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Posts Tagged ‘Doug Matus’—

Walking LA: Chinatown

This is part of a series of literary meditations on that rare urban pastime of exploring Los Angeles on foot.

Ethnic neighborhoods are as American as apple pie–or pad thai, chop suey, or tacos–and Los Angeles’s Chinatown is a prime example of this. A conflation of demolished old and manufactured new, Italian and Chinese immigrant cultures and histories, traditional recipes and innovative cuisine, cryptic apothecaries and contemporary art galleries, Chinatown is not only a quintessential American urban exercise in contrasts, but a classic example of the rich, complicated, and oft-contradictory fallout of reinvention that is Los Angeles.

L.A. is a beautiful, lush city, but it was not always like this; one has to remember that most of the flora, even the palm trees, were imported, and the City of Angels is as much an artificial production as any Hollywood blockbuster. Without a water redirection program that is truly gargantuan in its scope and scale—not to mention controversial–Los Angeles as we know it would simply not exist. Leveled in 1939 to make room for the construction of Union Station, the original Chinatown, which was established in the 1880s, was the victim of a similar lust for development. Chinese residents were resettled and the development of “New Chinatown” emphasized a kitschy adherence to stereotypical tourist expectations. In a sense, New Chinatown was just another Hollywood set, constructed around a large, “authentic” Central Plaza complete with Chinese style palaces and tiny side streets with names like “Gin Ling Way” and “Bamboo Lane.”

So it’s no accident that Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic film about the political intrigue around L.A. water rights and land distribution—disputes that grew more and more contentious as the metropolis bloomed in its desert confines—was set in and titled, well, Chinatown. It’s hard to say whether Polanski’s immortalized Chinatown’s neo-noir reputation or vice versa.  The historical reasons for Chinatown’s association with noir are twofold: Angelenos, who were raised on tales of “the exotic Orient” and Charlie Chan movies, flocked to the neighborhood for a taste of folkloric intrigue and mystique; secondly, the spectral presence of an entrenched local Italian mafia created atmospheric undercurrent of intrigue for decades.  The most obvious remnant of the old Italian stamp on the neighborhood is the famous Little Joe’s Italian American restaurant, which stands at the corner of Broadway and College. Though currently shuttered, the restaurant was a local fixture for over seventy-six years.  It is fitting that Little Joe’s stands at the north end of Chinatown, just a few blocks away from the official entrance: a massive steelwork archway that features two dueling Chinese dragons, complete with fog emitters for a touch of ‘authenticity.’

Chinatown extends for several blocks in either direction, but College Street is the principal thoroughfare and main attraction. On weekends, Chinatown is crawling with tourists, to the extent that one must weigh the benefits of a right turn against the likely demolition of several ambling, clueless, photo-snappers. On Saturdays it becomes clear why the New Chinatown is the way it is: it’s a theme park. The cheap souvenir shops do steady business in machine manufactured buddhas, cheap paper fans, and other claptrap.

The most striking aspects of the Chinatown experience are the smells. It seems like every other storefront is a cookery of some sort, most of which proudly display their products in the open air or behind a storefront window. Whole Cantonese ducks roll on spits, bronzed and perfect, dripping juices like the cumulative attention of so many hungry eyes makes them sweat from nervousness. To find the best dim sum, one has to venture into one of the small open-air malls, and follow the nostrils past electronics and toys stores, insurance agencies and salons. The street signs in Chinatown are all bilingual, many of the store signs are not, and menus are often the source of hilarious mistranslations. Ever been curious to try “human pickles?” Me neither. Another item worth investigation is one of the large tea and herb vendors, like P.C.T. Ginseng and Herbs. The casual customer will become overwhelmed by the sheer variety of herbs, medicines, and victuals on offer here, not to mention the creativity of the hypochondriac element displayed through the proliferation of so many cures.

But let’s be honest. Dim sum and ducks are all fine and good, as are authentic herb stores, but what keeps an individual pounding the same sidewalks over again, after an initial cursory exploration, is the presence of unique and interesting bars. Chinatown’s Mountain Bar more than fits the bill. Part of its charm is its inscrutability. The posted hours are 6pm-2am, but they may as well be “whenever-whenever.” One must show up on faith, and if the stars are aligned, the doors of the Mountain Bar will open. Located in the Central Plaza, there is no sign, but it is strangely hard to miss. Sandwiched between two atrocious souvenir shops, its charm beams forth unimpeded.

