Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's tumultuous way, and Ahab's also, as he went lurching along the deck.
"I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!"
"Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck--sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.' And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!"
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Can this be re-stated to invoke a Philosophy of Magic?
"To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have
therefore only pretended to pretend."
-Jacques Derrida
therefore only pretended to pretend."
-Jacques Derrida
Monday, December 1, 2008
The Difference Between Moves and Being Moved...
"To be a great magician, one must be able to present an illusion in such a way that people are not only puzzled, but deeply moved."
- S.H. Sharp
"The expert magician seeks to deceive the mind, rather than the eye."
- Sol Stein
"Confusion isn't magic"
- Dai Vernon
- S.H. Sharp
"The expert magician seeks to deceive the mind, rather than the eye."
- Sol Stein
"Confusion isn't magic"
- Dai Vernon
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Proof that David Blaine is the Real Deal...
“To most magicians, cards themselves are marvels…For one thing, they feel special in your hand. Touching them, holding them, shuffling — the whole process is almost poetic. If you’re in a room full of magicians and someone just mentions the word cards, within seconds, everyone is digging into their pockets and pulling out a deck of cards. It’s one of the most amazing feelings ever.”
-David Blaine
-David Blaine
Saturday, November 29, 2008
What's in a name?
What do these names mean to you?
Post a personal anecdote, of about 100 words:
1) Tally-Ho
2) Bee
3) Bicycle
4) (Insert name of your favourite Casino card)
5) Other
Post a personal anecdote, of about 100 words:
1) Tally-Ho
2) Bee
3) Bicycle
4) (Insert name of your favourite Casino card)
5) Other
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
A Letter from the Civil War (U.S.A.)
THE EVILS OF GAMING.
A LETTER TO A FRIEND IN THE ARMY.
BY REV. J. B. JETER, D.D., RICHMOND, VA.
MY DEAR FRIEND: Learning that GAMING is prevalent in the Army, I have concluded to address you a letter on its EVILS. I hardly need to assure you that I am actuated in this determination by the most sincere desire to guard you against a fascinating amusement which may issue in your ruin. I fully persuade myself that you will listen to the counsel of one who loves you, who feels a deep solicitude for your welfare, and whose age and experience qualify him to offer you wholesome instruction and warning.
That gaming is a sinful practice, you will readily admit. It is, like many other sins, not expressly but virtually prohibited in the scriptures. It is utterly at variance with their spirit and tenor. It springs from the inordinate love of money, "the root of all evil." This insatiable desire plunges the gamester "into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts," by which he is in dander of being drowned "in destruction and perdition." He violates the law of love: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Were this divine rule universally understood, loved and obeyed, it would banish gaming, and its attendant evils, from the world. The life of the gambler exemplifies the remark of Solomon, "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent." Not content with the slow and steady gains of industry and economy, the gamester seeks to grasp the golden prize, reckless of the means of attaining
it.
He cannot pray, without mocking his Maker, "Lead me not into temptation." The petition implies a desire to escape, and an obligation to resist temptation; but the gamester courts, knowingly and fearlessly, the most dangerous temptations. Good men, in all countries, and in all ages, and almost without an exception, agree in the condemnation of gaming. Most civilized nations have enacted stringent laws to suppress the vice as a nuisance and curse to society. Even gamblers themselves admit that the practice is wrong. An estimable man--a reformed sportsman--once said to me, "I would rather a gambler should warn my son against gaming than you should: he knows the evils of it from experience, and you do not."
Gaming is a most seductive vice. The path that leads to this dangerous precipice is strewed with flowers. "There is no harm," says the tempter, "in gaming for amusement." Perhaps, there is none. A game of chance or skill for relaxation or diversion seems to be innocent. It violates no express law of God or man. But the sport creates an agreeable excitement; and the fondness for this excitement grows by indulgence. At first the game is resorted to merely to fill up an idle hour, or to relax the mind from grave and wearisome pursuits; but soon it encroaches on the business of life, and the seasons of devotion. The pleasurable emotion is increased by small stakes; and there is no more evil, it is plausibly maintained, in betting than in playing for amusement. To keep up or to augment the excitement, the stakes are gradually and indefinitely increased. The amount staked becomes an object of desire, and the utmost skill and exertion are put forth to win it. Success allures to continued and bolder, and failure to deeper and more reckless gaming; and thus by winning and by losing the excitement is kept up, and the hopeful or the despairing adventurer presses forward in his career. The gamester has now reached a crisis at which secresy becomes necessary to screen him from suspicion and reproach; and he will find haunts suited to his purpose--rooms splendidly furnished, barred and guarded, accessible only to the initiated, or to the candidates for initiation, where he is invited to partake of the richest fare, "without money and without price."
In these gambling " hells," as they are appropriately called, he will meet, not merely with the low and the mean, but with the rich, the refined, the gay and the great. Cheered by the presence and the example of persons so numerous and respectable, he pursues his course, and soon becomes confirmed in the habit of gaming. Now arguments, warnings and entreaties are addressed to him in vain--the loss of property and character cannot deter him, nor can the miseries, tears and pleadings of his wife and children win him, from the path of ruin on which he has entered. Gaming is a most pernicious vice. I cannot better illustrate its evils than by giving a simple statement of the career and doom of a gambler whom I knew well, but who shall be nameless in this letter. He was of respectable parentage and connexions, and of a most amiable and generous nature. He grew up a promising, noble young man, the admiration of his friends, and the pride of his family. He, early in life, evinced an aversion to steady employment, and became the victim of artful, selfish and unscrupulous gamesters. His patrimony was soon spent, and he found it necessary to resort to gaming, and its usual arts of deception and swindling, to supply his wants. He quickly became a confirmed gamester. Removing to a large city, he entered regularly into the gambling business. His associates were gamblers, and sharpers, and their dupes, of various degrees of guilt. From virtuous and respectable society, such as he had known in his youth, he was, of course, excluded. From the Christian sanctuary, and all its sacred privileges, he habitually excluded himself. His noble nature, aided by the upright principles instilled into his mind by his pious mother, long resisted the corrupting influences of his business and his associations. He retained a warm attachment to his kindred, who were happily ignorant of his degradation, and from his ill-gotten gains made generous contributions for their support. He was accounted honorable among gamblers, for they have a code of honor among themselves. A gamester who does not swindle according to established rules is deemed a disgrace to their fraternity, and is liable to be expelled from it. But the subject of this sketch was conscientious, so far as conscientiousness can be affirmed of one whose business is pursued in violation of the laws of man and of God.
Repeatedly he made efforts to abandon his occupation, tear himself away from his associates, and regain his position in reputable society. But poor man! what could he do? Without employment, without the means of support, without kind and faithful friends, and without encouragement to reform, after a few fitful struggles, he would relapse into his inveterate habit. He had entered into a society in which the Bible was not respected, the sabbath was not known, and piety was ridiculed; and nothing much short of a miracle could have extricated him from the bad and potent influences that were hurrying him to destruction. Over the door of the gambler's retreat might be appropriately inscribed, in letters of lurid flame, "This is the way to hell; going down to the chambers of death." But few of the multitudes who enter these haunts of dissipation, crime and infamy, ever make their escape to the circle of virtuous society, or become heirs of heaven; and the man of our story was not one of the flavored few.
After every failure at reformation, he sunk to lower depths of vice and degradation. Gambling is rarely, or never, a solitary vice. Profanity, drunkenness, debauchery, swindling, and such like evils, spring up spontaneously in the gambler's hell, and reach an early and fearful maturity. The unfortune gamester was not exempt from the vices so common to his profession. He was, I know, addicted to drunkenness, and it is probable that he was the victim of all its kindred sins. The way of transgressors is always hard, and usually short. The poor gambler was doomed not to live out half his days. His drunkenness was followed by delirium tremens; and in a fit of this horrible disorder, he leaped from the third story of his wretched abode upon the paved street, and was found at early dawn by the watchmen of the city, a mangled, unconscious and dying man. I attended his funeral. It was a solemn and instructive scene. But few of his accomplices in crime, and his companions in degradation, were present. They avoided a sight which must have painfully reminded them of their guilt, infamy and approaching doom. As I attended his body to the grave, two of his associates testified that their lives had been preserved in a time of fatal epidemic, and general panic, by his kind, assiduous and skilful nursing.
The gambler, drunkard and suicide was laid in a solitary, unblessed and dishonored grave. I often notice it in passing with a sad heart. No stone marks the spot where rest his mortal remains--no flowers blossom on his tomb--but the place is barren and desolate--a fit emblem of his life and doom.
