New Poem

My poem "Baleful Moon" is up at http://www.currencylit.com/george-held, a new journal of writing on hard economic times.

"Don" and "Doff"

            I’m now old enough to recall words that have been lost to everyday speech since my childhood in the ’40s. There are the “SAT words,” like “eschew” and “ubiquitous,” which the College Board expected high-school juniors and seniors to know for college prep exams. Such words we find now in old novels but rarely hear on the street. “Ubiquitous” got a boost in the ’50s when it was spoken in a margarine commercial that ran ad nauseam. Yes, the ad was ubiquitous, “found everywhere,” for a while, then faded away. And then there are the everyday words, like “don” and “doff,” which entered the language centuries ago:

A pair from the start, both date to the 14th century, with "doff" coming from a phrase meaning "to do off" and "don" from one meaning "to do on." Shakespeare was first, as far as we know, to use the [latter] word. . . . He put it in Juliet's mouth: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet. / … Romeo, doff thy name; / And for that name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself." (Merriam-Webster Online)

            Today we still hear the word “don” in “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly”: “Don we now our gay apparel, Fa-la-la” etc., a line in which “gay” almost needs to be translated today, not to mention the need for revising the word order. In my boyhood, “Doff” held on in the expression “doff his hat,” which my father did when greeting a lady on the street, and Red Barber and Mel Allen, baseball broadcasters in the ’40s and ’50s, would say a batter doffed his cap as he crossed home plate and acknowledged the cheers for a homerun. Roy Campanella and Yogi Berra, both All-Star catchers, were said to “don the tools of ignorance” when strapping on their shin guards, chest protector, and mask.

            When was the last time, if ever, you heard “don” or “doff” in conversation? Which once-common words that have lost currency do you recall? Like the names of the dead, old words die when human beings no longer remember or use them.

King of Cryptic

My first publication of the new year turns out to be an essay on a ubiquitous insect, which I call "King of Cryptic." Please check it out online at WILDERNESS HOUSE LITERARY REVIEW:

www.whlreview.com/no-6.4/essays/GeorgeHeld.pdf

A Poem on Sylvia Plath

Please check out my poem "Legacy of a Mussel Hunter" in the new issue of STRING POETS: http://www.stringpoet.com/2011/12/george-held

Anniversary

I began this blog just over one year ago, and I want to say thanks to my 27 followers, all of whom I value. I trust I haven't tried your patience or lost your interest. A check of my blogging history shows that my posts have been infrequent. Even more infrequent have been comments, but a friend tells me that readers are generally too busy to leave one.

My small family has agreed once again to forego gift-giving at our Christmas gathering. Instead, as we did last year, we'll each make a donation to a charity we'll elect. So many Americans are doing without even necessities that it seems fitting for us not to receive more gifts in a long life that has left us pretty much without the need or desire for more possessions. We are in mind of Henry David Thoreau, whose mantra was "Simplify, simplify." And I am personally influenced by The Catholic Worker movement and its ascetic regimen. CW, which does good works for those in need (in NYC it has a house at 36 East 1st St.), has never sought tax-free status for the sake of its donors, who must give from the heart alone without the benefit of a deduction. In this, CW follows Paul, who wrote to the Corinthians, "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

When the King James Version was revised in the mid-twentieth century, the last of the three became "love." In an early novel, A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER, George Orwell had already changed charity to "money," and written that charity kills friendship. When we give alms or donate to a charitable organization, it is probably good to have some understanding of why we do so.

Among my favorite Christmases were those on which I went with my friends Roz & James to a YMCA in Brooklyn to help serve turkey dinners to those in need. I also served as the distributor of used overcoats, helping to fit the poor and homeless with some warm garment to help them withstand winter's cold. I was especially glad to help a thin man put on a down-filled Eastern Mountain parka that some Manhattanite had owned. The thin man looked very pleased with himself in the mirror and smiled at me as he left the "Y."

Whatever solstice holiday you celebrate, I wish you well.

