The Dance Revolution

In her book on the story of disco music Alice Echols traces the nurturing of the sound to gay dance clubs. In order for there to have been gay dance clubs, first gay people had to be able to dance, yet same sex close dancing was illegal throughout the US up until the late 60s. In 1969, Echols emphasizes, the government’s policing of same sex closeness was still an active and dispiriting part of LGBT life. Echols believes that the relative freedom experienced at the Stonewall Inn was what opened hearts to the possibility of real escape from oppression rather than hiding and cowering. 

[W]hen the Stonewall Inn opened in the spring of 1967, management and customers alike behaved as if the dance floor had been won. The unlicensed bar was a firetrap that doled out watered-down drinks in dirty glasses, but it quickly developed a loyal clientele because it was the only gay bar in New York City that as a matter of course permitted dancing between men. In contrast to another gay bar, the Tenth of Always, where ‘you knew that when the chandelier would flick on, you’d have to sit down,’ at the Stonewall ‘you were never told not to dance.’ Indeed, the only time the dancing came to a halt was when the police arrived. … [The raid that sparked the Stonewall riots] was hardly the first time that the police hit the Stonewall, but it was the first time they had not given notice to the management. And it was the first time that gays, angry about being treated like scum, fought back. 

The dance floor, Echols is saying, became a site of the transformation of consciousness, where emancipation of the public body allowed a change in how gay men saw themselves and each other — and how, in a new solidarity, they saw the non-gay world. Dancers, no longer threatened by the paddy wagon, could enjoy themselves without looking over their shoulders. 

It wasn’t just that the music’s volume and relentlessness encouraged physical intimacy and greater sexual straightforwardness between men. Disco’s sonics, with its thunderous bass and its bass drum kick, operated like an ‘audio orgasmatron’ … The music and the drugs pretty well obliterated any lingering sexual shyness. Moreover, the sweatbox quality of many gay discos made stripping to the waist all but necessary, which in turn made working out practically obligatory. … ‘Within a short five years, sculptured pectoral muscles had become one of the main attributes of gay male desirability.’ … Worked-out pecs came to be called ‘disco-tits.’ … [G]ay men rather than heterosexual men became the embodiment of masculinity and the fantasized object of desire for each other. … ‘We’re the men we’ve been looking for,’ as the protagonist of [novelist Edmund] White’s The Farewell Symphony put it.

I like recreational drugs. I like club music. But my body is not so into either. I’m not one who could go clubbing regularly because my body would just crash. Too many migraines, too many body aches, too little sleep. Besides, the drugs are too expensive, the music ultimately monotonous. As to ever having disco tits — I actually like working out, but my body that doesn’t. That sounds weird to everyone I’ve ever said it to. Still, it’s true. I can’t ramp up my work out routine to get those pretty muscles because my body basically says, nope, and sends me to bed for three days. 

I always kind of envied club kids, their energy, their active social lives, the sex. But it’s not a lifestyle I could participate in, other than briefly and at a remove. But if we credit Alice Echols’ argument, the club was where gay liberation really began, so good for them! Dance the revolution!  

source: 

Hot Stuff: disco and the remaking of American culture

by Alice Echols

2010. W. W. Norton & Co., New York

“Need You Tonight” by INXS

This was the song that turned me on to INXS. The video is pretty great, too. It’s just the band playing, but they’re being playful, and the visual effects, the musicians sliding into and out of the frame in collage-like isolation, holds one's attention. 

The album featuring “Need You Tonight,” Kick, was on my Christmas list. We always put a few things on the Christmas list — so we could be surprised but still get what we wanted — “Oh! You got me that one!” I don’t remember what I didn’t get in lieu of Kick. I was happy to get Kick!

I felt like I was on the cutting edge, man. 

“Need You Tonight” was one of those songs that I would rush to the record player to repeat, picking up the needle, eyeing the shiny line between songs, and settling the needle back to where it would pick up those opening clicks. It’s just that light percussion for the first several seconds, then Michael Hutchence stage-whispers, “Come over here.” 