In the story of this unfortunate man, you have, my dear friend, the history, omitting circumstantial variations, of every professional gambler. This numerous class are all on the high road to ruin. They have lost their virtue, their character, and their happiness. They are wasting their time, prostituting their talents, corrupting the youth of the country, deceiving and swindling the unfortunate victims of their arts, setting thorns in their death pillows, and preparing their souls for eternal destruction. It is questionable whether they are not the most hardened, the most reckless, and the most godless class of persons on the earth. "The finished gambler," said Dr. Nott, "has no heart--he would play at his brother's funeral--he would gamble upon his mother's coffin." Truly as I love you, my friend, and earnestly as I desire your earthly welfare, I would rather see you an inmate of the poor house than an occupant of the most splendid gambler's hell, and in the most successful course of accumulating wealth by the base and infamous arts of gaming.
Thus far I have portrayed the evils of gaming on professional gamesters--let us now notice the effects of the vice on the dupes and victims of these sharks in human form. It is surprising that any man, of sane mind, not initiated into the swindling arts of the profession, should venture to play with a practiced gamester. There is no equality in the contest. It is simplicity contending with cunning--inexperience contending with skill. The uninitiated can never win, except as they are permitted to do so, or the purpose of encouraging them to bet more largely. Success does not depend on chance, or even so much on skill as on the arts of deception and swindling. Some years ago, I was present in a select company before which a reformed gambler exhibited the various contrivances and arts by which the ignorant and unsuspecting are cheated of their money. To the unpracticed these means seemed little less than miraculous.
Cards are usually manufactured by gamblers, and by marks that escape the notice of the novice, they are known as readily by their backs as by their faces. In shuffling, cutting and dealing a pack of cards, the skillful player can, without the danger of detection, secure for himself any card, or just such a hand as he chooses. Nor is it so surprising that astute gamblers, stimulated by the intense desire of gain, and devoting their time and powers to the art of playing and deceiving, should attain to great skill in their business. They learn of one another, and quicken one another's ingenuity; and they are restrained in their tricks by no regard to law, justice or humanity. They belong to a realm from which conscience is banished. Gamblers generally travel and operate in company, that they may the more successfully seduce and fleece the unwary. These sharpers play with each other so as to attract attention. One seems to be in luck, and winning rapidly. He allures into partnership with him some simpleton, who hopes soon to reap a golden harvest. But the tide of luck quickly changes; and the miserable dupe is stripped of all his treasures, and left to bear his loss and his shame as best he can. The execrable swindlers when alone divide their ill-gotten gains, and continue their heartless robberies. By these, and similar arts, multitudes are every year deprived of their honest gains, or their patrimonial estates. It is by such victims that gamblers live, grow rich, and dwell in splendor. I knew a plain, industrious, honest and worthy man, who, from a thirst for gaming, went every Saturday evening to squander at the gaming table, among professional harpies, his hard earnings, until he had lost twenty thousand dollars. He knew that he would lose in every visit to the gaming table, and yet such was his infatuation, that no argument, no entreaty, and no motive could induce him to forego the pleasure of the sport.
But in the face of all these facts and considerations, gamblers, the lowest and the meanest of men, still find victims of their arts, and derive their profits, not merely from the thoughtless and the dissipated, but from the intelligent, the wealthy and the respectable. Year after year, thousands are reduced, by the nefarious arts of gaming, to poverty and ruin. Their families, in many instances, stripped of the means of comfort and support, are disheartened, grieved and humbled.
If then, my friend, you would preserve your virtue, your character, and your happiness--if you would not prostitute your powers, prove a curse to the world, and a grief to your fond parents--if you would not plant thorns in your dying pillow, bar the gate of heaven against yourself, and force your passage to destruction, shun the gambler, and the gambler's hell, as you would the plague.
Gamesters are not fit to be your associates. They are debased in their sentiments, corrupt in their principles, vicious in their practices, and baleful in their influence. They may, indeed, be polished in their manners, and warm in their professions of friendship; but they seek your money and your ruin. You cannot touch them without contamination. To be acquainted with them is to be dishonored. You cannot enter their haunts without peril to all your best interests. If there were no sin and no reproach in gambling, it would be the greatest stupidity to risk your money on games with the most skillful, the most unscrupulous, and the most dishonest of sharpers.
You had better throw your money into the fire; for in gaming you are simply giving it to the most selfish and the meanest of human kind--to harpies, who are seeking to cheat you not only out of your money, but out of your virtue and of your soul. The honest man who stakes his property at the table of a professional gamester is simply a fool, He shuts his eyes that he may suffer himself to be cheated. He richly deserves to be fleeced, and put to confusion and shame; and happy will it be for him, if he learns from his first lesson his folly and his danger.
Beware of gaming even for amusement. It is not necessary for purposes of relaxation and diversion. Fortunately, there is no lack of recreations, innocent in their nature, and refining in their tendency. Conversation, reading, walking, riding, athletic sports, and numerous simple diversions, may be resorted to in the intervals of toil or study, to refresh and invigorate the body, or to unbend the mind. But gaming is an amusement fraught with peril. It nourishes a habit that may prove the wreck of property, the bane of virtue, the blight of happiness, the ruin of the soul, and the curse of eternity. Abstain then from an indulgence that yields little pleasure and no profit, and is pregnant with such fearful peril.
He that enters this flowery, downhill, slippery road, knows not where he will stop. Thousands who begin by playing for pleasure end by playing for gain. Thousands who play honestly in the beginning, in the end, resort to all the tricks and frauds of the profession.
I need not repeat, my young friend, how sincerely I desire your welfare. You are the comfort, the pride and the hope of your parents. They anxiously, as I know, trained you in the ways of virtue and piety; and their earnest prayers have accompanied you to the camp. You are nobly engaged in your country's service.
I have confidence that, guided by the principles taught you in your youth, sustained by the prayers of your friends, shielded by the knowledge you have of the dangers that encompass you, and humbly trusting in God, and animated by the prospect of a bright reward, you will pass uncorrupted through the temptations of a soldier's life, and return to your home, to be the support and solace of your parents, the delight of your friends, and an ornament of society.
Your very sincere WELL WISHER.
A LETTER TO A FRIEND IN THE ARMY.
BY REV. J. B. JETER, D.D., RICHMOND, VA.
MY DEAR FRIEND: Learning that GAMING is prevalent in the Army, I have concluded to address you a letter on its EVILS. I hardly need to assure you that I am actuated in this determination by the most sincere desire to guard you against a fascinating amusement which may issue in your ruin. I fully persuade myself that you will listen to the counsel of one who loves you, who feels a deep solicitude for your welfare, and whose age and experience qualify him to offer you wholesome instruction and warning.
That gaming is a sinful practice, you will readily admit. It is, like many other sins, not expressly but virtually prohibited in the scriptures. It is utterly at variance with their spirit and tenor. It springs from the inordinate love of money, "the root of all evil." This insatiable desire plunges the gamester "into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts," by which he is in dander of being drowned "in destruction and perdition." He violates the law of love: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Were this divine rule universally understood, loved and obeyed, it would banish gaming, and its attendant evils, from the world. The life of the gambler exemplifies the remark of Solomon, "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent." Not content with the slow and steady gains of industry and economy, the gamester seeks to grasp the golden prize, reckless of the means of attaining
it.
He cannot pray, without mocking his Maker, "Lead me not into temptation." The petition implies a desire to escape, and an obligation to resist temptation; but the gamester courts, knowingly and fearlessly, the most dangerous temptations. Good men, in all countries, and in all ages, and almost without an exception, agree in the condemnation of gaming. Most civilized nations have enacted stringent laws to suppress the vice as a nuisance and curse to society. Even gamblers themselves admit that the practice is wrong. An estimable man--a reformed sportsman--once said to me, "I would rather a gambler should warn my son against gaming than you should: he knows the evils of it from experience, and you do not."
Gaming is a most seductive vice. The path that leads to this dangerous precipice is strewed with flowers. "There is no harm," says the tempter, "in gaming for amusement." Perhaps, there is none. A game of chance or skill for relaxation or diversion seems to be innocent. It violates no express law of God or man. But the sport creates an agreeable excitement; and the fondness for this excitement grows by indulgence. At first the game is resorted to merely to fill up an idle hour, or to relax the mind from grave and wearisome pursuits; but soon it encroaches on the business of life, and the seasons of devotion. The pleasurable emotion is increased by small stakes; and there is no more evil, it is plausibly maintained, in betting than in playing for amusement. To keep up or to augment the excitement, the stakes are gradually and indefinitely increased. The amount staked becomes an object of desire, and the utmost skill and exertion are put forth to win it. Success allures to continued and bolder, and failure to deeper and more reckless gaming; and thus by winning and by losing the excitement is kept up, and the hopeful or the despairing adventurer presses forward in his career. The gamester has now reached a crisis at which secresy becomes necessary to screen him from suspicion and reproach; and he will find haunts suited to his purpose--rooms splendidly furnished, barred and guarded, accessible only to the initiated, or to the candidates for initiation, where he is invited to partake of the richest fare, "without money and without price."
