January 2, 2009
The Theory of Electricity and Wanting: Valley Girl
Martha Coolidge, director of Valley Girl:
I wanted that feeling of love at first sight that just hits you. Hard. My goal in this picture was to accomplish the feelings that you have in your first love, the kind of incredible high that first love in high school gives you. There's nothing like it. We all know it ... I felt from old movies that the most important thing that you can do in a movie is play wanting. It isn't actually the getting of the person that is hot on the screen. It's the wanting. It's the electricity, it's the looks, it's the feeling of tension, of sexual tension, the parallel-ing of emotions, that really builds feeling in a picture. The eye contact, the kind of reflecting of each other that people do, and that the old actors from old Hollywood really knew how to do, because they couldn't show nudity then, they couldn't show all the things they could show today, and I wanted very much for Randy [Nic Cage] and Julie [Deborah Foreman] to really have that great desire and electricity together ... This is the theory of electricity and wanting, and I loved the pull between these two. Together they were just great.
The film was shot in 20 days.
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - T.S. Eliot
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Poets like William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane both said that they needed to forcibly divorce themselves from Eliot's influence in order to be able to write in their own way. He was so huge, so dominant - and in his own time - that it became difficult for other poets to find their own voices. Everything sounded like an imitation of Eliot. Interestingly enough, Eliot felt that way about Joyce's Ulysses, published in 1922, of which he said (among many other things), "I wish for my own sake that I hadn't read it." I love that quote.
I went through an Eliot phase in high school, mainly because my drama class had gone to see Cats in New York, and also we had had to read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in English class, and there was something about the descriptions (the yellow fog and I loved the part about the yellow smoke rubbing its back against the window panes - it just sounded so satisfying and real to me, I could SEE it) that I really liked. I was very into ADJECTIVES back then, which maybe one day I will write about - because it took a truly frightening obsessive form (frightening in that I had to break myself of the habit, and it really took some doing) - and I'm not sure what that was all about. And Eliot's work was really good with the adjectives. They transported me into another world. But the meaning of the poems?? Not sure I really grasped it back then!
I like that Eliot had - like many artists - a struggle really committing to be a poet. His parents thought it would be a waste of energy, wanted him to have a "real" job, so for a while, he did keep up the pretense - studying philosophy, going for his dissertation - but all the while, the poetry was growing in him. It began to occur to him that that was what he wanted to do. That and that alone.
So guess who entered the picture around this time?
Take a wild guess.
Ezra Pound. Was the man everywhere at once?
Pound read early drafts of Prufrock and basically browbeat Harriet Monroe (editor of Poetry) to publish it. Monroe didn't want to at first. She said no. Pound tried again. And again. Until finally she caved in 1915.
I don't think I knew that T.S. Eliot was American until, oh, last year or something retarded like that. If I was told the facts, I certainly didn't retain them. Cats seemed really British to me, especially because of the composers being British (not that that has anything to do with anything, just describing my own journey here) - and then "T.S. Eliot" the name sounds oh so British ... but no, dude was from St. Louis. I remember when I found that out, and I had to re-think my entire concept of the guy. "What?? He was American??" Eventually he became a British citizen, and he lived in Europe for most of his life - but he was US-born. Interesting, though: his family was originally from Massachusetts, but T.S. Eliot was raised in St. Louis. Eliot ended up going to Harvard and suddenly felt himself to be a Midwesterner. Although during his time in St. Louis, he felt like a Northeaterner. There was geographical displacement in this man from the beginning, and you can really see that in his poems. It wasn't that he belonged nowhere. It was that he belonged everywhere.
He said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1948:
In the work of every poet there will certainly be much that can only appeal to those who inhabit the same region, or speak the same language, as the poet. But nevertheless there is a meaning to the phrase «the poetry of Europe», and even to the word «poetry» the world over. I think that in poetry people of different countries and different languages - though it be apparently only through a small minority in any one country - acquire an understanding of each other which, however partial, is still essential.
