Friday, March 31, 2017
Blogging note …
I must be out and about again, starting very shortly. I will resume blogging when I can.
Take a look at these …
… Photos of 19-Year-Old Margo Hayes’s Historic Climb | Outside Online. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
In case you wondered …
… The Millions : Did Vladimir Nabokov Write the Great Refugee Novel? - The Millions. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… as the book progresses, the tone gradually shifts. During the first hundred pages, you might even assume that this is a comic novel. But as the tragedy of Pnin’s life unfolds, in flashbacks and reminiscences, the reader is shocked into a deeper awareness of the reality of the refugee’s life in exile. The more we understand Pnin, the better we grasp how the whole fabric of his existence has been torn apart by the whims of history. The novel ends with us watching a professor offer a caustic impersonation of Pnin that goes on and on and on. But, by this juncture, we are no longer laughing.
Generation of ignoramuses …
… How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture | Minding The Campus.
Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.
Something to think on …
The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.
— Nikolai Gogol, born on this date in 1809
Set your clock (a must read) …
A READING BY EX-ZEN MONK POETS
Featuring: JERRY MORGAN, ED KRIZEK,
ANGEL HOGAN & LEONARD GONTAREK
Hosted By EMILY DICKINSON –
“Saint of the Spoken Word Scene”
“Queen of the Nightclub World”
Saturday, April 1, 2015, 3 AM
CITY BOOK SHOP –
Pine & Quince Streets, Philadelphia
Angel Hogan is unflappable, buoyant, waggish, efficacious, indefinable, demiurgic, self-made thousandaire writer Angel Hogan is best known for her chapbook "Snapped It Back Into Place, & I'm Proud," a six-part choreopoemoir about life with a broken toe.
Leonard Gontarek is the author of over
one book of poems. He was raised by
wolves and is a disappointment to them.
Jerry Morgan is a local Philadelphia poet who grew up in the rural mountains of Appalachian Maryland. A pharmacist by trade, but a poet at heart, he dedicates much of his writing to his unique childhood in the Pentecostal church and his intense love of birds. He highly recommends refraining from petting strange dogs and is deathly afraid of ants. His current project, Odes for Linda, is series of poems inspired by his ten year relationship with his bare-eyed cockatoo.
Ed Krizek was elected President of his sixth grade class in 1966 and sponsored an essay contest in which he received third place for his essay titled “Cheating”. Ed graduated from Roslyn Public High School in Nassau County, NY after being expelled from an elite Prep School in Florida with seven weeks to go in his senior year of high school after being found in the girls’ dormitory after hours. Ed had all his clothes on but was drinking whiskey and playing the guitar, singing his rendition of Bob Dylan’s song, “The Times They Are A Changing”. He has entered the BIG and the REALLY BIG chapbook contests many times and has never been mentioned. Ed usually publishes his work in obscure journals (What poetry journal is not obscure?) that few people read. He has also published several poetry collections. After reading Ed’s most recent offering one reviewer stated, “This stuff is mildly interesting but I wouldn’t pay for it.’ He is telling all his friends about this reading as well as posting an ad on Facebook.
Featuring: JERRY MORGAN, ED KRIZEK,
ANGEL HOGAN & LEONARD GONTAREK
Hosted By EMILY DICKINSON –
“Saint of the Spoken Word Scene”
“Queen of the Nightclub World”
Saturday, April 1, 2015, 3 AM
CITY BOOK SHOP –
Pine & Quince Streets, Philadelphia
Angel Hogan is unflappable, buoyant, waggish, efficacious, indefinable, demiurgic, self-made thousandaire writer Angel Hogan is best known for her chapbook "Snapped It Back Into Place, & I'm Proud," a six-part choreopoemoir about life with a broken toe.
Leonard Gontarek is the author of over
one book of poems. He was raised by
wolves and is a disappointment to them.
Jerry Morgan is a local Philadelphia poet who grew up in the rural mountains of Appalachian Maryland. A pharmacist by trade, but a poet at heart, he dedicates much of his writing to his unique childhood in the Pentecostal church and his intense love of birds. He highly recommends refraining from petting strange dogs and is deathly afraid of ants. His current project, Odes for Linda, is series of poems inspired by his ten year relationship with his bare-eyed cockatoo.
