The Wit of the Staircase

New Beginning

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had
   twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of
   l'entre deux guerres -
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind
   of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better
   of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or
   the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so
   each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what
   there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already
   been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom
   one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover
   what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now,
   under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither
   gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not
   our business.

--T. S. Eliot
East Coker
Four Quartets

Link: whiskey river

Basil Rathbone's Ghosts

Basil Rathbone was entertaining a friend one night at his home in the Hollywood Hills. Both men were keenly interested in dogs and their breeding. His friend had brought with him two handsome specimens. As it got late, the two friends had a parting drink and called it a night. The friend and the canines got into the car and drove away. But, sadly, not very far.

As Rathbone turned to go back inside, he heard the screech of brakes and the sickening sounds of a ghastly car crash. His friend and the dogs were killed instantly.

In deep shock, and with the thought, “He was just standing here,” pounding in his aching head, Rathbone heard the damned phone begin ringing. Mechanically he picked it up and heard the voice of the MGM studio’s night switchboard operator. “Sorry, Mr. Rathbone but I have a woman on the line who simply must talk to you. She says it’s desperately, desperately important.” Probably some smitten fan, he thought as the operator said, “Sir, I’ve never heard anyone be so urgent. She hopes you’ll know what a certain message means.”

Rathbone, impatient and in a daze, snapped, “For Christ’s sake, put her on and be done with it!” The woman was calling from her home, located way to hell and gone on the far side of Los Angeles. She had a low and cultivated speaking voice and identified herself as a trance medium and clairvoyant. At that time the movie colony was going through one of its periodic infatuations with psychics, astrologers, table-tipping séances, Ouija boards and such. Rathbone scorned all such claptrap, but, he said, “the woman’s voice was so compelling.”

“I have for you, sir, what we term ‘a calling of urgency,’” she said. “It came to me with such impact that, although not knowing its meaning, I simply had to find you. The message is brief. Here it is in its entirety: ‘Traveling very fast. No time to say good-bye.’ And then, ‘There are no dogs here.’ ”

The next time I saw Rathbone (F.Y.I., he lived at 135 Central Park West), more years had gone by, and he was in the act of receiving a summons for letting his dog Ginger off the leash in Central Park. I thought he might have decided, looking back, that it had all been some sort of bizarre coincidence, or maybe a highly original prank. He said, “At the time, of course, I was quite shaken by it.” And now? “I am still shaken by it.”

Link: Ghosts - Dick Cavett - Opinion - Times Select - New York Times Blog.

Editor's Note: Theresa had left this post to appear automatically on this date (another will appear on New Year's Eve).

Storytelling On The Staircase

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

--Reynolds Price

Wit And The Warrior Heart: What Tarot Card Are You?

Wit is the Emperor.

"You are an authority figure, and other people look to you for what to do.
You are strong and powerful. Crossing you is not a good idea.
You have worked hard to get to your position, and you're not about to give it up to anyone.
Though you have a warrior heart, you are gentle to those who treat you well.

Your fortune:

In the near future, you need to be willing and able to defend those you love.
This may be the time for you to step up and be the authority figure to those around you.
It is time for you to be independent, to become your own person.
You may need to look at your relationship with your father, or your relationships as a father."

Link: What Tarot Card Are You?.

Goodnight, Children, We're In The Arms Of The Great Lover

"Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets...."

~Rupert Brooke, The Great Lover

See you in the a.m.

The Devil And Dick Cheney

Wit is cooking up a new politcal essay. We will be back later....

Love, Peace, and Soul
Wit

Outstanding In Her Field

Wit is visiting the Eastern Seaboard on Important Film Business....

And taking in some of the lovely scenery along the way....

Our Order From Their Chaos

"A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment..."

--Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Link: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

Above, Christian Schad, Shadogrophie.

Summer Travel

The Wit Of The Staircase is doing a little summer travelling for the next couple weeks, but we expect to keep up the usual blogging pace....

Gen X Librarians

"Now, there is a public librarian who writes dispatches for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a favored magazine of the young literati. Unshelved, a comic about librarians — yes, there is a comic about librarians — features a hipster librarian character. And, in real life, there are an increasing number of librarians who are notable not just for their pink-streaked hair but also for their passion for pop culture, activism and technology."

Link: A Hipper Crowd of Shushers - New York Times.

Mind If I Smoke?

The Smoking Museum, below.

Link: The Smoking Museum.

Via: Design Observer: writings about design & culture.

The Dirt

Well, as we've said, this "cheating" incident seems like a set up. We of Wit hope they stick together...

"The topsy-turvy love affair between British model Kate Moss and junkie rocker Pete Doherty has ended with Moss turfing the musician's piano, guitars and battered suitcases out of her house, according to press reports...."

Link: The Sydney Morning Herald: national, world, business, entertainment, sport and technology news from Australia's leading newspaper..

