TRANSCENDENTAL RAIN

TRANSCENDENTAL RAIN: personal recollections of the old year, 2005.
On December 24, 2005, a cold wet snowy night, an unassuming yet dedicated group of readers and writers met at AREOPAGITICA BOOK STORE, 3510 N. High St. There were about twelve of us -- the Poets Guild, founded and convened by Dotte Turner, is open to all-- and we read established work that reflected the season. The much honored poet Jean Desy read a piece written by Thomas Hardy around the time of World War I. In this poem the animals who, traditionally, knelt at midnight to worship Baby Jesus, are compared to soldiers slumped against the sides of trenches. Desy read her own hard edged intricate poem about a gas station and the city in winter.
Jackie Wetmore read poetry by Emily Dickinson. In it there were "leaden sieves of snow."Jeanni Ray enlivened all with a reading from David Sedaris.
Liz James read Kathleen Gallagher's poem "for Anna Akmatova," and Irina Ratushinskaya's "I will live and survive." In both of these "dissident" poems, images of light and ice radiate from the walls of a prison in winter. Pat Peterson read the traditional elocution piece, "jest fore Christmas" by James Whitcomb Riley.--A little nostalgia is good for everyone, like pepper on popcorn! Mark Stoll rocked his own version of The Twelve Days of Christmas, and Diana DelBianco looked like, and read about, a wintery goddess.
Best, and most revolutionary, or evolutionary, of all, was Rebecca Rutledge's reading from John Keat's The Eve of St. Agnes written in 1819.--Letting go, closing my eyes, I saw the moonlight, the luscious fruit on a silver tray, the heroine's beautiful hair. I saw, I heard, a necklace of words smouldering with imagination and craft.
I thought about Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. . . Yes, Kerouac and The Beats--how they knew the master poets -- not only Whitman, Dickinson, Rukeyser--but how they mastered the ballades
and villanelles of some bottle tossing young French guys. I recalled how the Beats studied and practiced and when they did break free
the pure gold glistened waiting to be panned.
These were my thoughts at Areo on December 24.
I pictured us , the readers, as an enduring, marginal people.--We're the new Subterraneans, maybe, or maybe the new Transcendentalists!--We who sip pot-brewed coffee and nibble cookies while we listen to Keats on a bleak winter's night.
The name, Areopagitica comes from the great English poet John Milton's dedication to free speech, in case you didnt know. I didn't.
Areopagitica hosts an easy going writer's workshop from two to four p.m. on the Third Thursday of each month.--You're welcome to
bring copies of your own work. The Poets Guild meets every Fourth Friday at 7:30 p.m.
Doug Rutledge owns and manages Areopagitica, a marvelous second hand book store patrolled by a marvelously literate dog, Zack.
MORE TRANSCENDENTAL RAIN, more personal recollections. BalletMet and Toulouse Lautrec in 2005.
As one who has studied and loved ballet for over thirty years I think I've developed an "eye." I hope our Columbus audience knows how good their Company is! The Nutcracker was a confection with just the right vintage pouf or elan, in costuming , scenery, casting. Choreography was icicle clear and candy cane sweet! Everyone was perfect. I went on opening night. For some reason two details continue to dance in my memory. Randolph Ward was incredibly light and precise as he manipulated his sabre as a swordsman (a toy swordsman, of course.) And Hisham Omardian as the sardonic and mysterious visitor who brings the Nutcracker toy, seemed to have taken a direct flight from Tchaikovsky's Russia.The dance-technique was finely honed, igniting snowflakes,diamonds and, of course, sugar plums!
Alice inWonderland will run from Feb. 9th thru the 19th. Call 229-4860 for tickets..