In these gambling " hells," as they are appropriately called, he will meet, not merely with the low and the mean, but with the rich, the refined, the gay and the great. Cheered by the presence and the example of persons so numerous and respectable, he pursues his course, and soon becomes confirmed in the habit of gaming. Now arguments, warnings and entreaties are addressed to him in vain--the loss of property and character cannot deter him, nor can the miseries, tears and pleadings of his wife and children win him, from the path of ruin on which he has entered. Gaming is a most pernicious vice. I cannot better illustrate its evils than by giving a simple statement of the career and doom of a gambler whom I knew well, but who shall be nameless in this letter. He was of respectable parentage and connexions, and of a most amiable and generous nature. He grew up a promising, noble young man, the admiration of his friends, and the pride of his family. He, early in life, evinced an aversion to steady employment, and became the victim of artful, selfish and unscrupulous gamesters. His patrimony was soon spent, and he found it necessary to resort to gaming, and its usual arts of deception and swindling, to supply his wants. He quickly became a confirmed gamester. Removing to a large city, he entered regularly into the gambling business. His associates were gamblers, and sharpers, and their dupes, of various degrees of guilt. From virtuous and respectable society, such as he had known in his youth, he was, of course, excluded. From the Christian sanctuary, and all its sacred privileges, he habitually excluded himself. His noble nature, aided by the upright principles instilled into his mind by his pious mother, long resisted the corrupting influences of his business and his associations. He retained a warm attachment to his kindred, who were happily ignorant of his degradation, and from his ill-gotten gains made generous contributions for their support. He was accounted honorable among gamblers, for they have a code of honor among themselves. A gamester who does not swindle according to established rules is deemed a disgrace to their fraternity, and is liable to be expelled from it. But the subject of this sketch was conscientious, so far as conscientiousness can be affirmed of one whose business is pursued in violation of the laws of man and of God.
Repeatedly he made efforts to abandon his occupation, tear himself away from his associates, and regain his position in reputable society. But poor man! what could he do? Without employment, without the means of support, without kind and faithful friends, and without encouragement to reform, after a few fitful struggles, he would relapse into his inveterate habit. He had entered into a society in which the Bible was not respected, the sabbath was not known, and piety was ridiculed; and nothing much short of a miracle could have extricated him from the bad and potent influences that were hurrying him to destruction. Over the door of the gambler's retreat might be appropriately inscribed, in letters of lurid flame, "This is the way to hell; going down to the chambers of death." But few of the multitudes who enter these haunts of dissipation, crime and infamy, ever make their escape to the circle of virtuous society, or become heirs of heaven; and the man of our story was not one of the flavored few.
After every failure at reformation, he sunk to lower depths of vice and degradation. Gambling is rarely, or never, a solitary vice. Profanity, drunkenness, debauchery, swindling, and such like evils, spring up spontaneously in the gambler's hell, and reach an early and fearful maturity. The unfortune gamester was not exempt from the vices so common to his profession. He was, I know, addicted to drunkenness, and it is probable that he was the victim of all its kindred sins. The way of transgressors is always hard, and usually short. The poor gambler was doomed not to live out half his days. His drunkenness was followed by delirium tremens; and in a fit of this horrible disorder, he leaped from the third story of his wretched abode upon the paved street, and was found at early dawn by the watchmen of the city, a mangled, unconscious and dying man. I attended his funeral. It was a solemn and instructive scene. But few of his accomplices in crime, and his companions in degradation, were present. They avoided a sight which must have painfully reminded them of their guilt, infamy and approaching doom. As I attended his body to the grave, two of his associates testified that their lives had been preserved in a time of fatal epidemic, and general panic, by his kind, assiduous and skilful nursing.
The gambler, drunkard and suicide was laid in a solitary, unblessed and dishonored grave. I often notice it in passing with a sad heart. No stone marks the spot where rest his mortal remains--no flowers blossom on his tomb--but the place is barren and desolate--a fit emblem of his life and doom.
In the story of this unfortunate man, you have, my dear friend, the history, omitting circumstantial variations, of every professional gambler. This numerous class are all on the high road to ruin. They have lost their virtue, their character, and their happiness. They are wasting their time, prostituting their talents, corrupting the youth of the country, deceiving and swindling the unfortunate victims of their arts, setting thorns in their death pillows, and preparing their souls for eternal destruction. It is questionable whether they are not the most hardened, the most reckless, and the most godless class of persons on the earth. "The finished gambler," said Dr. Nott, "has no heart--he would play at his brother's funeral--he would gamble upon his mother's coffin." Truly as I love you, my friend, and earnestly as I desire your earthly welfare, I would rather see you an inmate of the poor house than an occupant of the most splendid gambler's hell, and in the most successful course of accumulating wealth by the base and infamous arts of gaming.
Thus far I have portrayed the evils of gaming on professional gamesters--let us now notice the effects of the vice on the dupes and victims of these sharks in human form. It is surprising that any man, of sane mind, not initiated into the swindling arts of the profession, should venture to play with a practiced gamester. There is no equality in the contest. It is simplicity contending with cunning--inexperience contending with skill. The uninitiated can never win, except as they are permitted to do so, or the purpose of encouraging them to bet more largely. Success does not depend on chance, or even so much on skill as on the arts of deception and swindling. Some years ago, I was present in a select company before which a reformed gambler exhibited the various contrivances and arts by which the ignorant and unsuspecting are cheated of their money. To the unpracticed these means seemed little less than miraculous.
Cards are usually manufactured by gamblers, and by marks that escape the notice of the novice, they are known as readily by their backs as by their faces. In shuffling, cutting and dealing a pack of cards, the skillful player can, without the danger of detection, secure for himself any card, or just such a hand as he chooses. Nor is it so surprising that astute gamblers, stimulated by the intense desire of gain, and devoting their time and powers to the art of playing and deceiving, should attain to great skill in their business. They learn of one another, and quicken one another's ingenuity; and they are restrained in their tricks by no regard to law, justice or humanity. They belong to a realm from which conscience is banished. Gamblers generally travel and operate in company, that they may the more successfully seduce and fleece the unwary. These sharpers play with each other so as to attract attention. One seems to be in luck, and winning rapidly. He allures into partnership with him some simpleton, who hopes soon to reap a golden harvest. But the tide of luck quickly changes; and the miserable dupe is stripped of all his treasures, and left to bear his loss and his shame as best he can. The execrable swindlers when alone divide their ill-gotten gains, and continue their heartless robberies. By these, and similar arts, multitudes are every year deprived of their honest gains, or their patrimonial estates. It is by such victims that gamblers live, grow rich, and dwell in splendor. I knew a plain, industrious, honest and worthy man, who, from a thirst for gaming, went every Saturday evening to squander at the gaming table, among professional harpies, his hard earnings, until he had lost twenty thousand dollars. He knew that he would lose in every visit to the gaming table, and yet such was his infatuation, that no argument, no entreaty, and no motive could induce him to forego the pleasure of the sport.
But in the face of all these facts and considerations, gamblers, the lowest and the meanest of men, still find victims of their arts, and derive their profits, not merely from the thoughtless and the dissipated, but from the intelligent, the wealthy and the respectable. Year after year, thousands are reduced, by the nefarious arts of gaming, to poverty and ruin. Their families, in many instances, stripped of the means of comfort and support, are disheartened, grieved and humbled.
If then, my friend, you would preserve your virtue, your character, and your happiness--if you would not prostitute your powers, prove a curse to the world, and a grief to your fond parents--if you would not plant thorns in your dying pillow, bar the gate of heaven against yourself, and force your passage to destruction, shun the gambler, and the gambler's hell, as you would the plague.
Gamesters are not fit to be your associates. They are debased in their sentiments, corrupt in their principles, vicious in their practices, and baleful in their influence. They may, indeed, be polished in their manners, and warm in their professions of friendship; but they seek your money and your ruin. You cannot touch them without contamination. To be acquainted with them is to be dishonored. You cannot enter their haunts without peril to all your best interests. If there were no sin and no reproach in gambling, it would be the greatest stupidity to risk your money on games with the most skillful, the most unscrupulous, and the most dishonest of sharpers.
You had better throw your money into the fire; for in gaming you are simply giving it to the most selfish and the meanest of human kind--to harpies, who are seeking to cheat you not only out of your money, but out of your virtue and of your soul. The honest man who stakes his property at the table of a professional gamester is simply a fool, He shuts his eyes that he may suffer himself to be cheated. He richly deserves to be fleeced, and put to confusion and shame; and happy will it be for him, if he learns from his first lesson his folly and his danger.