That all sounds very nice and grown-up, doesn't it? But Eliot had witnessed the fracturing of "understanding", in World War I and World War II, and his later poems express the fear, the anxiety, of that desolate time in Europe and elsewhere. Eliot had a troubled first marriage, and lost a dear friend in World War I. There were other events, too, the death of his father ... and these all worked on him and his psyche - a terrible time for him, obviously - and the result was The Waste Land, published in 1922 (completed in 1921). It's one of the most important poems of the 20th century, obviously - and, like Yeats's Second Coming, describes the overwhelming sense of doom and fear, evil stalking the land, slaughter, carnage, chaos. Eliot was, of course, in England at the time, which I think also made a huge difference. Americans were greatly affected by the two world wars, obviously - we made enormous sacrifices, and raced in (to quote Eddie Izzard) like "the cavalry in the last reel" - and those who fought witnessed the carnage - but it wasn't on their own soil. Huge difference in psychology. Imagine the trenches and air raids sweeping across our own continent and how that would have affected us differently as a people. Eliot's The Waste Land is a giant poem, and was immediately famous, and immediately placed him not just in the canon, but at the top of it.
In order to understand the 20th century, The Waste Land is essential.
Interestingly enough, the form of The Waste Land represented a break with Pound. The poets Pound promoted found themselves eventually having to 'break' with him, because his influence was huge as well, and he was pushing them all towards a certain kind of expression, what he felt poetry was. He was responsible for many of their breakthroughs. Pound was instrumental in helping Eliot put The Waste Land together, which had existed in fragments. I love that the fragmentary nature of the poem remained intact, though - because that is what war does. That is what great cataclysmic events can do. Psychologies and cultures fragment. Eliot had suffered a nervous breakdown too, and needed help with the poem. Pound stepped in. Pound took all of the different drafts and acted as an editor, piecing it together. It says a lot about Pound that he saw what Eliot was working towards, and although his goals differed from Pound's, Pound put that aside. Perhaps Eliot would have leaned towards a more streamlined approach, perhaps Pound sensed that the poem needs its fractured format ... The form the poem takes expresses the experience of the poet (and also of the world at that time). Brilliant.
Eliot said later, about The Waste Land:
In The Waste Land I wasn't even bothering whether I understand what I was saying.
The poem is the stronger for it, for that lack of control.
My Norton book says, in its introduction to Eliot:
When the poem itself was first published, in 1922, it gave Eliot his central position in modern poetry. No one has been able to encompass so much material with so much dexterity, or to express the alienation and horror of so many aspects of the modern world. Though the poem is made of fragments, they are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that might be joined if certain spiritual conditions were met. In this way, Eliot's attitude toward fragmentation was different from Pound's - Eliot wanted to recompose the world, whereas Pound thought it could remain in fragments and still have a paradisal aspect that the poet could elicit. In other words, Pound accepted discontinuity as the only way in which the world could be regarded, while Eliot rejected it and looked for a seamless world. He began to find it in Christianity.
Eliot was quick to diss his own importance (you can see it in his Nobel speech), and he said, at one point, that The Waste Land wasn't so much a treatise on the alienation and fragmentation of the modern man - but just a piece of "rhythmical grumbling". Regardless, it is a huge accomplishment.
Here is the poem that started it all (for him and for me). Lots of things that I fell in love with when I was 14 I outgrew. Like colored legwarmers and Rick Springfield. But "Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" remains.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
January 1, 2009
Thanks
... to Harry, for his energy, support, and for just being there every day.
... to all of my cousins, for keeping in touch through IMs and Facebook, and letting us know we are all cared about
... to Shaka, for taking care of the crick in my neck and my overall body problems, for giving me a space where I can forget for a while
... to Brendan, for your strength, your humor, your sensitivity, your way with Cashel, your way with all of us, and for enriching my life in almost every conversation we have. Oh, and thanks for giving me Valley Girl for Christmas. I watched it last night and it is as fabulous as I remembered.
