Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

Characters frequently appearing in this drama:

• I - your humble narrator, sometime writer, poet, and translator, also journaling as lnhammer and prettygoodword (online pronouns: he/him/his)
• Janni - spouse and writer (online pronouns: she/her/her)
• Eaglet - nom de internet of our child, formerly known as TBD, not yet a writer (online pronouns: they/them/their)

I subscribe to interesting-looking journals to put them on my reading list, with no expectation of reciprocation. Feel free to, but no pressure.

For Poetry Monday:

A Sapphic Dream, George Moore

I love the luminous poison of the moon,
The silence of illimitable seas,
Vast night, and all her myriad mysteries,
Perfumes that make the burdened senses swoon

And weaken will, large snakes who oscillate
Like lovely girls, immense exotic flowers,
And cats who purr through silk-enfestooned bowers
Where white-limbed women sleep in sumptuous state.

My soul e’er dreams, in such a dream as this is,
Visions of perfume, moonlight and the blisses
Of sexless love, and strange unreached kisses.


Moore (1852-1933) is best known for adapting French naturalism into English fiction, but before he turned novelist he was a poet under the influence of French symbolists. (He was also a childhood friend of Oscar Wilde.) This is from his first collection, Flowers of Passion (1878). After all the preceding orientalist imagery, that “sexless love” gets some heavy sideeye. Commit to the bit!

---L.

Subject quote from Hotel California, Eagles, and yes colitas are cannabis buds.

For Poetry Monday:

Sir Gawain Fucks the Green Knight, Kim Deyn

Here’s a tale ripe for telling. Can’t say where I heard it first—in pretty French or Dutch. Perhaps as a young lady walking longside the Rijn. I’ll spin it for you in an English tongue, fine as frost on lace, sweet as malmsey wine. So it goes that young Gawain, strength kissed into his limbs, fresh as the bright dawn, comes trembling down to the Green Chapel. You’ve heard this tale, I know. His breath makes peach fuzz in the air, fear into him like worm to apple. Christmas Morn is too soon, time is short. You have your own life to save, he says, picking through thorn and bough to an ivy-clad cave.

The creature is the Jack O’ the Glen / forest prince / the wood’s own laughter. Beard of lichen and eyes like dark elder. I need not repeat their exchange—my boy’s flinching heart—a songbird in a rattled cage. It is after the blows are dealt, he asks, what god is worshipped in these green trees? Boy, the Knight replies, boy, were you not just down on your knees?

The Knight is the tang of sap / bark rough and petal soft / everywhere leaves scatter / easily crushed / Gawain clings / hardly knows what he clings to / he is the forest and the flower / a turmoil of roots / where god and tree meet and melt / the birch the oak the fern the deer / mushroom maggot crow / here Gawain is branch and bud / blow returned for blow


Originally published in Queerlings Issue 7 (Apr 2023). I have to wonder whether the initial inspiration was the last line.

---L.

Subject quote from Don’t Leave Me This Way, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes feat. Teddy Pendergrass (Thelma Houston’s disco cover is admittedly better).

It was a good seder—smaller than some years, but good.

However, comma, one guest brought a bottle of Manischewitz wine as a joke gift. When we opened it for the curious, we let Eaglet sample it—something we allow during rituals, mainly seders and shabbat, that include alcohol. Wine has always been yuck for them, but this? This they liked. A lot.

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.

(For those who haven’t met it, Manischewitz is a sweet, strong, low-grade American wine barely better than rotgut. Because for a long time it was the only readily available wine that’s kosher for Passover, many families traditionally serve it at seders—or rather served, to our great fortune.)

---L.

Subject quote from For What It's Worth, Buffalo Springfield.

For Poetry Monday, dipping back a few millenia:

A love song of Shu-Sin, Unknown

Man of my heart, my beloved man, your allure is a sweet thing, as sweet as honey. Lad of my heart, my beloved man, your allure is a sweet thing, as sweet as honey.

You have captivated me (?), of my own free will I will come to you. Man, let me flee with you — into the bedroom. You have captivated me (?); of my own free will I shall come to you. Lad, let me flee with you — into the bedroom.

Man, let me do the sweetest things to you. My precious sweet, let me bring you honey. In the bedchamber dripping with honey let us enjoy over and over your allure, the sweet thing. Lad, let me do the sweetest things to you. My precious sweet, let me bring you honey.

Man, you have become attracted to me. Speak to my mother and I will give myself to you; speak to my father and he will make a gift of me. I know where to give physical pleasure to your body — sleep, man, in our house till morning. I know how to bring heart’s delight to your heart — sleep, lad, in our house till morning.

Since you have fallen in love with me, lad, if only you would do your sweet thing to me.

My lord and god, my lord and guardian angel, my Cu-Suen who cheers Enlil’s heart, if only you would handle your sweet place, if only you would grasp your place that is sweet as honey.

Put your hand there for me like the cover (?) on a measuring cup. Spread (?) your hand there for me like the cover (?) on a cup of wood shavings.

