Botching

At University Press Books on Bancroft in Berkeley on Friday I found a small blue hardbound volume from Oxford University Press, The English Poems of John Milton, printed in 1946. Extremely compact, yet more than 500 pages, easy to read, yet with enough space even for all the long poems as well as the short. This particular copy was signed on the flyleaf by an early owner and has indeed been read, but remains in perfect shape. The price to me, twelve dollars.

Inside the book, on the page preliminary to the opening of Paradise Lost, are printed the two following messages –

The Printer to the Reader

Courteous Reader, there was no Argument at first intended to the book, but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, I have procured it, and withal a reason of that which stumbled many others, why the poem rimes not.
S. Simmons


THE VERSE

The measure of English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin – rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have expressed them. Not without cause, therefore, some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rime both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings – a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and in all good oratory. This neglect then of rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set – the first in English – of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming. 

Milton wrote this aggressive paragraph as his answer to early readers of Paradise Lost who complained because the author had not taken the trouble to make the poem rhyme. The engraving above was first published in 1645 as the frontispiece to an edition of collected poems published when the author was 37. He very much disliked this engraving, and himself insisted on the four lines of Greek verse underneath it, again aggressively defending his territory –

That an unskillful hand had carved this print
You'd say at once, seeing the living face;
But, finding here no jot of me, my friends,
Laugh at the botching artist's mis-attempt. 

– translation by David Masson, from The Life of John Milton

Jacket

On Friday I took a day away from my regular work at the library and instead met a friend in Berkeley. After lunch, we spent the sunny summer afternoon in bookstores together. One of the most exciting finds (and certainly the most photogenic) was waiting for me among the many miles of unfinished pine shelving at Black Oak Books on San Pablo Avenue.

The Limits of Art was first published in 1948 as part of the always-useful Bollingen Series. This copy (acquired for fifteen dollars) is from the fifth printing issued in 1966 with a dust jacket by design great Paul Rand (1914-1996). Than whom nobody ever did more with an unblended four-color printing-palette. Chocolate brown, ochre, burnt orange, black.

Sights

One of my lifelong friends spent part of this summer living in a house located high in the Berkeley hills. Before returning to her arid inland home in Southern California, she took this memory-picture of the airy skies that float and move above San Francisco Bay much of the time. She also sent several chromatic splendors encountered in San Francisco Chinatown.

The final memory-picture – fog, again – above rooftops and treetops of the Inner Sunset edged by dense green of Golden Gate Park.

Baby Goat

Mabel was extremely pleased to encounter a baby goat right out in the open at the Little Farm in Tilden Park. In fact there were three of these long-eared, long-legged juvenile goats on the lawn, each attended by a teenage summer employee. Mabel had some doubts about just how to approach a goat, but Mamma showed the careful way to gently pat and pet. The goat stood still.

Mabel's books are full of animals, her head is full of animals and her speech is full of animals. Yet her Northern California city existence in the early 21st century decrees rare and few moments of contact with actual living animals. She encountered a herd of small-scale adult goats while visiting her East Coast grandmother last year. That remains a splendid memory. As far as I know, however, that was the only other time Mabel ever had a chance to pet one. She was fully  prepared to enjoy the opportunity and the goat was prepared to put up with it.

On the way to the Little Farm

Strapped into the car seat on the way to Tilden Park, Mabel kept herself entertained with her Calimari Puppet. After we parked there was a short walk through woods to reach the Little Farm, our Sunday morning destination.

Full of activity and full of Mabel, this is the 2500th post on Spencer Alley. It began five years ago with no inkling or expectation that Mabel would even exist. Then in 2010 (seemingly all in a rush, as above) fate sent her along, changing everything for everybody for the better.

Cows & Mabel

The Little Farm in Tilden Park on Sunday was the perfect place to go for a Father's Day treat, as Mabel's father agreed and Mabel agreed and I agreed.

At the moment when my daughter's phone was busy taking this picture, Mabel and I were talking about the long curling pale pink tongue of the white cow. And the flies. Mabel did not approve of the flies on the cows. We fed the cows celery stalks.

Below, Father's Day photos of Mabel with (from top to bottom) Mamma, Daddy, and Grandma.

Green Ceramic Birdbath

Above, one of the sample borders laid out to raise ambitions and entice imitation among gardener-visitors to Berkeley Horticultural Nursery (known to all as Berkeley Hort). Friday morning I found myself there, rather than in my office at the library – since the  campus where my library is located shuts down every year for Good Friday. We were choosing the first wave of new spring flowers for the East Bay garden of Mabel's grandma. And I particularly admired the chartreuse ceramic birdbath in the picture immediately above – but then reflected that at this point in her life my granddaughter would inevitably pull it over on top of herself – it looked to be just about her height – and intense as its charms might be, they could not justify the risk.

I thought about taking pictures of the several sets of different seedlings we planted from their six-packs – some into borders and some into pots – but all were too small to look like anything yet. Most of the annuals at the nursery looked like they had just arrived, full of juice and healthy potential. However, the calla lily border along one side of the garden was flourishing, and I did take a couple of pictures of it – pictures that prompted me to look back at the day in January 2010 when my son-in-law dug up the single unsatisfactory clump of calla lilies that existed then, redistributing them and spacing them out so they could flourish, as now they do.    

Ocean Park

Ocean Park No. 16, 1968

Ocean Park No. 29, 1970

Ocean Park No. 49, 1972

 

Ocean Park No. 54, 1972

Ocean Park No. 79, 1975

Ocean Park No. 83, 1975

Ocean Park No. 90, 1976

Ocean Park No. 115, 1979

Ocean Park No. 116, 1979

When I started selecting samples from the Ocean Park series of Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) the first one I chose was No. 90, painted in 1976. Because that was the year my daughter was born – and of course every year around the time of her birthday I think about the specific & monumental year when she was born.

During the first half of he 1960s Diebenkorn lived and taught and painted in Berkeley (the very town where my daughter would later be born, another coincidence!). However, his best work was done in Santa Monica after he settled there in 1967. That's when he began the famous Ocean Park series of rectilinear, light-filled abstracts. 

Ocean Park No. 125, 1980

The artist is heavily represented in Bay Area museums, where his admirers have always been numerous (in 1948 he was given the first show of his career at San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor). His wide popularity means that I have had chances to see a relatively large number of his paintings in person – and not always with a very friendly eye. It used to seem to me that Diebenkorn found a romantic luminosity in Southern California (just as David Hockney did) that I found both inaccurate and unappealing. Chirpy and sanitized their visions seemed, held up next to the featureless smog pit that presented itself to my unvarnished eyes when I looked at the same landscape.

After all these years, I still feel dismissive of Hockney's naive sunshine, but no longer resent the questionable sources of Diebenkorn's inspiration. He has been dead for twenty years, and what matters now is that his paintings continue to get better as they outlive their creator. Every day in every way, they are improving – and soon will have left both their estimable and their delusional origins behind them altogether.

There are, in total, about 135 paintings in the Ocean Park series. Agreement seems to be general (among the tiny number of those who care) that the essential aesthetic trigger for this huge project (as opposed to the geographic trigger, already mentioned) was a single moment in 1966 when Diebenkorn saw two Matisse paintings (reproduced below) at an exhibition in Los Angeles. Both dated back to 1914 and neither had made the journey to the West Coast before. First, View of Notre Dame, and then French Windows at Collioure