FAT Friday Trolley Hop

Those of you who will be in Louisville on Friday should head down to Frankfort Avenue for the FAT Friday Trolley Hop. From the Mellwood Arts Center to Stiltz Avenue, you would be surprised just how many shops and galleries will be open. It's a great chance to see what's going on in the neighborhood, to meet with others interested in the Clifton/Crescent Hill community, and to just have fun. A list of events currently planned can be viewed here.

It looks like there may be a chance of thunderstorms Friday, currently the national weather service suggests those will be late in the evening.

Hope to see you in the neighborhood.

Living the good life in Clifton

I live in the Clifton Neighborhood of Louisville. It’s a neighborhood bounded by Brownsboro Road on the north, Ewing Avenue on the east, I-64 on the south and Mellwood Avenue on the west. (However, I like to claim all the way east to Bayly—that way I can count a Heine Bros. and a Carmichaels Bookstore as part of the neighborhood. There are many reasons you should consider living in (or at least visiting) the Clifton neighborhood. One of those reasons is food:

1. Coffee Shops.

I can walk to four different terrific spots for coffee: Heine Brothers, Java Brewing Company, Caffé Classico, and Nancy’s Bagels. (If you like dark roast, get a cup of Nancy’s Thundermuck. It is delightful.)

2. Restaurants in general.

We’ve got it all here in Clifton. We have high end spots like Volare, Basa and Bourbon Bistro. We have an excellent Asian Vegetarian restaurant, Zen Garden. North End is eclectic, delicious, and Kentucky Grown. We’ve got two great pizza places, Clifton’s and Fat Jimmy’s. And then there are the more exotic: Sari-Sari (Filipino) El-Mundo (Mexican), Shiraz (Middle-Eastern), and the Grape Leaf (Greek).

Now that spring has come, almost every Clifton restaurant and coffee shop offers outdoor dining. Come join us for breakfast, lunch or dinner. We'd love to see you.

Play Ball

The Louisville Bats won their home opener on April 11 8-5. It was a high-scoring game, and so fun for those of us who know little about baseball -- who do not spend the game listing hits, errors, and other esoteric statistics. The team will be in town all of the coming week, playing against the Pawtucket Red Sox from Friday April 11 to Monday, and then playing the Norfolk Tides through Friday, April 18. (See schedule).

The team, a farm team for the Cincinnati Reds, and the field itself are a wonderful part of Louisville – particularly in the spring. (In the heat of the summer, I’m not as big of a fan of outdoor spectator sports.) That said, I would suggest anyone visiting Louisville during baseball reason take an afternoon or an evening to attend a game. I honestly don’t think there’s a bad seat in the house. There’s a merry-go-round and other attractions to keep the kids happy, and a microbrewery just outside (Brownings) that you can enjoy before or after the game.

These are a couple shots of the game and the field that I took last night.

The official dog breed of the University of Louisville

University of Louisville partisans know that the pug, in every sense but the most formal, is the favorite dog breed of the Cardinal Nation:

Carson McCullers, Wunderkind

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book. — Carson McCullers

« Crossposted at Jurisdynamics »
To many of my fellow residents of Danzig U.S.A., I often say that my best preparation for becoming law school dean at the University of Louisville was to reread the works of Carson McCullers (1917-67). Plagued by atrocious health and a tempestuous love life, McCullers wrote her best-known work before she turned 30. Her harshest critics consign her to "minor" status and dismiss her work as "Southern Gothic." Her staunchest defenders argue that her literary legacy of "speak[ing] for the physically and psychologically deformed, the unprotected persons in an often indifferent world, is rich enough to earn her a permanent reputation as a great artist." Flannery O'Connor notwithstanding, I think it fair to call her the finest writer Georgia has ever produced.

Read the rest of this post . . . .An anthology containing The Ballad of the Sad Café reminded me of Carson McCullers's genius. The richest phrases from these stories are jewels that burn the skin at the slightest touch:

• The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain. (The Ballad of the Sad Café)


• With inner desperation he pressed the child close — as though an emotion as protean as his love could dominate the pulse of time. (The Sojourner)


• By moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love. (A Domestic Dilemma)

Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Carson McCullers (1940)

I want to write like Carson McCullers. I wish I could channel her. To the extent I have traversed some of the geographic and emotional space that Carson McCullers called home, perhaps I shall.