Beware of gaming even for amusement. It is not necessary for purposes of relaxation and diversion. Fortunately, there is no lack of recreations, innocent in their nature, and refining in their tendency. Conversation, reading, walking, riding, athletic sports, and numerous simple diversions, may be resorted to in the intervals of toil or study, to refresh and invigorate the body, or to unbend the mind. But gaming is an amusement fraught with peril. It nourishes a habit that may prove the wreck of property, the bane of virtue, the blight of happiness, the ruin of the soul, and the curse of eternity. Abstain then from an indulgence that yields little pleasure and no profit, and is pregnant with such fearful peril.
He that enters this flowery, downhill, slippery road, knows not where he will stop. Thousands who begin by playing for pleasure end by playing for gain. Thousands who play honestly in the beginning, in the end, resort to all the tricks and frauds of the profession.
I need not repeat, my young friend, how sincerely I desire your welfare. You are the comfort, the pride and the hope of your parents. They anxiously, as I know, trained you in the ways of virtue and piety; and their earnest prayers have accompanied you to the camp. You are nobly engaged in your country's service.
I have confidence that, guided by the principles taught you in your youth, sustained by the prayers of your friends, shielded by the knowledge you have of the dangers that encompass you, and humbly trusting in God, and animated by the prospect of a bright reward, you will pass uncorrupted through the temptations of a soldier's life, and return to your home, to be the support and solace of your parents, the delight of your friends, and an ornament of society.
Your very sincere WELL WISHER.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
The Cards are Calling Subtitle Explained
There are several English translations of Francois Villon’s poem, "De bonne doctrine a ceux de mauvaise vie."
Most were attempts at a somewhat literal interpretation of Villon’s 15-century French, which was made even more difficult due to his use of the criminal cant of his time.
Along came the English poet, author and critic, William Ernest Henley (August 23, 1849 – July 11, 1903), he of the poem, “Invictus.” Henley also collaborated with John S. Farmer in compiling “A Dictionary of Slang and its Analogues.” Farmer was an interesting person. His love of language resulted in books that, when listed, read like a linguaphile's theme park: Musa pedestris Three centuries of canting songs and slang rhyme; Vocabula amatoria: a French-English glossary of words, phrases, and…; A Dictionary of Slang Volume 1 A-K; A Dictionary of Slang Vol 2 L-Z; The regimental records of the British Army. A historical résumé…; Recently Recovered "Lost" Tudor plays, with some others; Merry songs and ballads prior to the year; Gammer Gurton's Needle; Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English; etc, etc,…
A rare book that chronicles the prodigious scholarship behind “A Dictionary of Slang and its Analogues” by Henley and Farmer is called, “The Correspondence of John Stephen Farmer and W. E. Henley on Their Slang Dictionary 1890-1904,” by John S. Farmer, Damian Atkinson and William Ernest Henley.
For any lover of the lore of the underworld and the criminal cant of that era (much of which is still in currency to this day, even in North America), this book is a treasure waiting to be re-discovered.
Clearly, Henley had a vast ocean of words to harvest as he approached the difficult task of re-thinking Villon’s poem. Henley’s genius was to use the criminal cant of 19th century London, thereby getting much closer, counter-intuitively, to the soul and spirit of Villon.
Again, as I posted previously, hearing the master card handler Ricky Jay speak the poem aloud in his show, “Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants” is a delight. Jay is enamored with the magic of the words and his deep and abiding passion is infectious.
I have to mention Ricky Jay and playing cards because sometime soon (after this infatuation with Villon), I do plan to get back to the main theme of this blog...
I will start with Villon’s poem in its original French, followed by the Henley translation (best read aloud for maximum enjoyment), and followed by a key that will help you to understand the criminal canting language Henley used.
"De bonne doctrine a ceux de mauvaise vie."
CAR ou soies porteur de bulles,
Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez,
Tailleur de faulx coings,
tu te brusles,
Comme ceulx qui sont eschaudez,
Traistres parjurs, de foy vuydez;
Soies larron, ravis ou pilles:
Où en va l'acquest, que cuidez?
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.
Ryme, raille, cymballe, luttes,
Comme fol, fainctif, eshontez;
Farce, broulle, joue des fleustes;
Fais, es villes et es citez,
Farces, jeux et moralitez;
Gaigne au berlanc, au glic, aux quilles.
Aussi bien va--or escoutez--
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.
De telz ordures te reculles;
Laboure, fauche champs et prez;
Sers et pense chevaulx et mulles;
S'aucunement tu n'es lettrez;
Assez auras, se prens en grez.
Mais se chanvre broyes ou tilles,
Ne tens ton labour qu'as ouvrez
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.
Ballade de Bonne Doctrine (1461)
VILLON'S STRAIGHT TIP TO ALL CROSS COVES
(Translation by William Ernest Henley. Key is below the poem)
I
1. Suppose you screeve, or go cheap-jack?
2. Or fake the broads? or fig a nag?
3. Or thimble-rig? or knap a yack?
4. Or pitch a snide? or smash a rag?
5. Suppose you duff? or nose and lag?
6. Or get the straight, and land your pot?
7. How do you melt the multy swag?
8. Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
II
1. Fiddle, or fence, or mace, or mack;
2. Or moskeneer, or flash the drag;
3. Dead-lurk a crib, or do a crack;
4. Pad with a slang, or chuck a fag;
5. Bonnet, or tout, or mump and gag;
6. Rattle the tats, or mark the spot;
7. You cannot bank a single stag:
8. Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
III
1. Suppose you try a different tack,
2. And on the square you flash your flag?
3. At penny-a-lining make your whack,
4. Or with the mummers mug and gag?
5. For nix, for nix the dibbs you bag
6. At any graft, no matter what!
7.Your merry goblins soon stravag:
8.Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
The Moral:
1.It's up-the-spout and Charley-Wag
2.With wipes and tickers and what not!
3.Until the squeezer nips your scrag,
4.Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
The Key:
Stanza I
Line 1. Screeve: forge.
Line 2. Fake the broads: cheat at cards. Fig a nag: make an old horse seem lively by stuffing a fig saturated with ginger up its backside.
Line 3. Thimble rig: old shell game, modern three-card monte.Knap a yack: steal a watch.
Line 4. Pitch a snide: pass counterfeit coin. Smash a rag: pass counterfeit bills.
Line 5. Duff: fence goods. Nose and lag: inform, "rat," collect evidence for the police.
Line 7. Melt: Spend. Multy: bloody. Swag: Goods
Line 8. Booze and the blowens cop the lot: drink and the women (debauchery, i.e. syphilis) will kill you off.
Stanza II
Line 1. Fiddle: swindle. Fence: deal in stolen goods. Mace: steal, go back on one's word. Mack: pimp.
Line 2. Moskeneer: to pawn for more than the pledge is worth. Flash the drag: wear women's clothes for an improper purpose.
Line 3. Dead-lurk a crib: house-break during the time when folks were in church. Do a crack: burglary with violence.
Line 4. Pad with a slang: join a travelling troupe. Chuck a fag: strike a blow under the chin
Line 5. Bonnet: Act as the “inside man.” Tout: solicit business or employment in an importune manner. Mump and gag: beg and talk with the intent to double-cross.
Line 6. Rattle the tats: roll the dice. Mark the spot: identify the victim of a con.
Line 7. Bank: save. Stag: piece of money.
Stanza III
Line 1. Tack: approach.
Line 2. On the square: legitimately. Flash your flag = set up a trade; or perform on the streets.
Line 3. Penny-a-lining: hack writing. Make your whack: Earn your money.
Line 4. Mummers: Christians. Mug and gag: make faces, gesticulate, preach.
Line 5. For nix: For nothing. Dibbs: Paltry amounts of money. Bag: collect.
Line 6. Graft: job, activity, trade.
Line 7. Goblins: money. Stravag: go astray, leave your pockets.
The Moral:
Line 1. Up the spout: Pawn. Charley Wag: pickpocket.
Line 2. Wipes: handkerchiefs. Tickers: watches.
Line 3. Squeezer: hangman's noose. Scrag: neck.
Most were attempts at a somewhat literal interpretation of Villon’s 15-century French, which was made even more difficult due to his use of the criminal cant of his time.