The Mountain Bar is blessed with a striking interior. Chinese themed decor and embellishments are illuminated in soft red light, such that the late drinker feels he/she has descended into the heart of the world’s depravity. Bartenders and fellow patrons take on a sinister air in the shadowy, Tartarusan splendor of the Mountain Bar, and one almost expects to see Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway hunched toward each other in a corner booth. The Mountain Bar also hosts periodic literary readings, which is another mark in its favor; it is a typical destination for locals newly freed from the confines of a gallery opening, of which Chinatown hosts dozens in any given month.

Contemporary art galleries abound in the small streets around Central Plaza, and are a source of much of the nightlife in and around the area. I’m not entirely sure how “Chinese” it all is, but it’s nice nonetheless. In a sense, Chinatown could stand as a microcosm for Los Angeles, that glorious epitome of all contradictions. But that might be over thinking it; it’s best probably to settle in over a pint at the Mountain Bar and forget all about it; after all, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

Miller Walks

millerwalks.com

Cool in general and of particular interest to Henry Miller fans, this site uses Google Maps to chart out Henry Miller’s adventures, from his ramblings in Clichy to Paris to New York, and everywhere in between. Google’s street-view feature allows you to zoom in and take a contemporary stroll through Miller’s old stomping grounds. The site is also updated with academic tidbits, essays, and archival marginalia about Miller and his coterie.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

Walking LA

This is the first in a series of literary meditations on that rare urban pastime of exploring Los Angeles on foot.

L.A. has a reputation as a driver’s city.  I know this, because I’ve read it described elsewhere, endlessly, in peoples’ reflections on the place; and also, because of my first experience of L.A., which came through an old girlfriend who once laughed in my face when I asked her if there were any cool bars or coffee shops within ‘walking distance’ of her house. There are certain things that contribute to L.A.’s demarcation in this regard. First of all, the place is huge; it’s an official “mega-city,” with the metropolitan area comprising almost 500 square miles and containing nearly 15 million souls. Whether you were born and raised in Watts or the OC, chances are that, when asked in polite conversation where you’re from, you’ll respond “L.A.” But who would be willing to hoof the distance between these two areas? Public transport is insufficient. As a new transplant, I’ve seen more shuttered subway stops than functioning ones, and the prospect of navigating a bus system in a place where single streets can stretch for 24 miles (Sunset Blvd.), or the famous highway system regularly suffers the daily glut of seven million cars, leaves me anxious and uninspired. Public transport, in order to be successful, has to be fast and easy. In L.A., it is neither of these, which leaves most residents with no option but to hop behind the wheel, and add their presence to the communal cluster of the 110, 5, 10, or 101.

In reality, L.A. is an imminently walkable city, at least within the neighborhood regions that comprise it. Los Angeles is a city, of course, and an immensely large one; but it is also a conglomerate of individual communities, many of which feel like autonomous regions and have much to offer the foot-bound voyager. So how do we find our feet in this great mecca of urban development? Easy. By putting our feet on the ground, and breaking the city down into the neighborhood elements that comprise its body and soul. There’s a lot of history here, and for such a vehicular city, a vibrant street culture, with food vendors, pedestrians, small storefronts, and a rich visual texture of beautiful buildings, graffiti, flora, and vistas to reward the urban spelunker. In this series of essays I will explore the practice of walking L.A., a project that I hope will endear me more to this strange place that inspires such intense reactions of love and hate. A secondary goal will be to root out the variegated strands of literary culture persistent here at the end of our continent. As Henry Miller stated, great literature is born of the streets; yet Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world, has never possessed in the popular imagination a literary heritage comparable to, say, New York. Of course, as with everything here, appearances are deceiving. The great writers of Los Angeles – Chandler, Fante, Bukowski – have all celebrated the city in microcosm, and to read their writings without an awareness of place is to miss half the point. Los Angeles is beautiful and complex, and bears the attention of prolonged study. This fact was made apparent to me continually in the course of my first walk, which centered around the city’s historic Pueblo center.