Ed Krizek was elected President of his sixth grade class in 1966 and sponsored an essay contest in which he received third place for his essay titled “Cheating”. Ed graduated from Roslyn Public High School in Nassau County, NY after being expelled from an elite Prep School in Florida with seven weeks to go in his senior year of high school after being found in the girls’ dormitory after hours. Ed had all his clothes on but was drinking whiskey and playing the guitar, singing his rendition of Bob Dylan’s song, “The Times They Are A Changing”. He has entered the BIG and the REALLY BIG chapbook contests many times and has never been mentioned. Ed usually publishes his work in obscure journals (What poetry journal is not obscure?) that few people read. He has also published several poetry collections. After reading Ed’s most recent offering one reviewer stated, “This stuff is mildly interesting but I wouldn’t pay for it.’ He is telling all his friends about this reading as well as posting an ad on Facebook.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
This clown again …
… Drexel professor wanted to 'vomit' after service member given courtesy on plane | Fox News.
Since he favors abolishing the white race, perhaps he should set an example and start with himself.
Hmm …
… The Poetry of Pop: Nine Poets on Their Favorite Song Lyrics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In my brief career as a teacher of college English, I brought to my students' attention the aesthetics of "Eleanor Rigby" and the Hollies' "Bus Stop," which could both be heard on the air at the time (showing how long ago that was). Guess I was ahead of my time.
Something to think on …
Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know', and thou shalt progress.
— Maimonides, born on this date in 1135
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Divine proportion …
… Informal Inquiries: The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --.
My own take: Miss Emily's view is that the mind is what lets us know anything that we can know, including that there is a God.
My own take: Miss Emily's view is that the mind is what lets us know anything that we can know, including that there is a God.
Literary happenstance …
… On the Accidental Origins of Beloved Books | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)
Blogging note …
I have been out and about all day, and must go out again this evening. My blogging will resume when I get the chance.
Act of faith …
… Waugh’s Helena, Father General, and the Reality of Revelation | George Weigel | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Helena is full of Waugh’s humor—including a hilarious putdown of Edward Gibbon and the anti-Christian motif in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—which makes for easy and amusing reading. The author’s intent, however, was entirely serious. He knew that Gnosticism was a protean heresy that re-occurred across the centuries. And as a convert (like his heroine), Evelyn Waugh chose the best tools at his disposal, his well-honed abilities as a wordsmith, to take a stand against the modernist tendency to reduce revelation to myth—and to make ourselves the judges of revelation, rather than being judged by it.If anything could persuade that we are nearing the end times, it is the current state of the Catholic Church.
Unmoored in time …
… A Holy Man In Harrow | Standpoint. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Dilworth, a Professor of English, has been writing on Jones for 40 years. He is an expert teaser of meaning from Jones’s elusive, allusive art. The poet once said that he was going to start signing his letters “The not understood D.J.” He wouldn’t have liked dumbing down or making history “accessible”.
Waiting on the Holy Spirit …
… Prospects of a Catholic Literary Revival | Catholic World Report - Global Church news and views. (Hat tip, G. E. Reutter.)
… the reality is that Catholic doctrinal, sacramental, artistic, and ascetic practices have been greatly weakened over the last fifty years. What some have called “suburban rite Catholicism” often has the same deracinated, placeless feel as the kind of globalized metropolitan existence that Gioia finds so destructive to American writing in general. While Gioia is correct that theology and philosophy cannot create culture on their own, a robust embrace of Catholic teaching and a true wrestling with the reflective traditions around it is necessary on a broad level to create a community with enough common assumptions to both inspire and sustain a vigorous intellectual and artistic life.Thomas Day, the author of Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo, which is mentioned near the end of this piece, was a college classmate of mine. A sterling fellow.
Poet of isolation …
… Bill Knott’s Anti-Career of Guerrilla Poetry - The New Yorker. (Hat tip, G. E. Reutter.)