Along came the English poet, author and critic, William Ernest Henley (August 23, 1849 – July 11, 1903), he of the poem, “Invictus.” Henley also collaborated with John S. Farmer in compiling “A Dictionary of Slang and its Analogues.” Farmer was an interesting person. His love of language resulted in books that, when listed, read like a linguaphile's theme park: Musa pedestris Three centuries of canting songs and slang rhyme; Vocabula amatoria: a French-English glossary of words, phrases, and…; A Dictionary of Slang Volume 1 A-K; A Dictionary of Slang Vol 2 L-Z; The regimental records of the British Army. A historical résumé…; Recently Recovered "Lost" Tudor plays, with some others; Merry songs and ballads prior to the year; Gammer Gurton's Needle; Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English; etc, etc,…
A rare book that chronicles the prodigious scholarship behind “A Dictionary of Slang and its Analogues” by Henley and Farmer is called, “The Correspondence of John Stephen Farmer and W. E. Henley on Their Slang Dictionary 1890-1904,” by John S. Farmer, Damian Atkinson and William Ernest Henley.
For any lover of the lore of the underworld and the criminal cant of that era (much of which is still in currency to this day, even in North America), this book is a treasure waiting to be re-discovered.
Clearly, Henley had a vast ocean of words to harvest as he approached the difficult task of re-thinking Villon’s poem. Henley’s genius was to use the criminal cant of 19th century London, thereby getting much closer, counter-intuitively, to the soul and spirit of Villon.
Again, as I posted previously, hearing the master card handler Ricky Jay speak the poem aloud in his show, “Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants” is a delight. Jay is enamored with the magic of the words and his deep and abiding passion is infectious.
I have to mention Ricky Jay and playing cards because sometime soon (after this infatuation with Villon), I do plan to get back to the main theme of this blog...
I will start with Villon’s poem in its original French, followed by the Henley translation (best read aloud for maximum enjoyment), and followed by a key that will help you to understand the criminal canting language Henley used.
"De bonne doctrine a ceux de mauvaise vie."
CAR ou soies porteur de bulles,
Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez,
Tailleur de faulx coings,
tu te brusles,
Comme ceulx qui sont eschaudez,
Traistres parjurs, de foy vuydez;
Soies larron, ravis ou pilles:
Où en va l'acquest, que cuidez?
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.
Ryme, raille, cymballe, luttes,
Comme fol, fainctif, eshontez;
Farce, broulle, joue des fleustes;
Fais, es villes et es citez,
Farces, jeux et moralitez;
Gaigne au berlanc, au glic, aux quilles.
Aussi bien va--or escoutez--
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.
De telz ordures te reculles;
Laboure, fauche champs et prez;
Sers et pense chevaulx et mulles;
S'aucunement tu n'es lettrez;
Assez auras, se prens en grez.
Mais se chanvre broyes ou tilles,
Ne tens ton labour qu'as ouvrez
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.
Ballade de Bonne Doctrine (1461)
VILLON'S STRAIGHT TIP TO ALL CROSS COVES
(Translation by William Ernest Henley. Key is below the poem)
I
1. Suppose you screeve, or go cheap-jack?
2. Or fake the broads? or fig a nag?
3. Or thimble-rig? or knap a yack?
4. Or pitch a snide? or smash a rag?
5. Suppose you duff? or nose and lag?
6. Or get the straight, and land your pot?
7. How do you melt the multy swag?
8. Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
II
1. Fiddle, or fence, or mace, or mack;
2. Or moskeneer, or flash the drag;
3. Dead-lurk a crib, or do a crack;
4. Pad with a slang, or chuck a fag;
5. Bonnet, or tout, or mump and gag;
6. Rattle the tats, or mark the spot;
7. You cannot bank a single stag:
8. Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
III
1. Suppose you try a different tack,
2. And on the square you flash your flag?
3. At penny-a-lining make your whack,
4. Or with the mummers mug and gag?
5. For nix, for nix the dibbs you bag
6. At any graft, no matter what!
7.Your merry goblins soon stravag:
8.Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
The Moral:
1.It's up-the-spout and Charley-Wag
2.With wipes and tickers and what not!
3.Until the squeezer nips your scrag,
4.Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
The Key:
Stanza I
Line 1. Screeve: forge.
Line 2. Fake the broads: cheat at cards. Fig a nag: make an old horse seem lively by stuffing a fig saturated with ginger up its backside.
Line 3. Thimble rig: old shell game, modern three-card monte.Knap a yack: steal a watch.
Line 4. Pitch a snide: pass counterfeit coin. Smash a rag: pass counterfeit bills.
Line 5. Duff: fence goods. Nose and lag: inform, "rat," collect evidence for the police.
Line 7. Melt: Spend. Multy: bloody. Swag: Goods
Line 8. Booze and the blowens cop the lot: drink and the women (debauchery, i.e. syphilis) will kill you off.
Stanza II
Line 1. Fiddle: swindle. Fence: deal in stolen goods. Mace: steal, go back on one's word. Mack: pimp.
Line 2. Moskeneer: to pawn for more than the pledge is worth. Flash the drag: wear women's clothes for an improper purpose.
Line 3. Dead-lurk a crib: house-break during the time when folks were in church. Do a crack: burglary with violence.
Line 4. Pad with a slang: join a travelling troupe. Chuck a fag: strike a blow under the chin
Line 5. Bonnet: Act as the “inside man.” Tout: solicit business or employment in an importune manner. Mump and gag: beg and talk with the intent to double-cross.
Line 6. Rattle the tats: roll the dice. Mark the spot: identify the victim of a con.
Line 7. Bank: save. Stag: piece of money.
Stanza III
Line 1. Tack: approach.
Line 2. On the square: legitimately. Flash your flag = set up a trade; or perform on the streets.
Line 3. Penny-a-lining: hack writing. Make your whack: Earn your money.
Line 4. Mummers: Christians. Mug and gag: make faces, gesticulate, preach.
Line 5. For nix: For nothing. Dibbs: Paltry amounts of money. Bag: collect.
Line 6. Graft: job, activity, trade.
Line 7. Goblins: money. Stravag: go astray, leave your pockets.
The Moral:
Line 1. Up the spout: Pawn. Charley Wag: pickpocket.
Line 2. Wipes: handkerchiefs. Tickers: watches.
Line 3. Squeezer: hangman's noose. Scrag: neck.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
A wonderful piece on Villon before the "translation" of the blog subtitle
Villon - The Genius Of The Tavern
(Originally published in 1919 by Robert Lynd )
IT is to Stevenson's credit that he was rather sorry that he had ever written his essay on Villon. He explains that this was due to the fact that he " regarded Villon as a bad fellow," but one likes to think that his conscience was also a little troubled because through lack of sympathy he had failed to paint a just portrait of a man of genius. Villon was a bad fellow enough in all conscience. He was not so bad, however, as Stevenson made him out. He was, no doubt, a thief ; he had killed a man ; and it may even be ,(if we are to read autobiography into one of the most shocking portions of the Grand Testament) that he lived for a time on the earnings of " la grosse Margot." But, for all this, he was not the utterly vile person that Stevenson believed. His poetry is not mere whining and whimpering of genius which occasionally changes its mood and sticks its fingers to its nose. It is rather the confession of a man who had wandered over the " crooked hills of delicious pleasure," and had arrived in rags and filth in the famous city of Hell. It is a map of disaster and a chronicle of lost souls. Swinburne defined the genius of Villon more imaginatively than Stevenson when he addressed him in a paradoxical line as :
Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn,
and spoke of his " poor, perfect voice,"
That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers, Like joy-bells crossed with death-bells in our ears.
No man who has ever written has so cunningly mingled joy-bells and death-bells in his music. Here is a realism of damned souls—damned in their merry sins—at which the writer of Ecclesiastes merely seems to hint like a detached philosopher. Villon may never have achieved the last faith of the penitent thief. But he was a penitent thief at least in his disillusion. If he continues to sing Carpe diem when at the age of thirty he is already an old, diseased man, he sings it almost with a sneer of hatred. It is from the lips of a grinning death's-head—not of a jovial roysterer, as Henley makes it seem in his slang translation—that the Ballade de bonne Doctrine à ceux de mauvaise Vie falls, with its refrain of destiny :
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.
And the Ballade de la Belle Heaulmière aux Filles de Joie, in which Age counsels Youth to take its pleasure and its fee before the evil days come, expresses no more joy of living than the dismallest memento mori.
