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Sunday 6 March 2016

Speedway Traffic Interruption

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We sent the spotters up with cinder blocks to chain themselves down to. #Wind: image via FrontRow Motorsports @Team_FRM, 6 March 2016

Simaetha calls on Hecate, and hears the wild dogs at the gate. High winds. Here comes the Fourth International.
Gust front last night.
We sent the spotters up with cinder blocks to chain themselves down to. There came

Drenching rains upon the lurching hillside. Today two deer sheltered out back. Two fascinated
Cats watched. One escaped to sojourn to the wild then returned soaking in the arms of the civilised woman.
Then the deer... and the Chinese envoy was here, incanting of love and the great famine as the wind
Blew, the sheets of rain... there lived a wife at Usher's well... long live the weeds... I tried to sleep
Amid the botheration of a pelting series of failed revolutionary dreams of the things that you have seen
In those brave moments of truth upon the naked beach cobblestones
But can now see no more, beautiful and fair comrade, and a good thing it is
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep and say this
Beautiful and fair post scriptum you were given, among the cabbages, winding across wide water, without sound,
Who, when you first met, there in the middle of the road, could not have known
The desperate clown privations that lay ahead, on the animal collective farm,
Was not meant for you. And before the night is out every new shoot and bud and leaf and aspirin and pismire
Say this too...
 

Saturdays volunteers on the 1st of May, Kremlin [s.d.] | by The Graduate Institute, Geneva

"Saturday volunteers on the 1st of May, Kremlin" [The back of the document holds the mention "May 1st. Subbotniki in the Kremlin." A subbotnik was a volunteer working on Saturdays.]: photographer unknown, n.d. (Boris Souveraine papers, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Library / The Graduate Institute of Geneva)

Portrait of Lenin by Yuri Annenkov, Moscow (1921) | by The Graduate Institute, Geneva

Portrait of Lenin: drawing by Yuri Annenkov, Moscow, 1921 (Boris Souveraine papers, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Library / The Graduate Institute of Geneva)

"Lenin with comrades at a May Day rally in Red Square, May 1919" | by The Graduate Institute, Geneva

"Lenin with comrades at a May Day rally in Red Square, May 1919."  This political demonstration takes place near the Kremlin and celebrates the IIIrd Communist International. One reads the names of the countries represented in the Communist International on the banners, as well as the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!": photographer unknown, 1 May 1919 (Boris Souveraine papers, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Library / The Graduate Institute of Geneva)

Portrait of Leon Trotsky, by Yury Annenkov, [s.d.] | by The Graduate Institute, Geneva

Portrait of Leon Trotsky: drawing by Yuri Annenkov, n.d. (Boris Souveraine papers, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Library / The Graduate Institute of Geneva)

Demonstration of the War Invalids, Petrograd [April 1917] | by The Graduate Institute, Geneva

"The Demonstration of the War Invalids, Petrograd [April 1917]." The photo may represent a demonstration which took place in April 1917, in a tense political climate marked by anti-war demonstrations in Petrograd and Moscow. A witness of the demonstration, Trotsky described it in these words: "In April 1917 there took place the patriotic nightmare of the war invalids. An enormous number of wounded from the hospitals of the capital, legless, armless, bandaged, advanced upon the Tauride Palace. Those who could not walk were carried in automotive trucks. The banners read: 'War to the end'. That was a demonstration of despair from the human stumps of the imperialist war."': photographer unknown, April 1917 (Boris Souveraine papers, The Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Library / The Graduate Institute of Geneva)



Gust front last night near Purcell, Oklahoma as #severe #storms rolled in. #okwx
: image via Jason Cooley @operation_chase, 1 March 2016

4 comments:

TC said...

We're having mad storms with winds and debris and water everywhere, at the moment... earlier when things were just brewing, I doddered down to the street and encountered the congenial Chinese octogenarian engineer and his wife, out braving the deluge. They had after all gone through the Cultural Revolution, he and his charming wife. What's a mere weather event. He's quite literary and has read every great modern American and British novel which no American reads any more. He was an engineer and built roads and bridges, once, but then things became, as he puts it, "complicated". He told me today he has writ a work of autobiographical fiction, Love in the Great Famine. He said it is, in fact, a history of China, 1949-1964, as viewed from a personal perspective. His charming wife beamed as he said this and I knew that she is the love interest in the novel. And the winds and rain streamed in our faces, much as celebrities in the ice bucket challenge, only older. Though some of the celebrities are pretty old... but the wind is howling out there and I digress.

A slip of the neurons made the engineer into an envoy. Just so you know.

John Cale: Chinese Envoy (live, 1983)

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

"There came / Drenching rains upon the lurching hillside. Today two deer sheltered out back. " -- yes, here too, more than two -- at least the old cypress in the yard didn't come down . . .

Mose23 said...

The Fourth International: blimey. And then the revolution betrayed but I guess we all know the script, your engineer better than most.

Under the cobblestones, the beach, and under the beach, the Calais mud.

Long live the weeds. Yes. Always hope forcing through the cracks.

TC said...

Steve,

Today, after the latest downpours, the two deer have gone. Four old trees now in various anxious stages of coming down...

Duncan,

Whatever forces itself up through the cracks will be the Voluntary International of Tomorrow.