It was a fantastically beautiful day. This is not strange, noting the locale, but worth mention due to the effervescence the sunshine extracts from the clean white lines of the downtown architecture, interspersed with the oases of public gardens and parks. Los Angeles is a fascinating city architecturally. In the past few decades, attention has been drawn to the fabrication of monolithic wonders, like the Frank Gehry designed Disney Concert Hall. As a city of spectacle, though, L.A. has always been the sight of showy building accomplishment, from the stately halls of public administration to the boutique wonders of homes in the hills. At the center of it all is one of its true stone wonders: Union Station, a New Mission monolith built to much fanfare in 1930 that continues to provide the beginning and end to many West Coast experiences.

If Los Angeles is the Paris of the Americas (and why not?), then Union Station is its Gare Saint-Lazare. This beauteous terminal has been amply represented in cinema and literature, and can serve as a useful representation of the city it serves. Union Station would seem intimidating. After all, it is the downtown transportation hub that links a massive city to its equally massive airport, LAX. Union Station is also an Amtrak and bus terminal, with direct service up and down the West Coast, and east to Texas. It is not intimidating, however; neither its majestic mission facade, rising next to the similarly designed USPS Terminal Annex, nor its generous interior layout. I parked my motorcycle across the street (one must, of course, drive to walk here), entered through the front doors, and was immediately greeted with a splendor of space: a direct line, defined in polished oak and vaulted ceilings, from the curb, straight through the waiting area, to the terminals and bus station. To the left of the entryway, barred to foot-traffic but eminently viewable, is the old ticket-hall, a huge room with a mighty row of art-deco counters, polished marble floors, and paneled-wood ceilings. Its grandiosity and enforced barrenness inspired thoughts of tragic, sudden departures, a teary movie heroine in shades of celluloid buying the first ticket to nowhere, with everyone wearing hats and smoking cigarettes. Opposite this is a nice-looking bar (too early in the day for me to sample, but I’m sure a welcome retreat for weary travelers) and a breezeway that leads to a garden and shuttered restaurant. The gardens that bookend this main area are massive and lush, the kind of arboreal design indulgence one doesn’t find very much out East. The shuttered restaurant is ghostly and romantic, like an old wedding photo. A sign advertised it as available for filming.

The Pueblo lies roughly across the street from Union Station, a fitting welcome for new visitors to the city. The Pueblo was the center of the first incarnation of L.A., El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciuncula, founded in 1781. I’m not sure when the settlement’s name was shortened to “Los Angeles,” but I imagine it came as a relief to natives whose querents would fall asleep during the answer to the question of “Where are you from?” The Pueblo area later became the site of the city’s first Chinatown; hence the references to “New Chinatown,” in regard to the current district. The history of L.A.’s Chinatown, and its reason for relocation, are detailed at the Chinese-American Museum, right off the main Pueblo plaza. Apparently, the original Chinatown was leveled and the residents forcibly removed for the construction of the Union Station I so eulogize in the preceding paragraph.

From my perspective, the two most interesting landmarks on the Pueblo Plaza are La Placita and the Avila Adobe. La Placita was L.A.’s first established church, in 1814, and still provides a full range of services. I walked into the little chapel, where a golden icon was on display behind the altar, and a group of elderly folk were knelt at various pews in quiet prayer and reflection. At the opposite end was an impressive depiction of the crucified Christ, enclosed in a glass coffin and surrounded by a heap of flowers. A couple of people waited in line to pay homage and perform silent reflection. It takes an advanced cynic not to respect the spirit of such a place; such disconnect is out of my reach.

