Saturday, September 30, 2017
Hmm …
… How algorithms are transforming artistic creativity | Aeon Essays. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Kasparov argues that the introduction of machine intelligence to chess did not diminish but enhanced the aesthetics of the game, creating a new space for creativity at the game’s highest levels. Today, players of ‘freestyle’ chess work with high-end chess systems, databases of millions of games and moves, and often other human collaborators too. Freestyle teams can easily defeat both top grandmasters and chess programs, and some of the best centaur teams are made up of amateur players who have created better processes for combining human and machine intelligence.This brings to mind Somerset Maugham's observation that "perfection is a trifle dull." That is also the point of Robert Herrick's "Delight in Disorder."
These centaur games are beautiful. The quality of play is higher, the noise of simple human errors reduced, making space for the kind of pure contest that the platonic solids and geometries of chess idealise.
Finding a way in …
… The Little Books of Julia Nemirovskaya - Asymptote. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I would like to talk about my journey into a short lyric by Julia Nemirovskaya, a Russian poet who was born in Moscow in 1962 and now teaches at the University of Oregon. I first read Nemirovskaya’s poems five years ago and was immediately charmed by her voice. It is a humble voice, somewhat childlike—a perfect vehicle for her penetrating, childlike imagination.
Something to think on …
This is the essence of all sciences — that you should know who you will be when the Day of Reckoning arrives.
— Rumi, born on this date in 1207
Friday, September 29, 2017
Ah, yes …
… The Prisoner Turns 50 - Hit & Run : Reason.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Debbie and I watched episode 2 last night.
Honoring a feast day …
… Michaelmas; a sonnet for St. Michael the Archangel | Malcolm Guite. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Comforted by nonsense …
… Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense review – honey and heartbreak | Books | The Guardian.
Parrots also brought him a patron, Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, whose teeming family exposed Lear to a new audience for his gifts as an entertainer. As an artist, Lear was supposed to remain below stairs with the servants, but Stanley liked to have his protege upstairs to amuse his guests. Where Carroll had Alice and the Liddell family, Lear had the Knowsley nursery, where the Stanley children, their friends and nursemaids, kept riotous company. Unlike Carroll, he did not sentimentalise little girls, betraying no hint of the paedophile. Rather, Lear loved the mayhem of childhood to which nonsense was the only answer. Nonsense was infantile, rude, eccentric and grumpy, as children are. Nonsense could celebrate surreal violence and ghoulish accidents. As a roving landscape painter, Lear could be exquisite. Through his crazy wordplay, he could express his inner torment as a homosexual single man in Victorian England.
Just so you know …
… Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived - StumbleUpon. (Hat tip, Felix Giordano.)
Drama critics converse …
… AMERICAN THEATRE | Three on the Aisle: Advancing the Argument. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Hmm …
… Informal Inquiries: Don Quixote yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Miguel de Cervantes said, “Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”I don't know about too much sanity, but too much rationality can be a problem.
Not what you might think …
… Ancient Identities | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Religious conflict did arise, but mainly in a way very different from modern religious conflict. If individuals neglected the cult that, in the public mind, enacted the soundness and fertility of humans, animals, and fields, the success of the army and the flourishing of trade, the god or gods would take revenge on the whole society, with plague, famine, economic collapse, and natural and military disasters. Not to honor one’s own god or gods was the basic contagious sin.Once again, the ancients sound more reasonable than many people today.
Q&A …
… "Not a heartbeat, but a moan": Nicole Sealey - The Barnes & Noble Review. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Without thought to how poems will eventually be shared, I just try to write the best poems I can, given my limitations as an imperfect person. To me, a poem is a translation of thought and experience into something capable of being shared and, to some extent, understood — no matter page or stage.
Poet at a distance …
… Homecoming by Dorianne Laux : American Life in Poetry. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Something to think on …
Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.
— Miguel de Unamuno, born on this date in 1864
Thursday, September 28, 2017
A wise man …
… Anecdotal Evidence: `Reading Chekhov Helps'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.”I have few regrets, though one is any attachment I may have had to political partisanship. Few things seem more corrupting.
Conservation …
… Appeal launched to collect poetry in endangered languages | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Capitals and Colons, or, A Grammar Moment
In the post below, on Banned Books Week, the author of the quoted excrept (the article is from the NYTimes) uses a colon twice, and a lower case letter on the next word once and an upper case letter on the next word once.
I had always thought one should use a lower case letter following a colon: it is no period after all, and so should not be accorded the dignity of one. But apparently there are at least two rules on use of a capital letter following a colon. The Times author's inconsistent use isn't one of them. And my use isn't really favored either. I don't care though and will stick to my use: a colon is not a period, after all.
I had always thought one should use a lower case letter following a colon: it is no period after all, and so should not be accorded the dignity of one. But apparently there are at least two rules on use of a capital letter following a colon. The Times author's inconsistent use isn't one of them. And my use isn't really favored either. I don't care though and will stick to my use: a colon is not a period, after all.
Watching an Editor at Work
... I asked Scott why he had been so rough on me the previous winter. “Sometimes my job is to be an asshole,” he explained with equanimity. I wasn’t startled at this. At one point on an earlier book, when I told him how stressed I was feeling, he had replied, a bit airily, I thought, “Oh, every good book has at least one nervous breakdown in it.”