Seductive! Michael Hutchence is pretty! I would have come to his command. Of the other band members, Tim Farriss, who appears in the video in a black baseball cap, always caught my eye. Those dark brows and big eyes. 

Finally, a guitar strums, sharp and jangly, at 20 seconds. The riff is repeated. A few seconds later the warm throb of the rest of the music bumps up and carries you along through the rest of the song. “All you’ve got is this moment,” Hutchence says, though, as I often do, I had trouble picking out the words. Something about a garden? “The twenty-first century's yesterday.” It is? Well, I like lyrics that are a little odd. 

While I want the lyrics of a song to please me, the lyrics are rarely what first get into my ear. If I don’t groove to the music, I don’t much care what they’re saying. Sadly, you’ll have to forgive me in regards to critical analysis of music. Beyond the lyrics my analysis isn’t much better than the old American Bandstand rate-a-record standby, “It’s got a good beat. You can dance to it.” And “Need You Tonight” passes that test!

When Hutchence gets to “Slide over here / And give me a moment,” I’m ready, I’m dancing, I’ve been dancing, what? does he want me to stop dancing? But it’s the refrain, “You’re one of my kind,” that stuck with me. As one searching for his kind, it’s something I wanted to be able to say. Not to mention, “I’m lonely.” As an intermittent insomniac, I identified with “I’m not sleeping, whether or not it was because I was really hot for somebody.

I like the question / answer part of the lyrics, especially the answer to “Whatcha gonna do?” “Gonna live my life!”

Yes, Hutchence is addressing this to a “girl,” but the best those of us with same sex yearnings could hope for in pop music (until very recently) was a genderless “you.” And, you know, “girl” just becomes punctuation after a while. “I need you tonight,” I sang along. “I need you tonight.”

source: Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987

“Why Can’t I Be You?” by The Cure

“Why Can’t I Be You?” was the song that turned me on to The Cure. It was so weird and so catchy, blaring horns, Robert Smith’s whiny/screechy vocals, that stomping beat, loud, giddy, comically lascivious, gender-neutral. 

I kept an eye out for a used copy of “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me,” The Cure album on which “Why Can’t I Be You?” appeared. Being a double album, even used it was more expensive than most of my purchases. 

I loved to put “Why Can’t I Be You?” on the stereo and crank it up and whirl and thrash around the room. It was a song to lose it to. 

The lyrics are not your usual love stuff. Why can’t I be you? Is that envy? A desire so fervid the lover wants to become the beloved? It’s kind of trans — transformational, transgender (perhaps). Were the beloved of the same sex the plaint could include envy (you’re so much prettier than me); why can’t I be more like you? Why can’t I be just like you? I want to be you! 

I love the line, “I'll kiss you from your feet to where your head begins.” The kissing starts with the feet and goes up to another beginning. There’s a little bit of dissonance with that head, too — it begins at the top, right?, but it could also begin on the way up, at the chin or nape. The underside of the head would be where the head would begin for one working their way up from the feet. I like the instability of that. Where the head begins, where the head ends. Then there’s the other head. The head of the cock. How high up does the singer climb?

The singer sees everything “you do [as] kissable.” Not every part of you, but everything “you do.” The beloved actions are kissable. The lover is so besotted, they are full of action, “run[ning] around until … out of breath,” the actions even becoming violent, “hug you to death,” and, boy, that appetite is worked up and yet the lover is feeling “bitten … cooked.” It’s a messy song lyrically. And the way the words are shouted, crooned, whined, yowled … the messiness of the lyrics seems right.  

There were other songs on the album that I grew fonder of. “Just Like Heaven” and “Catch” are much sweeter and catchy and easy to like. “Why Can’t I Be You?” can get grating, and I stopped playing it for a while. But in the right mood it drives you the kind of crazy you need.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen the video. I often like videos. But sometimes they detract. I’m not sorry the images in this video weren’t a major part of my experience of the song. Still, it’s goofy fun. I like Smith’s blobby fur suit. 

source: Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987

Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987

 

When I was growing up I didn’t hear much I liked on the radio. And I disliked so much of what I did hear that I preferred not to have the radio on. 