An Important Thing Rescued

Naturally Wit is a Scorpio, children of the Staircase.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Before I suggest to you what your next assignment should be, read this passage from poet Adrienne Rich. "Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language-this will become not merely unspoken, but unspeakable." What I hope you will do in the coming week, Scorpio, is rescue from obscurity any important thing that is on the verge of becoming unspeakable. Be a retriever of that-which-is-about-to-disappear. Be a rememberer of that-which-is-close-to-being forgotten.

Link:

village voice > people > Free Will Astrology: Free Will Astrology by Rob Brezsny .

It Is Said She Will Reign Until The End Of Time

"The fairy, Melusine, was the daughter of the fairy Pressyne and King Elynas of Albany. She became the fairy Queen of the forest of Colombiers in the French region of Poitou. One day, she and two of her subjects were guarding their sacred fountain when a young man, Raymond of Poitiers, burst out of the forest. Melusine spent the night talking with Raymond, and by dawn, they were betrothed, but with one condition. Melusine requested that Raymond promise that he would never see her on a Saturday. He agreed, and they were married.

Melusine brought her husband great wealth and prosperity. She built the fortress of Lusignan so quickly that it appeared to be made by magic. Over time, Melusine built many castles, fortresses, churches, towers and towns, each in a single night, throughout the region. She and Raymond had ten children, but each child was flawed. The eldest had one red eye and one blue eye, the next had an ear larger than the other, another had a lion’s foot growing from his cheek, and another had but one eye. The sixth son was known as Geoffrey-with-the-great tooth, as he had a very large tooth. In spite of the deformities, the children were strong, talented and loved throughout the land.

One day, Raymond’s brother visited him and made Raymond very suspicious about the Saturday activities of his wife...."

Link: Encyclopedia Mythica: Folktales.

Top Ten Books About Outsiders

3. The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens

If poetry has more than its fair share of outsiders, American poetry has some of its oddest. Stevens spent his whole working life as vice-president of an insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut. He composed some of his greatest poems whilst walking to work and had his secretary type them up. Belonging to no movement, never hanging with any group, with few influences, he is almost a poet sui generis. Stevens was a unique and independent pedestrian amidst the world's flux (or perhaps it's more accurate to say the "flux of being" disclosed as the permanent world), and the enterprise was to fix it poetically in the intensest language. Stevens is the creative outsider operating alone.

Link: Neil Griffiths' top 10 outsider books | Top 10s | Guardian Unlimited Books.

Citizen Wit And Project Monarch

So it must be clear by now, children of the Staircase, that MK-ULTRA (and even weird, disinfo-saturated Project Monarch) are the ne plus ultra weapons of past decades, as if all the Cold War missile paranoia was just a smoke screen for all the body snatchers the Pentagon was beginning to hatch.

Mind control and psychological warfare are the primary weapons that led to our current Monarch Moment. Cults like Scientology and mind control-manufactured Monarch girlies and Operation Mockingbird are the fungus among us that has been eating away at the foundations of democracy for decades....

King Bush? Emperor Cheney? They don't call it Monarch for nothin'.

Link: YouTube - The Most dangerous Game part 1.

Kafka At Hell's Gate

Happy Birthday Franz Kafka, from The Wit Of The Staircase.

"We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me an look at me, what do you know of the grief that is in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell."

--Franz Kafka

Link: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

Star Spangled

"It is He who maketh the stars as beacons for you, that ye may guide yourselves, with their help, through the dark spaces of land and sea: We detail our signs for people who know."

--The Koran

Here on the Staircase we are oft not understood, what with our Late Capitalist contradictions and our desire to burn through any container some sap imagines will hold us.

But just as The Little Prince could look up into the vast night sky and know that his rose lived far off on some particular planet, we at Wit also detail our signs for those who know, so that They might be guided toward Us by the varied light of our linguistic constellations. Yes, language created even the first ever illumination, and now we borrow back a little word and a little wattage both in order that we might reflect another of nature's fair farragos.

So...let there be Aria di Capri we utter, and prettily perfume the rectory air at dim rainy dusk on this fabled Fourth Of July eve. One burst from the bottle is a beautiful's woman's laugh, startling, sharp and silver like a 747 slicing suddenly above the cloud cover and rising into the sun. The city, the rain, the proximity to many stupid people stacked waiting for what? in apartments. And the inviolable white magic aura of our apartment is rent right away by July Aura anyway.

Like shiny armor it suddenly encases us. The sunshine, the lemons, the exuberances of sour grapefruit and tanged-up clementines that are so shiny, so way-out, they look like rocks that will be polished for some fantastic fairy giant's jewels. The mist still hangs in the air as I speak, like light trails careening oh so slowly off a crackling Catherine Wheel.