TRANSCENDENTAL RAIN III: LIZ AND LAUTREC It is June 2005. I'm at the Lautrec and Montmartre exhibit at The National Gallery in Washington D.C. The exhibit is crowded and noisy but everybody is nice. Lautrec is popular! Hannah is two; she rides in Mommy's arms, or on Daddy's shoulders. She loves the black cats. There are a lot of them--Remember The Black Cat night club? Things really rocked there, not far from the Moulin Rouge. Ganny is impressed with what a great painter Lautrec was. How strong and versatile. She loves seeing his posters of the actress Jane Avril and she double-loves the serious and respectful oil portrait he painted of Avril, where shes a beautiful, fine featured woman in a long coat and it's dawn and she's leaving the theatre. She's a three dimensional human being. Berthe Morisot sits , without make up, serious, fine featured, at her dressing table. She's thin. She reads. I think she's beautiful. So did Lautrec. He took his subjects, yes, even the women, seriously. Morisot is lovely, she is his friend. A man says, "Ugh. Not sexy or pretty." I want to smack him but I don't. --Later, I see the Renoir's Women exhibit at the Columbus Art Museum. Lautrec seems more versatile than Renoir, and in most ways, as strong a painter as Renoir. I try to censor my thoughts . But I continue to remember the portraits by Lautrec. His women seem , well, to be thoughtful individuals. In a way, I think, its Lautrec who really loved women; he could be a friend. Hannah and I love to watch the 1890 film clip of the barefoot dancer Loie Fuller who is performing in Paris, like a butterfly. In black and white film she flutters and skips and her wings and scarves never stop moving. Isadora Duncan will be influenced by Loie and long after Lautrec is dead she herself will die in a phantasmagoria of scarf in Paris.--Isadora was right. she said "Art is greater than governments."--Hannah calls "Kitty, butterfly!"--Happy New Year,everyone.
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TRAVELS WITH ERNEST

ArtScene's First Book Review: Travels With Ernest: Crossing the Literary Sociological Divide
by Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge

I recommend this book enthusiastically, for several reasons:
First, amid the helter skelter of my own life, I treasure books I can enjoy in segments. Second, I enjoy books which I consider well written, and third, I relish non fiction books that read like imaginative prose but are actually non fiction works.--Some of Truman Capote's magazine articles , for example.
Travels With Ernest, Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide meets each of these criteria. The book was published by AltaMira Press in 2003 as part of the Anthropological/Sociology Ethnographic Alternative Series. Savoring, dipping into this book, was a joy.It IS a joy,
I continue to dip in.
SUNBEAMS: LAUREL
Travels With Ernest enabled me, a compulsive stay-at-home, to see distant places. For example, as I write it's deep winter in Ohio, 2006, and I'm writing about Laurel and Ernest's ninth sojourn at St. Petersburg Beach, Florida in March 2002.
Laurel, an accomplished poet, writes first, revealing her sharp yet lyrical talent for descriptive prose. It's her first trip since 9/11 and she breathes deeply "imagining millions of zaps of the happiness potions that live in the sea, some call them 'negative ions.'"
She describes the GulfGate Condos as "color coordinated, swirls of turquoise , shrimp, and shells on the Wall Tex, chair covers, upholstery, pictures, dishes, towels, sheets. I sink into the comfort of the cliche."
Her description of the beach and its "five miles of white sand" is breathtaking. What satisfies her most is "the crescent shape of the beach, like a new moon." Anywhere on the beach she can see "the whole beach, its ending and beginning. Which is which depends on the direction I walk, I feel cradled and safe."
Earlier, Laurel had noticed the Holiday Inn, "round and perched like a spaceship readying for take off." She noticed "Young couples, mid age couples and leathered octogenerations in skimpy suits."
When they return to the condo Ernest and Laurel leave the sliding doors open "so the sound of the waves can lull us to sleep." In the morning when they beach walk, Laurel praises "the brown pelicans. . . The Old One commanding the T of the fishing pier, like a security guard checking passports. . . A gray heron arrives, stares unmercifully at a juvenile pelican, until the babe leaves its prime post atop the highest outcropping."
One this morning walk we're also allowed to relish a previous visit to Evander Preston's jewelry store where Ernest once bought Laurel "a pair of gold earrings, flat and smooth with wrinkled edges like the sea."