Buying music was also tricky. You couldn’t listen to records before buying them in our small town music store. And if you had been allowed to, I probably would have felt too self-conscious. Suppose you try a few records — and you don’t like any of them? The music store is in business. They want you to buy stuff. I couldn’t afford to buy more than one record every few months. Besides, there would have been other people — other kids, probably — who would have been waiting to use any listening station. 

In any case, there wasn’t a listening station. So my brother and I had to judge music by the album covers. Our eyes were caught by the sci fi style of Boston, for instance. Actually spinning the record once it was home — no. I kind of liked parts of Boston songs, but the music had nothing on the guitar spaceships album art. When I did find an artist I liked, it made sense to buy more by them. A buddy turned us on to ABBA and to ELO. Over time I lost interest in ELO — not that there isn’t ELO I still like. ABBA wore a groove in my head. Yet there had to be a world beyond ABBA. 

My brother David made friends who listened to stuff a bit outside the late-70s mainstream. Thus he brought home Talking Heads, whose music intrigued and irritated me in equal measure. David Bowie, ditto. 

I remember in a class in high school (1980? 81?) we pushed our chairs into a circle and did a get-to-know-you intro. You were supposed to say a couple things about yourself, like what music you liked. When my turn came around I said, “I don’t like music.” This drew shocked reactions and some protests. I hadn’t liked any of the music my classmates named. In my experience there was no genre that made me happy. I liked individual songs, whatever boxes they were supposed to fit in. I liked my mother’s folk songs — but not all of them, that’s for sure. I liked very little country music, very little disco, very little rock. 

If you put those little bits all together maybe you’d get a decent mix tape or two. Which would have been a nice thing to be able to do. 

There were San Francisco radio stations that probably would have interested my ears, but their signals weren’t strong enough to be received in Sebastopol. MTV launched in 1981. We couldn’t afford to subscribe. 

I stayed up late to watch some video compilation shows on broadcast television and finally in New Wave found a genre that didn’t annoy more frequently than it pleased. 

By the time I was attending junior college, SF’s KITS had switched its format from Top 40 to “Modern Rock,” or New Wave / Post Punk, synths, jangly guitars. I would listen while doing my homework. And I was regularly going to Santa Rosa where there was a good record store called, helpfully, The Last Record Store. The Last Record Store featured used records, and a lot of the used records were recent. So, without breaking the bank, I could try out artists I knew by only a song or two. 

KITS (now calling itself LIVE 105) offered listeners an opportunity to get their playlist. I sent a self-addressed stamped envelope and got what you see above. 

Clearing out a box of papers during the covid-19 shutdown I unfolded the playlist and smoothed it out. Yes, I recognized most of the songs. Some I loved. But even those I didn’t care for didn’t make me want to rush to turn off the radio. 

The accessibility of music these days is entirely different from when I was a kid. Pretty cool that I can do quick internet searches and turn up any song on this list. What I loved back then, I followed up on back then. Other songs have provided a hit of nostalgia, without my wanting to add them to my music library. “The Great Commandment” by Camouflage; “Voyage Voyage” by Desireless. But I could now! If I wanted.

your reward

Gary Panter is best known for designing the set for PeeWee’s Playhouse. He’s also a comics artist (think surrealism rather than superheroes) and a musician. 

In an interview with Aaron Cometbus about comics, Gary Panter mentions money. Cometbus flinches.

Cometbus: Every interview seems to veer into a discussion about money …

Panter: … I get approached by young people all the time. ‘How can I have a career in art? How can I have a career in comics?’ Well, if you did the drawing, that’s your career. That’s it, your reward. You did the drawing, you got to do it, you were alive.

In other words, you better have a day job.

Still, there’s nothing fresh about saying that, and I would pass over yet another enjoinder not to depend on your art to pay your bills — because what’s to say? — except I actually find a little poignant Panter’s “you got to do it, you were alive.” Because doing these things for love, the art, that’s experiencing life. You get to be alive. 

source:

Cometbus #57 

by Aaron Cometbus

2016. 