Something about Knott froze in childhood, leaving a body of work marked by the child’s tendency to literalize imaginative schemes. Knott was a poet of zany precision, the zaniness usually coming right away, often in the first line, followed by quite meticulous workings out of his oddball premises. He is, at his best, a poet of home-brewed koans, threading his philosophical paradoxes into scenes of slacker glamour.
Mark thy calendar …
PPF BOOK FAIR 2017
The Philadelphia Poetry Festival will include a Poetry Book Fair.
This is for individual poets signing and selling their books of poems.
All proceeds will go to and be handled by the authors.
The space is free, but very limited. You must sign up in advance.
Please contact Leonard with interest: gontarek9@earthlink.net
THE PHILADELPHIA POETRY FESTIVAL 2017!
The Free Poetry Festival
Poetry organizations, magazines, poetry presses, poetry series,
writing programs in the Philadelphia area, etcetera.
This year's festival will be held at
The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut Street in West Philadelphia.
Join us on Sunday, April 23, from 1 PM to 4 PM
The Rotunda – 4014 Walnut Street in West Philadelphia
A wonderful event space!
Lots of street parking – metered and non-metered
Fresh Grocer Parking Garage across Walnut Street
Great places for food & spirits within a block:
Smokey Joe’s, The Greek Lady, Mizu Sushi Bar,
West Philly City Tap House, Bobby’s Burger Palace,
Copabanana, Hummus & The Last Word Book Shop.
THIS EVENT IS FREE
The Philadelphia Poetry Festival will include a Poetry Book Fair.
This is for individual poets signing and selling their books of poems.
All proceeds will go to and be handled by the authors.
The space is free, but very limited. You must sign up in advance.
Please contact Leonard with interest: gontarek9@earthlink.net
THE PHILADELPHIA POETRY FESTIVAL 2017!
The Free Poetry Festival
Poetry organizations, magazines, poetry presses, poetry series,
writing programs in the Philadelphia area, etcetera.
This year's festival will be held at
The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut Street in West Philadelphia.
Join us on Sunday, April 23, from 1 PM to 4 PM
The Rotunda – 4014 Walnut Street in West Philadelphia
A wonderful event space!
Lots of street parking – metered and non-metered
Fresh Grocer Parking Garage across Walnut Street
Great places for food & spirits within a block:
Smokey Joe’s, The Greek Lady, Mizu Sushi Bar,
West Philly City Tap House, Bobby’s Burger Palace,
Copabanana, Hummus & The Last Word Book Shop.
THIS EVENT IS FREE
Something to think on
A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.
— Joyce Cary, who died on this date in 1957
Law and Imagination
Hypotheticals, fantastical beings, and a fictional omnibus: legal reasoning is made supple by its use of the imagination
"The Mystery of Things"
This understanding is surely at the heart of King Lear’s “mystery of things” as well as our apprehension of the gulf between potentiality and actuality, a gulf that extends to the very act of creation itself, including the making of a poem. As Gioia says of the difference between the idea of a poem and the poem as realized in words on the page (“The Next Poem”),
How much better it seems now
than when it is finally written.
How hungrily one waits to feel
the bright lure seized, the old hook bitten.
Such is the distance between Jacob sleeping on a “stone pillow” beside the brook and seraphim ascending the ladder between the earth and heaven. And from that place lying in between what is and what was, what may be and what might have been—a place almost, but not quite, beyond words—Dana Gioia has brought back to us some of the finest poems of his or any other time.
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Eight hour days??? Or three...
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.8 hours every day. Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers revealed that most people aren't working for most of the time they're at work.
The most popular unproductive activities listed were:
Reading news websites - 1 hour 5 min Checking social media - 44 min Discussing non-work-related things with coworkers - 40 min Searching for new jobs - 26 min Taking smoke breaks - 23 min Making calls to partners/ friends - 18 min Making hot drinks - 17 min Texting or instant messaging - 14 min Eating snacks - 8 min Making food in office - 7 min
This is particularly good news for freelancers and others who work from home. It's easy to feel like you're not "doing" enough when you don't have to go into an office. Yet this research suggests that if you're productive for just 3 hours a day, you're outputting the same amount as someone in the office for 8 hours.
