ends with a thrill of horror and this vision of general conflagration.
     The thematic emphasis falls heavily on the competing demands of the morality of love, where the lady and her William defy social convention yet behave in a romantically noble fashion, sacrificing all for passion. A possible patriotic theme vanishes as the English lord acquits himself well, sealing his tragic valor with a pledge of suicide. The representative of traditional values, the brother, concerned for the honor of the family, is portrayed in a wholly unattractive way, so harsh and unfeeling that his moral position is undermined. He threatens her with immediate death the moment he confronts her. [3] Similarly, the class issue is raised by the low status of the treacherous kitchen worker, ignoble in deeds as in birth, only to be canceled by the readiness of the “bonny boy,” certainly a servant or dependent, who carries her message to her champion. With these bipolar oppositions nicely balanced, the story of star-crossed love may play out.
     The song thus insists on the primacy of desire – there is no denying the lady’s willful love-death. The issues of nationalism, morality, and class do not vanish but are subsumed in the ungovernable passion that drives the story. Received ideas govern: ladies are passive (if stubborn), males active to the point of violence. The manor-house setting raises interest in the story, as people today take a lively interest in the affairs of British royalty and Hollywood celebrities. Like viewers of many a modern movie, the listener to “Lady Maisry” can enjoy the second-hand experience of what must be understood as a story of sexual misconduct – after all, the lady’s liaison is secret and violates her obligations to Christian morality, family and community – without violating any norms. In fact, the song could pass for an object lesson in the damage potential of unloosed sexuality.
     The charm of this particular song, I think, is that it provides all the reassuring affirmation of popular art while retaining knots of ambiguity. The simpler art will portray one hundred per cent heroes and villains. Here one can only react with some ambivalence to each of the three main characters. The lady who loves so well might seem a trifle stand-offish to her local suitors, what the troubadours called daungereux (not far from what a more modern idiom would condemn as “hincty”), while engaging in a secret and forbidden premarital liaison. The brother who represents the conventional morality that governs most listeners’ lives is cold and brutal. The lordly lover, while valiant and loyal, having failed to sweep her off to safety at his own estate, comes, in the end, only tardily to her aid. In spite of the formulaic plot, the song hints at the complexities of lived experience.
     Further, while acknowledging the contradictions of gender, ethnicity, and class, the song spotlights desire as the primary motive force for life, the principal cause of conflict and drama. The governing opposition of the song is the lady’s reckless search for love and her brother’s conviction that he must control eros in the name of honor, however harsh the means. In the world of the ballad as in the Eden story and the real world, people suffer because if desire. The individual who has experienced this in life may, upon hearing the song, enjoy the role of spectator, relishing like the viewer of tragedy the fact that it is others who suffer this time while knowing that similar, if less lurid, calamities occur regularly.
     While, like other popular and oral texts, “Lady Maisry” reinforces received ideas and accepted behavior, it also illustrates literature’s particular ability to reflect the contradiction, ambivalence, and mystery of lived experience. The listener is able at once to take pleasure in the sensationalism of an illicit affair and a gruesome denouement while feeling some kinship with the passionate lady, the moralistic brother, and the lover who fails to save his lady. Issues of gender, class, nationalism, family, and sexual purity fade, leaving the listener to reflect on the turbulence stirred by irresistible desire.


1. For January 1845.

2. John Jacob Niles collected it in 1934 in the Appalachians and vividly recreates the scene in his Ballad Book. A contemporary U.K. group not only recorded the song but calls itself Lady Maisery.

3. In an odd detail, he threatens to kill the messenger if the bad news he brings be a lie, yet also promises a “malison” or curse should the information be accurate.


I

THE YOUNG lords o’ the north country
Have all a-wooing gone,
To win the love of Lady Maisry,
But o’ them she wou’d hae none.

II

O they hae courted Lady Maisry 5
Wi’ a’ kin kind of things;
An’ they hae sought her Lady Maisry
Wi’ brooches an’ wi’ rings.

III

An’ they ha’ sought her Lady Maisry
Frae father and frae mother; 10
An’ they ha’ sought her Lady Maisry
Frae sister an’ frae brother.

IV

An’ they ha’ follow’d her Lady Maisry
Thro’ chamber an’ thro’ ha’;
But a’ that they cou’d say to her, 15
Her answer still was Na.

V

‘O haud your tongues, young men,’ she says,
‘An’ think nae mair o’ me;
For I’ve gi’en my love to an English lord,
An’ think nae mair o’ me.’ 20

VI

Her father’s kitchy-boy heard that,
An ill death may he dee!
An’ he is on to her brother,
As fast as gang cou’d he.