One must admit, of course, that the obsession .of vice is strong in Villon's work. In this he is prophetic of much of the greatest French literature of the nineteenth century. He had consorted with criminals beyond most poets. It is not only that he indulged in the sins of the flesh. It is difficult to imagine that there exists any sin of which he and his companions were not capable. He was apparently a member of the famous band of thieves called the Coquillards, the sign of which was a cockle-shell in the cap, " which was the sign of the Pilgrim." " It was a large business," Mr. Stacpoole says of this organization in his popular life of Villon, " with as many departments as a New York store, and, to extend the simile, its chief aim and object was to make money. Coining, burglary, highway robbery, selling indulgences and false jewellery, card-sharping, and dice-playing with loaded dice, were chief among industries," Mr. Stacpoole goes on to tone down this catalogue of iniquity with the explanation that the Coquillards were, after all, not nearly such villains as our contemporary milk-adulterators and sweaters of women. He is inclined to think they may have been good fellows, like Robin Hood and his men or the gentlemen of the road in a later century. This may well be, but a gang of Robin Hoods, infesting a hundred taverns in the town and quarrelling in the streets over loose women, is dangerous company for an impressionable young man who had never been taught the Shorter Catechism. Paris, even in the twentieth century, is alleged to be a city of temptation. Paris, in the fifteenth century, must have been as tumultuous with the seven deadly sins as the world before the Flood. Joan of Arc had been burned in the year in which Villon was born, but her death had not 'made saints of the students of Paris. Living more or less beyond the reach of the civil law, they made a duty of riot, and counted insolence and wine to themselves for righteousness. Villon, we are reminded, had good influences in his life, which might have been expected to moderate the appeal of wildness and folly. He had his dear, illiterate mother, for whom, and at whose request, he wrote that unexpected ballade of prayer to the Mother of God, He had, too, that good man who adopted him, Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint Benoist---
mon plus que père Maistre Guillaume de Villon,Qui m'a esté plus doux que mère ;
and who gave him the name that he has made immortal. That he was not altogether unresponsive to these good influences is shown by his references to them in his Grand Testament, though Stevenson was inclined to read into the lines on Guillaume the most infernal kind of mockery and derision. One of Villon's bequests to the old man, it will be remembered, was the Rommant du Pet au Diable, which Stevenson refers to again and again as an " improper romance." Mr. Stacpoole has done a service to English readers interested in Villon by showing that the Rommant was nothing of the sort, but was a little epic—possibly witty enough—on a notorious conflict between the students and civilians of Paris. One may accept the vindication of Villon's goodness of heart, however, without falling in at all points with Mr. Stacpoole's tendency to justify his hero. When, for instance, in the account of Villon's only known act of homicide, the fact that after he had stabbed the priest, Sermoise, he crushed in his head with a stone, is used to prove that he must have been acting on the defensive, because, " since the earliest times, the stone is the weapon used by man to repel attack—chiefly the attack of wolves and dogs "—one cannot quite repress a sceptical smile. I admit that, in the absence of evidence, we have no right to accuse Villon of deliberate murder. But it is the absence of evidence that acquits him, not the fact that he killed his victim with a stone as well as a dagger. Nor does it seem to me quite fair to blame, as Mr. Stacpoole does by implication, the cold and beautiful Katherine de Vaucelles for Villon's moral downfall. Katherine de Vaucelles—what a poem her very name is I--may,, for all one knows, have had the best of reasons for sending her bully to beat the poet " like dirty linen on the washing-board." We do not know, and it is better to leave the matter a mystery than to sentimentalize like Mr. Stacpoole :---
Had he come across just now one of those creative women, one of those women who by the alchemy that lives alone in love can bend a man's character, even though the bending had been ever so little, she might have saved him from the catastrophe towards which he was moving, and which took place in the following December.
All we know is that the lady of miracles did not arrive, and that in her absence Villon and a number of companion gallows-birds occupied the dark of one winter's night in robbing the chapel of the Collège de Navarre. This was in 1456, and not long afterwards Villon wrote his Petit Testament, and skipped from Paris.
We know little of his wanderings in the next five years, nor do we know whether the greater part of them was spent in crimes or in reputable idleness. Mr. Stacpoole writes a chapter on his visit to, Charles of Orléans, but there are few facts for a biographer to go upon during this period. Nothing with a date happened to Villon till the summer of 1461, when Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orléans, for some cause or other, real or imaginary, had him cast into a pit so deep that he " could not even see the lightning of a thunderstorm," and kept him there for three months with " neither stool .to sit nor bed to lie on, 'and nothing to eat but bits of bread flung down to him by his gaolers." Here, during his three months' imprisonment in the pit, he experienced all that bitterness of life which makes his Grand Testament a " De Profundis " without parallel in scapegrace literature. Here, we may imagine with Mr. Stacpoole, his soul grew in the grace of suffering, and the death-bells began to bring a solemn music among the joy-bells of his earlier follies. He is henceforth the companion of lost souls. He is the most melancholy of cynics in the kingdom of death. He has ever before him the vision of men hanging on gibbets. He has all the hatreds of a man tortured and haunted and old.
Not that he ever entirely resigns his carnality. His only complaint against the flesh is that it perishes like the snows of last year. But to recognize even this is to have begun to have a just view of life. He knows that in the tavern is to be found no continuing city. He becomes the servant of truth and beauty as he writes the most revealing and tragic satires on the population of the tavern in the world's literature. What more horrible portrait exists in poetry than that of la belle Heaulmière " grown old, as she contemplates her beauty turned to hideousness—her once fair limbs become" speckled like sausages "? " La Grosse Margot " alone is more horrible, and her bully utters his and her doom in the last three awful lines of the ballade which links her name with Villon's: Ordure amons, ordure nous affuytNous deffuyons honneur, il nous deffuyt, En ce bordeau, où tenons nostre estat.
But there is more than the truth of ugliness in these amazing ballads of which the Grand Testament is full.
Villon was by nature a worshipper of beauty. The lament over the defeat of his dream of fair lords and ladies by the reality of a withered and dissatisfying world runs like a torment through his verse. No one has ever celebrated the inevitable passing of loveliness in lovelier verse than Villon has done in the Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis. I have heard it maintained that Rossetti has translated the radiant beauty of this ballade into his Ballad of Dead Ladies. I 'cannot agree. Even his beautiful translation of the refrain,
But where are the snows of yesteryear,
seems to me to injure simplicity with an ornament, and to turn natural into artificial music. Compare the open ing lines in the original and in the translation, and you will see the difference between the sincere expression of a vision and the beautiful writing of an exercise.
Here is Villon's beginning :
Dictes-moy où, n'en quel pays, Est Flora, la belle Romaine ? Archipiade, ne Thais,Qui fut sa cousine germaine ?
And here is Rossetti's jaunty English :
Tell me now in what hidden way isLady Flora, the lovely Roman ? Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thaïs, Neither of them the fairer woman ?
One sees how Rossetti is inclined to romanticize that which is already romantic beyond one's dreams in its naked and golden simplicity. I would not quarrel with Rossetti's version, however, if it had not been often put forward as an example of a translation which was equal to the original. It is certainly a wonderful version if we compare it with most of those that have been made from Villon. Mr. Stacpoole's, I fear, have no rivulets of music running through them to make up for their want of prose exactitude. Admittedly, however, translation of Villon is difficult. Some of his most beautiful poems are simple as catalogues of names, and the secret of their beauty is a secret elusive as a fragrance borne on the wind. Mr. Stacpoole may be congratulated on his courage in undertaking an impossible task—a task, moreover, in which he challenges comparison with Rossetti, Swinburne, and Andrew Lang. His book, how-ever, is meant for the general public rather than for poets and scholars—at least, for that intelligent portion of the general public which is interested in literature without being over-critical. For its purpose it may be recommended as an interesting, picturesque, and judicious book. The Villon of Stevenson is little better than a criminal monkey of genius. The Villon of Mr. Stacpoole is at least the makings of a man.
(Originally published in 1919 by Robert Lynd )
IT is to Stevenson's credit that he was rather sorry that he had ever written his essay on Villon. He explains that this was due to the fact that he " regarded Villon as a bad fellow," but one likes to think that his conscience was also a little troubled because through lack of sympathy he had failed to paint a just portrait of a man of genius. Villon was a bad fellow enough in all conscience. He was not so bad, however, as Stevenson made him out. He was, no doubt, a thief ; he had killed a man ; and it may even be ,(if we are to read autobiography into one of the most shocking portions of the Grand Testament) that he lived for a time on the earnings of " la grosse Margot." But, for all this, he was not the utterly vile person that Stevenson believed. His poetry is not mere whining and whimpering of genius which occasionally changes its mood and sticks its fingers to its nose. It is rather the confession of a man who had wandered over the " crooked hills of delicious pleasure," and had arrived in rags and filth in the famous city of Hell. It is a map of disaster and a chronicle of lost souls. Swinburne defined the genius of Villon more imaginatively than Stevenson when he addressed him in a paradoxical line as :
Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn,
and spoke of his " poor, perfect voice,"
That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers, Like joy-bells crossed with death-bells in our ears.