SAND: ERNEST
When they awake, Ernest, a professsor emeritus in English at The Ohio State Universitiy, quotes Tennyson's "the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls." Theirs is a double pilgrimage. First, they want to revisit the Don Cesar Hotel which was built in 1925 and used to be a haunt of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Coincidentally, they want to see President George W. Bush and his motorcade drive up to the Don Cesar for a $2500 a plate rundraiser. As two retired professors they exchange hilarious wisecracks about the price! They also intend to have lunch in an ice cream parlor which was once named Zelda's, but they have to settle for the new Uncle Andy's.
Ernest, who is an aficianado of--indeed, an expert on--F.Scott
Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby--describes the scene with accuracy and literary elan. As Laurel puts it "Ernest can riff." He describes the Don Cesar as "our goal the flamingo pink mirage shimmering up ahead in the Florida heat, gigantic yet fragile looking, a Hansel and Gretel castle that might at any moment dissolve like sherbet into the Gulf of Mexico."
When Laurel and Ernest sight some kind of surveillance craft Ernest describes it with "the sleek black trawler has been shadowing our southward progress down the white crescent ever since we left our condo a few minutes ago. The trawler bristles with black domes, black antennae. Black radar grids whirl and pirouette."
"Better watch our p's and q's" whispers Laurel. . ."otherwise they'll get the impression we're speaking in code."
"Dot," I say, "dash."
N.C. AND GEORGE W.
Laurel asks Ernest whether he remembers George W. Bush at Yale. This sets Ernest off on a riotous yet highly informative ramble on those Yale days, 1963-1971, when he (Ernest) was assistant professor of English there. He recalls "classrooms full of good looking kids who'd rather discuss yachts than Yeats. Most of them looking like, oh, clones of the Kingston Trio."
Ernest writes skillfully, fearlessly, about N.C., the then-new New Criticism, and explains how and why N.C. eventually contaminated,--yes, nearly murdered --the craft of literature, yea, education. Here is a marvelous expose, a must, for a throng of serious writers who have been suffering in silence and wondering for some time what really went wrong.
Ernest explains how, eventually, grades were inflated and "Yale-ies were getting into Phi Beta Kappa with a grade average in the low eighties."
When Laurel says "too bad you can't talk about Bush with the People you know" Ernest responds with "Yeah, the 'just before you and I'
crowd mocking the Mother Tongue."
In his ramble Lockridge also defends the worth and history of Yale and takes pride in his time there. Some readers may disagaree with his indictment of N.C. but his explanation is first rate, convincing.
ORBITING
With Ernest Lockridge and Laurel Richardson you can visit Beirut, Lebanon in 1999 and "see" Ernest's daughter Helen marry Jean-Paul. You can travel to death Valley and Copenhagen and Petrozabodsky and Sedona and wind up in Worthington, Ohio, where Ernest and Laurel live.--The Ireland trip is special for literature buffs because of Ernest's
pungent relationship to W.B. Yeats and James Joyce.
HOW THIS BOOK WAS MADE
Laurel Richardson is an accomplished poet and a sociologist and ethnographer. She is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at The Ohio State University.
She is the author of five books. Ernest Lockridge is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at the Ohio State University. He is the author of three novels and works of literary criticism and the editor of Twentieth Century Interpretation of the Great Gatsby. He did, indeed,
teach for eight years at Yale. Laurel and Ernest are a real life married couple who write, who travel together, converse amiably and frequently, and eat three meals a day with each other.
In the Appendix Laurel and Ernest, with Carolyn Ellis, one of their co editors , explain the nuts and bolts, the nitty gritty, that goes
into their writing. One of their aims is to crack the common expectations of context, text, and content. I found the Appendix as fascinating as the main text. In Laurel's statement she explains "in twenty six words, this was that collaborative process: we traveled; she saw, he saw, she writes; he writes; she reads his, he reads hers; they talk; he tapes; she transcribes, they 'vette,' they publish."
FROM EVERYWHERE WITH LOVE

In Travels With Ernest the authors break down societal barriers of alienation by sharing their conversations, thoughts, experiences.
The Travels may function as a sociology text book--after all,sociologists RECORD--but it's also the actual story of two people who love each other and share their work and their lives.--I treasure this book. It's kind of like reality TV, but the ideas are more exciting, and the language is platinum.