VII

‘O is my father an’ my mother well, 25
But an’ my brothers three?
Gin my sister Lady Maisry be well,
There’s naething can ail me.’—

VIII

‘Your father an’ your mother is well,
But an’ your brothers three; 30
Your sister Lady Maisry ’s well,
So big wi’ bairn gangs she.’

IX

‘Gin this be true you tell to me,
My malison light on thee!
But gin it be a lie you tell, 35
You sal be hangit hie.’

X

He ’s done him to his sister’s bow’r,
Wi’ meikle doole an’ care;
An’ there he saw her Lady Maisry
Kaiming her yellow hair. 40

XI

‘O wha is aught that bairn,’ he says,
‘That ye sae big are wi’?
And gin ye winna own the truth,
This moment ye sall dee.’

XII

She turn’d her right and roun’ about, 45
An’ the kame fell frae her han’;
A trembling seiz’d her fair body,
An’ her rosy cheek grew wan.

XIII

‘O pardon me, my brother dear,
An’ the truth I’ll tell to thee; 50
My bairn it is to Lord William,
An’ he is betroth’d to me.’—

XIV

‘O cou’d na ye gotten dukes, or lords,
Intill your ain country,
That ye draw up wi’ an English dog, 55
To bring this shame on me?

XV

‘But ye maun gi’ up the English lord,
Whan your young babe is born;
For, gin you keep by him an hour langer,
Your life sall be forlorn.’— 60

XVI

‘I will gi’ up this English blood,
Till my young babe be born;
But the never a day nor hour langer,
Tho’ my life should be forlorn.’—

XVII

‘O whare is a’ my merry young men, 65
Whom I gi’ meat and fee,
To pu’ the thistle and the thorn,
To burn this woman wi’?’—

XVIII

She turn’d her head on her left shoulder,
Saw her girdle hang on a tree; 70
‘O God bless them wha gave me that,
They’ll never give more to me.

XIX

‘O whare will I get a bonny boy,
To help me in my need,
To rin wi’ haste to Lord William, 75
And bid him come wi’ speed?’—

XX

O out it spake a bonny boy,
Stood by her brother’s side:
‘O I would run your errand, lady,
O’er a’ the world sae wide. 80

XXI

‘Aft have I run your errands, lady,
Whan blawn baith win’ and weet;
But now I’ll rin your errand, lady,
Wi’ saut tears on my cheek.’

XXII

O whan he came to broken briggs, 85
He bent his bow and swam,
An’ whan he came to the green grass growin
He slack’d his shoone and ran.

XXIII

O whan he came to Lord William’s gates,
He baed na to chap or ca’, 90
But set his bent bow till his breast,
An’ lightly lap’ the wa’;
An’, or the porter was at the gate,
The boy was i’ the ha’.

XXIV

‘O is my biggins broken, boy? 95
Or is my towers won?
Or is my lady lighter yet,
Of a dear daughter or son?’—

XXV

‘Your biggin is na broken, sir,
Nor is your towers won; 100
But the fairest lady in a’ the land
For you this day maun burn.’—

XXVI

‘O saddle me the black, the black,
Or saddle me the brown;
O saddle me the swiftest steed 105
That ever rade frae a town!’

XXVII

Or he was near a mile awa’,
She heard his wild horse sneeze:
‘Mend up the fire, my false brother,
It’s na come to my knees.’ 110

XXVIII

O whan he lighted at the gate,
She heard his bridle ring;
‘Mend up the fire, my false brother,
It’s far yet frae my chin.

XXIX

‘Mend up the fire to me, brother, 115
Mend up the fire to me;
For I see him comin’ hard an’ fast,
Will soon mend it up to thee.

XXX

‘O gin my hands had been loose, Willy,
Sae hard as they are boun’, 120
I would have turn’d me frae the gleed,
And casten out your young son.’—

XXXI

‘O I’ll gar burn for you, Maisry,
Your father an’ your mother;
An’ I’ll gar burn for you, Maisry, 125
Your sister an’ your brother.