M&Ms … or salmon …

I’ve heard of various seemingly fussy contract stipulations that rock stars require at a show, like a bowl of m&ms — but there must be no brown ones. On the surface this just sounds eccentric — or arrogant — but I remember reading that one of the reasons for weird stipulations that are easy to check is that, if those are conscientiously followed through on, then less obvious details are probably taken care of too (things that might affect the quality of the sound, say). 

Maori musical artist Mihirangi says she includes an interesting (and heartwarming) requirement in her contract.

“Whenever she performs abroad, [her] contract stipulates that the organisers must facilitate a meeting with local indigenous groups, to learn about their culture and land and to request permission to perform on that land. ‘I actually can’t perform unless I meet with the local indigenous elders. It’s a cultural thing for me, it’s who I am, it’s my spirituality. It’s really empowering, when you go on stage you feel like you’re becoming part of the local family and that you have a right to be there. You’re connected through the family you’ve met who’ve supported you and nurtured you by opening this space for you. I suggest everyone do that, not just indigenous people.’ … One of [Mihirangi’s] first such experiences came from a meeting at a festival in Canada. ‘The local indigenous people had never had that sort of meeting happen before. They were so honored by it that they came to the festival and caught salmon in the local river and fed the entire festival. … Just that little act alone gave them responsibility, gave them a sense of purpose and empowerment of their own culture, of their own land.’

source: 

“The Power of Language” by Jim Hickson

Songlines

#155, March 2020

Title to Indian Land, part three

I sold it. 

The deadline for getting in the paperwork was July 31. I got the deed notarized on July 20 and mailed the next day. 

The offer letter came this spring. Just before the covid-19 shutdown. Originally the deadline for taking the offer was May 8. The offer letter explains:

We are pleased to include you in the Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, which is part of the Class Action Settlement Agreement often referred to as the Cobell Settlement. The intent of the Buy-Back Program is to consolidate highly fractionated tracts of Indian land, allowing for better utilization of the land for social, economic or cultural purposes benefitting the tribal community. Interests purchased under the Buy-Back Program will be transferred to the Tribe in trust.

I had fractionated interest in four tracts, or about 17 acres. This is pastureland. The offer letter proposed the following purchase amounts:

Tract #1 … $2.24

Tract #2 … $1.58

Tract #3 … $9.94

Tract #4 … $104. 35

That totals $118.11, though they throw in $75 for filling out the paperwork. Which is nice of them. 

After the covid-19 shutdown the deadline was extended to July 31. So I made it. I think. I haven’t heard back yet. “Allow at least 60 calendars days for approval of the sale and processing of your payment,” says the letter. 

The heirs to this land are multitudinous. “Fractionated,” that’s no joke. One of the tracts has 116 owners. The others 109, 29, and — this is not reasonable either but only seems so in contrast — 15!

My favorite part of the deal isn’t the money. It’s that I got the names of ancestors: Marie Kempton, Sarah A. Kempton, Bernard E. Kempton, and Bernice Kempton. 

And aerial photos of the land, like this:

Indian land, part one and part two

the poets haven’t forgotten

Deep in our own pandemic, references to a similar event, the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918, will jump out at one, won’t they? 

Grace Marie Grafton devotes a poem to the California painter, Rex Slinkard (died 1918, age 31), “Death at an Early Age”: 

“he died … 

of what was called the Spanish Flu. 

… as his fever rose and

held him in fire, he asked to be carried

down to water. They say that he sang

next to the waves as he died.”

There’s a transgender aspect to the poem that also gives it a contemporary connection: 

“He imagined himself a woman …

… break[ing]

into shattered forms that walk together

near the surf …”

*

Lucille Lang Day, in her poem “Journeys,” briefly looks in on journeys of some in her family tree. Her grandmother on her mother’s side, for instance:

“… my mother’s

mother dies again of pneumonia

in Massachusetts in the flu epidemic

of 1918, and my mother comes over

mountains, rivers and plains 

to California …”

The “again” in the line above refers to the grandmother dying in Day’s imagination — once from the physical life, then again when her grandchild revisits her memory. 