Along the tortuous and mostly frustrating path toward personal and professional satisfaction, I've gotten waylaid from time to time. Quite a bit, to tell the truth, and more than I would wish on anyone I liked. Perhaps the worst of these detours was law school.

That said, if my professional life has achieved anything of value (to others if not to myself), it is this: Though you studied law, your life might not be an evil bankrupt waste. In a very real sense, my goal of channeling the literary spirit of Carson McCullers may yet redeem this small corner of my life.

Wunderkind that she was, in real literary life as in the autobiographical short story by that name, Carson McCullers established her reputation with her first novel: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940). In his celebrated review of this book, Richard Wright said that Heart was "not so much a novel as a projected mood, a state of mind poetically objectified in words, an attitude externalized in naturalistic detail." Inner Landscape, 103 New Republic 195 (Aug. 1940). "Whether you will want to read the book," he wrote, "depends upon the extent to which you value the experience of discovering the stale and familiar terms of everyday life bathed in a rich and strange meaning, devoid of pettiness and sentimentality."

What made McCullers such a prodigy was her preternatural ability to capture the heart at its frailest. That is a skill associated not with youth, but with experience. The inspiration for the title of her first novel, The Lonely Hunter, a poem written by William Sharp under the pen name Fiona MacLeod, expresses a distinctly middle-aged sentiment:

• Green branches, green branches, I see you beckon; I follow!
• Sweet is the place you guard, there in the rowan-tree hollow.
• There he lies in the darkness, under the frail white flowers,
• Heedless at last, in the silence, of these sweet midsummer hours.


• But sweeter, it may be, the moss whereon he is sleeping now,
• And sweeter the fragrant flowers that may crown his moon-white brow:
• And sweeter the shady place deep in an Eden hollow
• Wherein he dreams I am with him — and, dreaming, whispers, "Follow!"


• Green wind from the green-gold branches, what is the song you bring?
• What are all songs for me, now, who no more care to sing?
• Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
• But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.


• Green is that hill and lonely, set far in a shadowy place;
• White is the hunter's quarry, a lost-loved human face:
• O hunting heart, shall you find it, with arrow of failing breath,
• Led o'er a green hill lonely by the shadowy hound of Death?


• Green branches, green branches, you sing of a sorrow olden,
• But now it is midsummer weather, earth-young, sun-ripe, golden:
• Here I stand and I wait, here in the rowan-tree hollow,
• But never a green leaf whispers, "Follow, oh, Follow, Follow!"


• O never a green leaf whispers, where the green-gold branches swing:
• O never a song I hear now, where one was wont to sing.
• Here in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
• But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

Here in the heart of summer, life is sweet to me still. The harvest is yet to come; I might find in motion what I lost in space.

Of late I have devoted considerable time to pondering and to watching the classic Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life. One scene in that movie invariably reminds me of the exuberance of youth. When I stop thinking of this scene as an emblem of "juniority," I shall be dead, or at least fit to die. George Bailey tells his future wife, Mary, "Well, not just one wish. A whole hatful . . . . I know what I'm going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that."

I know what I'm going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next year and the year after that. Like my literary hero, Carson McCullers, I'm going to tell stories full of pain and longing. I know better than to imagine that telling such stories could ever keep feelings of pain and longing at bay, for it is the essence of the human condition to love through faith rather than reassurance, and more often than not to wait in vain for the transformed echo of love songs one has sung. Between hunts on the lonely hill called life, I shall find solace in giving voice to sorrow and Sehnsucht.

Medieval and Renaissance treasures at the Speed

Louisville's Speed Art Museum will host an exhibit, Medieval and Renaissance Treasures From the Victoria and Albert Museum, from January 22 through April 20, 2008:

Statuette: Crucified Christ by Giovanni Pisano, 1285-1300, Ivory, 15.3 cm. © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum.

This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition presents 35 masterpieces including a rare notebook on geometry and mathematics by Renaissance artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci. The notebook, written in mirror image cursive, is the highlight of the exhibition.