No man who has ever written has so cunningly mingled joy-bells and death-bells in his music. Here is a realism of damned souls—damned in their merry sins—at which the writer of Ecclesiastes merely seems to hint like a detached philosopher. Villon may never have achieved the last faith of the penitent thief. But he was a penitent thief at least in his disillusion. If he continues to sing Carpe diem when at the age of thirty he is already an old, diseased man, he sings it almost with a sneer of hatred. It is from the lips of a grinning death's-head—not of a jovial roysterer, as Henley makes it seem in his slang translation—that the Ballade de bonne Doctrine à ceux de mauvaise Vie falls, with its refrain of destiny :
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.
And the Ballade de la Belle Heaulmière aux Filles de Joie, in which Age counsels Youth to take its pleasure and its fee before the evil days come, expresses no more joy of living than the dismallest memento mori.
One must admit, of course, that the obsession .of vice is strong in Villon's work. In this he is prophetic of much of the greatest French literature of the nineteenth century. He had consorted with criminals beyond most poets. It is not only that he indulged in the sins of the flesh. It is difficult to imagine that there exists any sin of which he and his companions were not capable. He was apparently a member of the famous band of thieves called the Coquillards, the sign of which was a cockle-shell in the cap, " which was the sign of the Pilgrim." " It was a large business," Mr. Stacpoole says of this organization in his popular life of Villon, " with as many departments as a New York store, and, to extend the simile, its chief aim and object was to make money. Coining, burglary, highway robbery, selling indulgences and false jewellery, card-sharping, and dice-playing with loaded dice, were chief among industries," Mr. Stacpoole goes on to tone down this catalogue of iniquity with the explanation that the Coquillards were, after all, not nearly such villains as our contemporary milk-adulterators and sweaters of women. He is inclined to think they may have been good fellows, like Robin Hood and his men or the gentlemen of the road in a later century. This may well be, but a gang of Robin Hoods, infesting a hundred taverns in the town and quarrelling in the streets over loose women, is dangerous company for an impressionable young man who had never been taught the Shorter Catechism. Paris, even in the twentieth century, is alleged to be a city of temptation. Paris, in the fifteenth century, must have been as tumultuous with the seven deadly sins as the world before the Flood. Joan of Arc had been burned in the year in which Villon was born, but her death had not 'made saints of the students of Paris. Living more or less beyond the reach of the civil law, they made a duty of riot, and counted insolence and wine to themselves for righteousness. Villon, we are reminded, had good influences in his life, which might have been expected to moderate the appeal of wildness and folly. He had his dear, illiterate mother, for whom, and at whose request, he wrote that unexpected ballade of prayer to the Mother of God, He had, too, that good man who adopted him, Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint Benoist---
mon plus que père Maistre Guillaume de Villon,Qui m'a esté plus doux que mère ;
and who gave him the name that he has made immortal. That he was not altogether unresponsive to these good influences is shown by his references to them in his Grand Testament, though Stevenson was inclined to read into the lines on Guillaume the most infernal kind of mockery and derision. One of Villon's bequests to the old man, it will be remembered, was the Rommant du Pet au Diable, which Stevenson refers to again and again as an " improper romance." Mr. Stacpoole has done a service to English readers interested in Villon by showing that the Rommant was nothing of the sort, but was a little epic—possibly witty enough—on a notorious conflict between the students and civilians of Paris. One may accept the vindication of Villon's goodness of heart, however, without falling in at all points with Mr. Stacpoole's tendency to justify his hero. When, for instance, in the account of Villon's only known act of homicide, the fact that after he had stabbed the priest, Sermoise, he crushed in his head with a stone, is used to prove that he must have been acting on the defensive, because, " since the earliest times, the stone is the weapon used by man to repel attack—chiefly the attack of wolves and dogs "—one cannot quite repress a sceptical smile. I admit that, in the absence of evidence, we have no right to accuse Villon of deliberate murder. But it is the absence of evidence that acquits him, not the fact that he killed his victim with a stone as well as a dagger. Nor does it seem to me quite fair to blame, as Mr. Stacpoole does by implication, the cold and beautiful Katherine de Vaucelles for Villon's moral downfall. Katherine de Vaucelles—what a poem her very name is I--may,, for all one knows, have had the best of reasons for sending her bully to beat the poet " like dirty linen on the washing-board." We do not know, and it is better to leave the matter a mystery than to sentimentalize like Mr. Stacpoole :---
Had he come across just now one of those creative women, one of those women who by the alchemy that lives alone in love can bend a man's character, even though the bending had been ever so little, she might have saved him from the catastrophe towards which he was moving, and which took place in the following December.
All we know is that the lady of miracles did not arrive, and that in her absence Villon and a number of companion gallows-birds occupied the dark of one winter's night in robbing the chapel of the Collège de Navarre. This was in 1456, and not long afterwards Villon wrote his Petit Testament, and skipped from Paris.
We know little of his wanderings in the next five years, nor do we know whether the greater part of them was spent in crimes or in reputable idleness. Mr. Stacpoole writes a chapter on his visit to, Charles of Orléans, but there are few facts for a biographer to go upon during this period. Nothing with a date happened to Villon till the summer of 1461, when Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orléans, for some cause or other, real or imaginary, had him cast into a pit so deep that he " could not even see the lightning of a thunderstorm," and kept him there for three months with " neither stool .to sit nor bed to lie on, 'and nothing to eat but bits of bread flung down to him by his gaolers." Here, during his three months' imprisonment in the pit, he experienced all that bitterness of life which makes his Grand Testament a " De Profundis " without parallel in scapegrace literature. Here, we may imagine with Mr. Stacpoole, his soul grew in the grace of suffering, and the death-bells began to bring a solemn music among the joy-bells of his earlier follies. He is henceforth the companion of lost souls. He is the most melancholy of cynics in the kingdom of death. He has ever before him the vision of men hanging on gibbets. He has all the hatreds of a man tortured and haunted and old.
Not that he ever entirely resigns his carnality. His only complaint against the flesh is that it perishes like the snows of last year. But to recognize even this is to have begun to have a just view of life. He knows that in the tavern is to be found no continuing city. He becomes the servant of truth and beauty as he writes the most revealing and tragic satires on the population of the tavern in the world's literature. What more horrible portrait exists in poetry than that of la belle Heaulmière " grown old, as she contemplates her beauty turned to hideousness—her once fair limbs become" speckled like sausages "? " La Grosse Margot " alone is more horrible, and her bully utters his and her doom in the last three awful lines of the ballade which links her name with Villon's: Ordure amons, ordure nous affuytNous deffuyons honneur, il nous deffuyt, En ce bordeau, où tenons nostre estat.
But there is more than the truth of ugliness in these amazing ballads of which the Grand Testament is full.
Villon was by nature a worshipper of beauty. The lament over the defeat of his dream of fair lords and ladies by the reality of a withered and dissatisfying world runs like a torment through his verse. No one has ever celebrated the inevitable passing of loveliness in lovelier verse than Villon has done in the Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis. I have heard it maintained that Rossetti has translated the radiant beauty of this ballade into his Ballad of Dead Ladies. I 'cannot agree. Even his beautiful translation of the refrain,
But where are the snows of yesteryear,
seems to me to injure simplicity with an ornament, and to turn natural into artificial music. Compare the open ing lines in the original and in the translation, and you will see the difference between the sincere expression of a vision and the beautiful writing of an exercise.
Here is Villon's beginning :
Dictes-moy où, n'en quel pays, Est Flora, la belle Romaine ? Archipiade, ne Thais,Qui fut sa cousine germaine ?
And here is Rossetti's jaunty English :
Tell me now in what hidden way isLady Flora, the lovely Roman ? Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thaïs, Neither of them the fairer woman ?
One sees how Rossetti is inclined to romanticize that which is already romantic beyond one's dreams in its naked and golden simplicity. I would not quarrel with Rossetti's version, however, if it had not been often put forward as an example of a translation which was equal to the original. It is certainly a wonderful version if we compare it with most of those that have been made from Villon. Mr. Stacpoole's, I fear, have no rivulets of music running through them to make up for their want of prose exactitude. Admittedly, however, translation of Villon is difficult. Some of his most beautiful poems are simple as catalogues of names, and the secret of their beauty is a secret elusive as a fragrance borne on the wind. Mr. Stacpoole may be congratulated on his courage in undertaking an impossible task—a task, moreover, in which he challenges comparison with Rossetti, Swinburne, and Andrew Lang. His book, how-ever, is meant for the general public rather than for poets and scholars—at least, for that intelligent portion of the general public which is interested in literature without being over-critical. For its purpose it may be recommended as an interesting, picturesque, and judicious book. The Villon of Stevenson is little better than a criminal monkey of genius. The Villon of Mr. Stacpoole is at least the makings of a man.