Across the Plaza from La Placita is Olvera Street. This narrow passage, lined with souvenir and trinket shops, is the home of many historic buildings, including the Avila Adobe, built in 1821, and recognized as L.A.’s oldest surviving residence. The place is fairly palatial, with several large rooms surrounding a contained garden; it was constructed by one of the first settlers to make their fortune in ranching, and was later used as the U.S. Army headquarters during the Mexican-American War. Olvera St., with its shaded, brick-paved confines, empties out onto E. Cesar Chavez, one of modern downtown’s main thoroughfares. The contrast between the quiet, adobe lined lanes of the Plaza and the traffic signals and exhaust of the City of Commuters is profound, but a necessary reminder of the L.A.’s depth and complexity. In the words of Emerson, “Do I contradict myself? Well, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.” So it can be that a city centered around a driving culture can reveal so much to the sidewalk wanderer.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

Marc Fitten’s Indie 100

indie100mfitten.wordpress.com

Marc Fitten is on a quest. He’s taking a cross-country road trip, visiting one-hundred independent bookstores, and documenting the process on a blog. As of this posting, he’s over halfway there, having most recently visited bookstore number sixty-five, Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe in Washington, D.C.. Fitten’s already made his sweep through Los Angeles, and it’s interesting to read his final impressions in light of an initial biased confession in which he admits, “I didn’t expect much in the way of Los Angeles bookstores after the bonanza by the Bay, but…”.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog

pippoetry.blogspot.com

This blog is maintained by Douglas Messerli, publisher of Green Integer Books. Green Integer is an independent and innovative press based in Los Angeles that has an enormous catalogue and excellent design aesthetic. The blog focuses on twentieth century poets, established but for the most part obscure, whose innovative work Messerli feels deserves a wider readership. Many of them have not been translated into English, or only haphazardly, so the blog is of special interest to fans of international literature.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

image is of the similarly-named but very different Pip from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations

The Soul of a Man

i’ve got too many girlfriends
who’d be cool chicks if they weren’t such cunts
Ah, bowl of dicks,
they mean nothin, baby.
It was Halloween on the blue Nile, you know how it gets.
i’ll deposit the pictures i took in my spank bank.
the female form looks best behind a shower curtain.

i feel worse than i’ve ever felt.
____________________ all i want is whiskey cigarettes and records. and to not wake up tomorrow.
____________________ dear lord, give me the strength to get the fuck out of town
____________________ and by strength i mean money.
____________________ pick me up take me out fuck me up.

____________________ if i could only put the wood to a quality broad
____________________ then get breakfast and clean laundry
____________________ then i’d be ready
____________________ to rape and pillage the world

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

Lyric poetry as it is currently defined – a brief, polished statement of intense emotion – was a form cemented in the Romantic period of the 19th century. Lyric poetry existed long before that, of course; some of the oldest extant examples of Greek verse were considered “lyric,” in that they were short pieces composed for accompaniment with a lyre. The form originated among ancient writers who wished to spurn the grandiose requirements of the epic form, or the tight constraints of the elegy or trochaic and iambic, which were public forms, written for recitation at specific occasions. The lyric poem as private expression reached its apotheosis in the sonnets of Shakespeare, and was subsequently popularized by a roster of immortals: poets like John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Goethe, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Baudelaire. Where is the lyric form now, though? The Modernists reviled the form, and while it was briefly revived in the confessional works of mid-century writers like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, it has certainly fallen out of fashion among the vanguard of compositional practice. My hypothesis is that, while lyric poetry no longer dominates the institutionalized study or practice of the art of poetry, lyrical expression has seeped irrevocably into the mainstream of popular culture, through the prevalence of outlets like twitter and the facebook “status update.”

Venues like these have opened up an avenue of personal expression in which the sharer displays to the world their private thoughts, joys, torments, or inanities. A constriction is placed upon length, and the well-crafted status update can grant an air of import to the most banal of everyday occurrences. That anyone should consider their own private thoughts worthy of public consumption has always been the motivating force behind lyric composition. As such, the rolling status update can be seen as a sort of fragmented lyric poem, an ongoing exposition of crafted, emotive sharing. My purpose in this experiment is to display this through the creation of poem comprised entirely of another person’s status updates. The intent in utilizing an anonymous person’s outpourings is to showcase the lyricism inherent in this form, without falling back on artificial poesy.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

I chose a single person from my “friends” whose status updates are often evocative or amusing. Using Facebook’s archives of this person’s posts (nothing ever disappears from Facebook) I traveled back through the months and extracted updates according to whim. Once I had amassed a certain amount  of material, I arranged a poem. Not a single word has been cut from or added to the original updates.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

