Movie Stars Who Die the Most. Not an article for people who hate spoilers, because it lists the movies in which characters die.

Also, the list includes only male actors currently working. No actresses at all, which is a real pity. And no Bogart, Cagney, Peter Lorre….

Nor does it include Sean Bean, who apparently has a clause in all his contracts that would force the studios to quadruple his pay should be survive to the end credits.

Or Samuel L. Jackson, who is both a great actor and a star, and who dies a lot.

So maybe it includes only male actors currently working who have a movie coming out soon enough that they’re on the list to be mentioned in Premiere. A title too long to fit the marquee.

Also, I myself would have included the great bit of trivia that John Wayne died in only one of his films — the last.

So what actresses have died the most often on film? What are the greatest death scenes in film history? What movies have more than one great death scene?

For the last category, I’d say that Repo Man has at least three great (and hilarious) death scenes:

1. “People just explode.”
2. “I blame society.”
3. “I showed them — I had a lobotomy.”

My brain seems to be crawling at quarter-speed today. Time-lapse photography might well show that it’s attempting to give me the finger.

However, these time-lapse photographs show amazing natural events. A lunar eclipse, a thunderstorm, a wildfire, growing mushrooms, a rotting apple, and more.

Some things take time. Others are fast, like Tweets, but can do a lot of damage as they go by.

The five worst Twitters ever. By worst they mean something like “causing most collateral damage.” Link courtesy zem42.

If you slow down high-speed phenomena, you can see extraordinary things.

Sonnet 65

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o’ersways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out, Against the wrackful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays? O fearful meditation! where, alack, Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid? O! none, unless this miracle have might, That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

–William Shakespeare

You still shine bright, 445 years after your birth.

Poetry Month is ending soon, but (in addition to today’s poem), I’ll leave you with recommendations for two fine novels about poets, both by John Crowley.

The Translator, John Crowley

Christa (Kit) Malone, college student and aspiring poet, studies with and helps to translate the work of Innokenti Isayevitch Falin, a distinguished Russian poet in exile. It’s 1962, and the Cold War is at its height. As teacher and student learn from each other, the political tensions grow toward the Cuban missile crisis.

OK, there is no way to summarize this novel. It is as tough and delicate as porcelain, shapely as a peach. Kit is both flawed and talented, and she matures as she copes with loss, grief, guilt, learning, betrayal, and love. Falin speaks with the unmistakable accents of the Slav living in translation, and from a wholly believable history.

The author writes with a feather-light, effective touch of the issues that were about to blow the country apart. He explores the problems of language — context, translation, even finding the way to speak — while subtly revealing tragedies and great joy. The story accumulates feeling as it goes along, and its narrative tensions grow more and more taut.

Occasionally one encounters a perfect poem. Much less often does one find a perfect work of fiction, whose form, phrasing, and content could not be improved.* This, to my mind, is one of the few.

Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, John Crowley

Lord Byron never wrote a novel. If he had, he would have written the story at the center of this one: a tale of passion, hereditary curses, courageous women, star-crossed men.

Around his manuscript are other stories: about the modern researchers seeking to decode it; about Ada Lovelace, Byron’s daughter; about a Byronic film director.

Crowley never makes the common mistake of confusing Byron the man with the characters in his poetry. His Lordship’s manners were urbane, Augustan, generous, idealistic, and warm, and all that is shown in the Byron manuscript. Having extensively researched Byron, I was able to spot dozens of charming allusions to his life and work. And the voice is Byron’s own, the same voice in his letters, journals, and collected conversations. It’s an extraordinary performance.

Byron himself is so vivid none of the other characters can quite live up to him, but the book is well worth reading anyway. I came away from it feeling glad that someone could speak in Byron’s human, humane voice. Those qualities matter.

*Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn is one such book. Rachel McKenzie’s The Wine of Astonishment is another. Shirley Hazzard’s The Bay of Noon.

So, we’ll go no more a-roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have a rest.

Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we’ll go no more a-roving By the light of the moon.

–George Gordon, Lord Byron

It’s one of those days when everything comes together in an almost lyric perfection of coherence. And today’s message is: Survival of the fittest!

In reading John Crowley’s The Translator (subtle, beautiful, humane — look for a full review later in the week), I ran across this gem, the marching song of the Nietzsche Study Group.

Nietzsche loves me, this I know. Zarathustra told me so. Little ones to US belong. They are weak but WE ARE STRONG. – John Crowley

This made me laugh so much I tweeted it.

abostick59 responded: Are you sure that was JOHN Crowley?

And that comment led me to check with my local Thelemite expert, who confirmed that Aleister Crowley admired Nietzsche sufficiently to include him in the list of Gnostic saints, which also includes Pan, Siddhartha*, Charlemagne, Richard Wagner, and Roderic Borgia, AKA Pope Alexander the Sixth. (Check the link for the whole list.)

But where are the women on that list? Where are Cleopatra, Messalina, Theodosia, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Margaret of Anjou, Diane de Poitiers, Catherine the Great?

Meanwhile, gramina shared a link with me about mantis shrimp, which have astonishingly sensitive eyes which can see ten times as many colors as humans, but otherwise seem like God’s justification for hating all shrimp.

“They’re enchantingly violent,” he said in an affectionate, almost paternal tone. “They catch other animals by either spearing it through the heart or smashing it to pieces. Unlike most predators that grab prey, these pummel it and destroy it. When they interact with each other over a burrow, they use their armored front appendages and smash each other on the face. Whenever they get into any type of situation, they smash things. You can’t pick these up. They’re really great animals to have around.”