XXXII

‘An’ I’ll gar burn for you, Maisry,
The chief of a’ your kin;
An’ the last bonfire that I come to,
Mysel’ I will cast in.’ 130

Big Bill Otter's Sprees and Frolics

     The reader of Huckleberry Finn who thinks that the author has perhaps exaggerated the violent, semi-lawless towns with their drunks, duels, feuds, and frauds, all enacted against the violent background of chattel slavery, finds in William Otter’s autobiography History of My Own Times a putatively nonfiction depiction of much the same scene.
     Little is known about why or how Otter, a plasterer by trade, happened to publish this volume in 1835. The curious thing about Otter’s narration is not his working-class perspective, but his self-concept. The subtitle promises “A Series of Events, and Musical Incidents Altogether Original.” In fact, the word “musical” here apparently means something like entertaining, and to Otter nothing was more amusing than causing pain to people and animals. He was a tavern habitué and progressed from youthful adventures in which he and his crew would simply overrun a drinking spot in order to steal liquor and break things to elaborate conspiracies with fellow drinkers to play pranks which sometimes resulted in real physical harm as well as destruction of property. The entire book consists of his boastful narration of his endless “sprees” and “frolics,” mostly directed against Blacks, Irish Catholics, or trusting acquaintances, though occasionally with an affluent butt such as the “dandy,” Dr. Vanpike, in whose face he contrives to piss. Otter is the sort of joker who purchases itch powder and laxatives; he tricks a man into drinking turpentine and tosses lime into a monkey’s face. He is a large man who was quite willing to have a physical confrontation. He relates a contest on which two men grab each other by the ears and then head-butt. Otter by his telling had far the hardest head.
     He was particularly fond of attacking minorities. He describes ushering in Christmas by lurking outside the midnight mass to harass the Catholics when they emerged and participates in rioting against the Irish in New York City. He sent a goat up the aisle of a black church and then beat the worshippers to the ground when they emerged, noting with satisfaction that he spared neither sex or age. He liked to pick up extra cash by capturing escaped slaves. By his own account he caused livestock and pets to be badly injured and tortured, and killed a dog in front of its owner (whose tears inspire his laughter). He had no hesitation about stealing in small ways, though he was a hard-working tradesman as well.
     Disreputable, nasty, and wicked as these activities sound, he seems to have had little trouble recruiting comrades to assist his plots. Though often the initiator, he elicited applause from his cronies for what they regarded as his enterprise and wit. In middle age he was popular enough to be elected burgess (or mayor) of his town.
     The story is organized by his “frolics,” with almost every paragraph running until the episode has ended, some going on for pages with great strings of paratactic, coordinated clauses. Otter’s use of slang and colloquial syntax and grammar is entertaining and his stories move rapidly.  In spite of the repetitive accumulation of similar anecdotes, the book reads smoothly; one hears the waggish tone of the raconteur. Apart from hanging out in barrooms, the author later owned one, and there can be little doubt that many of these tales found oral expression a great many times before they appeared on a printed page.
     Literary parallels pointed out by Otter’s editor, Richard B. Scott include George Washington Harris’ Sut Lovingood and Davy Crockett’s popular autobiography, and Scott also speculates on the political and historic implications of the book. Otter was a Jacksonian Democrat. The gentility of the rising American middle class would never tolerate his high jinks, and the Great Awakening of his day would see him simply as a lost sinner. Yet perhaps the most significant reading of the data encoded in Otter’s autobiography would focus on the unselfconscious, unrestrained ego assertion so often associated with masculinity, so high-spirited, so at home with alcohol and violence. He managed to set down upon the page sufficient information that we can almost understand Jackass films, the schoolyard bully, and the dreadful grins often evident in photos of the perpetrators of lynchings.


William Otter, Richard B. Scott ed. History of My Own Times or, the Life and Adventures of William Otter, Sen. Comprising A Series of Events, and Musical Incidents Altogether Original. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Some Notes Toward a Theory of the Avant-Garde

A few days ago, I presented a talk titled “What’s New: the Meaning of Avant-Garde in the Arts” at the Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf. Though some of the material I presented was derived from my essays “Millenarian Rhetoric and the Avant-Garde,” “The Inconsequential Bayonets of Art,” and “Lament for the Loss of the Avant-Garde,” I mean here to simply note several ideas that were new. The following aims merely to record what was not in the earlier essays and does not aim therefore at polish or even coherence, only at contributing toward an understanding of this important concept.


The Essential Combativeness of the Avant-Garde

     Literature always develops and changes. New styles succeed old and writers such as Catullus and Dante were once justifiably called “new.” The avant-garde is a particular subcategory of new culture in which an adversarial relationship with the majority culture is assumed. This arises necessarily from the term itself.
     The term avant-garde was first used in English in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur with a purely military meaning. This usage gained in popularity by the late 18th century. It was first used in the cultural sphere in 1825 by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel.” For him artists were likely “forward troops” who could educate the masses through the dissemination of radical ideas through their work. Thus actual revolution provided the crossover point from military to artistic content. The fact that the masses would be unlikely to be reading “avant-garde” literature did not trouble Rodrigues who envisioned a militant and influential cadre of artists in support of socialism.  Shortly thereafter in 1845 Henri Murger began publishing the stories which became in 1851 the collection Scènes de la Vie de Bohème which preceded Puccini’s opera by almost half a century. In 1848 Thackeray used Bohemian in its counter-cultural sense in Vanity Fair.