*

sources:

Lens: poetry of art in California

by Grace Marie Grafton

2019. Unsolicited Press, Portland OR

Becoming an Ancestor

by Lucille Lang Day

2015. Cervena Barva Press, West Somerville MA

1961 agenda of Southern whites is the same as today’s

In Jeff Chang’s book-length essay on contemporary art and race, Who We Be, Chang quotes a pollster who illuminates a clash of cultures between whites and blacks in the south: 

 

In a 1961 study, Henry Allen Bullock argued that all consumers purchased things in order to have the security of ‘belonging,’ but that Blacks and whites had very different motivations. … 

Bullock illustrated his point by pointing to how Southern whites and Blacks that he interviewed completed the sentence ‘If I could change the world I would …’ The list of whites’ most frequent replies included: 

‘Make it so that people would not park in front of my driveway.’ 

‘Stop the neighbors’ children from cutting across my lawn.’ 

‘Destroy the United Nations.’  

‘Change the Supreme Court.’ 

But Blacks said: 

‘Make all people the same.’ 

‘Establish brotherhood.’ 

‘Do away with war.’ 

‘Break down segregation.’

I know who I want to bring home for dinner. 

source: 

Who We Be: the colorization of America

by Jeff Chang

2014. St Martin’s Press, New York

Title to Indian land, part two

I am looking at the spring 2020 statement describing the income on Indian land in which I inherited an interest. In Title to Indian land, part one I said at a glance the statements seem to add up to less than the postage on the envelope. 

Does a closer look bear that out? The spring 2020 statement has codes on it that I don’t understand (they probably just identify the tracts), but the accounting looks pretty simple. Let’s review the numbers in the CASH column. 

Nine transactions are listed. The first is CASH 0.10 … the second 0.01 … 

0.07

0.11

0.10

0.02

0.02

0.10

1.00

Out of that I could buy two Forever stamps. 

The largest numbers are cumulative. A beginning balance is listed as 44.39, an ending balance as 45.92. I don’t know how long that $45 has taken to accrue. Years? 

I’ve never seen a penny. Do they pay out when the accrual reaches a certain level? $50? $100? 

The money is meaningless. Clearly. If there is meaning in this ownership share it is as evidence of heritage. Which I like. 

name check

D. A. Powell has hit the big time. He’s won awards, been the subject of adoring essays, publishes in very competitive venues, goes on reading tours. That sounds like the big time to me.

I don’t know how many books he sells. I hope he sells some. Doug is a poet. Poetry sales can’t hope to match a mid-list mystery novel. In poetry the big time isn’t big money. Still, he’s been noticed. 

Doug found his feet as a poet in the Sonoma County poetry scene about the same time I did. He’s not much older than me, so we were peers. Weren’t we? Despite the smallness of the scene I don’t remember running into Doug much. I’m sure we had poet friends and acquaintances in common. 

It’s not easy to get around Sonoma County without a car. I didn’t have access to one, except when my mother would drive me somewhere — and, for a brief period, I got to use her old car after she bought a newer one. I was fortunate in that the Russian River Writers Guild based its reading series in Sebastopol, where I lived, and getting to it was a walk of about ten minutes. 

One of the organizers of the Russian River Writers Guild, Mo Hurley, has set up a blog for RRWG memorabilia. Going through a box of old papers last week I came across some copies of The Obligatory Hug, the RRWG newsletter. One of the Hugs wasn’t represented on the blog, so I snapped images of it and posted them.

In that Hug there’s a calendar of the reading series Doug Powell ran at a cafe in downtown Santa Rosa. I was never invited to read there, but many of the names are of people I knew well. I don’t remember if I ever attended. (See above about lack of transportation.) Since these poets would read in Sebastopol, maybe arranging to get to Santa Rosa didn’t seem necessary. 

In other words, Doug and I never really hung out. As he began to make a name for himself in the national poetry scene, I took for granted that Doug had no memory of me. 

Besides the RRWG blog Mo has set up a memorial blog for Marianne Ware, another RRWG stalwart, a self-declared mother figure for SoCo writers, and an instructor at Santa Rosa’s community college. Marianne was a sweetheart, and a fine performer of her own, often hilarious, writing. 