I
Who knew?
… Laudator Temporis Acti: Thus Homer Lives On. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I wonder if he'd think that today.
I wonder if he'd think that today.
Q & A …
… Samuel Beckett and Painting – RhysTranter.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The more I looked at paintings by the artists on whom he wrote and, for the most part, had close and extended relationships with, the more I became convinced that Beckett’s engagement with painting was less—and over his writing career less and less—to do with the prompts that theatrical images found in painting and increasingly to do with an interrogation of the image and its communicative structure. Beckett seemed more preoccupied with what the procedures and problems of painting suggest for the writer in relation to his own problems and procedures.
Listen in …
… Episode 211 – John Cuneo | Virtual Memories.
“These drawings were made with no intention of anyone ever seeing them. They were just practice, and — as more than one person has suggested — a cry for help.”
The lives of others …
… This Long Pursuit. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In a wonderful essay, “Shelley Unbound,” Holmes discusses the warping effect the actual events in a subject’s life have on our later assessment of that subject. This is a very odd, very astute observation, and one he explores brilliantly in showing how Shelley’s untimely death “was used to define an entire life, to frame a complete biography,” producing “what might be called thanatography.” Prime mover in this respect was Shelley’s friend, “the incorrigible myth-making” Edward John Trelawny, who, over fifty years, continued to rewrite his account of the fatal shipwreck “accumulating more and more baroque details, like some sinister biographical coral reef.”
Q & A …
… The Creative Catholic: Fr. James V. Schall S.J. on the art and vocation of writing | Catholic World Report - Global Church news and views. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
There is an inverse ratio. Writing well is an art. Research is an art. The word ‘research’ can be confusing. Not infrequently, the most outlandish positions are ‘well researched’. It is basically a question of truth, not amount of time in justifying the position and citing authors.
Exploring the ruins …
… The Millions : Escaping the Waste Land: On Flannery O'Connor and T.S. Eliot - The Millions. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Eliot delivers the ruins. O’Connor preserves them, navigates them, and then, inspired by Catholicism, discovers in them an original form of grace.
Something to think on …
I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing. I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write.
— Nelson Algren, born on this date in 1909
Monday, March 27, 2017
Hmm …
… Populism is the result of global economic failure | Business | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Populism is seen as irrational and reprehensible. It is neither. It seems entirely rational for the bottom 90% of the US population to question why they are getting only 2% of income gains. It hardly seems strange that workers in Britain should complain at the weakest decade for real wage growth since the Napoleonic wars.
Mysteries …
… Informal Inquiries: The marriage of Heaven and Hell.
I think Miss Emily was very much on guard against the two unforgivable sins, presumption and despair. I also think that C.S. Lewis was on to something when he said that the door to Hell was locked from the inside. Like the Abbé Mugnier, I believe in Hell because it is doctrine of the Church. Also like him, I do not necessarily believe that anyone is there.
I think Miss Emily was very much on guard against the two unforgivable sins, presumption and despair. I also think that C.S. Lewis was on to something when he said that the door to Hell was locked from the inside. Like the Abbé Mugnier, I believe in Hell because it is doctrine of the Church. Also like him, I do not necessarily believe that anyone is there.
Avoiding invalidity …
… Everything is illuminated: Rowan Williams on the art and faith of David Jones. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
For him, all art rested on the conviction that God had made a world of endless cross-reference, and that humanity was most fully human when it acknowledged this. Art was humanity doing what only humanity could do.
The greatness of small things …
… First Known When Lost: Absence.
"All poetry is in a sense love-poetry." Edward Thomas makes this suggestion at the end of a paragraph in which, discussing the unique power of poetry, he states: "If what poets say is true and not feigning, then of how little account are our ordinary assumptions, our feigned interests, our playful and our serious pastimes spread out between birth and death. . . [Poetry] is the utterance of the human spirit when it is in touch with a world to which the affairs of 'this world' are parochial." Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (Martin Secker 1910), pages 86-87.I love the painting of the house on the canal.