Near the end of our lunch, Scott offered one more wise observation about the writing process: “The first draft is for the writer. The second draft is for the editor. The last draft is for the reader.”
At that lunch, he knew how grateful I was to him. Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom is a much better book for his powerful intervention. In retrospect, that first draft was herky-jerky and sometimes portentous. It also frequently was hard to read without rewarding the reader for making the effort. The final version, published in May of this year, pops right along.
Go 'Way!!!
This week is Banned Books Week, in which the American Library Association highlights its annual Top Ten List of Most Challenged Books: effectively a curated snapshot of the American state of mind.
Every year since 1990, hundreds of complaints by parents, educators and the public have poured into the association’s online reporting system. There were 323 challenges to published books recorded in 2016. The details are confidential: The association is more interested in how people think about specific books and censorship than in publishing who called for a ban and where.
Appreciation …
… John Ashbery (1927–2017) | by Luc Sante | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Much of his work gives the impression of having been piped straight to the surface from his unconscious, although it certainly passed through a powerful poetic engine that determined line breaks and measured flow and regulated music. His reading voice maintained that imperturbable meandering pace, never succumbing to declamation or melodrama or the pregnant pauses of needier poets but issuing a steady stream of words in unexpected patterns, so that young poets would attend his readings not just to hear him but to furtively scribble the images and lines his had touched off in their own fugue states.
A peculiar worldview …
… George Eliot’s Rebellions | Helen Andrews. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It is the subject, not the author, that is poorly suited for a book of this type. George Eliot had no moral system. She rejected the very idea of moral systems. Before her pseudonym was unmasked, a reviewer for the Athenaeum speculated that the author of Adam Bedemust be “a clever woman with an observant eye and an un-schooled moral nature.” Un-schooled is precisely the right word. Moral feelings assailed her in gusts, but she refused any effort to discipline them.
Something to think on …
A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.
— Peter De Vries, who died on this date in 1993
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Reading in a distracting world …
… Lectio and Literature — Education & Culture. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Lectio divina involves ruminating on very short passages of Scripture, whereas novels can go on for four hundred pages. But there are basic principles to the practice that are helping me slowly recover my ability to read deeply and well. What are these?
The perennial annoyance …
… Into the vortex of Widmerpool | Standpoint. (Hat tip, Dave Lull)
Powell was as surprised as anyone, writes Hilary Spurling in Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time, her masterly new biography of the author, “when Widmerpool showed signs of taking on a momentum of his own . . . acquiring in the end, like Shakespeare’s Falstaff or Dickens’s Mr Micawber, an identity beyond his fictional origins, becoming even for people who had never read the Dance the essence of a harsh, officious and manipulative greed for power.” Spurling quotes a review by David Piper of Temporary Kings, the penultimate book in the Dance: “In him [Widmerpool] Powell has isolated — and named for ever — a recurring elemental irritant of human intercourse. Everyone has their Widmerpool . . . Who is your Widmerpool? — awesomely, whose Widmerpool are you?”
The very first assignment I got from The Inquirer was to review Hearing Secret Harmonies, the concluding volume of Dance. Unfortunately, I hadn't read the previous 11 volumes. But I conscientiously set about doing so. It is very much worth the time.
In case you wondered …
… How Alexander Calder Became America's Most Beloved Sculptor | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“So now, at thirty-two”—so Calder put it in the Autobiography—“I wanted to paint and work in the abstract.” His first attempts were paintings rather than sculptures—perhaps a bow to Mondrian. These paintings are spare and enigmatic. Most of them—there are fewer than two dozen—don’t bring to mind specific works by Mondrian, in which the black lines extending from edge to edge assert the rectangle of the painting as a powerful, free-standing planar reality. Calder was already thinking about abstract forms as they moved through a fluid three-dimensional space. Calder later observed, “It was Mondrian who made me abstract—but I tried to paint, and it was my love of making plastic things that turned me to constructions.”
Something to think on …
Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.
— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, born on this date in 1821
Listen in …
… Episode 236 – Mimi Pond | Virtual Memories.
“I felt more of a sense of empty nest when I finished this book than I did when my children left home.”… Episode 237 – Ann Telnaes and Matt Wuerker.
“I did some hard-hitting cartoons during the Bush administration. . . . I kind of wish I held back a little because now it’s like, ‘Where do we go from here?'” –Ann Telnaes
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
V. S. Naipaul
It's not often that I'm floored by a contemporary novel -- I mean, really, truly taken. But that was the case with A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul's harrowing account of the period following African independence.
With the exception perhaps of Rushdie, I can't remember reading a novelist with such an evolved style, such a clear sense for the way words are meant to interact. For its syntax alone, A Bend in the River is to be celebrated. Naipaul's language is evocative, emotional, precise. It captures the chaos of that time, but also its sense of wonder and possibility.
Naipaul's novel is about more, though, than fabulous writing: it's a book about race and gender, and about ethnicity. Many of Naipaul's most memorable characters are outsiders: from Europe, from India and Persia. Their reflections -- and their interactions with native Africans -- serve as the lens through which Naipaul evaluates two recurrent themes: power and identity.
At all moments, in virtually all scenes, Naipaul is attuned to power: how it is generated -- and how it is maintained. Some of the novel's most haunting passages focus on this theme. "They say it is better to kill for days than to die forever," he writes.