Reading through reminiscences at the Ware blog, I was surprised to find myself name-checked. By D. A. Powell. 

[Marianne Ware, Doug writes, was o]ne of the first of many passionate and gifted poets I met in Sonoma County. Donna Champion brought me to the Russian River Writers Guild for a holiday party, and introduced me to Maureen Hurley, Glenn Ingersoll, Paul Mariah and Marianne. I was nervous & young, and whatever poem I shared with the group that night was, I'm sure, crap. But Marianne, a gracious and nurturing presence, smiled and told me how wonderful the poem was. 

Wait, I remember the poem now! It's in a drawer somewhere, if I haven't burned it. Yes, it truly was crap.

I remember reading a manifesto Doug wrote, championing a new poetics — Badism. Write crap! Don’t be ashamed. Own it. 

Maybe, by 2010 when he wrote the note about Marianne, Doug had eschewed his old Badism beliefs. After all, he’d hit the big time with good stuff!

source: http://marianneware.blogspot.com/2010/06/class-act.html

“the world everybody else lives in”

A poet’s perspective, according to Mary Ruefle:

There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.

source: “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World”

an essay by Mary Ruefle

The Planet on the Table: poets on the reading life

edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen

Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY

a continuity of taste

Mary Ruefle describes a continuity of taste:

I was … reading, for the first and last time in my life, my own private journals, which I began writing when I was sixteen and ceased to write when I was forty. As is my habit, I was copying selected passages from the [poet I was also reading at the time] into a notebook. Later that evening I began reading a journal I kept twenty years ago. In it, I was reading the notebooks of the [same] poet … and had copied into the journal by hand my favorite passage, which was identical with the passage I had copied earlier in the day, believing completely that I had never encountered it before.

In my Best Poems posts I list all the poems I copied out in my own hand over the previous year. Have I have copied out the same poem more than once? There are two occasions I have copied out the same poem in different translation. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about reading over my personal anthology and coming across the same exact poem in English — only a handful of years separating the duplicates. How did I not remember? Surely, the poem seemed awfully familiar.

Not that this was a problem. I mean, I liked it. I’ve wondered occasionally if I would copy out some poem in my personal anthology if I were to come upon it all unseen. In that case, the answer was clearly yes. 

source: “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World”

an essay by Mary Ruefle

The Planet on the Table: poets on the reading life

edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen

Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY

be suspicious of your sources

I don’t recall having heard this before: 

[A] month or so after atom bombs annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the New York Times discounted the rumors that were terrifying the world.  

On September 12, 1945, the daily published a front-page story by its chief science reporter William L. Laurence, which challenged the alarmist notions head-on. There was no radioactivity whatsoever in those razed cities, the article assured one and all, it’s only ‘the Japanese continuing their propaganda …'   

That scoop won Laurence the Pulitzer Prize. 

Sometime later it came out that he was receiving two monthly paychecks: one from the New York Times, the other from the payroll of the US War Department.

The Wikipedia entry for William L. Laurence doesn’t tell the story quite that way. “For his 1945 coverage of the atomic bomb, beginning with [an] eyewitness account from Nagasaki, he won [the] Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1946.” 

Wikipedia goes on:

In 2004, journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman called for the Pulitzer Board to strip Laurence and his paper, The New York Times, of his 1946 Pulitzer Prize. The journalists argued that at the time Laurence ‘was also on the payroll of War Department’ and that, after the atomic bombings, he ‘had a front-page story in the Times disputing the notion that radiation sickness was killing people.' They concluded that ‘his faithful parroting of the government line was crucial in launching a half-century of silence about the deadly lingering effects of the bomb.'

source:

Children of the Days: a calendar of human history

by Eduardo Galeano

translated by Mark Fried

Nation Books / Perseus Group, New York

word of the day: tiercel

word: tiercel

context:

winter sun 

in the eye of her tiercel 

returns to her glove

— Harvey Hess

definition (Merriam-Webster): a male hawk; especially : a male peregrine falcon

This haiku was opaque until I looked up “tiercel.” Suddenly, it was evocative. 

source: Haiku World: an international poetry almanac

edited by William J. Higginson

1996. Kodansha International, New York

what won’t surprise a poet

“It is the gift of all poets to find the commonplace astonishing, and the astonishing quite natural.” — Margery Sharp

The mice of the Prisoners’ Aid Society, who have been sent to rescue a poet from the dungeon of the Black Castle, at last meet the prisoner and he is not surprised to hear them speak. 