More Villon before an exposition on the blog subtitle
Ballade
I know flies in milk
I know the man by his clothes
I know fair weather from foul
I know the apple by the tree
I know the tree when I see the sap
I know when all is one
I know who labors and who loafs
I know everything but myself.
I know the coat by the collar
I know the monk by the cowl
I know the master by the servant
I know the nun by the veil
I know when a hustler rattles on
I know fools raised on whipped cream
I know the wine by the barrel
I know everything but myself.
I know the horse and the mule
I know their loads and their limits
I know Beatrice and Belle
I know the beads that count and add
I know nightmare and sleep
I know the Bohemians' error
I know the power of Rome
I know everything but myself.
Prince, I know all things
I know the rosy-cheeked and the pale
I know death who devours all
I know everything but myself.
François Villon
(Trans. by Galway Kinnell)
I know flies in milk
I know the man by his clothes
I know fair weather from foul
I know the apple by the tree
I know the tree when I see the sap
I know when all is one
I know who labors and who loafs
I know everything but myself.
I know the coat by the collar
I know the monk by the cowl
I know the master by the servant
I know the nun by the veil
I know when a hustler rattles on
I know fools raised on whipped cream
I know the wine by the barrel
I know everything but myself.
I know the horse and the mule
I know their loads and their limits
I know Beatrice and Belle
I know the beads that count and add
I know nightmare and sleep
I know the Bohemians' error
I know the power of Rome
I know everything but myself.
Prince, I know all things
I know the rosy-cheeked and the pale
I know death who devours all
I know everything but myself.
François Villon
(Trans. by Galway Kinnell)
Ricky Jay, Francois Villon and the Magic of Words
The (lengthy) sub-title for this blog is best heard in the HBO special called “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants.”
Ricky Jay is a master card handler who relishes the underworld of the card mechanic, as well as the complete history of “artifice, ruse and subterfuge” in all of its manifold forms.
Jay’s “52 Assistants” show has been revived a few times since it aired on HBO – only a lucky few have seen it live. His gambling expose is nothing short of mesmerizing.
At one point in the show, Ricky Jay recites the Villon poem with wicked relish and provides a bit of historical context.
For lovers of language, it is a genuine pleasure to watch and hear Ricky Jay perform.
If you know about Ricky Jay, nothing more needs to be said. If not, watch some of his videos on YouTube.
He also acts. He was in David Mamet’s first cut as a film director (“House of Games”) – but I will be posting about that film later...Meanwhile, I am working on a detailed explanation about the poem quoted in my blog header.
Ricky Jay is a master card handler who relishes the underworld of the card mechanic, as well as the complete history of “artifice, ruse and subterfuge” in all of its manifold forms.
Jay’s “52 Assistants” show has been revived a few times since it aired on HBO – only a lucky few have seen it live. His gambling expose is nothing short of mesmerizing.
At one point in the show, Ricky Jay recites the Villon poem with wicked relish and provides a bit of historical context.
For lovers of language, it is a genuine pleasure to watch and hear Ricky Jay perform.
If you know about Ricky Jay, nothing more needs to be said. If not, watch some of his videos on YouTube.
He also acts. He was in David Mamet’s first cut as a film director (“House of Games”) – but I will be posting about that film later...Meanwhile, I am working on a detailed explanation about the poem quoted in my blog header.
The Magician and the Cardsharp
Dai Vernon (June 11, 1894 – August 21, 1992) was a Canadian magician. His expert sleight-of-hand technique and extensive knowledge garnered him universal respect among fellow magicians and the nickname of The Professor.
He was born in Ottawa as David Frederick Wingfield Verner.The Professor and the still vexing mystery of “The Expert at the Card Table,” by the so-called “S. W. Erdnase” is one of the great stories in the world of playing cards. Erdnase’s book was originally sub-titled, “Artifice, Ruse and Subterfuge at the Card Table: A Treatise on the Science and Art of Manipulating Cards”.
“Artifice, Ruse and Subterfuge at the Card Table”(!)
The magic of language is the most potent magic of all…
For further reading, I recommend the incredible book, “The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America's Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist”, by Karl Johnson. The book is about Vernon’s quest to find a quasi-mythical card mechanic who could allegedly deal imperceptibly from the middle of the deck in a live game of poker.
But Johnson goes far beyond that obsessive quest and in the process, he has written a book for the ages.
I will not give any more away. Buy the book!
He was born in Ottawa as David Frederick Wingfield Verner.The Professor and the still vexing mystery of “The Expert at the Card Table,” by the so-called “S. W. Erdnase” is one of the great stories in the world of playing cards. Erdnase’s book was originally sub-titled, “Artifice, Ruse and Subterfuge at the Card Table: A Treatise on the Science and Art of Manipulating Cards”.
“Artifice, Ruse and Subterfuge at the Card Table”(!)
The magic of language is the most potent magic of all…
For further reading, I recommend the incredible book, “The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America's Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist”, by Karl Johnson. The book is about Vernon’s quest to find a quasi-mythical card mechanic who could allegedly deal imperceptibly from the middle of the deck in a live game of poker.
But Johnson goes far beyond that obsessive quest and in the process, he has written a book for the ages.
I will not give any more away. Buy the book!
Shade is a loving cinematic paean to the lore and lure of playing cards
In 2003, film director Damian Nieman created a movie called “Shade.”
The following trivia bits are taken from the IMDB website.
I hope this whets your appetite to see the movie:
-Charlie Miller, Max Malini, Dai Vernon/"The Professor", Larry Jennings, Nate Leipzig and Jacob Daley are all famous sleight-of-hand magicians. In fact, nearly every major male character in the film is named for a sleight-of-hand magician.
-The hands seen performing card tricks in the beginning of the film belong to writer/director Damian Nieman, R. Paul Wilson, Jason England, and Earl Nelson, all card magicians. Nieman also had Earl Nelson and R. Paul Wilson teach Sylvester Stallone and Stuart Townsend how to perform their card tricks for the film.
-Bo Hopkins' character is named John Scarne. John Scarne was also a famous sleight of hand artist during the mid-20th Century. He was best known for exposing crooked gambling to the public. In The Sting (1973) he doubles for Paul Newman's hands.
-In the beginning of the movie, you see a lot of card cheating devices that have been used throughout the 19th and 20th Century. Among them is the Kepplinger holdout device which was the most popular card cheating device used.
-Throughout the movie you see Sylvester Stallone's character putting oil on his hands from time to time. This is done by many card magicians (not just cardsharps) to keep the hands soft so that you can manipulate the cards easier.
-All of the playing cards used are manufactured by the United States Playing Card Company. The brands shown are Aristocrat (very hard to come by), Bee, Bicycle, and Tally-Ho (which is primarily available in the New York City/Long Island area).
-The book shown throughout the movie, "The Expert at the Card Table" by S.W. Erdnase, is known as the "Cardman's Bible". Originally published in 1902 for cheating purposes, it is still considered the best book on card manipulation.
-While all of the card tricks shown are real, not all of the techniques are described and take a while to master, but all of the actors did their own card manipulations for this movie.
The following trivia bits are taken from the IMDB website.
I hope this whets your appetite to see the movie:
-Charlie Miller, Max Malini, Dai Vernon/"The Professor", Larry Jennings, Nate Leipzig and Jacob Daley are all famous sleight-of-hand magicians. In fact, nearly every major male character in the film is named for a sleight-of-hand magician.
-The hands seen performing card tricks in the beginning of the film belong to writer/director Damian Nieman, R. Paul Wilson, Jason England, and Earl Nelson, all card magicians. Nieman also had Earl Nelson and R. Paul Wilson teach Sylvester Stallone and Stuart Townsend how to perform their card tricks for the film.
-Bo Hopkins' character is named John Scarne. John Scarne was also a famous sleight of hand artist during the mid-20th Century. He was best known for exposing crooked gambling to the public. In The Sting (1973) he doubles for Paul Newman's hands.
-In the beginning of the movie, you see a lot of card cheating devices that have been used throughout the 19th and 20th Century. Among them is the Kepplinger holdout device which was the most popular card cheating device used.
-Throughout the movie you see Sylvester Stallone's character putting oil on his hands from time to time. This is done by many card magicians (not just cardsharps) to keep the hands soft so that you can manipulate the cards easier.
-All of the playing cards used are manufactured by the United States Playing Card Company. The brands shown are Aristocrat (very hard to come by), Bee, Bicycle, and Tally-Ho (which is primarily available in the New York City/Long Island area).
-The book shown throughout the movie, "The Expert at the Card Table" by S.W. Erdnase, is known as the "Cardman's Bible". Originally published in 1902 for cheating purposes, it is still considered the best book on card manipulation.
-While all of the card tricks shown are real, not all of the techniques are described and take a while to master, but all of the actors did their own card manipulations for this movie.
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