The Definition of Avant-Garde

     Kostelanetz in his Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes proposes a value-laden definition of avant-garde: work that “transcends” current practice and will find its audience only later though it will eventually have considerable influence. This is, of course, absurd. Trivial or inconsequential avant-garde work is not only possible, but the rule. First-rate popular or conventional art is likewise common. Avant-garde artists are not those who magically anticipate coming trends. Indeed, the techniques associated with the word have remained remarkably consistent.
     The specific descriptive value of the term avant-garde seems to me to consist in the following qualities: a conscious aim to “épater la bourgeoisie,” a claim that the work of the “advanced” school has value beyond and above that of other artists, and a particular set of techniques and attitudes.

1.
     Avant-garde art typically offends, shocks, disturbs because of its transgressiveness in aesthetic, political, religious, or moral realms. As I recall the first poetry readings I attended, Paul Carroll’s Big Table series in Chicago, the greatest audience reaction, a reliable and palpable rise, occurred during erotic, revolutionary, or blasphemous passages. People cheered every violation of “straight” norms. This is probably the most characteristic quality of the avant-garde. Thus Mapplethorpe not only used homoerotic imagery, but chose to document activities and poses that would be shocking even to those untroubled by straightforward love between men.

2.
     Though I differed with Kostelanetz’ attribution of higher value to avant-garde art, I would readily agree that such work claims a higher worth than the accepted. The Secessionists, Refusés, and similar groupings took pride in their outsider status. For punk musicians a lack of professional skills was the hallmark of authenticity. This is related to the popularity of a variety of contrarian aesthetic systems in the twentieth century. Such forms of appreciation as hip, the camp, kitsch are all elitist in that they assert privileged forms of reception of the work, ostensibly superior to that of the usual consumer. This attitude reinforces the first characteristic above as most critics and cultural consumers will be annoyed and offended by this claim of a higher mode of understanding, unless they choose to include themselves in the aura of the avant-garde’s greater sophistication.

3.
     Though the pretension of the avant-garde is to innovation, the movement has been generally characterized by a specific battery of techniques and attitudes that has changed little in the last hundred years. The use of abstraction, conceptual and performance art, aleatory work, and the use of ethnographic and pop culture materials remains the hallmark of the avant-garde.
Apart from the formal or stylistic elements, the avant-garde is highly likely to follow the Romantics of two centuries ago in a long list of judgments, among them celebrating the vatic role of the artist and privileging the unconscious over the conscious and thus the work of children, the poor and uneducated, mad people, and those in oral cultures.


The Problematics of the Avant-Garde

     Each of the distinguishing characteristics detailed above generates problems, leading to serious questions, if not to a crisis, of the avant-garde. First, the philosophical position implied by what one might (ironically) call “classic” avant-gardism constructs a cul-de-sac. Secondly, the movement is hobbled by its reactive character, inverting received ideas as a matter of habit without thought. Finally, the gap between what might have once been conceived as the party of the future and that of the present no longer exists in either content or in form, removing the motive for rebellion.

1.
     The sweeping challenge presented by the theoreticians of the avant-garde is, in fact, so radical as to lead to a dead-end. Much like absolute philosophical skepticism or total monism, it leaves little room for meaningful elaboration or development. When all objects are equivalent, enlightenment may arise, but art is eclipsed. After conceptual art brought everything into the realm of the aesthetic, no further progress is possible. With the loss of conventions comes a concomitant loss of signifying potential.

2.
     The avant-garde is hobbled by its largely reactive character; like Satanism, it merely inverts the practices of its antagonist rather than, like paganism, ignoring them. In this way heroin can seem more attractive than health and fetishes more fascinating than commonplace sexuality. Such contrarianism is salutary as long as the establishment resists the avant-garde. An insistence on always playing the bad boy removes the chance of developing an independent base for the artist’s judgments.

3.
     Indeed the gap no longer exists. The advance guard is no longer out front. The art world has long accepted the entire spectrum of avant-garde technique, while politically radical art lacks an audience and, indeed, all non-commodified art is ever more marginalized. Even the most revolutionary techniques may become automatized from repeated use, and soi-disant innovators who in fact do nothing experimental create the odd spectacle of an institutionalized avant-garde. When situation comedies use “shit” the opening of Jarry’s Ubu Roietz, which originally provoked a riot after which the play was banned, has lost its point and requires a footnote.
     For several generations the American government has sponsored programs of jazz music and abstract expressionism as instruments of foreign policy, and advertisers sell blue jeans and cologne with techniques devised for the derangement of the senses.
     Under these conditions a new turn is essential is the concept of the avant-garde is to have any meaning for coming generations.