I think that these are wonderful, and true, observations. But might it not also be said that all poems are elegies? This may be a case of six of one, half a dozen of the other: an elegy is an expression of love (a greater or a lesser love, depending upon the nature of the relationship between the elegist and the departed). There are various types and degrees of love, and the potential objects of our love are innumerable. But what all love has in common is this: the belovèd may leave us. Hence, love poems. Hence, elegies.
Something to think on …
Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.
— Shusaku Endo, born on this date in 1923
Sunday, March 26, 2017
Torment and the Muse …
… A Letter from the Bottom of the World: On Robert Lowell, Poetry and Madness. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Walk, look, and listen …
… The University Bookman: De Animali Ambulante. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
We do not have to move to Manhattan, where Horowitz lives, to practice what she preaches, which is, basically, that much is to be seen on your very own block, your very own street. In some ten accounts of walking around a single city block, often beginning from her own front door, Horowitz circles, or squares, or rectangles a city block.
Something to think on …
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
— A. E. Housman, born on this date in 1859
Saturday, March 25, 2017
And a newer artist, John Mayer, seeks redemption...
Across four hectic days this month, as Mr. Mayer, lucid and optimistic, finished his big-budget new album, “The Search for Everything,” and filmed a music video for what he hopes will be his next hit single, he seemed to especially relish reflecting on his 2010 undoing. Recalling the consequences of those infamous magazine articles — in which he used the phrase “sexual napalm,” chronicled his onanism in horrific detail, referred to his male anatomy as David Duke and somehow separately used a racial epithet — Mr. Mayer was vivid and virtuosic in his self-laceration.
The answer my friend, is...
The Nobel Prize winner talks about his latest release, Triplicate
Are you concerned about what Bob Dylan fans think about these standards?These songs are meant for the man on the street, the common man, the everyday person. Maybe that is a Bob Dylan fan, maybe not, I don’t know.
Has performing these songs taught you anything you didn’t know from listening to them?I had some idea of where they stood, but I hadn’t realized how much of the essence of life is in them – the human condition, how perfectly the lyrics and melodies are intertwined, how relevant to everyday life they are, how non-materialistic.
Up to the sixties, these songs were everywhere – now they have almost faded away. Do they mean more to you when you hear them now? They do mean a lot more. These songs are some of the most heartbreaking stuff ever put on record and I wanted to do them justice. Now that I have lived them and lived through them I understand them better. They take you out of that mainstream grind where you’re trapped between differences which might seem different but are essentially the same. Modern music and songs are so institutionalized that you don’t realize it. These songs are cold and clear-sighted, there is a direct realism in them, faith in ordinary life just like in early rock and roll.
Friendship has its burdens....
...Sometimes I get lucky and there’s a real-life event I can use as an excuse, like that time in ’93 when an accident in the Lincoln Tunnel had traffic backed up so bad I wouldn’t have been able to make it to his MTV Unplugged taping even if I’d wanted to,” Gilman said. “But for the most part, it just gets harder over the years. There are only so many ways I can change the subject when he asks if I’ve gotten around to checking out ‘Built To Run’ or whatever.”
“I do occasionally feel guilty,” he added. “I mean, Bruce and his bandmates have helped me move like half a dozen times.”It's Onion Saturday!
Faith in a secular age …
… Charles Taylor and the Communion of the Saints | Dale M. Coulter | First Things.
Taylor’s prescription for our secular age remains connected to his reading of Christian tradition, in particular his understanding of the communion of the saints. Within this communion, Taylor notes, there are a variety of models for how conversion unfolds in the life of a person. By “communion of the saints,” Taylor means: “a communion of whole lives, of whole itineraries toward God.” The church consists concretely of diverse peoples with different itineraries toward God that will be finally resolved only at the eschaton. Given that the desire for the transcendent remains embedded within the constitution of the human person, what helps the late-modern self to break out of the immanent frame is to see the rich tapestry of conversion that the church embodies in her life. It is no longer the relationship between the great Gothic cathedrals on the medieval landscape and the scholastic cathedrals of the mind; rather, it is the messy, sometimes chaotic, flow of men and women toward God.