Power is at the root of identity here, and A Bend in the River is nothing if not a meditation on how characters come to terms with themselves in a world that can be bitterly indifferent. Even the most corrupt among Naipaul's characters recognize that their deficiencies, their perversions are a function of power: Naipaul writes, for instance, of a man "enraged by his own helplessness." Self-realization can be a painful thing.
Ultimately, A Bend in the River is a novel attuned to cycles: how power emerges and retreats, how individuals realize their potential at one moment, only to see it collapse at another. I can't say enough for just how successful this book is. The last word is reserved for Naipaul:
"Unless I acted now, my fate would be like theirs. That constant questioning of mirrors and eyes; compelling others to look for the blemish that kept you in hiding; lunacy in a small room."
Coinages …
… How Do You Decode a Hapax? (Also, What’s a Hapax?) - Atlas Obscura. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Hmm …
…Reading J. A. Baker's The Peregrine in Fall. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Our species isn’t that old, and yet we forget. In the blink of an eye, we crawled out from the caves, swept across the globe like a cancer, and after two hundred and fifty years of industrial civilization, we appear to be pushing all life toward the brink of extinction. “We are the killers,” Baker writes. “We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.”Well, you can blame Almighty Evolution for that. See also this.
Something to think on …
If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks.
— T. S. Eliot, born on this date in 1888
Monday, September 25, 2017
Art and landscape …
… A Walk in Willa Cather’s Prairie | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Recently, I read Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Wonderful. Tonight I will start O Pioneers!.I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass. . . . I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
Remembering …
… The Word and the words: a sonnet for Lancelot Andrewes | Malcolm Guite. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Well, he was admired by Richard Crashaw, who went over to Rome, and he seems to me more nearly Catholic than Anglo.
Well, he was admired by Richard Crashaw, who went over to Rome, and he seems to me more nearly Catholic than Anglo.
Something to think on …
A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
— William Faulkner, born on this date in 1897
Check these out …
… A Boat Full of Seagulls: 10 Poems and TangosTranslated from the Spanish by Stephen Page. (Hat tip, G. E. Reutter.)
Sunday, September 24, 2017
FYI …
The Life of The Poet Workshop with Leonard Gontarek – Fall 2017
Thursdays, 5:30 – 7 PM. $72 for four classes.
The Fall Workshop will meet four times: September 28, October 5, 12, 19.
Note – New Location: 4221 Osage Avenue, Philadelphia.
Discussion of contemporary and international poetry, and participants’
work. Weekly assignments. Improve your poetic skills. Gain a fuller
understanding of poetry in our world. Find balance, support and time
to write. Keep your spirit up. For poets at any level.
Please contact Leonard Gontarek with interest: gontarek9@earthlink.net,
215.808.9507 – Independent workshops and manuscript editing available.
While there’s no guarantee you’ll become the next Robert Frost, with the guidance of award-winning, prolific poet Leonard Gontarek, it’s at least a possibility. Encouraging students to explore as many avenues as possible and remove themselves from their work, he’ll help you find—then strengthen—your style and voice.
Philadelphia Weekly, Nicole Finkbiner
Have taken several sessions of The Self and Place in Poetry and leave each class in a good place. Leonard is patient and direct. With deft skill and compassionate humor he helps us find the purest parts of our poems.
Kathryn Giedgowd
Leonard Gontarek is the author of six books of poems, including, Take Your Hand
Out of My Pocket, Shiva and He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs.
He coordinates Poetry In Common, Peace/Works, Philly Poetry Day, The
Philadelphia Poetry Festival, and hosts The Green Line Reading & Interview Series.
Since 2006, he has conducted 1000 poetry workshops in venues including,
Musehouse, The Kelly Writers House, The Moonstone Arts Center,
Free Library of Philadelphia, University City Arts League, Philadelphia
Arts in Education Partnership, and a weekly Saturday workshop from his
home in West Philadelphia. He has been Mad Poet-in-Residence since 2008.
He has received Poetry fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts,
the Mudfish Poetry Prize, the Philadelphia Writers Conference Community Service
Award, was a Literary Death Match Champion. His poem, 37 Photos From The Bridge,
a Poetry winner for the Big Bridges MotionPoems project in 2015, was the basis
for the award-winning film by Lori Ersolmaz.
Leonard Poem here:
https://voxpopulisphere.com/
Leonard Poem here:
http://www.cleavermagazine.
Leonard Poem here:
http://www.versedaily.org/
Leonard reading Promise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Take Your Hand Out Of My Pocket, Shiva, by Leonard Gontarek.
Available from:
Small Press Distribution
800.869.7553
spd@spdbooks.org
spdbooks.org
Hanging Loose Press
347.227.8215
print225@aol.com
hangingloosepress.com
“This is a book of human hungers so exact in its recognitions it leaves a reader stricken with a sense not just of how detailed our desires are, but how rare it is to have them articulated in ways yet unspoken. 'In my poor country, we poured sugar/ on everything to not notice our hunger,' Leonard Gontarek writes, but where that coat of sweetening fails, this poet stays to record what is still needed, what is still hungry, what is still so very, and beautifully, human.”
—Katie Ford, author of Blood Lyrics and Colosseum
“With its spare language, dry wit, and unnerving honesty, Gontarek's latest book delivers a sucker punch of solitude and desire. Here is a voice that offers no simple solutions to the whirl of the universe, but instead stands next to you and points out the small essential thing you forgot to notice. Deliberate, bare, and infused with a searing humor, these poems hiss and bloom at the same time.”
—Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things and Sharks in the River
Thursdays, 5:30 – 7 PM. $72 for four classes.
The Fall Workshop will meet four times: September 28, October 5, 12, 19.
Note – New Location: 4221 Osage Avenue, Philadelphia.
Discussion of contemporary and international poetry, and participants’
work. Weekly assignments. Improve your poetic skills. Gain a fuller
understanding of poetry in our world. Find balance, support and time
to write. Keep your spirit up. For poets at any level.
Please contact Leonard Gontarek with interest: gontarek9@earthlink.net,
215.808.9507 – Independent workshops and manuscript editing available.
While there’s no guarantee you’ll become the next Robert Frost, with the guidance of award-winning, prolific poet Leonard Gontarek, it’s at least a possibility. Encouraging students to explore as many avenues as possible and remove themselves from their work, he’ll help you find—then strengthen—your style and voice.
Philadelphia Weekly, Nicole Finkbiner
Have taken several sessions of The Self and Place in Poetry and leave each class in a good place. Leonard is patient and direct. With deft skill and compassionate humor he helps us find the purest parts of our poems.
Kathryn Giedgowd
Leonard Gontarek is the author of six books of poems, including, Take Your Hand
Out of My Pocket, Shiva and He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs.
He coordinates Poetry In Common, Peace/Works, Philly Poetry Day, The
Philadelphia Poetry Festival, and hosts The Green Line Reading & Interview Series.
Since 2006, he has conducted 1000 poetry workshops in venues including,
Musehouse, The Kelly Writers House, The Moonstone Arts Center,
Free Library of Philadelphia, University City Arts League, Philadelphia
Arts in Education Partnership, and a weekly Saturday workshop from his
home in West Philadelphia. He has been Mad Poet-in-Residence since 2008.
He has received Poetry fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts,
the Mudfish Poetry Prize, the Philadelphia Writers Conference Community Service
Award, was a Literary Death Match Champion. His poem, 37 Photos From The Bridge,
a Poetry winner for the Big Bridges MotionPoems project in 2015, was the basis
for the award-winning film by Lori Ersolmaz.
Leonard Poem here:
https://voxpopulisphere.com/
Leonard Poem here:
http://www.cleavermagazine.
Leonard Poem here:
http://www.versedaily.org/
Leonard reading Promise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Take Your Hand Out Of My Pocket, Shiva, by Leonard Gontarek.
Available from:
Small Press Distribution
800.869.7553
spd@spdbooks.org
spdbooks.org
Hanging Loose Press
347.227.8215
print225@aol.com
hangingloosepress.com
“This is a book of human hungers so exact in its recognitions it leaves a reader stricken with a sense not just of how detailed our desires are, but how rare it is to have them articulated in ways yet unspoken. 'In my poor country, we poured sugar/ on everything to not notice our hunger,' Leonard Gontarek writes, but where that coat of sweetening fails, this poet stays to record what is still needed, what is still hungry, what is still so very, and beautifully, human.”
—Katie Ford, author of Blood Lyrics and Colosseum
“With its spare language, dry wit, and unnerving honesty, Gontarek's latest book delivers a sucker punch of solitude and desire. Here is a voice that offers no simple solutions to the whirl of the universe, but instead stands next to you and points out the small essential thing you forgot to notice. Deliberate, bare, and infused with a searing humor, these poems hiss and bloom at the same time.”
—Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things and Sharks in the River
In case you wondered …
… What Should Have Happened In Hillary Clinton's Useless Book | HuffPost. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… as her die-hard defenders proclaimed, Clinton can write a book if she wants, and nobody gets to stop her. They’re not wrong. She has every right to write a book about the election. But not this book. Nobody should ever be allowed to write a book like this.
Tracking the decline …
… “Humiliating”: Inside the Latest Controversy to Roil The New York Times | Vanity Fair.
Didn’t the Times just layoff a bunch of copyeditors?
Good …
… Clergy and Lay Scholars Issue Filial Correction of Pope Francis.
I am not a fan of the current Pope.
I am not a fan of the current Pope.
Something to think on …
To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, born on this date in 1896
Saturday, September 23, 2017
Artful writing …
… Tales of Ratiocination: The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes.
Genres have to do with the subjects that sre being written about. Any book in any genre can also be a work of art, sometimes high art.
Genres have to do with the subjects that sre being written about. Any book in any genre can also be a work of art, sometimes high art.
A matter of taste …
… Reading the Writing on His Walls - WSJ.
One thing that’s clear is that the collection, like President Bush’s top-four list, reflects its owner’s taste, not that of a high-priced art consultant. Rather than “buying signatures” or hewing to the dictates of fashion, Mr. Albee collected artists who were respected but comparatively little known to the public at large. His top-dollar pieces include a pair of nudes by Milton Avery, who is greatly admired by connoisseurs but has never been popular. Instead of Jackson Pollock, he chose a painting by Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife. He also owned three pieces each by Sidney Gordin, John McLaughlin, Richard Stankiewicz and Pavel Tchelitchew —none of them art-world matinée idols—and when he did buy works by famous artists like Marc Chagall or Wassily Kandinsky, they were stylistically uncharacteristic of the rest of their output.