Drawn from one of the greatest collections of medieval and Renaissance works in existence, these mostly small-scale “Treasury Arts” were created principally for the church in the Middle Ages and for wealthy collectors during the Renaissance.

Included in the exhibition are carved ivories, bronze sculpture, jeweled metalwork, stained glass and works by Donatello and Pisano.

The Harry Pickens Trio at the Jazz Factory

I had the distinct pleasure of listening to the Harry Pickens Trio on Saturday, January 26, 2008, at the Jazz Factory, perhaps Louisville's premier venue for live jazz. The show exceeded the expectations set in the Jazz Factory's program notes for Saturday's performance:

The jazz giant Harry Pickens celebrates his birthday at The Jazz Factory with his great jazz trio. Bring your friends, your family and your acquaintances for an evening of music that is guaranteed to warm the heart and fortify the soul. Harry lives, breathes and exudes the essence of jazz. He's performed internationally with jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Milt Jackson, Freddie Hubbard and Joe Henderson, as well as top players from his own generation, including Kenny Garrett, Ralph Peterson and Wallace Roney. In addition to being a gifted musician, Harry is an eloquent spokesperson for the music and a charismatic performer.

There is no substitute for a live musical performance, and even a recording from Saturday's show could do scarce justice to the power and the presence of the Harry Pickens Trio. But courtesy of bassist Chris Fitzgerald, who is also a member of the University of Louisville's music school faculty, I'm pleased to post two performances by the Harry Pickens Trio:

I've Never Been in Love Before



How Insensitive

Editor's note: Cross-posted at The Cardinal Lawyer

I wish it would rain

Strictly speaking, this post presents contemporary bluegrass music that has no direct connection to Louisville or to any other part of Kentucky. But Southern music, whatever its precise provenance, falls well within the mandate of Danzig U.S.A., and this is an especially poignant song.

Nanci Griffith, I Wish It Would Rain, Little Love Affairs (1988)

Chorus:
Oh, I wish it would rain
And wash my face clean
I want to find some dark cloud to hide in here
Love in a memory
Sparkled like diamonds
When the diamonds fall . . . they burn like tears
When the diamonds fall . . . they burn like tears

Once I had a love from the Georgia pines
Who only cared for me
I wanna find that love of twenty-two
Here at thirty-three
I've got a heart on my right
One on my left . . . neither suits my needs
No, the one I love lives away out West
And he never will need me

Repeat chorus.

I'm gonna pack up my two steppin' shoes
And head for the Gulf Coast plains
I wanna walk the streets of my own hometown
Where everybody knows my name
I wanna ride the waves down in Galveston
When the hurricanes blow in
'Cuz that Gulf Coast water tastes sweet as wine
When your heart's rollin' home in the wind

Repeat chorus

When the diamonds fall darlin' . . . they burn like tears

© 1987 Wing and Wheel Music

---

	The Lynn Morris Band performs I Wish It Would Rain, a song originally written and performed by Nanci Griffith.

Die Preußische Staatsbibliothek

Die Preußische Staatsbibliothek

The Prussian State Library

Along Unter den Linden in Berlin, some distance east of Brandenburger Tor but considerably west of Alexanderplatz and Fernsehturm, stands the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. In the distant but hardly forgotten past this beautiful building bore a more assertive name: Die Preußische Staatsbibliothek. The Prussian State Library.

Unter den Linden is lined with beautiful buildings, and many of them speak more overtly to the ebb and flow of modern German history. It takes a grotesquely lazy tourist to overlook the stunning reconstruction of the Reichstag, for instance. Touring the publicly accessible portion of the old parliament building, restored to its proper place as the seat of national government, helps even a casual visitor understand how a united, democratic Germany fulfills through living architecture the twin promises that the Reichstag has made: Dem Deutschen Völke and Der Bevölkerung. To the German People and To the Population.