... to the Chinese man at the gift shop who sells me my rose oil and always greets me with a nice smile and friendly banter ... I look forward to going in there
... to Barry. Just because.
... to Allison, for our friendship that just gets deeper and better with every passing day. I miss you!
... to Bob O'Neill, for caring about the books
... to Mum. I can't even speak.
... to Pat, for making my sister Jean happy
... to Maria, for just being there, for reading my book in one sitting, for comparing it to the Waltons, for bringing Cashel into the world, and for her general energy over Christmas
... to Michael, for being understanding about my freakout of tween proportions over the last week. "Woah, slow down" he wrote. I need understanding. I need safety. Sometimes I freak out. I need someone who can understand, talk me out of the clock tower, tell me to chillax in a loving manner, and not abandon me just because I'm difficult. Thank you.
... to David Maslin for his applesauce
... to Dad. For everything.
... to the Quinns. I have known them my whole life. I love them.
... to Father Creedon. Words cannot express.
... to Kerry, for her humor, her Red Sox Kleenex box, and for taking care of Hope while I am away
... speaking of Hope, thank you Hope for coming into my life
... to Keith at House Next Door, for giving me a space to write giant pieces about my current obsessions - and for also editing me so well to save me from my own excesses.
... to Mitchell. For being my date at Jean and Pat's wedding, for making sure his tie matched my bridesmaid dress, for not letting that bitchy actress appropriate my cousin Kerry's career, for listening, laughing, loving, and for everything else you have given me.
... to Jackie, who for some reason is banned from commenting on my blog, and I can't figure out how to change it. I have felt you out there, dear friend.
... to all the gorgeous women in my Girl Group - I cherish each and every one of you
... to Alex, whose humor, intelligence, anger, creativity, and passion are a constant reminder of how I want to live my life
... to David, for talking, listening, caring, and making me laugh
... to Cashel, for just who you are, my dear nephew - you are such a good person and I am proud to know you.
... to Ben, for coming into Siobhan's life, and for being such a nice person, such a part of our family already. Thanks for the hot dogs!
... to Mickey Rourke, for coming back from obscurity and thrilling me to no end
... to Melody: for how you love my brother, for how you love Cashel, and for how you have been like a third sister these years ... It means so much to me to have you be a part of my life.
... to Pat McCurdy, for your caring funny text messages, and for still, after everything, being there for me
... to Beth, for letting me in on what you are going through right now, and being such a good friend
... to Siobhan, for being a continuous surprise, someone I cherish more and more each day
... to Ann Marie, for the fact that she and I, early in our friendship, realized that we wanted to have a "prom-like experience" again, so we went out and bought, basically GOWNS to drive up to Milwaukee and see a Pat McCurdy show. We showed up in this dingy bar in GOWNS. I am laughing out loud.
... to Joe Hurley, for emerging out of the damn blue in the way you did, remembering me as that girl in the eyepatch from years ago singing "Where is love" on the sidewalk in lower Manhattan, for tracking me down like a bloodhound - that took some doing and I am so impressed with your effort - and also for your amusing emails which really have lightened my days recently. Without even knowing it (and that is the best part of it), you have reminded me of who I am.
... to Ted, for all the wine, the conversation, and our years-long friendship ... I am so grateful for it
... to Betsy, for the Tangy Taffy and for being my best friend before I even knew who I was
... to Mere - first of all for crocheting those mittens last year when I asked you to ... you didn't hesitate, you just STARTED and you created the weird thing that I asked you to - bless you! ... and for being a wonderful friend. Even though you are missing a toe.
... to Beyonce, for her "Single Ladies" song and video. I can't get enough and when I've felt blue and broken, as I often feel, I'll watch it. It works.
... to Barbara, for believing in me
... to the neighbors who came over the morning of the snowstorm and - without being asked - shoveled out our driveway and shoveled out all of our cars
... to Kate, one of my dearest and most treasured friends. I'm sorry I haven't been there for you recently, as you go through all these huge changes! I miss you so much!