Admirable Miranda July

Miranda July feels different. The 37-year-old performance artist, fiction writer, and film actress and director has made and starred in two admirable movies, the prize-winning Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011), which is now playing at an art house cinema near you. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, among other places, and are collected in No one belongs here more than you. (Scribner, 2007). Yet despite these conventional signs of success, Miranda July, like many other artists,  feels different.

Born Miranda Jennifer Grossman, she changed her surname to July once she became a professional artist. The name change presumably expressed her sense that she was different, the daughter of hippie intellectuals, her father Jewish and her mother Protestant. She kept Miranda (from the Latin for “admirable”), probably taken by her parents from Shakespeare’s ingénue in The Tempest. The name Miranda July sets her off as distinctive, the way “George Orwell” submerged and improved on Eric Blair, who was also felt uncomfortably different from the lads he went to school with.

Though a blue-eyed, raven-haired beauty who can resemble the young Liz Taylor, July at times appears uncomfortable in her own skin. As Sophie, her character in The Future, says, “I wish I were one notch prettier.” This sense of personal unease contributes to the anxiety her protagonists feel about physical intimacy onscreen. In The Future, for instance, though Sophie and her androgynous boyfriend live together, sharing the same bed, it’s not clear that they are lovers. That might be why she has an affair with a conventional businessman with conventional lust for her. She seems bemused but not displeased by his attention.

July’s short-short story “The Moves” begins, “Before he died, my father gave me his finger moves. They were movements for getting a woman off. He said he didn’t know if they’d be of use to me, seeing as how I was a woman myself. . . .” Later he says, “You’re going to make some woman very, very happy. . . .” But the narrator doesn’t indicate that she is a lesbian and speculates that one day she’ll “have a daughter and I’ll teach her what he taught me.”

July’s sexual ambivalence or ambiguity probably explains why a lesbian group has petitioned Wikipedia to include in her bio a note that raises the issue of whether she is gay or bisexual. In any case, she is married to the artist and director Mike Mills, whose film Beginners (Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer) explores his father’s coming out at the age of 75.

One of the treats in The Future, which grew out of a performance piece, is a dance that July conjures up while wearing an expansible yellow t-shirt that has the power of self-animation before she picks it up off the floor and pulls it on. July has the body control of a modern dancer and has performed at such venues as The Kitchen and The Guggenheim Museum. She seems slightly more at ease when dancing, usually solo, than when acting.

Whatever her art, July remains compelling. She has a sly sense of humor and an intriguing persona that tests the line between innocence and knowingness, ambition and inertia, desire and ambivalence. I suggest you make her acquaintance by seeing her films and reading her stories. You, too, might feel she’s appealingly different and an admirable artist.

Catch Me at Left Bank Books

If you can't attend my reading at 81 White St. on Thurs., I'll be one of 5 poets reading at Left Bank Books for rare books, with lots of signed first editions and a bookish atmosphere. A nice event for book and poetry lovers.

Friday 11/18: Friedman, La Prade, Held, Lisella and Torrence-Thompson Read Poetry at Left Bank Books in Greenwich Village NYC

New York, N.Y., October 18, 2011 -- On Friday, November 18th, Left Bank Books of New York invites book lovers and poetry lovers to celebrate the November birthdays of poets Stephen Crane (11/1), Marianne Moore (11/15), J.P. Dancing Bear (11/17), Sharon Olds (11/19), Paul Celan (11/20), William Blake (11/28), and Celia Lisset Alvarez (11/30) with a late evening poetry reading by five noted local poets.

Poets Wear Prada's founder and managing editor, Roxanne Hoffman, will host the poetry reading at Greenwich Village's Left Bank Books in New York City. Special guest, the prose poet David Joel Friedman, author of The Welcome (National Poetry Series, University of Illinois Press. 2006) will introduce Erik La Prade (Chelsea), George Held (Greenwich Village), Maria Lisella (Astoria), and Juanita Torrence-Thompson (Flushing). Each poet will each read work by a favorite November birthday poet, as well as from their own recent books and new work.

The reading will start at promptly at 8 p.m. and will be followed by a brief Q&A.