Profundity is everywhere. The final product revealed, in concentrated form, the thought cycles and relative emotional state of the updater.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

Orpheus vs. Orpheus

THE HYMNS OF ORPHEUS       vs       THE ORPHIC HYMNS
by Orpheus                                                         by Orpheus
Translated by Thomas Taylor                         Translated by A. Athanassakis
306 pp. Philosophical Research Society      146 pp. Society of Biblical Literature

The beauty of the Orphic Hymns lies primarily in the mystery of their provenance. Legendary poet Orpheus, companion of Jason, descender into Hades, and father of ancient Greek theology, certainly had a busy and well-documented life of adventure. Due to the variety of legends and stories involving Orpheus, it is impossible to offer a sequentially arranged and definitive synopsis of his life. According to the different traditions, his father was either a quasi-legendary Thracian king named Oeagrus, or the god Apollo. Regardless, at some point in his early youth, Apollo became fond of him and gave him a golden lyre, which he taught him to play. Orpheus’ mother, who was either the Muse Calliope or a mortal woman descended from a Muse, instructed him on the writing of verse. The key aspect of the Orpheus myth resides there, in his felicity with song and poetry. According to Aeschylus, Orpheus’ talent was such that the very rocks and trees responded to his compositions. He was a member of Jason’s crew on the Argonaut, and saved his companions from the Sirens by outsinging those legendary temptresses. He later descended into Hades to reclaim his deceased wife, Eurydice, and his songs were such to move the pity of Death himself. Eurydice was granted life, on the condition that Orpheus could lead her out of the underworld without looking back. He failed, and she remained in the clutches of Hades. He was so distraught by this that he renounced the love of women, and is sometimes credited with the invention of Greek homosexuality. The most famous account of his death is at the hands of a group of enraged, female followers of Dionysus, who resented his love of male youths and his rejection of their god. The Dionysian priestesses ripped him to shreds in a drunken fury, but could not prevent his severed head from singing. His golden lyre was reclaimed by Apollo and installed in the heavens, where it can be viewed to this day as an arrangement of stars.

There is no definitive statement within any of the ancient sources of the Orpheus myth to explain when and for what reasons he sat down to compose his hymns, which are the only extant complete body of his writing. In addition to the hymns, there have come down to us a fragmented Theogony, known as the Rhapsodic Theogony, and pieces of an Argonautica told from Orpheus’ perspective, which are also attributed to Orpheus himself.  The complete hymns were known and read at least as early as 500 CE, when they were mentioned in a Latin codex (Athanassakis xii). The current collection, on which our two English translations by Thomas Taylor and A.A. Athanassakis are based, appeared around the 12th century. Our translators offer widely differing scholarly ideas about the true history of the hymns, opinions which greatly influence the style and content of the respective translations. Even their answers to the key questions – Did Orpheus exist? and Did he write these hymns?–are widely divergent.

Thomas Taylor published the first English translation of the hymns in 1792. An avowed classicist and ‘liberal mind,’ Mr. Taylor prefaces the hymns with a lengthy dissertation on the life and theology of Orpheus. His purpose for embarking on the work is to reveal the heritage of Greek philosophy as beginning with Orpheus and continuing through Pythagoras and Plato, and to also showcase the striking similarities between the religious ideas of the ancient Greeks and modern Christian beliefs.

Ultimately, his prefatory dissertation is of more value than the translations themselves. Mr. Taylor, through close study of obscure ancient sources, many of them available to him only as crumbling medieval manuscripts, has provided us with a clear and sensible historical outline of the hymn’s genesis, and also a revelatory summation of the life of the author. Mr. Taylor accepts it as a matter of fact that Orpheus did in fact exist, that he (more or less) accomplished all the feats attributed to him, and that he composed his hymns as a repository for his spiritual and philosophical knowledge. The ingenuous solution to the obvious biographical paradoxes – i.e. how could one person die so many different ways – is that Orpheus is a reincarnate spirit, like the Buddha, and that there were actually four ancient Orpheuses, and five if you count the first Orpheus’ decision to reincarnate initially as a swan, so as not ‘to be born of woman.’ Each of these Orpheuses accomplished different things; for the sake of this review, we need only identify that it was the fourth Orpheus who composed the hymns, sometime between 800-600 BCE.