Our sparks stay suspended all night tonight by Olde American Magic, so stay up. They'll illumine the way toward every American's rightful portion of liberty, joy and crazy-colored, ever present, indestructible light.

Link: Aedes De Venustas| Indulge Your Senses....

The Fireworks Are Hailing Over Little Eden Tonight

Happy Fourth of July from The Wit Of The Staircase.

"The fireworks are hailin' over Little Eden tonight
Forcin' a light into all those stoned-out faces
left stranded on this Fourth of July...."

Link: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - 4TH OF JULY, ASBURY PARK (SANDY) LYRICS.

104 Weeks Of Independence: The Wit Of The Staircase Is Two

The Wit Of The Staircase began broadcasting on July 4th, 2005, with the post below.

Link: The Wit of the Staircase: Happy Independence Day!.

Chicken Shit

"To complain about the ‘injustice’ done by humans to chickens – those cannibalistic balls of faeces and feathers – is to call into question the entire basis of human civilisation...."

Link: sp!ked review of books | Stop Planet Chicken, I want to get off.

Jealous Much, Meatheads?

Says here that some Kate Moss lookalike zombie went after Pete Doherty. Kate and Pete were set up by some media scam or some other saboteur, says street con and psyop savvy Wit.

It's the same with the cocaine video of last year. Just digest it and stick together, childrens.

Link: Doherty cheats on Moss.

The View From The Staircase

"Go live, win and lose, smash your hands against hysterical constellations, your head against phases of the moon, and your heart against another heart. Find the leisure to contemplate the results. You will discover the human condition. Foolish people who say that they seek reality don’t know what they are saying. For them, the worldly, when they approach it, they tremble and feel weak, distressed, fearful, terrified and repelled. They reject the truth and turn somewhere else for it, an easier, a softer, lifeless one. Little do they realize that they have been through the door itself, and in error, stupefying ignorance, in that immensity, said nothing is here, and stepped back to dullness. They may be less eloquent and merely realize the words it is painful. I must stop it, and step back."

--John Brzostoski

Link: whiskey river.

Poets Do The Darnedest Things: Shelley Was A Total Asshole

"His two latest biographers perpetuate the Jekyll-and-Hyde tradition, one exploring his spiritual journey, the other totting up the emotional and moral cost of his unearthliness and inhumanity. In Death and the Maidens, Janet Todd confronts more frankly than anyone has done before the fact that Shelley spent virtually his entire adult life trying to lure young girls away from the protection of their families. All of them were vulnerable, inexperienced and underage. Two killed themselves on his account. Most of the babies they bore him died while in his care. The character who emerges from this book was as manipulative as he was mesmeric, self-absorbed and ruthlessly self-righteous.

'It is no reproach to me that you have never filled my heart with an all-sufficing passion,' he wrote to Harriet Westbrook, who had run away from school to marry him only to find herself dumped after three years for 16-year-old Mary Godwin. Shelley insisted there was 'little to regret' when Harriet was fished out of the Thames two years later, pregnant at 21 with her third child (which, as Todd argues persuasively, may well have been his). 'Everyone does me full justice - bears testimony to the uprightness & liberality of my conduct to her,' Shelley wrote, and married Mary a fortnight after the discovery of the body...."

Link: Shelley: poet, predator and prey | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books.

Above, Death and the Maidens by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

"INDEPENDENT FIREWORKS" TOMORROW!! ROCK AND ROLL BENEFIT FOR ST. MARK'S CHURCH IN THE BOWERY

Tomorrow Beginning At 7pm!
July 3rd, 2007

A-Ron and BrendanFowler/EthanSwan

In Association With Supreme/RVCA Clothing
present:

A GIANT BENEFIT for historic
St Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
at 2nd Ave at 10th St, NYC 

7pm to 4am

Food/Drinks

$5 Entry!!!!

LIMITED EDITION PRINT BY DASH SNOW!!!

***All funds-raised will go toward restoring the façade of historic St. Mark's Church In The Bowery***

Originally a church of Manhattan's elite, St. Mark's became a progressive force in the neighborhood both socially and culturally. Supportive of immigrant, labor and civil rights, the church was a meeting place for Black Panthers and Young Lords, and launched the first lesbian healthcare clinic.

Poets like W.H. Auden (who was a parishoner), William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Kahlil Gibran, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith and Jim Carroll have all read here; since 1966, the St Marks Poetry Project has organized poetry events. The Danspace project has featured dance legends like Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. Sam Shepherd's first two plays were produced here, and Andy Warhol screened his early films in the sanctuary....

July 3rd's Event Features:

TheVirgins/CarClutch(BARR)/LissyTrullie/KriaBrekkan(MUM/AnimalCollective)

and EffiBriest/ModRocket/YoungLords/RubNTug

PLUS: DjMikeFellows+SECRETSPECIALOGUESTS !!!!

Please come...you can sleep all day the next day (the 4th) and wake up to see the fireworks...