Notes on Recent Reading 18 [Radcliffe, Stendhal, Erasmus]

Romance of the Forest (Radcliffe)

     Radcliffe’s novel has plenty of romance, raised to a high pitch the first half by Adeline’s distress at unwilling confinement and the threat of sexual exploitation. This exquisite but frustrated affection continues in the second as the true love that arises in the midst of her perils is then transformed into anxiety over the fate of her champion, unfairly condemned to death. Throughout the narrative, she has ample motive to weep and to swoon. The language, especially between lovers, is stilted and highly artificial – though I do recall an article demonstrating that actual fainting was apparently common during the age of the “man of sensibility,” so perhaps the delicate circumlocutions are all drawn from life. There are plenty of rhapsodic descriptions of wild landscape as well as Gothic ruins with endless rooms upon room, secret passages and all the machinery of the late eighteenth century thriller. A good number of the poetic quotations that head each chapter are drawn from Collins. The word “romance” is used often in a self-conscious reflex.
     Yet the warm glow of Enlightenment confidence plays over the Romantic landscapes, and La Luc, Radcliffe’s philosopher, reminds the reader of Rasselas or Candide with his wise moderation.
Coleridge developed his notions on the “willing suspension of disbelief” specifically to defend artificial “romance” settings and plots, and to advocate for the free use of the supernatural in literature. This narrative, while it only plays with the metaphysical, pays scant heed to realism or even plausibility. Radcliffe did not even attempt to make the scene convincingly French, but then, millions are about to relish the concluding episode of the television series Breaking Bad which, its gritty detail notwithstanding, is altogether fantastic.


The Red and the Black (Stendhal)

     Stendhal managed to make of Sorel a complex and satisfying antihero. He seems at first an absurdly mistaken provincial Napoleon, seeking advancement through his wits while pretending piety and love without any authentic feelings whatsoever. Utterly cynical and self-interested, interested only in self-advancement, still he regards himself as a person of the highest honor and standards. He wonders in prison whether he has acted the egotist and concludes “I abandoned a simple and modest merit for what was brilliant.” Thinking “I have loved the Truth,” this most hypocritical of men laments that he could find only hypocrisy in the wider world, little suspecting that each of the others who strike him as so fraudulent, may seem, no less than our hero, subjectively a wronged lover of the truth.
     Whereas Samuel Richardson would have seen no moral ambiguity in the case of this ruiner of two women, their will no match for their passions, Stendhal constructs a more radical vision in which no one stands outside corruption. The epigraphs from Don Juan encourage a comedic/satiric reading until the sudden attack on Madame de la Renal, so injurious to Sorel’s own interests, irresistible and foolish as anything that those he felt so far above had done. Human character is finally revealed, not as wickedly duplicitous and cunning, but as blundering, absurd, and blind.


Colloquies (Erasmus)

     Ordinarily, the most literary quality of the compositions written for language learners is a certain oddity. Yet the Colloquies, written at first simply for teaching Latin, are perhaps the best introduction to Erasmus’ work. In the fifteenth century, the great Christian humanist demonstrated that orthodoxy may coexist with tolerance rather in the style of the current pope. This benign regard for the follies of humanity extends in fact to such church-sanctioned activities as pilgrimages, exorcisms, and elaborate funerals. Erasmus regularly discerns the truly spiritual, at least what works for those of an intellectual cast of mind, and the polish of his Latinity signifies the high standard of his character.
     The Colloquies are incidentally valuable as vignettes of sixteenth century life. In his piece on “Inns,” he describes the world of the Renaissance hospitality industry with color and humor. His piece on pilgrimage includes a catalogue of marvelous and magical stones as well as detail on religious practice. His anti-war “Charon” at once reflects its historic origins and speaks eloquently to today.
     But the appeal of the collection is its free-ranging variety from a highly original takes on courtly love (“The Wooer and the Maiden”) and the pastoral with his servant playing Cyclops (“Cyclops, or the Gospel Bearer”) to a house party at the most civilized country estate ornamented with both nature and art (“The Godly Feast”). It is difficult to escape the conviction that Erasmus sought salvation from his sense of beauty as well as from his sense of the divine.

Documents of the third Surreal Cabaret

The third Surreal Cabaret was presented at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, August 23 at the Seligmann Center for the Arts, 23 White Oak Drive in Sugar Loaf.