For those who approach Germany from the admittedly peculiar cultural prism of the American South, however, die Preußische Staatsbibliothek represents an obligatory visit in its own right. All Berlin, to the socially progressive Southerner, represents what our own "Heimat" should become. Reunited Berlin, once and rightful capital of Germany, after conquest, occupation, partition, disarmament, and global humiliation scarcely commensurate for Germany's crimes against humanity. If only Atlanta, Columbia, Birmingham, Nashville, and Richmond could be comparably redeemed from their own history. And there in the heart of Berlin, mere yards from the din of Unter den Linden, the courtyard of the old Prussian State Library beckons. This was the same ivy-covered oasis that greeted visitors and employees of the Library and its cousin, Die Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (the Prussian Academy of Sciences).

Within the courtyard, a single inscription will stand out: MCMXIII. 1913. The year before it all began unraveling and Germany found itself on an often hellish journey of seventy-five years. No American Southerner can behold that inscription and fail to think, "What if?" What if my own homeland, at its historical precipice comparable to MCMXIII in Germany, had only known and had exercised its last clear chance to set things right? What if I had only known? What would we, what could we have done differently?

The last words Willie Stark utters, as he lies mortally wounded by his assassin's bullets, are as perfect in the courtyard of the Preußische Staatsbibliothek as they are in All the King's Men: "It might have been all different Jack. . . . You've got to believe that. You got to. You got to believe that. . . . And it might even been different yet. If it hadn't happened, it might — have been different — even yet."

Jack Burden, for his part, knows all too well that "the world is a great snowball rolling downhill and it never rolls uphill to unwind itself back to nothing at all and nonhappening."

Because I live in Danzig U.S.A. in order to work toward its betterment (despite fearing at a deep level that the region truly is irredeemable), because I am a Southerner again by choice after having had opportunities to leave and to stay away for good, and because I too know how it feels to look back at that one moment and wonder, "Wenn nur . . . if only . . . ," I go out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time. Und mittlerweile wartet die Preußische Staatsbibliothek auf mich.

Thomas Merton's Louisville epiphany

Reprinted from The Cardinal Lawyer
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) put the intersection of Fourth and Walnut Streets (now Fourth and Muhammad Ali Boulevard) on the literary map of twentieth century America. His "Fourth and Walnut" epiphany is arguably the most famous piece of writing associated with Louisville.

There are in fact two versions of Merton's Fourth and Walnut epiphany. He wrote the first in his private journal on March 19, 1958, the day after his fateful visit to Louisville and the seventeenth anniversary of his taking the vows of the Trappist order. The second version appeared in his 1966 book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Excerpts from the two versions appear below:

1. From Thomas Merton's private journal, March 19, 1958:

Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream — the dream of separateness, of the “special” vocation to be different. My vocation does not really make me different from the rest of men or put me is a special category except artificially, juridically. I am still a member of the human race — and what more glorious destiny is there for man, since the Word was made flesh and became, too, a member of the Human Race!

Thank God! Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them. I have the immense joy of being a man! As if the sorrows of our condition could really matter, once we begin to realize who and what we are — as if we could ever begin to realize it on earth.

It is not a question of proving to myself that I either dislike or like the women one sees on the street. The fact of having a vow of chastity does not oblige one to argument on this point — no special question arises. I am keenly conscious, not of their beauty (I hardly think I saw anyone really beautiful by special standards) but of their humanity, their woman-ness. But what incomprehensible beauty is there, what secret beauty that would perhaps be inaccessible to me if I were not dedicated to a different way of life. It [is] as though by chastity I had come to be married to what is most pure in all the women of the world and to taste and sense the secret beauty of their girl’s hearts as they walked in the sunlight — each one secret and good and lovely in the sight of God — never touched by anyone, nor by me, nor by anyone, as good as and even more beautiful than the light itself. For the woman-ness that is in each of them is a once original and inexhaustibly fruitful bringing the image of God into the world. In this each one is Wisdom and Sophia and Our Lady — (my delights are to be with the children of men!).


2. From Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.

Certainly these traditional values are very real, but their reality is not of an order outside everyday existence in a contingent world, nor does it entitle one to despise the secular: though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous.

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers!

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.