Hardly surprising …
… Why College Graduates Still Can't Think — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
In 2010, the Noel-Levitz Employer Satisfaction Survey of over 900 employers identified “critical thinking [as] the academic skill with the second largest negative gap between performance satisfaction and expectation.” Four years later, a follow-up study conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found little progress, concluding that “employers…give students very low grades on nearly all of the 17 learning outcomes explored in the study”—including critical thinking—and that students “judge themselves to be far better prepared for post-college success than do employers.”Well, it's hard to think critically if you aren't interested in views different from your own.
Public and private …
… Listen NPR, the Market is Already Saving PBS - Foundation for Economic Education - Working for a free and prosperous world. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I have been linking to different views on this debate precisely because there are different views.
I have been linking to different views on this debate precisely because there are different views.
Grief …
… “The Sharpened Shears He Plied” by Rhina P. Espaillat | Rattle: Poetry. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Some thing to think on …
It is only through shadows that one comes to know the light.
— Catherine of Siena, born on this date in 1347
Friday, March 24, 2017
Blogging note …
I have an appointment with a Jesuit friend and counsellor today, and have errands to run after that. So, once again, my blogging will resume sometime later. I am an unusually busy old man.
Worth serious attention …
… Collected Essays on Philosophers by Colin Wilson | Issue 119 | Philosophy Now. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Wilson never disassociates a man from his ideas; a core component of his theory of Existential Literary Criticism is that a study of the author’s character is an essential part of interpreting their thought. As he notes with regard to Spinoza, “any attempt to judge him must start from Spinoza the human being” (p.205). His view of Herbert Marcuse is similarly tempered: “I am less interested in condemning Marcuse than in finding out ‘how he got like he is’” (p.80). Similarly, for Wilson it is Foucault’s sexual dysfunction which induces the negative inertia of most of his writing; while Wittgenstein was “a strange, tormented man” (p.233). In fact, Wilson is at his most critical when dissecting Bertrand Russell in three pieces here, again because personality flaws in the man dissipated his philosophy: “I am not attacking Russell on grounds of morality, but on his blindness to his own shortcomings. He liked to think of himself as a philosopher in the traditional sense of the word… yet he failed to see any inconsistency in
Something to think on …
The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.
— William Morris, born on this date in 1834
Thursday, March 23, 2017
Letter without spirit …
… Really Modern English by Anthony Esolen | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Little to learn here …
… Deaths of the Poets review: A superficial take on ‘self-destructive’ poets. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Take a look at these …
… Lowell's Grotto of Our Lady #01 Photo by Rus Bowden — National Geographic Your Shot.
This gives me an opportunity to once again sing the praises of Franz Werfel's novel, The Song of Bernadette, which really is great.
This gives me an opportunity to once again sing the praises of Franz Werfel's novel, The Song of Bernadette, which really is great.
FYI …
… Call for Submissions: Global Dystopias | Boston Review. (Hat tip, Dan Bloom.)
A simple description of contemporary society ought to do.
A simple description of contemporary society ought to do.
Too much truth for power …
… check out the review of Isaac Babel's Odessa Stories: We Reviewed March's Best Books, Music, and Movies - Vice. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Babel wrote his Odessa stories during the 1920s, and the tales set after the Russian Revolution depict with ironic skepticism the new government's efforts to impose a communist system on gangsters and religious Jews. … Although Babel welcomed the revolution, he saw the Soviets as violently opposed to the code of honor that existed among the Odessa gangsters and recklessly indifferent to Jewish history.
Something to think on …
'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
— Friedrich von Hayek, who died on this date in 1992
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Mix and match …
… Beyond Ideology: Poetry and the Conservative Mind — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
No matter its stripe, ideology subdues the imagination, the artistic spirit, and the intellect, which give life to culture itself. Besides, true conservatism is not ideological; it will be wildly distorted in the long run if its intellectual sustenance comes only from the dogmatists in its midst.This is certainly true, which is why literature in general and poetry in particular ought to be read disinterestedly, for their own sake, and not for any ideological reason.