The program

1. Steve Roe performed Museum Piece, a monologue describing a bizarre museum treating the relationship of art to commerce, science, and violence.
Roe is founder of COPE, the Council of (Poetic) Experimentation, a performance group dedicated to performing classic and original multimedia experimental works. Roe was Associate Producer and acted in the prize-winning film Under Jakob's Ladder.

2. Jennifer Kraus did Mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror which through video, movement and voice searches for redeeming vulnerability behind the current "selfie" culture.
Kraus, a Warwick native, is a dance teacher and choreographer. She most recently worked at HERE Arts Center in NYC as an Assistant Director. She has formed a theatrical production company, HUGE CUP Productions, through which she develops original dance theater work.

3. Michael Sean Collins delivered Igor’s Revenge, or The Black Dog Takes Another Bite, a macabre surreal existential monologue representing a conversation between a man and his unconscious.
Collins is an actor, poet, magician, photographer and former 22-year resident of New York City. He has performed in television, film, theater, cafes, night clubs circuses and alternative performance venues across the United States and Canada.

4. Chloe Roe sang Aria, John Cage’s composition which requires a single performer to vocalize in five languages using ten vocal styles.
Roe is a professional actress and singer. She appears as the lead in the feature film Feral Child and as Francis in The Library. She is also a member of The Manhattan Girls Chorus. But most of all she likes to rock out with her band.

5. William Seaton enacted The Debate of Thaumastes and Panurge, a disputation conducted entirely in gestures.
Seaton conceived the Surreal Cabaret. He also produces the Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series and teaches workshops at the Northeast Poetry Center’s College of Poetry.

6. ArtCrime with John Korchok provided opening and incidental music and performed a unique version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
ArtCrime is a cell of committed aesthetic hackers devoted to the overthrow of musical expectations. Using jazz, classical, and rock idioms, we make music that is reminiscent of the future. We sleep in the daytime, we work in the nighttime. We might not ever get home.


The poster by David Horton

[I haven't succeeded in reproducing the excellent poster by David Horton. Blogger doesn't seem to like the pdf format. Perhaps it will appear here soon.]


The benediction by the Lama Swine Toil

Good evening and welcome to the Surreal Cabaret at the Seligmann Studio, the staging area for advanced artistic research in Orange County. I am the Lama Swine Toil, Surrealist Chaplain, midwife to your imaginative endeavors for the next few hours. Allow me to bestow the special benediction of the unordained and to share a few words of scripture.
I am bedazzled to gaze upon you and to behold radiant perfect Buddhas enjoying the endless unemployment of Eternity. But in this quantum universe we find ourselves like Schrödinger’s cat in two states at once. I see as well as Buddhas small caged and pacing beasts like those in the Humane Society, motherless, anxious, and feeling alien indeed. Suspended between these realities, I invite you to make of yourself tonight a young child with no responsibilities beyond observing and playing.
And now a few words from our scriptures. Remember always the rule of the Abbey of Theleme which existed never and always: “Do as thou wouldst.” In different words the rural Midwestern prophet Ezekiel Cole expressed the same timeless thought “If thou hast eyes, go thy way.” Allow me to conclude with the glad exclamations of Lord Buckley’s Nazz, “Oh great swingin’ flowers of the fields! And the Nazz say “Dig Infinity!”

Gascoigne’s “Notes of Instruction”

     Between Wyatt and Surrey, George Gascoigne is probably England’s most significant poet. His historical position is unassailable. According to Legouis’ thorough A History of English Literature Gascoigne wrote the first “prose story taken from real life, the first prose comedy, the first tragedy translated from Italian, the first masque, the first regular satire, and the first treatise on English prosody.” He was perhaps only too prolific; he is little read today. In his pursuit of a career as soldier, courtier, and poet, he never measured up to the high standard Sidney would achieve in each of these realms after him. 