... to Michele, for getting so enraged about a recent article in the Pro Jo that she considered calling up the editor to give her own version of events. A sort of Rhode Island expose. Brilliant! Also, for her kind emails and support
... to Patrick Sandora, for making me LAUGH!! You're awesome!
... to Stephenie Meyer, for her Twilight books. They have been such a welcome escape from the intensity of this December, and I have been transported by them. I so needed it.
... to Jean ... for saying the word "Benny's" in almost every conversation, and for just who you are. I'm so proud of you.
... to my new niece/nephew, whoever you will be ... I love you already.
To prove I've still got "it"
... just like Clara Bow had "it":
Thanks Caitlin (or should I say Mary Kate / Ashley?)
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Marianne Moore
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
T.S. Eliot wrote in 1923, early in Moore's career:
"I can only think of five contemporary poets - English, Irish, French and German - whose works excite me as much or more than Miss Moore's."
He felt that her poetry was probably the "most durable" of all the greats writing at that time.
Sadly, I have no idea how to recreate what Moore's poems LOOK like on my own site - does anyone have any tips? Movable Type irons out her jagged beginning lines - and half of the fun of Moore is what her poems look like. The start of each line is staggered, like little steps (or, in a lot of poems they are) - and so the reading of the poem becomes something almost experiential, as opposed to passive, or intellectual. Her poems really look like something.
Moore was great friends with people like H.D. (more on her here) and Ezra Pound (more on him here) and she had many admirers. Her work as a critic was unfortunately cut short, due to the collapse of the main journal she wrote for - but you can see her critical mind at work in her poems. She was one of those poets who wrote a lot about poetry itself. She had many ideas, she wanted to let images talk to one another through the verse - and perhaps the connecting links were opaque to us, the reader - but that just adds to the power of her stuff. Her poems have been compared to Cubist paintings. They are not literal. She goes into a dreamspace, and the words tumble out (at least that is the impression - not only from the sounds, but from, again, the LOOK of the words on the page) - almost like things happen in dreams. The unconscious is paramount. Poetry is not meant to reveal all. What you leave out is almost as valuable as what you include. She wrote: "Omissions are not accidents."
My view of Marianne Moore was, for a while, tainted by her rather snotty response to an overly fawning Sylvia Plath. Plath was ga-ga, a young woman at the time, not famous yet - and they met in 1955. Plath had sent Moore some of her poems, and she feared she made some gaffe by sending her carbon copies. Moore sent her a pointed letter that hurt Plath's feelings. Anne Stevenson writes in Bitter Fame:
In July, to Sylvia's surprise and keen distress, Miss Moore sent her in reply what Sylvia saw as "a queerly ambiguous spiteful letter... 'Don't be so grisly,'" she commented; "you are too unrelenting.'" And she added "certain pointed remarks about 'typing being a bugbear.'" Sylvia concluded that Miss Moore was annoyed because she had sent carbon copies instead of fresh top sheets. That seems unlikely. While Marianne Moore usually admired Ted's work, she never warmed to Sylvia's, disliking the early traces of the very elements that later were to carry her to fame: macabre doom-laden themes, heavy with disturbing colors and totemlike images of stones, skulls, drownings, snakes, and bottled fetuses -- hallmarks of Sylvia's gift.
Marianne Moore very much admired the poetry of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath's husband for a time, but Hughes never forgave her for her slighting of Plath, and wrote a poem about it in his collection Birthday Letters.
A Literary Life, by Ted Hughes
We climbed Marianne Moore's narrow stair
To her bower-bird bric-a-brac nest, in Brooklyn.
Daintiest curio relic of Americana.
Her talk, a needle
Unresting - darning incessantly
Chain-mail with crewel-work flowers.
Birds and fish of the reef
In phosphor-bronze wire.
Her face, tiny American treen bobbin
On a spindle,
Her voice the flickering hum of the old wheel.
Then the coin, compulsory,
For the subway
Back to our quotidian scramble.
Why shouldn't we cherish her?
You sent her carbon copies of some of your poems.