Something to think on …
Nothing is worth more than this day.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who died on this date in 1832
Recommended reading …
… Dystopian fiction is big now. But here’s a book for people worried about fake news. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Ranked by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century and by Robert McCrum of the Guardian as the 60th best novel written in English, “Scoop” is, as Christopher Hitchens put it, “Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch; youthful and limber and light as a feather.” Waugh biographer David Wykes says it “radiates enjoyment and happiness” — tonally, then, it is quite different from the despairing visions that dominate today’s reading lists. But the novel’s depiction of an insular, gullible and sometime dishonest press will strike a chord with many readers in the Age of Trump — or in the Age of the Anti-Trump Media.
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Mark thy calendar …
Sat., April 1, 2017 @ 5-7PM in Lambertville, NJ
CHROMA: An Ekphrastic ProjectArt by Ravenna Taylor
with poets
with poets
Ellen Foos
Lois Marie Harrod
Kasey Jueds
Vasiliki Katsarou
Fred Lowe
MaryAnn L. Miller
Hayden Saunier
Lynne Shapiro
John Richard Smith
John Timpane
Lois Marie Harrod
Kasey Jueds
Vasiliki Katsarou
Fred Lowe
MaryAnn L. Miller
Hayden Saunier
Lynne Shapiro
John Richard Smith
John Timpane
Ravenna Taylor Studio
233 N. Union St.
Lambertville, NJ 08530
233 N. Union St.
Lambertville, NJ 08530
Free
Contact: (908) 238-1570
Contact: (908) 238-1570
Open studio, reading, and reception.
Public invited.
Public invited.
On-street parking possible and lot parking available behind Thai Tida restaurant.
Chroma: An Ekphrastic Project
Something to look forward to …
… BBC - James Wood (Writer) Q&A - Decline And Fall - Media Centre. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Exploring your inner Paterson …
… The Poetics of Everyday Life: Poetry Books for Fans of PATERSON : The Booklist Reader. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The movie really is sweet. Nice, too, that Paterson himself is not tormented.
The movie really is sweet. Nice, too, that Paterson himself is not tormented.
Listen in …
… Episode 210 – Tony Tulathimutte | Virtual Memories.
“There’s no way to write about millennials without adopting a comic tone.”
Blogging note …
I must be off to the dentist's and then to The Inquirer. My blogging effort will resume sometime later.
For the occasion …
… World Poetry Day: Listen to Philip Larkin read his melancholic poem Aubade. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul.
— Jean Paul, born on this date in 1763
Monday, March 20, 2017
For the defense …
… 11 Things You Probably Didn't Know Were Funded With Help From The National Endowment For The Arts - BuzzFeed News.
On the other hand, Faulkner, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and lots of others seem to have got by without such help.
On the other hand, Faulkner, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and lots of others seem to have got by without such help.
Much in what he says …
… The suicide of expertise: Glenn Reynolds.
By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”
Cause for hope …
… These monks in Ireland spend their lives praying for priests. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“As monks … we have a particular focus on reparation for the sins of priests which, especially of late, have so disfigured the Face of Christ in the eyes of the world.”
Speaking truth to power …
… Petition — Philip Hanlon: Take Back Dartmouth — Change.org.
… we believe that the lack of fiscal discipline that has come to characterize the College’s decision-making process has harmed Dartmouth students as well as the broader Dartmouth community. Specifically, the unchecked growth of extraneous services and unnecessary support offices, along with the mass hiring of non-faculty staff members, is holding back Dartmouth from reaching its full potential. According to the Dartmouth Office of Institutional Research, non-faculty staff numbered 2,408 in the year 1999 (1). By 2004, this figure had risen to 3,342 – an increase of almost 1,000 staffers in just five years. Notwithstanding layoffs necessitated by the recession, the College has not taken steps to reverse its prolonged hiring binge. In 2015, Dartmouth employed a total of 3,497 non-faculty staff, and it seems unlikely that the current administration has plans to change course (2).I admire these students. Talk about swimming against the stream.
Holocaust booster …
… The ugly news at St. Thomas | Power Line.