Appointment announced …
… Alice Oswald named BBC Radio 4 Poet-in-Residence | The Bookseller. (Hat tip, G.E. Reutter.)
A contemporary Virgil …
… Of Arms and the Man - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The late Robert Fagles praised Virgil’s “unequalled blend of grandeur and accessibility.” Mr. Ferry’s poem has stateliness often encased in easy 21st-century diction. This helps make his Virgil our contemporary. His “Aeneid” is readable, even page-turning. Virgil’s impulit becomes “bashes,” and vestem, “shirt.” During the fall of Troy, Panthus tells Aeneas “the Trojans are finished.” Even grammar turns easygoing: “But who is that who from afar we see?” Words like “guesthouse” and “waggled” appear. Turnus accuses Drances of “talking away with your famous windbag blather.” Tarchon rallies his troops: “What are you so afraid of, you so-called soldiers, / You no-good, hang-back, half-ass Etruscans?” At the end Jupiter shuts Juno up once and for all: “I forbid you to try anymore. Enough is enough.” And when Aeneas defeats Turnus he tells him: “Now get it together, the time has come.”
And the winner is …
… Vietnamese refugee Ocean Vuong wins 2017 Forward Prize for Poetry. (Hat tip, G.E. Reutter.)
Something to think on …
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
— Wilkie Collins, who died on this date in 1889
Friday, September 22, 2017
Hmm …
… Does the Right Really Think a Sombrero is just a “Straw Hat”? | New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I know Lionel Shriver. She will be amused to learn that she is now regarded as right-wing. But when did libertarianism become exclusively right-wing? I consider myself a libertarian. What all libertarians have in common is a suspicion of authority and the state. There are, after all, libertarian socialists (who I think have much in common with Chesterton's and Belloc's Distributism). Putting all that aside, though, how is it right-wing to object to the nonsense about cultural appropriation? Was it cultural appropriation for Denzel Washington to be cast as Don Pedro in Kenneth Branagh's film of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing? I don't think so. Just good acting. Cultures grow by cross-pollinating. They die by in-breeding.
In praise of imperfection …
… Essay Daily: Take One Daily and Call Me Every Morning: ADVENT 12/1, Phillip Lopate on A Little-Known Gem by Max Beerbohm. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
He starts by zeroing in on Goethe’s vanity. “Goethe has more than once been described as ‘the perfect man’…. But a man whose career was glorious without intermission, decade after decade, must sorely try our patience.” He enumerates: “he was never injudicious, never lazy, always in the best form—and always in love with some lady or another just so much as was good for the development of his art, but never more than that by a tittle.” Of course this is unfair, but the irreverence is tonic.
Prophetic fiction …
… A Late-Night Radio Drama, With Hints of the Internet to Come. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Before we go further, it’s worth noting how fully this novel, which is set mostly in the two decades after World War II, anticipates the daily purge that is the internet, its mille-feuille layers of outrage and heartbreak.
In it, Elkin (1930-1995) considers how the telephone can make “every home in America its own potential broadcasting station, and every American his own potential star.” Everyone is his own cognitive hacker, his own potential phone phreak.
Something to think on …
Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can.
— Fay Weldon, born on this date in 1931
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Hmm …
… Dress like Beckett | What we can learn from writer's clothes.
Bad idea to dress like somebody else. Dress like yourself.
FYI …
… USAJOBS - Job Announcement.
This came in an email. So I thought I'd just in case someone is interested.
This came in an email. So I thought I'd just in case someone is interested.
The poet as saint …
… Poet Robert Lax found what he needed in the circus - The Buffalo News. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
One slight correction: It was John the Evangelist, not John of the Cross who lived on Patmos and the Book of Revelation.
One slight correction: It was John the Evangelist, not John of the Cross who lived on Patmos and the Book of Revelation.
Retrospective …
… Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 - The Barnes & Noble Review. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
A more predictably chronological walk through the decades might have highlighted the way in which Bidart’s work has evolved with experience; this more inventive sequence invites a different sort of insight. It’s true that the poems from the ’60s and ’70s, composed before Bidart found his full voice, are more straightforward, more conventional. Some, like “Herbert White” and the excellent “Ellen West,” are persona poems; others are memoir pieces written under the influence of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. Yet what this ordering makes apparent is the remarkable consistency and unity of Bidart’s work over time.
Talking to God …
… "Flannery's confession," a poem by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The catechism defines prayer as the lifting up of the mind and heart to God (at the catechism we had in first grade did). Anyway, when I do that, I usually try to keep quiet.
Something to think on …
We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.
— H. G. Wells, born on this date in 1866
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
Here's challenge …
… Informal Inquiries: Twenty-four pre-Christian era books.
I doubt if can name all of them, and I am sure I haven't read all of them. I've read Herodotus, a good deal of Plato and Aristotle, Homer of course, Caesar's Gallic Wars, Seneca's letters (though Seneca lived into the Christian era), the Upanishads and the Tao te Ching (if the latter two count), Thucydides (I think), Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Others that come to mind — Plutarch, Tacitus, and Marcus Aurelius, for instance — are not pre-Christian.
I doubt if can name all of them, and I am sure I haven't read all of them. I've read Herodotus, a good deal of Plato and Aristotle, Homer of course, Caesar's Gallic Wars, Seneca's letters (though Seneca lived into the Christian era), the Upanishads and the Tao te Ching (if the latter two count), Thucydides (I think), Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Others that come to mind — Plutarch, Tacitus, and Marcus Aurelius, for instance — are not pre-Christian.
