Forrest > Recent Status Updates

I sense an Ufa silent movie marathon in my future: Dr Caligari, The Golem, Nosferatu, Faust, Metropilis are all invited.

Okay, Barnitz was just a contrarian, plain and simple. One of those people who channels his high intelligence into focused spite. Too bad he died young, or he might have gotten over it and proven a great contributor to dark poetry, maybe even philosophy.

Excellent. Back-to-back bios of Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht. The gloss on Brecht is really good!

Would love to know more about the meaning of occultic tattoos. The subject is fascinating to me.

Normally, I might laud Barnitz's snarkiness toward his father, but while reading this biography, I am feeling more and more that he was just a petulant jerk of a son.

This is coming together, sort of, but it's definitely not a lock-tight thesis, or at least it's not yet being demonstrated as such. Maybe by the end of the book?

Just discovered, for the first time, that an author on Goodreads has blocked me. I don't even know who he is. Maybe he was offended by my review of The Catcher in the Rye, though I have lots of Goodreads friends who I disagree with on that one. Weird. Maybe he doesn't like my politics over on twitter??? Whatevs.

Barnitz's essay "The Art of the Future"(1901) is an intriguing overview of the state of affairs in American art, music, and literature at that time. There's acknowledgement that not much is happening, but an overly-hopeful patriotic streak runs wide throughout. Barnitz is an excellent essayist.

Barnitz utterly annihilates Rudyard Kipling in what I can only call an Anti-eulogy for the dead writer. Essentially, he destroy's Kipling's reputation by saying there is no reputation there worth destroying. If I were to define the word "scathing" by way of using a literary critique as an illustration, this would be the one.

This is not a graphic novel. This is a graphic encyclopedia. So much information!

"Fragments" (p.99) is, ironically, the most cohesive and comprehensive poem in the entire Book of Jade. It might be Baritz's pushing (though I'm confident that the critiques I am about to read will disagree with me)!

"Until the dead stars rot in the black sky"

Definitely one of the better last-lines to a poem that I've read.

In the late '20s "No matter who you talked to, everyone was afraid of something that was uncertain and difficult to grasp" - Max Schmeling, professional boxer

Hint: Bone up on your Old Testament before you read this or you're 1) going to get lost really quickly and 2) not going to be able to separate true biblical sources from other folklore, if you think it matters. I've read the Old Testament about five times, I think now, and I'm still having to "check notes" to stay on track.

"When the tyrants of Athens, Corinth, and Sicyon legalized Dionysus-worship in their cities, they limited the orgies, it seems, by substituting wine for toadstools . . ."

Wher's the fun in that?

Would love to see some archaeological evidence corroborating the Greek > Irish connection.

I now view the Welsh and Irish bards as clever underdogs, simultaneously co-opting and mocking orthodox Christianity with poems/songs full of multiple meanings. They were tricksters in the flesh!

Well, if "The House of Youth" doesn't cause a spontaneous mid-life crisis in you, nothing will!

I have an entirely illogical, but rather visceral reaction to Albert Einstein's presence in this book. Maybe it has something to do with enjoying the fantasy that was Berlin so much that I don't want to concede to logic. I don't want the magic destroyed (and yet, the Nazis are coming . . .)!

"Nocturne" is a poem worth quoting in full for my review.

So many Hercules.

So Many Mike

Josephine Baker's story is fascinating. I wonder if anyone has made a movie or done a documentary about her life? I'd be interested to see it!

AHA! Thieve's Cant! Or, at least, bard's cant! Or Druid's cant! In any case, this is very cool (if waaaaay on the speculative side, with almost no evidence).

Oh, Berlin. You naughty, naughty city!

Ah, now the cryptography section. This looks interesting. Any time I see hand-drawn pictures in an academic book, I get excited. It sometimes means that the author has taken time to lift their eyes from the books and think about how humans think for a moment.

I am becoming addicted to esoteric poetics.

I'm thinking I'll have to correlate what I'm reading here with Marija Gimbutas' The Language of the Goddess. Still trying to figure out the ancient fascination with snakes.

There is a stone seat at the top of Cader Idris, 'the Chair of Idris' where, according to the local legend, whoever spends the night is found in the morning either dead, mad, or a poet.