… there can be no doubt that he crossed the line from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism. To say “[Y]ahood [Jews] will get what coming for them” is not just to criticize the State of Israel. It is to call, in plain enough terms, for the mass murder of Jewish people, whether in Israel or elsewhere. If Muhammad or his defenders think otherwise, then they must have spent their lives in a kind of coma, unaware of or indifferent to the Holocaust and the discourse about Jews and Judaism that preceded it.
Appreciation …
… Anecdotal Evidence: `A Hunter Without a Blank in His Magazine'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Something to think on …
Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.
— Isaac Newton, who died on this date in 1727
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Form and function …
… Finding a Form for Prayer | Catholic World Report - Global Church news and views.
Block has found a way to honor both Levertov’s apparent concern for authenticity of experience and Auden and Winters’s appreciation for the discipline and formal beauty made possible by speech when given form through the refinement of grammar into measure. He does so by concealing, as it were, the refinement of verse within the bare appearance of organic form.
Something to think on …
Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.
— Tobias Smollett, born on this date in 1721
Anita Brooker
A few months ago, I read my first of Anita Brookner's novels, Hotel du Lac. I wrote about that book on the blog.
Now, I've finished another of Brookner's books, The Latecomers, which tells the story of two Jewish men transported to London as part of the Kindertransport at the start of the Second World War.
While there are elements of the novel that I found moving, it's not, on the whole, as successful as Hotel. For one thing, there's far too much description. I can't remember a work of fiction with such little dialogue, and with so much, well, describing. (That's fine and well, of course, and all those adjectives have the potential to circle something special: but in this case, they don't. Or they don't all the time.)
By the end of The Latecomers we know Brookner's characters well. No doubt: we know their wives, their children, even their grandchildren; we anticipate their actions, their responses. And yet, they remain two dimensional -- which is a product, I think, of the narrative structure: they simply don't say enough; they do not interact as we might expect them to do, even in this imagined world.
The sense I took away is that the characters remain flat because Brookner is unwilling to fully chart their roots -- in Germany, before the war. True, one character spends a chapter back in Berlin, but it doesn't result in a coherent experience for the reader: there's not enough said or done; there's not enough dialogue to understand how the character -- in this case, Fibich -- felt about his return.
This I found odd, as Brookner herself came from a family of Ashkenazi Jews who'd emigrated to London. Indeed, there's a sense in which the entire history told in The Latecomers is Brookner's own. For whatever reason, that history is never fully probed: the idea of experiencing life in phases, under duress, is never fully exposed.
What is exposed here, though, and what is nicely presented, is the idea of family. Both characters in the novel -- Fibich and Hartmann -- emerge stronger than we found them: their sense of fatherhood more complete, their sense for life's rewards more nuanced. This, I think, is the lasting impact of Brookner's novel: that home is an emotional space, a space that we build with our families. It's more than geography alone.
Saturday, March 18, 2017
RIP …
… Chuck Berry, a Founding Father of Rock 'n' Roll, Dies at 90 | Billboard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Family feuds …
… Norman Podhoretz Still Picks Fights and Drops Names - The New York Times. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“Every morning,” he wrote in the 1967 memoir “Making It,” “a stock-market report on reputation comes out in New York. It is invisible, but those who have eyes to see can read it. Did so-and-so have dinner at Jacqueline Kennedy’s apartment last night? Up five points. Was so-and-so not invited by the Lowells to meet the latest visiting Russian poet? Down one-eighth. Did so-and-so’s book get nominated for the National Book Award? Up two and five-eighths. Did Partisan Review neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Down two.”Small world. In more ways than one.
Countering ignorance …
… of Snoopy, among others: Leticia Miranda on Twitter: "is this offensive?
In all fairness, she did just pose a question. But it might be a good idea to ask it in private rather than on Twitter. And maybe one shouldn't be looking to take offense.
In all fairness, she did just pose a question. But it might be a good idea to ask it in private rather than on Twitter. And maybe one shouldn't be looking to take offense.
Except there is …
… Nigeness: No Problem.
Yes, it seems the more college-educated people there are, the more klutzy speaking and writing there is. I see "different than" everywhere now. One my own bugbears is "this begs the question," which demonstrates that the speaker or writer has no idea what "begging the question" means.
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