Logic for living …
… Remembering Lotfi Zadeh, the Inventor of Fuzzy Logic | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Zadeh, who died earlier this month, at the age of ninety-six, had modest hopes for his paper; he figured that the main reason it had been accepted was because the author was a member of Information and Control’s editorial board. Gradually, though, his innovation found a following, particularly in the East. In the nineteen-eighties, engineers in Sendai, Japan, incorporated fuzzy logic into the design of the city’s new subway, using it to program the system’s famously smooth starts and stops. A catalogue of fuzzy consumer electronics followed—cameras, washers and dryers, vehicle transmissions and anti-skid braking systems, air-conditioners and thermostats, rice cookers, vacuum cleaners, and unmanned helicopters.
Something I happened upon …
… NOT TO WRITE WAS NOT TO BE ALIVE - NYTimes.com.
Why read Van Wyck Brooks? Because he wrote beautifully.
Masterwork …
Full disclosure, as they say: Harold is a friend of mine. His works have just been uploaded to YouTube and I intend to link to them one at a time. I think they are well worth hearing.
The winter of his discontent …
… Martin Amis: ‘I miss the English’ | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
If America is, for Amis, an easier place in which to grow old – fewer critics, for a start – he retains an expectation that he and his wife will move home one day. “I miss the English,” he says. “I miss Londoners. I miss the wit. Americans, they’re very, well, de Tocqueville saw this coming in about 1850 – he said, it’s a marvellous thing, American democracy, but don’t they know how it’s going to end up? It’s going to be so mushy that no one will dare say anything for fear of offending someone else. That’s why Americans aren’t as witty as Brits, because humour is about giving a little bit of offence. It’s an assertion of intellectual superiority. Americans are just as friendly and tolerant as Londoners, but they flinch from mocking someone’s background or education.”There is much in what he says.
Grand old man …
… A Soul in Wonder.(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Longley is not a poet to be read lazily. His poetry is as crafted as a hand-weaving or hand-carving, full of love, skill, hard work and vision. It is mindful of the alchemist’s motto, “Tria sunt necessaria: videlicet patientia, mora et aptitudo instrumentorum” (Three things are necessary: patience, soul and a way with the tools). Longley has all these, together with a classical education, an ear for music and a love and knowledge of the natural sciences. Therefore, his work demands attention of the reader, demands engagement with the voice of the poems and an appreciation of the craft involved in producing the finished poem, which may have scientific themes and words, Latin references, family resonances or even the statement of deeply-felt love and friendship for colleagues, past and present. Hence the usefulness of the poet’s own perception of his four great themes – love, war and death, nature and the art of poetry.
Something to think on …
I think in order to move forward into the future, you need to know where you've been.
— Charles Williams, born on this date in 1886
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Tonight …
POETRY IN COMMON
&
THE GREEN LINE CAFÉ POETRY SERIES
PRESENT
AN OPEN POETRY READING
THE ANNUAL RONALD JOHNSON POETRY AWARD
FOR BEST POEM
THE PRIZE: Poetry Books Valued at $50
Judges: RAFI LEV & CASSIE MACDONALD
Hosted by LEONARD GONTAREK
Tuesday, September 19, 2017, 7 PM
THE GREEN LINE CAFE IS LOCATED
AT 45TH & LOCUST STREETS
PHILADELPHIA, PA USA
(Please note the address, there are
other Green Line Café locations.)
greenlinecafe.com
This Event Is Free
Cassie MacDonald has been Hearthkeeper of Brigid's House in Waterfront South Camden since 2008, where she practices radical hospitality and hosts writers, artists and musicians with wide-open creative space and loving encouragement. From here, she launched the Poetry Liberation Front, whose Guerrilla Poets paint poems on abandoned places in the neighborhood. She is also Coordinator of Camden FireWorks, a collective of artist studios, gallery and teaching space and the future home of the FireHouse Press, in the emerging artist district known as SoBro. Her latest chapbook of poems, Use Your Words, is currently looking for a home.
Rafi Lev has over 25 years experience in multicultural education, cross-cultural communication, interfaith dialog, leadership training, youth mentorship and intergroup relations. For six years he performed with Full Circle Theatre’s intergenerational improve troupe and has been trained in Comedy Sportz, PlayBack Theatre and Theater of the Oppressed. He was a founding 3 year member of Center City Poets and has been published in Moonstone Arts “Poetry Ink”, “The Fox Chase Review” and “ In Barcelona”. His favorite forms include haiku and tanka and he is an avid aficionado of the daily jumble. His community building efforts have ranged from volunteering with Fellowship Farm, Asian Arts initiative, Norris Square Neighborhood Project, Operation Understanding, Broad Street Ministries, Raices Culturales Latinoamericanas, the Arts and Spirituality Center and Mighty Writers. Originally from the Midwest and a lifelong linguist, he has lived and studied in South America and the Middle East, as well as worked and traveled extensively in Africa, Asia and Europe. Rafi is rumored to have one of the largest refrigerator magnet collections in the Delaware Valley. Most days, he is still searching for that elusive perfect Muse.