I rather like Sharp’s description of the poet’s perspective. Oddly, however, not once does Margery Sharp quote a line of the young man’s poetry. 

Nor do we ever learn what led to his imprisonment. One might assume it had something to do with the poetry, but Sharp never really tells us. 

source:

The Rescuers

by Margery Sharp

1959. A Yearling Book / Dell Publishing, New York

word of the day: adjure

word: adjure

context:

[A] cruel black paw pinned [the two mice] to the ground! … ‘Whatever you do, lie still!’ adjured the glance of Miss Bianca.

definition (Merriam-Webster): to command solemnly under or as if under oath or penalty of a curse

One of the complications for the intrepid mice of the Prisoners’ Aid Society is the prison cat. Up to now Miss Bianca has figured out ways to placate — or, at least, distract — the monstrous mouser, but now her dear friends and colleagues, Nils and Bernard, are under the cat’s power. Can she outwit the cat this time?

source:

The Rescuers

by Margery Sharp

1959. A Yearling Book / Dell Publishing, New York

words of the day: strawfoot and hayfoot

words: strawfoot and hayfoot

context:

”Hear that, Amelia? The lady says we never learnt no manners! Hands up all who goes to dancing class! Hands up all who know strawfoot from hayfoot! My word, she should see some of our barn dances!”

definition: the strawfoot is the right foot, the hayfoot the left. According to an American Heritage article, during the US Civil War “the drill sergeants repeatedly found that among the raw recruits there were men so abysmally untaught that they did not know left from right, and hence could not step off on the left foot as all soldiers should. To teach these lads how to march, the sergeants would tie a wisp of hay to the left foot and a wisp of straw to the right; then, setting the men to march, they would chant, ‘Hay-foot, straw-foot, hay-foot, straw-foot’—and so on, until everybody had caught on. A common name for a green recruit in those days was “strawfoot.”

The mouse rescuers of the Prisoners’ Aid Society are on their way to the Black Castle to save an imprisoned poet. They’ve stowed away on a supply caravan. The journey lasts several days, so the carriage drivers must camp along the way. At night, local, country mice clamber up to check out the provisions and socialize with Miss Bianca, Nils, and Bernard. Miss Bianca whispers about the lack of refinement of the country mice, but they have sharp ears. 

source:

The Rescuers

by Margery Sharp

1959. A Yearling Book / Dell Publishing, New York

word of the day: postilion

word: postilion

context:

[The intrepid rescuers] received all last instructions in the committee room [which was] an old carriage lamp … tossed down into the wine cellar by a long-ago postilion.

definition (Merriam-Webster): one who rides as a guide on the near horse of one of the pairs attached to a coach or post chaise especially without a coachman

Miss Bianca, Nils, and Bernard have been recruited by the Prisoners’ Aid Society to rescue a poet from the dungeon of The Black Castle. The Prisoners’ Aid Society consists entirely of mice. As you know, mice are intimately familiar with the unfortunate situation of prisoners, and, it seems, they have organized to help them. 

source:

The Rescuers

by Margery Sharp

1959. A Yearling Book / Dell Publishing, New York

I will love you forever, more or less

An American is talking translation with a Japanese who lived in Korea for more than 20 years. 

[A translator] must keep his readers’ sensibilities in mind. [The Japanese] cites a common Korean expression of fondness that he had trouble translating in a novel. ‘A Korean who loves someone might say, “I’ll wait for you for ten years, for a hundred years, for a thousand years!” And to a Korean reader this would be absolutely normal.’ But translating the phrase literally would perplex the Japanese reader. ‘“A hundred years?” he’d wonder. “But I’ll be dead by then!”’

source:

The Invitation-Only Zone: the true story of North Korea’s abduction project

by Robert S. Boynton

2016. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York