"Circular Breathing" (Michelle Castleberry)

"Circular Breathing"
(Michelle Castleberry)

I get to pick the warm-up tonight,
so it’s “All Blues,” my favorite Miles.
The bass player starts too slow,
and before I come in he whispers,
“You’ll suffocate, C.,” and smiles.
Thinks he’s smart cause
bassists don’t have to breathe.
At least not to make their
high-strung wooden girls sing.
They only use fingers and bows
to sift sound from the air.

I don’t care.

Got the perfect reed tonight.
I love all the sounds that
no one else can hear—
the cat tongue rasp as I wet my Rico #4.
The “peck, pock, poke” of shutting
the right hand keys of my horn.
That second of wind before
the vibration catches in the reed
and falls down the brass.

That bass player can
Kiss. My. Ass.

We call the drummer Take, and he
stirs the dry snare head with brushes.
Jim burbles a low trill while he eyes
a clot of drunk college boys. He hushes
them with a mean, mean face
while his trumpet snarls.
Then he nods to me, inviting:

“C’mon, now.”

I pick up the melody, like a mama
with a baby, gentle and firm.
Eyes closed.
This is not a skill as much as
something that my body knows.

I turn the tune in my lungs and mouth,
into my horn and then out.
Through the smoke rings that float stage-side.
The fratties are gentled now, just ponies
with full bellies, still and open-mouthed.

I look at the bassist as I hold the final note,
watch his eyes water before I ever need to blink,
before I look for eyes in the crowd, thirsty to drink
what I pour and pour and pour for them.




"Circular Breathing" appears in Michelle Castleberry's first collection of poems, Dissecting the Angel, to be published in October. Currently her words and C-sax playing frequently grace poetry and music stages in Athens, Georgia. She was the featured reader at Athens Word of Mouth (March 2012), and her work has appeared in Six Little Things, Umbrella, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.  The poet's character studies are of family members, friends in tough places in need of helpful words, and muses of all kinds.  Her poems can be country-charming ("let me wrap you in a blanket / of kudzu and trumpet vine") and city-tough: "It takes a lot of man to be this pretty" is Castleberry's take on a Diane Arbus photograph of James Brown, 1966. "Woman on Fire" is an expansive meditation that begins in the burn unit at Herat, Afghanistan, and resolves into a psalm on strength and resilience. There's a connection between the poet's tangible world and poetic imagination; the Arkansas-born poet writes about a creative life with some grit to it, and sweat. "I have heard it breaking windows and furniture,"  she writes, "heard it making howls just beyond the door."

"Shady Characters": a history of punctuation



 



Left, from the pen of Isaac Newton; right, detail from Johann Conrad Barchusen’s “Pyrosophia” (1698). Courtesy the Othmer Library of Chemical History, Chemical Heritage Foundation.

 

Keith Houston at The New Yorker's "Page Turner" blog has a few examples of punctuation history taken from his new book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. Houston unmasks the history (and often arcane names) of symbols such as the ampersand and the pilcrow in his Shady Characters blog. 

Above are examples of that pesky little electronic annoyance, the hashtag. There's no record that Newton found it useful enough for a twitter account, however; the shortened form  for the words "pound weight," the Latin libra pondo, is also familiar in the abbreviation lb, or lbs. Here's Houston's short history of the hashtag, or what engineers designing the Touch-Tone phones jokingly dubbed the octothorpe.

The story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation “lb,” for the Roman term libra pondo, or “pound weight.” Like many standard abbreviations of that period, “lb” was written with the addition of a horizontal bar, known as a tittle, or tilde (an example is shown above, right, in Johann Conrad Barchusen’s “Pyrosophia,” from 1698). And though printers commonly cast this barred abbreviation as a single character, it was the rushed pens of scribes that eventually produced the symbol’s modern form: hurriedly dashed off again and again, the barred “lb” mutated into the abstract #. The symbol shown here on the left, a barred “lb” rendered in Isaac Newton’s elegant scrawl, is a missing link, a now-extinct ancestor of the # that bridges the gap between the symbol’s Latin origins and its familiar modern form. Though it is now referred to by a number of different names—“hash mark,” “number sign,” and even “octothorpe,” a jokey appellation coined by engineers working on the Touch-Tone telephone keypad—the phrase “pound sign” can be traced to the symbol’s ancient origins. For just as “lb” came from libra, so the word “pound” is descended from pondo, making the # a descendent of the Roman term libra pondo in both name and appearance.

The Composites: A rogue's gallery of fictional characters

Humbert Humbert, as described by Nabokov in Lolita,
sketched by Brian Joseph Davis

What does Emma Bovary really look like? Sam Spade? How about "that lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows"?

In the reader's imagination literary characters have a way of becoming real people, and film adaptations imprint a visual image that may be once- or twice-removed from the printed page. (It's difficult to imagine Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade without seeing Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.)

Brian Joseph Davis curates a website called The Composites which interprets literary characters using police-artist techniques and composite sketch software, using descriptions from the books themselves. The straight-ahead interpretations feature wide eyes and expressionless faces, a rogues gallery of the fictionally famous and infamous.

Here are a few, with the authors' descriptions included:

Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

… Combed his light-brown hair neatly in front of the mirror, and set off for Radio City. He had always thought he had the world’s dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist’s face, he thought … Really it was only his darker hair that was very different from Dickie. Otherwise, his nose—or at least its general form—his narrow jaw, his eyebrows if he held them right … He wasn’t really worried. Tom had at first amused himself with an eyebrow pencil—Dickie’s eyebrows were longer and turned up a little at the outer edges—and with a touch of putty at the end of his nose to make it longer and more pointed, but he abandoned these as too likely to be noticed. The main thing about impersonation, Tom thought, was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person one was impersonating, and to assume the facial expressions that went with them. The rest fell into place … He might play up Tom a little more, he thought. He could stoop a little more, he could be shyer than ever, he could even wear horn-rimmed glasses and hold his mouth in an even sadder, droopier manner to contrast with Dickie’s tenseness.

Emma Bovary, Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age…Her eyelids seemed chiseled expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down.

The results, as expected, can be a little spooky: the intent isn't a three-dimensional portrait, but an artist's sketch of characters rendered through the writer's words. "The program and process is quite manual and interpretive. We're not in CSI-territory yet,* Davis writes.

His renderings benefit from the ideas readers bring to the characters themselves -- these are all creations authors and readers have imagined as strong, willful, and even (as in the case of Emma Bovary) more than a little cautious of revealing too much. Davis invites suggestions, and asks those interested in submitting character ideas to include the novels' descriptive passages. Next up, according to Davis's recent note: Mrs. Dalloway, Kilgore Trout, Holden Caulfield.

Alfred Jarry, born September 8 1873

"God is the tangential point between zero and infinity."

Alfred Jarry

 (Sept. 8, 1873 - Nov. 1, 1907)

illustration by Siegfried Woldhek