      Though workmanlike with considerable ingenuity and occasional wit, his poetry has only flashes of memorable phrase. His alexandrines and fourteeners sound all but interminable to today’s ears. He is capable of sounding very like the rustics of Midsummer Night’s Dream: “My liking lust, my lucklesse love,” “My secrete partes are so with secret sorrowe soken.” Still, the conceit of his “Lullaby of a Lover” is striking “Full many wanton babes have I,/ Which must be stilled with lullaby.” He is good with proverbial expressions: “every bullet hath a lighting place” “mo the merrier” “castels buylt above in lofty skies,/ Which never yet had good foundation.” Other folk-like materials sound fresh and lively: “There's nobody at home/ But Jumping Joan,/ And father and mother and I.” He can have a spurt of Renaissance freshness: for him, the devil must be killed “with gonshote of beleefe.”
     His pioneering poetics, called “Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English” appeared in The Posies in 1575. His terminology and habits of thought are Aristotelian and rhetorical. His ideas arise from induction, not a priori, and seek to account for his own experience in poetry. Gascoigne betrays no belief in inspiration of either the Platonic or the Christian varieties. [1] Influenced by authors like Castiglione and by his own position, seeking patronage at court, he portrays poetry as a refined accomplishment like skill at arms, horsemanship, or love-making.
     Like most pre-modern literary theorists, Gascoigne’s analysis is centered on the use of the conceptual framework and terminology of the rhetorical tradition. [2] Gascoigne’s rhetorical orientation is evident in his stress on invention and on propriety. To him a work must be both “good” (appealing in concept or content) and “fine” (that is, well-executed or stylish).
     In invention the poet can display his “the quick capacity,” a quality that might be equated today with originality. Each work has its own unique character which must be consistently maintained. The reader may relish the wit of the author’s ideas independent of their validity.
     The interest in propriety is another rhetorical trait. Meter must be consistent. Each metrical form implies a certain appropriate subject matter. The tradition allows the artist to convey more semantic data when his audience is familiar with a set of conventions and expectations.
     Further, Gascoigne, as a writer in an age when Latin composition still made the vernacular seem to many second-rate, insists on the value of natural colloquial language in poetry. Metric stress should correspond to stress in spoken usage [3]; iambic is the ordinary meter of the English language; words of one syllable are more English than polysyllabics. Obsolete and foreign or learned words are generally undesirable.
     Gascoigne says nothing about morality, or instruction. Art is wholly aesthetic; a good poem is “delectable,” [4] To please readers, authors must avoid trite expressions, avoiding the “uncomely customes of common writers,” and expressing ideas obliquely through tropes, allegory, or allusion, or some other novel presentation. Thus the aesthetic text affords the pleasures of a riddle or crossword. It must be soluble but not obvious, in Gascoigne’s terms “frame your stile to perpiscuity and to be sensible,” neither too obscure nor too “easie.”
     His stress is on ingenuity or wit in a context of shared convention. The poet is in fact, quite similar to a skilled raconteur or a clever party guest. Art is a display of well-wrought words, clearly within a tradition, yet defining its own sophistication through moves that cannot be wholly anticipated. This sort of dance of expectations between the writer and the audience requires considerable shared education and culture. Such poetry works most efficiently with the most homogenous readership.
     Gascoigne insists on this familiar yet refined milieu when he places his essay in an upper-class familiar social context, addressing it to an Italian friend in fulfillment of a personal promise. Thus his formulas of humility – he calls his own ideas “simple” at the outset and concludes saying “I doubt my own ignorance” – reinforce the genteel amateur’s love of art that was part of upper-class identity. Far from defining his profession, Gascoigne’s poems, like those of the other chief poets of his age, are an decorative ornament, a flower of chivalry which, when combined with his other elegant accomplishments and his martial valor, characterize him as one of “the best,” that is to say, an aristocrat. Though his ideas are neither as well-worked-out as Sidney’s nor as original as Dr. Johnson’s, he provides a reliable view of the ideas current in his time and social milieu.


1. I am using the Collected Works of George Gascoigne edited by John W. Cunliffe, a 1969 Greenwood Press reprint of the 1907 Cambridge University Press edition.

2. Some decades after Gascoigne rhetoric received its definitive Elizabethan treatment in George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie (1589). This topic in general has been too little appreciated. Rhetoric has too often been abandoned to those interested in “public speaking.”

3. The discussion of meter is complicated by the fact that Gascoigne conflates Classical quantitative meters with accentual English ones.