I learned from Wikipedia (and confirmed elsewhere) that these foot-long lobster-like creatures pack a punch so powerful that they occasionally smash aquarium glass. They strike at the same speed and with about the same force as a .22 caliber bullet. The videos have to be slowed down so you can see the creature moving.

Also, they sometimes do somersaults to get back into the ocean if they’re stranded on the shore. For as far as 2 meters. Imagine a creature looking like a deranged lobster, a foot-long half-armored thing with multiple mouths hanging out on stalks, doing somersaults on the beach. You’d swear off alcohol forever.

Happily, they have their own web site, where you can watch videos and read up on their behavior, assuming you can read white letters on pale blue ground. Maybe it’s only for mantis shrimp with their superior eyesight.

*Sorry, but this made me think of the line from A Fish Called Wanda: “The central tenet of Zen Buddhism is not ‘Every man for himself’.”

ETA And then serrana mentioned the Nazi super-cows, which turn out to be attempts to breed back to the aurochs. This site is named for the aurochs and includes cow solitaire.

You are like me, you will die too, but not today: you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:…

This poem was written byReginald Shepherd, wrote the article on Adorno and Celan that I mentioned yesterday. His blog is still up, the site maintained by his partner (for whom this poem was written), although Shepherd himself died last year from cancer.

O Little Root of a Dream

This poem by a Holocaust survivor is posted as my response to Hitler’s birthday. Celan’s Death Fugue may be the single best poem to come out of World War II. Do go read it.

Theodor Adorno raised the question of whether it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

To me, poetry is, has always been, one of the few possible answers to the death camps, since long before I read Adorno or Celan. When I was a small child, I saw those pictures. (You know the ones.) They were in books on my father’s shelves. Books — poetry, stories, nonfiction, any kind of book — were the only defense I had against those images, against the searing things he did to me and animals, against the things he made me do, and which even then I sensed were a private expression of the same impulse that built the smokestacks.

Books are defiance even in defeat. They are victory even in death. Long after their authors are dead, they go on tapping out the message of freedom to prisoners caged in tyrannies of iron or clapboard. They can speak the truth when all utterance is forbidden and only lies are acknowledged.

Adorno’s oft-quoted dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz is a quotation from a larger, far more complex and shifting attitude. (Good article on it by the late poet Reginald Shepherd.)

Adorno also wrote:

Literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism…. It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.

For April 18, anniversary of the great San Francisco Quake, we have one of the great poems of geology:

Lay of the Trilobite

A mountain’s giddy height I sought, Because I could not find Sufficient vague and mighty thought To fill my mighty mind; And as I wandered ill at ease, There chanced upon my sight A native of Silurian seas, An ancient Trilobite.

So calm, so peacefully he lay, I watched him even with tears: I thought of Monads far away In the forgotten years. How wonderful it seemed and right, The providential plan, That he should be a Trilobite, And I should be a Man!

And then, quite natural and free Out of his rocky bed, That Trilobite he spoke to me And this is what he said: ‘I don’t know how the thing was done, Although I cannot doubt it; But Huxley – he if anyone Can tell you all about it;

‘How all your faiths are ghosts and dreams, How in the silent sea Your ancestors were Monotremes - Whatever these may be; How you evolved your shining lights Of wisdom and perfection From Jelly-Fish and Trilobites By Natural Selection.

‘You’ve Kant to make your brains go round, Hegel you have to clear them, You’ve Mr Browning to confound, And Mr Punch to cheer them! The native of an alien land You call a man and brother, And greet with hymn-book in one hand And pistol in the other!

‘You’ve Politics to make you fight As if you were possessed: You’ve cannon and you’ve dynamite To give the nations rest: The side that makes the loudest din Is surest to be right, And oh, a pretty fix you’re in!’ Remarked the Trilobite.

‘But gentle, stupid, free from woe I lived among my nation, I didn’t care – I didn’t know That I was a Crustacean.* I didn’t grumble, didn’t steal, I never took to rhyme: Salt water was my frugal meal, And carbonate of lime.’

Reluctantly I turned away, No other word he said; An ancient Trilobite, he lay Within his rocky bed. I did not answer him, for that Would have annoyed my pride: I merely bowed, and raised my hat, But in my heart I cried: -

‘I wish our brains were not so good, I wish our skulls were thicker, I wish that Evolution could Have stopped a little quicker; For oh, it was a happy plight, Of liberty and ease, To be a simple Trilobite In the Silurian seas!’

–May Kendall

* He was not a crustacean. He has since discovered that he was an Arachnid, or something similar. But he says it does not matter. He says they told him wrong once, and they may again.

I have no idea if May Kendall is a relative; she was an English poet and reformer, and my ancestors of that ilk came to this side of the Atlantic four hundred years ago.

Also, go buy a copy of Earthquake Weather, a stunning collection of poems by Janice Gould.

For April 19, one of the great poems of American history

Concord Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument, April 19th, 1836

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set today a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Goodbye, Harry Kalas. I am so glad you lived to see your team win the World Series again.

From the time I was 12, Harry Kalas was the voice of the Phillies. Whenever we made the playoffs, I resented the national broadcast team who took over from the local guys. Why should someone like Kalas, who called wins and losses steadily, for decades, have his place usurped when the team was finally getting some glory?

If Harry wasn’t calling the plays with Richie Ashburn, it wasn’t really a Phillies game. Richie’s been gone a few years, but now his old partner has rejoined him. They’re both in the Hall of Fame — Kalas as broadcaster, Ashburn as player.

Harry Kalas collapsed in the broadcast booth shortly before the Phillies game with the Nationals. He was 73. Philadelphia won’t be the same without him.