&
THE GREEN LINE CAFÉ POETRY SERIES
PRESENT
AN OPEN POETRY READING
THE ANNUAL RONALD JOHNSON POETRY AWARD
FOR BEST POEM
THE PRIZE: Poetry Books Valued at $50
Judges: RAFI LEV & CASSIE MACDONALD
Hosted by LEONARD GONTAREK
Tuesday, September 19, 2017, 7 PM
THE GREEN LINE CAFE IS LOCATED
AT 45TH & LOCUST STREETS
PHILADELPHIA, PA USA
(Please note the address, there are
other Green Line Café locations.)
greenlinecafe.com
This Event Is Free
Cassie MacDonald has been Hearthkeeper of Brigid's House in Waterfront South Camden since 2008, where she practices radical hospitality and hosts writers, artists and musicians with wide-open creative space and loving encouragement. From here, she launched the Poetry Liberation Front, whose Guerrilla Poets paint poems on abandoned places in the neighborhood. She is also Coordinator of Camden FireWorks, a collective of artist studios, gallery and teaching space and the future home of the FireHouse Press, in the emerging artist district known as SoBro. Her latest chapbook of poems, Use Your Words, is currently looking for a home.
Rafi Lev has over 25 years experience in multicultural education, cross-cultural communication, interfaith dialog, leadership training, youth mentorship and intergroup relations. For six years he performed with Full Circle Theatre’s intergenerational improve troupe and has been trained in Comedy Sportz, PlayBack Theatre and Theater of the Oppressed. He was a founding 3 year member of Center City Poets and has been published in Moonstone Arts “Poetry Ink”, “The Fox Chase Review” and “ In Barcelona”. His favorite forms include haiku and tanka and he is an avid aficionado of the daily jumble. His community building efforts have ranged from volunteering with Fellowship Farm, Asian Arts initiative, Norris Square Neighborhood Project, Operation Understanding, Broad Street Ministries, Raices Culturales Latinoamericanas, the Arts and Spirituality Center and Mighty Writers. Originally from the Midwest and a lifelong linguist, he has lived and studied in South America and the Middle East, as well as worked and traveled extensively in Africa, Asia and Europe. Rafi is rumored to have one of the largest refrigerator magnet collections in the Delaware Valley. Most days, he is still searching for that elusive perfect Muse.
Hmm …
… Uncensored John Simon: Who Killed Poetry? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I suppose that the answer to the question posed in the title is "John Ashbery." But while the post makes plain that Simon does not like Ashbery's poetry, and even doubts that it is poetry, he never actually gets around to demonstrating that Ashbery somehow killed poetry.
For what it's worth, here is the only review I ever wrote of Ashbery's work. I seem to have gleaned some meaning — and some pleasure — from it.
I suppose that the answer to the question posed in the title is "John Ashbery." But while the post makes plain that Simon does not like Ashbery's poetry, and even doubts that it is poetry, he never actually gets around to demonstrating that Ashbery somehow killed poetry.
For what it's worth, here is the only review I ever wrote of Ashbery's work. I seem to have gleaned some meaning — and some pleasure — from it.
But the science was settled!
A group of prominent scientists on Monday created a potential whiplash moment for climate policy, suggesting that humanity could have considerably more time than previously thought to avoid a “dangerous” level of global warming.
Hear, hear …
… Camille Paglia's Teaching | Mark Bauerlein | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Paglia believes there is a causal connection between young Americans’ ignorance of history and their dim view of present conditions. At a conference in Oxford, Paglia stated again, in response to a student who criticized her and others for telling youths not to be so sensitive and snowflaky, “There is much too much focus on the present.” Thanks to the (presumed) sensitivity of modern youth, Paglia says, students have not had a “realistic introduction to the barbarities of human history . . . . Ancient history must be taught . . . . I believe in introducing young people to the disasters of history.” Without that background, she implies, our only standard of appraising current circumstances is current circumstances plus a few utopian dreams. We have so much material prosperity, they think, so why don’t we have more perfect people to enjoy it?
Something to think on …
The philosopher does not seek to understand the world — that is the business of the scientist — but he asks himself how is it that there is a world to understand? How is it that this world is intelligible to human beings and that there is an intelligent being to know it in its intelligibility?
— Étienne Gilson, who died on this date in 1978
What "culture" is about …
… Cultural appropriation | J. C. on the ethics of borrowing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Culture, from Latin cultura "a cultivating, agriculture," figuratively "care, culture, an honoring."
Dave also reminds me of an earlier post on this subject.
Culture, from Latin cultura "a cultivating, agriculture," figuratively "care, culture, an honoring."
Dave also reminds me of an earlier post on this subject.
Monday, September 18, 2017
Once upon a time …
… When Chicago Was the Real Literary Capital of the United States | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Good to hear …
… Marsha Mercer column: Not dead yet, poetry due for comeback | THEIR OPINION | richmond.com. (Hat tip, G.E. Reutter.)
On the job …
… New U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith reports for duty. (Hat tips, Rus Bowden and G. E. Reutter.)
Something to think on …
Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.