As for the Taylor translation itself; it is, in a word, terrible. Mr. Taylor himself seems to acknowledge this, and offers in his preface not only the timeless translator’s complaint of the ultimate impossibility of their enterprise, but also an explanation of the Hymn’s singular difficulty. Apparently their construction around conclusive epithets involves so many hermetic devices that it is impossible to communicate their meaning to the uninitiated. According to Mr. Taylor:

Most of the compound epithets of which the following Hymns chiefly consist, thought very beautiful in the Greek language; yet when literally translated into ours, lose all their propriety and force. In their native tongue, as in a prolific soil, they diffuse their sweets with full-blown elegance; but shrink like the sensitive plant at the touch of the verbal critic, or the close translator (ix).

None of this, however, explains Mr. Taylor’s most grievious injury to his source material: his decision to render the hymns in a contemporary idiom, wholly prosaic and entirely inappropriate, complete with an awkward a-b-a-b rhyme scheme. Yikes.

A. Athanassakis does a much better job with the actual translation, and in his preface offers a much more sober–some would say boring and unexciting–explanation of the hymn’s provenance. According to him, Orpheus existed in the same way Hercules did: as a mythical character that, over time, accumulated a symbolic/spiritual significance which attracted a band of worshippers. The Orphic hymns were thus composed around 400 CE by a nameless priest of the Orphic cult, for use in a ritual setting.

Mr. Athanassakis, who has taught in the Classics Department of UC Santa Barbara for nearly thirty years, composed his translation in the 1960s, on a commission from a group concerned with making available obscure ancient religious texts for scholarly study. It is intended as a corrective for the Taylor translation, which, according to Athanassakis, obscures the intermittent literary quality of the original. Mr. Athanassakis, a professional scholar of Greek and translator, has also done celebrated, academic translations of the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod’s Theogony; having no personal knowledge of Greek, I take this to signify a greater fidelity to the original than that offered by Mr. Taylor.

The Athanassakis translation is, as he states, straightforward and unadorned. There is no rhyme scheme, no attempt to resolve linguistic obscurities; the result is a batch of hymns that are intermittently dull, often interesting, and, on a couple of occasions, truly stunning. Take, for example, the two renderings of Hymn LXXX.

Taylor:

TO THE WEST WIND

Sea-born, aerial, blowing from the west,
Sweet gales, who give to weary’d labour rest:
Vernal and grassy, and of gentle sound,
To ships delightful, thro’ the sea profound;
For these, impell’d by you with gentle force,
Pursue with prosp’rous Fate their destin’d course.
With blameless gales regard my suppliant pray’r,
Zephyrs unseen, light-wind’d, and form’d from air.

Athanassakis:

TO ZEPHYROS

Western breezes, ethereal begetters of all,
as you blow gently your whisper brings deathlike rest.
Vernal and meadow-haunting, you are loved by havens
because to ships you bring . . . soft and light air.
Come in a spirit of kindness and blow perfectly,
O airy, invisible and light-winged ones.

Again, I have no personal knowledge of ancient Greek, but “vernal and grassy” can’t sound good in any language. It can be seen that in the Taylor translation we get a stilted example of English Romantic poetry, stamped upon an ancient Greek source; in the Athanassakis, a simple but moving poem of ethereal beauty. The value of the Taylor translation, as stated, resides in his explication of Orphic theology and adventurous interpretation of the hymn’s compositional history. As a purely literary document, however, the Athanassakis work stands on a higher level. It is impossible to determine the historical accuracy of the Orpheus myth. According to Orphic scholar M.L. West, who bases his determination on various ancient Greek sources, Orpheus would have predated Homer by several centuries, and even the ancient accounts that document that era are secondhand and steeped in allegory. Regardless, whether the hymns are the literal utterances of Apollo’s son, or the creation of “a religious association of people who called themselves mystic initiates” (Athanassakis 4), their literary quality is revealed in the more recent translation. It can be hoped that more scholarly attention may solve the riddle of their appearance, but until then, we must enjoy them for what they are: beautiful poems of indisputably spiritual significance.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

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