Everything about them -
The ghost gloom, the constriction,
The bell-jar air-conditioning - made her gasp
For oxygen and cheer. She sent them back.
(Whoever has her letter has her exact words.)
'Since these seem to be valuable carbon copies
(Somewhat smudged) I shall not engross them.'
I took the point of that 'engross'
Precisely, like a bristle of glass,
Snapped off deep in my thumb.
You wept
And hurled yourself down a floor or two
Further from the Empyrean.
I carried you back up.
And she, Marianne, tight, brisk,
Neat and hard as an ant,
Slid into the second or third circle
Of my Inferno.
A decade later, on her last visit to England,
Holding court at a party, she was sitting
Bowed over her knees, her face,
Under her great hat-brim's floppy petal,
Dainty and bright as a piece of confetti -
She wanted me to know, she insisted
(It was all she wanted to say)
With that Missouri needle, drawing each stitch
Tight in my ear,
That your little near-posthumous memoir
'OCEAN 1212'
Was 'so wonderful, so lit, so wonderful' -
She bowed so low I had to kneel. I kneeled and
Bowed my face close to her upturned face
That seemed tinier than ever,
And studied, as through a grille,
Her lips that put me in mind of a child's purse
Made of the skin of a dormouse,
Her cheek, as if she had powdered the crumpled silk
Of a bat's wing,
And I listened, heavy as a graveyard
While she searched for the grave
Where she could lay down her little wreath.
It is not Moore's fault that a casual comment about carbon copies would send an overly-sensitive young woman into such a tailspin - but it is such tiny moments that make up art (for the artists, I mean) - moments where misconnections or loss are clearly revealed. Hughes had the sense of Plath's sensitivity, he knew it back then, and tried to protect Plath from her own excesses (not an easy job). And now, decades and decades later, he still has some words for Moore.
Such is life.
Moore was a GIANT, by the time Plath and Hughes met her - the "grande dame" of American poetry. She was an eccentric (Moore was), although the outer aspect of her life was always quiet and narrow. She lived with her mother. She did needlepoint. She worked at a library. She wore hats with little veils and fur stoles. She never married.
But her poetry - with its breathless rhythms and counterintuitive images - its fascination with exotic animals - its SCOPE - shows that the enormity of life is not just represented by the events of our lives, but what is going on inside us, how we see. Plenty of people have had phenomenally interesting lives, with scandals and sex and drugs and months living in a tent in Tunisia - but that doesn't necessarily mean that the poetry is going to be good.
Marianne Moore walked a straight and narrow life, and her poems are HUGE.
Also, I have to say: I love that she was an enormous baseball fan. Actually, she was a huge sports fan, in general - but baseball was her passion. She wrote poems about baseball and I treasure them.
Marianne Moore and Langston Hughes
Here is a piece Ted wrote about Marianne Moore.
Here is one of my favorites of her poems. Again, I can't replicate what it looks like - but the beginning lines are all staggered, so the poem looks almost fragmented, breathless. I love her imagery. Nothing about her is expected. Nothing is traditional. Only she could put these lines and these words together. I find her to be a rigorous poet to read. I can't relax. She doesn't let me. The images are too unexpected, I have to pay attention. Like: " its rock crystal and its imperturbability, / all of museum quality..." To me, not only is that line perfect and evocative ... but a surprise, a little gift.
ENGLAND
with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral;
with voices - one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept - the
criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy
with its equal shores - contriving an epicureanism
from which the grossness has been extracted,
and Greece with its goat and its gourds,
the nest of modified illusions: and France,
the "chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly,"
in whose products, mystery of construction
diverts one from what was originally one's object -
substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its emotional
shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability,
all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south,
where cigars are smoked on the street in the north;
where there are no proofreaders, no silk-worms, no digressions;
the wild man's land; grass-less, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,
but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!
The letter a in psalm and calm when
pronounced with the sound of "a" in candle, is very noticeable, but
why should continents of misapprehension
have to be accounted for by the fact?
Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools
which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?
Of mettlesomeness which may be mistaken for appetite,
of heat which may appear to be haste,
no conclusions may be drawn.
To have misapprehended the matter is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough.
The sublimated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment,
the cataclysmic torrent of emotion
compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language,
the books of the man who is able to say,
"I envy nobody but him, and him only,
who catches more fish than
I do" - the flower and fruit of all that noted superiority
if not stumbled upon in America,
must one imagine that it is not there?
It has never been confined to one locality.
Today in history: January 1, 1892
The Irish potato famine of 1847, with its millions of people pouring into America in a neverending stream, had been the first sign that the country would need some sort of system to register these people, make sure they weren't bringing in diseases, whatever. Immigrants had always come to America, but it was usually in more of a trickle - rather than a flood, like in "black '47".
And so today in history, January 1, 1892, Ellis Island officially opened for business as the primary immigration-registration center for entry into the United States.
The first immigrant of millions to pass through on this day in history was a 14-year-old Irish girl from County Cork named Annie Moore. Three large ships waited to land on that day, and eventually 700 immigrants entered the country on January 1 alone.
Annie Moore was given a 10 dollar gold piece, and welcomed to America.
From American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920, a memory from an immigrant, 1914:
"At seven o'clock our boat lifted anchor and we glided up the still waters of the harbour. The whole prow was a black mass of passengers staring at the ferry-boats, the distant factories, and sky-scrapers. Every point of vantage was seized, and some scores of emigrants were clinging to the rigging. At length we came into sight of the green-grey statue of Liberty, far away and diminutive at first, but later on, a celestial figure in a blaze of sunlight. An American waved a starry flag in greeting, and some emigrants were disposed to cheer, some shed silent tears. Many, however, did not know what the statue was. I heard one Russian telling another that it was the tombstone of Columbus.We carried our luggage out at eight, and in a pushing crowd prepared to disembark…. At a quarter to ten we steamed for Ellis Island. We were then marched to another ferry-boat, and expected to be transported somewhere else, but this second vessel was simply a floating waiting-room. We were crushed and almost suffocated upon it. A hot sun beat upon its wooden roof; the windows in the sides were fixed; we could not move an inch from the places where we were awkwardly standing, for the boxes and baskets were so thick about our feet; babies kept crying sadly, and irritated emigrants swore at the sound of them. All were thinking--"Shall I get through?"
The "tombstone of Columbus"! Ha!!
To those of you who ever visit New York - I highly recommend taking a trip over to Ellis Island. It's strangely emotional - you just can feel the ghosts of the millions of people who passed through. They are all still there. The museum does a great job of displaying information, there's a film to watch, tours to take - it is well worth it.
Here's an image of the Inspection Room - where each immigrant would be screened by doctors for any signs of illness, physical ailments, disease. This was also where their documents would be checked and double-checked. If they were healthy, and if their papers were correct - they would then be allowed to enter the United States.
And so today, let's take a second to remember Annie Moore, the 14 year old Irish girl, the first name on the long long rolls of immigrant records at Ellis Island. There's a statue of Annie Moore at Ellis Island - a bronze statue - which was unveiled by Ireland's president Mary Robinson in 1993.
Here's some more information about Annie Moore. My favorite excerpt from that piece comes at the end:
So what's really important about Annie Moore is not so much that she was born in Ireland, but that she came to America. Someone had to be the first immigrant to land at Ellis Island and as fate would have it she was the one. It might just as easily been someone named Rebecca Schimkowitz or Maria Parmasano. In somewhat the same spirit of commemorating an Unknown Soldier as a symbol of patriotic sacrifice, the story and statues of Annie Moore are intended to remind people of this and future generations of the courageous journey made by countless millions of nameless, faceless immigrants who set out to make a new life for themselves in a strange and distant place called America.
Some images below, including the Inspection Certificate from January 1, 1892, showing Annie Moore's name (the last image below the jump).
Happy birthday, Ellis Island.