— Samuel Johnson, born on this date in 1709
The ghost of uncertainty …
… The New World of William Carlos Williams. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… when he was preparing his last book for the press, Leibowitz writes, Williams grew so anguished that he “tore the manuscript to pieces and dumped them in the trash.” His wife had to fish out the fragments and mail them to his publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions, “who put them together like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Sunday, September 17, 2017
A satisfying rightness …
… Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur: A Biographical Study by Robert Bagg and Mary Bagg | Quarterly Conversation. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Part of the problem for any biographers of a poet like Wilbur is the essential goodness and conventionality of their subject’s life. In the Army, he was neither hero nor coward. He did his job. He is a Christian. He was married to the same woman, Charlee, for sixty-five years, until her death in 2007, and had four apparently normal children. There is no evidence of marital infidelity, spousal abuse, or other scandal. The Baggs tells us the couple rather naively misused prescription drugs with alcohol in the 1980s, and successfully underwent treatment. That’s about the most shocking thing they have to report. Compare that to the lives of Berryman and Crane.
Sound advice …
… Reading Poetry Can Instantly Boost Your Happiness, Says Deepak Chopra | Reader's Digest. (Hat tip, G. E. Reutter.)
Honoring a feast day …
… Hildegard of Bingen: A Sonnet | Malcolm Guite. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
See also:
Jeannette Jones: “A Theological Interpretation of ‘Viriditas’ in Hildegard of Bingen and Gregory the Great.”
See also:
Jeannette Jones: “A Theological Interpretation of ‘Viriditas’ in Hildegard of Bingen and Gregory the Great.”
Mens sana in corpore sano …
… 104-Year Old Japanese Doctor Recommends These 14 Healthy Pieces of Advice. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I love the typo in the first line.
I love the typo in the first line.
Hmm …
… Thirty Years, by John P. Marquand (1954) - The Neglected Books Page. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In his introduction to the book, Clifton Fadiman calls Marquand “the best novelist of social comedy now [1954] at work in our country” and predicts that he will be considered the American Thackeray of the 20th century. Fadiman attributes Marquand’s success to his being “at once outsider and insider.” From the distance of over a half century later, I think it’s become clear that Marquand was far more insider than outsider. And despite recent attempts to prop up the place of rich East Cost white men as its pinnacle, it’s probably also safe to conclude that the role of Boston and New York clubmen in the American Establishment mostly of historical and anthropological interest today.
But could not one say the same of Thackeray's drawing rooms? Good novels actually provide worthwhile insight into how people — presumably people much like ourselves — actually lived in circumstances that happen superficially to differ from our own. Marquand's novels might provide needed insight into today's Ivy Leaguers (see H. M. Pulham, Esq.).
Inquirer reviews, sort of …
There are two reviews in the paper this Sunday, but I can only find one online. Maybe somebody should buy those who staff Philly.com a subscription to the paper.
Anyway, here's the one review that is online: Jesmyn Ward goes to front of the choir with 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'.
There's also this: Stephen Greenblatt goes back, back to the beginning with 'The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve'.
Anyway, here's the one review that is online: Jesmyn Ward goes to front of the choir with 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'.
There's also this: Stephen Greenblatt goes back, back to the beginning with 'The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve'.
Something to think on …
We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.
— Hildegard von Bingen, who died on this date in 1179
Saturday, September 16, 2017
Tracking the inanity …
… Report: Standing Up to Pee Gives Boys an Unfair Advantage in Physics | Parenting.
You really can't make this stuff up.
Grief born of love …
… The Poetry of Death | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
In the weeks after her funeral, I drove four times a day to her grave. I read novels only if they exercised rage and misery—“No Country for Old Men,” not “The Ambassadors.” I took pleasure only in disaster: Oklahoma City, an airplane crash in New York with everyone killed. My days were misery, except for an hour in the morning, when I revised the wailing and whining I had drafted beside her hospital bed. Today I realize that these death poems had already begun to bring my language back to life. One morning I looked out of the window at her garden. Her peonies, basketball-sized, stood tall and still unopened late in May, with weeds starting from the black earth around them. I began the poem that, by autumn, became “Weeds and Peonies.”
A man among books …
… Clifton Fadiman Didn’t Mind Being Called Schoolmasterish | Humanities. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Introducing his 1957 essay collection, Any Number Can Play, he was eerily prescient about our e-mail-and-text-addled, Twitterpated age. “Now there is a tendency to absorb the instantaneously received idea, mentally file it, and proceed to the next message transmitted by the tireless mass-communicators,” he wrote. “With so many signals crowding in upon us, there is no time, and soon no inclination, to arrange them in order of importance, reflect upon them, and take proper action. Eventually the alert reception of the signal suffices.”
A timely reminder …
… Why Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ Still Matters So Much To Me – The Forward. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Many of us have been struck by the fact that it took Elie 10 years to prepare himself to put into words the horrors of what had been done to him and to his family and to his people. A whole 10 years before he could begin to write. And when he did so, in the spring of 1955, this wise old man who had been to hell and back was just 26 years old. What must it have been like for this man, in his Paris lodgings, to rouse the demons — to hear once again what he called the “silent cries”? “While I had many things to say,” he would later write, “I did not have the words to say them….. How was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy? Hunger — thirst — fear — transport — selection — fire — chimney… I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right.” He reimmersed himself in that period, into the darkness of night. The approach that came most naturally to him was blunt and unsparing. What he bore witness to — and thus relived — were the horrors inflicted upon him, but also his own most searing moments of dehumanization, when he could not bring himself to help the person whose companionship had helped keep him alive in Auschwitz and later, on the death march — his father. As he eventually wrote, “He had called out to me and I had not answered.”
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