Beginning to see the light

Cross-posted from The Cardinal Lawyer
Marc Swanson's unsettling and sometimes shocking exhibition, Beginning to See the Light, has reached its final month at the 21C Museum Hotel:

Marc Swanson: Beginning to See the Light, comprises artwork made for several different exhibitions over the last five years, reuniting in this context to present a broad overview of the artist's œuvre. Swanson's sculptures, paintings, installations, and video projects combine disparate references to art history, music, mythology, and his own personal lore, providing a body of work that explores ongoing themes such as autobiography, duality, and desire. For this exhibition, Swanson has embarked on a meditative process that is not merely a nostalgic portrait, a history, or a looking back, but a contemporary struggle forward to know one's self, presenting us with an exquisitely vulnerable portrait of an artist.

This blog's namesake

Danzig, as it is known to the German-speaking world, is the Polish city of Gdańsk. As Gdańsk, the city has played a pivotal role in Poland's transition out of Communist rule. In 1970 anti-government demonstrations in Gdańsk triggered the ouster of Communist leader Władysław Gomułka. In 1980, the Gdańsk Shipyard gave birth to the Solidarity trade union movement. By 1989, Communist rule ended, and former Solidarity leader, Lech Wałęsa, became President of Poland in 1990.

But the name Danzig carries an altogether different set of connotations. Danzig has had a long history as a city-state, not only as a member of the Hanseatic League but also as a "free city" during the Napoleonic era. The best known use of the phrase, "Free City of Danzig" (Freie Stadt Danzig), refers to the independent city established by the Treaty of Versailles and overseen by the League of Nations. It represented Poland's sole hope for free access to the sea, a key premise of Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points." Because the city's population was overwhelmingly German, however, the Treaty of Versailles did not assign Poland complete sovereignty over Danzig. Eventually, the city became a primary target of the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. The heroic defense of Danzig's Polish Post Office culminated the tumultuous two decades when Danzig/Gdańsk stood squarely between Germany and Poland.

Louisville, for its part, has combined elements of Southern and Midwestern culture throughout its history. It is predominantly Southern, but it looks northward as no other Southern city does. The resulting cultural mix can be analogized to the experience of Danzig during the Weimar Republic. One can only hope that Louisville never experiences the trauma that afflicted Danzig/Gdańsk during the half-century between the outbreak of World War II and the accession of Lech Wałęsa to the Polish presidency.

Bourbon and bluegrass

The November 4, 2007, edition of the New York Times' travel section features a story on the pursuit of bourbon and bluegrass in Kentucky:

[Author Steven Kurutz] embarked on a road trip centered on bourbon and bluegrass, exploring the back roads of the state where those two American mainstays trace their deepest roots. It was a trip that spoke to our passions and vices; [travel companion] Chris and I are both avid fans of traditional country and roots music, and we’re also dedicated whiskey drinkers, so much so that holidays are often met with an exchange of a bottle of whiskey between us. (Occasionally, we’ve even combined the two, sneaking a flask into a concert.)

We fashioned our itinerary in the style of a bluegrass song: a defined structure but with ample room for improvisation. During the first part of the trip, we would hit the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, a whiskey version of California’s Napa Valley made up of seven distilleries (Maker’s among them) that are open to the public. Our final stop would be the sixth annual Jerusalem Ridge Bluegrass Celebration in Rosine, the birthplace of Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass. It was in the central part of the state, in the rolling hills between Lexington and Louisville — where a layer of limestone filters the iron from the water, making it ideal for bourbon making — that Scotch-Irish distillers settled in the early 1800s.

Cross-posted from The Cardinal Lawyer and Agricultural Law.

Multimedia notes

1. The online version of the Times' feature includes a multimedia supplement, which you may watch in a popup window.


2. Be sure to enjoy Bill Monroe singing his signature song, Blue Moon of Kentucky:
   
   

Welcome to Danzig U.S.A.

Welcome to Danzig U.S.A., a blog about Louisville, Kentucky. The name of this blog comes from an offhand comment on MoneyLaw: "Louisville . . . is to the American South as the Free City of Danzig was to the Weimar Republic." I can think of no more succinct — and culturally loaded — way of describing my city.

I'm Jim Chen, law school dean at the University of Louisville and host of The Cardinal Lawyer and the blogs of the Jurisdynamics Network. From time to time, I hope to post observations about Louisville, Kentucky, and the American South. I am a native of the region and love Louisville. I also hope to persuade other Louisville residents to join me in presenting this city in a light that is at once honest and affectionate.