Original text:


Thanks, WikiMedia!

Hat tip. One of the world’s oldest surviving lyric poems, written presumably during the reign of Shu-Sin / Šu-Suen, king of Sumer and Akkad from circa* 2037-2028 BCE. The tablet identifies the speaker as Inana, and it’s generally read as relating to the sacred marriage of the fertility goddess** and the land’s king. That said, it reads to me as a straight-up (i.e. non-ritual) erotic poem — a smoking hot one.*** The translation from Sumerian is a composite created by Graham Cunningham from ones by Krecher & Jagersma and Sefati (source, credits).


* While relative times in Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia are relatively solid, absolute timestamps have error bars of ±60 years. For context, he ruled two and a half centuries after the death of Sargon of Akkad, the father of Enheduanna.

** Possibly, though this is highly debated, embodied as her high priestess. Not debated: she almost certainly didn’t wear little red panties.

*** I hope those wood shavings (?) don’t catch on fire.

---L.

Subject quote from Semi-Charmed Life, Third Eye Blind.

Holy crap, how did I only notice this AFTER posting yesterday’s links?!? The people who brought us Krill Waves Radio posted at the start of last April a 1-hour mix of skeleton shrimp to headbanging to instrumental metal, under the Kriller Waves Radio label.

People. They just invented Brinecore. As an April Fools joke.

And it RULES.

---L.

Subject quote from Let’s Go Crazy, Prince and the Revolution.

This famous post is doing the rounds again:

my favorite thing i’ve learned in college is that way back in ancient china there was this poet/philosopher guy who wrote this whole pretentious poem about how enlightened he was that was like “the eight winds cannot move me” blahblahblah and he was really proud of it so he sent it to his friend who lived across the lake and then his friend sends it back and just writes “FART” (or the ancient Chinese equivalent) on it and the guy was SO MAD he travels across the lake to chew his friend out and when he gets there his friend says “wow. the eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sends you across the lake”

This story is so Chinese.

It’s a real incident, btw: the guy was Su Shi, a Song dynasty poet/artist/essayist/statesman sometimes better known by his art name Su Dongpo, the "friend" was his Chan (Zen) master Foyin, the abbot of a temple across the lake where he was staying, and 屁 means both “fart” and (idiomatically) “nonsense.” Very Zen.

Edit to clarify: Foyin was not just a friend but Su Shi's master, who taught him meditation. Which means my man was crossing the lake to chew out his Zen master, and somehow thought this was going to go well for him. Smh.

---L.

Subject quote from Cruel Summer, Bananarama.

A few musical links, from various traditions:

A 1-hour mix of Chinese lofi tracks from Lofi Girl. Excellent. (via)

A 1-hour mix of jazz arrangements of traditional Iranian music. There’s lots more on the channel. Dig it. (via YT sidebar)

A 2-hour mix of the Pokémon Red/Blue soundtrack covered as Japanese jazz fusion. Ooo-kay then. (via YT sidebar)

---L.

Subject quote from Me and Bobby McGee, Janis Joplin.

For Poetry Monday:

She Says, Being Forbidden:, Leonora Speyer

And was there not a king somewhere who said:
“Back, waves! I do command you!” I forget
His name, beloved, or his race, and yet
I know the story and am comforted.
The tides will rise, are rising—see, they spread
About your robes, your ermine will be wet,
Your velvet shoes, your dear dear feet! Ah let
Me warn you, sir, the waves will reach your head!

My king, my kingly love, how shall we stay
The bold broad lifting of this lovely sea?
What is the master word that we must say
To bring these roaring waters to the knee?
The other king went scampering away!
Will you so do? Or will you drown with me?


Hat-tip to conuly. Ah, Cnut, we hardly recall ye. This is from Speyer’s 1926 collection Fiddler’s Farewell, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

---L.

Subject quote from Respect, Aretha Franklin.

For Poetry Monday:

The Llano Estacado, John Poch

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience?
If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man:
a sky’s worth. Some even sow the dry playa
mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under
after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps
an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard.
Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen,
no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water.

Among a little wind grit, in a grid on a grid, somewhere
like the crossroads of outer space and Earth, Texas,
a handful of ragged elms withstand a long sway
of heat and wind. These old guards of a home haunt
the field but wither even as ghosts must. Honor them
with a walk among homesick bricks, and prophesy good.


First published in Poetry issue July/August 2009. The Llano Estacado is a large mesa/plateau in west Texas and easternmost New Mexico, extending from Amarillo through Lubbock and down to Odessa. The name is often translated as “staked plain,” with a folk etymologies explaining that its dry grassland is so featureless that Native Americans supposedly put up markers to guide their way (and Coronado famously did find it confusing), but the actual origin is probably “stockaded/palisaded plain,” referring to the escarpments of its eastern and western edges. The sharp-shinned hawk is a common small hawk of the region. The elms, which are not native, would have been grown by a former homesteader by irrigation from wells.

---L.

Subject quote from Dreams, Fleetwood Mac.