4. He does make a formulaic gesture toward Christianity in his “Advertisement” to the reader that prefaces The Posies.

Two Exemplary Anecdotes from the Sixties Student Movement

     Most movements for social change are generated among the oppressed and aggrieved: women demonstrated for suffrage and workers for unions. Local homeowners get together to declare “not in my back yard” or to campaign for a stoplight. The student and youth movements of the 1960s are unusual in that those who took up the cause of African-Americans and of the Vietnamese people were relatively privileged members of the crest of the great American middle class, created largely by the labor movement of the thirties and the GI Bill of the forties. As white college students they enjoyed comforts and expectations rather greater than the norm even for their own affluent postwar country.
     People speak loosely about “the sixties” as an era of psychedelics and political protest. As a ’67 graduate of the University of Illinois, I can testify that protestors (and dopers) were a marginal group throughout my undergraduate years. When I manned the Students Against the War table in the student union, I could count on arguing with fellow students all day long. My wife was called a dyke for marching in a demonstration against parietal hours for women. I felt I knew all the people in the small coterie involved with leftist protest.
     The fact is that when I arrived at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1963 the Old Left groups had vanished. I believe the only progressive group on the Champaign-Urbana campus of tens of thousands of students was the NAACP, to be followed later by a Friends of SNCC chapter. The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 inspired Students for Free Speech and Student Committee on Political Expression.
     About this time several others and I – I believe it was perhaps six students that one needed to create an official organization – started an Independent Socialist Club. Like the Port Huron authors, we wanted to avoid the historic entanglements of the Stalinists, Trotskyites, and followers of Norman Thomas (who spoke at the U. of I. in the spring of ’65). We could be punctilious if we liked as there were so few of us and we did no organizing, no demonstrations, indeed, no political work at all. Our meetings were as good as private though a few drifters passed through.
     Inconsequential as we were, we found we constituted a tempting bait for the very groups of which we had been wary. An older Communist, a YSA rep from miles away, and a local Socialist each in turn asked us to affiliate. Even as a discussion group we meandered. One of our original crew began pushing SWP tapes of Raya Dunayevskaya. Another thought we could best contribute to progress by intensive discussions of What is to be Done?
     Mercifully, in the fall of 1965, Students for a Democratic Society organized. At that point SDS was a broad popular front organization with many Democratic Party activists as well as socialists, anarchists, and wholly non-ideological individualists, perhaps even a stray liberal Republican or two. The Independent Socialist Club disbanded after a scant year of existence.
     The New Left Movement is often said to have begun with the February 1960 Woolworth’s sit-in in Greensboro and the subsequent founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but until SDS there was no large and inclusive student organization pressing for social justice and peace. Veterans of the Southern Movement, both white and black, were influential leaders in the years that followed as were the “red diaper” babies whose families had been socialist in earlier decades, but each of these groups was small in numbers. The increasingly massive numbers of people willing to stand up against the system arose from the “youth revolution” element which grew exponentially following the Haight-Ashbury Summer of 1967 and the continuing threat of the draft which affected most men (though virtually all those who sought to wiggle out of the military obligation were able to do so).
     My second anecdote concerns a friend I will identify only as D-------- K------ as we have been out of touch for some time, and I have not discussed my account with him. It is, however, simple and sketchy enough that I am confident of its accuracy and, I hope, significant enough to warrant telling.
     In the junior year of his studies at a prestigious private university K------, who had considerable personal charm, a gift for rabble-rousing, and a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, moved to establish a DuBois Club on his campus. The DuBois Clubs were in fact essentially the youth group of the American Communist Party, as the Young Communist League had been (and would again be – the old name came back in 1984). Universities often found such groups unpalatable, particularly schools with endowments that count on the continuing patronage of wealthy alumni. Many in higher education doubtless feared publicity arising from even the smallest of revolutionary contingents and tried to ban such clubs.
     The membership of a DuBois Club might have been little larger and its impact little greater than my Independent Socialist Club had it been permitted, but it was not. Virtually all the students agreed that this decision was undemocratic, and they rallied energetically against it. My friend K------ had the opportunity to exercise his considerable abilities as a debater, entertainer, and wit in an ongoing series of demonstrations that attracted ever-increasing crowds. The celebrity he won in this cause led to his election as student body president the following year (1967-8). I doubt that the DuBois Club ever had a real meeting. K------‘s psychic jiu-jitsu had caused the university administration to defeat itself and elevate him to prominence. As a result of their bungling and the movement of history, the critical mass of participants for truly disruptive sit-ins and rallies had arrived. Though most of the students were simply believers in what K------ might have called bourgeois democracy, that alone was enough to set them on his side against the powers that be.
     A revealing sequel occurred the following spring. As K------ tells it, he was delivering a rousing anti-war speech on campus when he was interrupted by cries of “Talk is bullshit!” We want action, not talk!” and eventually, “To the ROTC Building!” He was left standing at the podium with a mere remnant of his audience. When those who had left destroyed the ROTC Building, he was charged with having incited a riot, though the claim was sufficiently absurd that it was later dropped.
     These experiences suggest, first, the simple truth that political protests of the sixties occurred, for the most part, during the last few years of that decade (and the first months of 1970). When students did become active, they were often moved by non-political motives. When political, their values were generally not radical and, indeed, rarely went beyond the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The most dramatic actions were generally not the result of traditional labor union-style organizing and careful planning, but rather were spontaneous, sharing as much of the character of post-football disorders as of sit-down strikes. When the draft no longer threatened most young men, they ceased protesting. There were from the start dedicated advocates for social justice who sought to question America’s foreign and domestic policies and to suggest radical alternatives, but their numbers were never great. Both those who would trivialize the movement of the sixties and those who would idealize it might well recall these home truths.