In the Beginning Was the Word
“The beginning, the spark. an ending count to rains that feLL aLL too quickly/now the blues of her dress. they cover my eyes and all that I SEE.”
Author unknown, although it may be the same person who wrote the declaration of despair (now painted over) which I photographed in August less than a block away. What are we to make of these enigmatic writings, so ostentatiously plain and yet begging for interpretation? Art project by someone from the artists’ colony directly across the street? Late night scrawlings of a mad, spraypaint-wielding poet? Your guess is as good as mine.
This is my new favorite Oakland blog. Thanks for the observations and commentary, and Happy New Year!
January 5th, 2010 at 11:51 pmThanks, Sussu, and Happy New Year to you! I’m glad I discovered your blog too. That anthropology project you mentioned is right up my alley—literally fragmentary evidence of West Oakland’s rich history. (And I haven’t had any glögg since I had a Swedish housemate in college…)
January 6th, 2010 at 2:21 amNice diptych; I wish the two photos were side by side!
I especially like the freeway in the background, and I’m trying hard to connect the graffiti to that freeway and the sky, as a way to cleanse my mind of the disturbing suspicion that it’s really a poetic soliloquy from the point of view of Bill Clinton.
January 6th, 2010 at 7:06 amSide by side might have been nice, but the writing is hard enough enough to read as it is, and shrinking the photos enough to fit side by side would have made all of it impossible to read (better yet would have been to get the whole thing in one photo, but I would have had to shoot it as a very acute angle, and it wouldn’t have been at all legible). I found it pretty challenging to photograph well, so I basically ignored aesthetic concerns and just tried to get all the writing in the frames.
I thought of Clinton too. It’s a shame that blue dresses are forever stained (groan—sorry) with that association. Oh, and that’s not a freeway in the background; it’s part of BART’s repelatron skyway.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:34 amThe shots work for me aesthetically just fine. I didn’t mean you should have squeezed them to fit…
January 6th, 2010 at 12:17 pmUgh: the shadows, the expanse of roadway, the odd angles, and the overexposure of the wall with the writing on it, making the blue letters hard to see…I know I may be my own worst critic, which is as it should be, but all those things bother me.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:34 pmWe here did toast the New Year — a bit early — with what we consider Gloegg, and would be happy to try it on you next you are here!
Is repelatron a real term or a nick name for that skyway?
Talking about poetry: did you see Christopher Ricks’ piece on Jane Campion’s film “Bright Star” in a recent NYRB? I was delighted to read John Keats’ lines chosen by Ricks, having never realized how clearly and even simply he could express his feelings — I tended to be put off by his allusions to antiquity, though I always loved his letters.
January 6th, 2010 at 5:09 pmRuth: “Repelatron skyway” is a phrase taken from a Tom Swift book, and it has become a recurring allusion on my blog—a metaphor for the overhead freeways and overhead train viaducts which blight many neighborhoods of Oakland. If you click on this link to reach a post I wrote about BART in October, then the reference is explained there.
I haven’t seen the Ricks piece yet, and I probably wouldn’t have read it if you hadn’t mentioned it, since I hated “The Piano,” which is all I know of Jane Campion. I guess classical allusions were de rigeur in Keats’s day, as pop culture allusions were de rigeur for all the bright young literary minds of the late 20th century. I also find some of Keats’s references to antiquity somewhat gratuitous and forced, but I’d rather read “On first looking into Chapman’s homer” or “Ode on a Grecian Urn” than something along the lines of “On first hearing the ‘Simpsons’ theme song” or “Ode on the Golden Arches.” Keats’s letters are indeed great. Now that written correspondence has mostly been reduced to text messages and Twitter tweets, one can only find that winning combination of casual banter and serious thinking in…blog posts and blog comments! (I’m half kidding, of course—but only half!)
January 6th, 2010 at 6:15 pmI was going to say wasn’t that from Tom Swift? It’s good to know I do recall some things from books read long long ago.
January 6th, 2010 at 8:04 pmJust for the record, I like Keats’ poetry but really didn’t like “Bright Star” — stilted and morbid. His life was tragic, but the movie ruins any moments of happiness in the love affair by presenting everything with an overlay of gloom which may be obvious to us who know how the story ended but shouldn’t have been so obvious to the young lovers.
January 7th, 2010 at 10:04 amKeats is amazing, Ruth. The Odes (To Autumn, On a Grecian Urn, and (especially) To a Nightingale) are the high point of English poetry in the last four hundred years or so, if I recall correctly some things from poems read long ago. Phrases from his poems still bounce around my head. On the other hand I also have bouncing around in my head some doggerel about Keats from a Salinger book that goes, as I probably wrongly remember:
John, John, John, John,
You should have put your sweater on!
As if that would have saved him…
January 7th, 2010 at 6:00 pmAnd if Shakespeare had died at 26, you could have dropped that 400-year qualifier….My two favorite words in a poem ever: wild surmise.
January 8th, 2010 at 5:13 amI suggest submission to Inspiring Cities (via wood_s_lot which highlights the Copenhagen example).
January 9th, 2010 at 8:51 am(oops, inadvertently linked the example; index to above …)
January 9th, 2010 at 8:54 amA link to Uninspiring Cities might be better at the moment, given my current lack of ideas. (Some bloggers have more inspiration than time; I have more time than inspiration—the dull brain perplexes and retards, as Keats put it.)
January 9th, 2010 at 3:23 pm