… Chasing the Ineffable. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I make translation easier for myself by sticking mostly to poets writing in the mainstreams of their traditions. In most cases I can find scholarship and data bases that help to illuminate a word’s meanings, so my biggest frustrations occur with poetry that is more experimental.
Only a fool dismisses essential distinctions as pedantry. And if one is not willing to learn the elementary terminology of a debate, then one should not presume to enter the debate. One who does not understand such terms as abortifacient, embryo, gamete, and viable should not enter the abortion debate, for example.
There is nothing adversarial in a genuine philosophical conversation. The person I am addressing and responding to is not my adversary but a co-inquirer. In the ideal case there is between us a bond of friendship, a philiatic bond. But this philiasubserves the eros of inquiry. The philosopher's love of truth is erotic, in the root, not the sexual, sense of the term, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks. It is not the agapic love of one who knows and bestows his pearls of wisdom. God’s love is agapic; Socrates’ love of truth is erotic; Socrates’ love for his friends is philiatic.
This is a brilliant piece. This is philosophy as I learned it at a Jesuit college (long before the Jesuits went adrift). Getting together to inquire into the nature of things — which demands, of course, continual rehearsal.
This is a digital edition, free-to-access, of the complete surviving correspondence between T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Emily Hale (1891–1969)
“Killing two birds with one stone” and asserting “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” will consign you to the naughty step, as both expressions “normalize violence against animals.” Exclaiming “I killed it!” about your presentation at work is sure to make your mates blanch. (Whoops! The UK Home Office has banned the word “mate,” for reasons unexplained; perhaps white men found supremacist solidarity in the term.) Come now, “doing a good job should not be equated with death.” “Killing it” could “also be triggering if someone close to the recipient actually was killed.”
I decided, quite consciously (though misguidedly), that if a big vocabulary impressed girls, I could excel at it as nobody ever had. By that time, my grandparents had given me Webster’s Second New International Dictionary, which for years had sat on a shelf in my room. I took it down and started scouring the pages for interesting, genuinely useful words. I didn’t want obsolete words. I wanted serviceable words and remarkable words. I resolved to copy out, by hand, 30 good ones per day—and to do it without fail.
It’s clear that copyediting as it’s typically practiced is a white supremacist project, that is, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who don’t or won’t perform this culture. Beginning with an elementary school teacher’s red pen, and continuing with agents, publishers, and university faculty who on principle turn away work that arrives on their desk in unconventionally grammatical or imperfectly punctuated form, voices that don’t mimic dominance are muffled when they get to the page and also before they get there—as schools, publishers, and their henchmen entrench the idea that those writing outside convention are not writing “well,” and therefore ought not set their voices to paper at all.
This is called categorism. Instead of thinking of something on its own terms, you fit it into a category, in this case, I guess, so-called critical race theory.
Theoretically the young girl and the struggling artist could certainly have met, living as they did in the same town for 15 months in 1888-89. It was also quite plausible that Van Gogh patronised the family shop for canvas.
If a writer’s aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood, but to escape being misunderstood; where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again. Caught in a hand which does not love its kind, it will turn to an insignificant ugly thing, that can neither flash nor fly.
Inner purification and meditation, by which the soul "gathers herself together," are necessary for the philosopher's approach to the Real. The true philosopher aims at a separation of the soul from the body, and so must not fear death. We fear death because we love the body and its pleasures.
Bob Blaisdell’s new biography, Chekhov Becomes Chekhov, is absorbing, pleasurable, and as unaffected as its subject; and while describing Chekhov’s life through close readings of his multitudinous stories and correspondence over two years—1886 to 1887—he doesn’t simply (as the title promises) explain how Chekhov came to be Chekhov but rather how impossible it was for him to become anybody else.
The January 6th protest was milder than any of the hundreds of Black Lives Matter riots the summer before, and led to no serious destruction of Capitol artifacts. But the Democrats en masse pretended to be horrified. They denounced the protest as an “armed insurrection” and compared it to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and other enemy attacks on the United States which resulted in thousands of deaths.
I don’t think the Democrats pretended to be “horrified’. I think they were worried that they had been found out and that many would disagree for various reasons. This is what happens when those entrusted with managing government think that the top priority is their maintaining power by pandering to fashionable coteries.
The left is the deadly enemy of joy. This is why Adam Kinzinger recently made fun of Lauren Boebert for dancing. You can’t attain Utopia if people are dancing and skateboarding and gardening and racing mini-bikes and having keg parties; it’s much more important to police dance clubs and censor jokes
Sor Juana devoted herself to investigating as much as possible of this world while also serving the demands of the next.
I started life not far from Kensington. My family used to shop there. I bought my first Classics Illustrated in the Woolworth’s there. A friend of mine some months drove me through. The place bore no resemblance to the place I remember. What a bunch of losers. Of course, our worthless DA is no help.
Both the Greta Thunberg cult and N.I.C.E. are hostile to human procreation. Today’s progressives, though “sex-positive” in theory, in fact despise any human sexual activity that could produce natural offspring.
Does anyone remember that Perelandra, the second volume of Lewis’s trilogy, was made into an opera by Donald Swann, one half of the comedy duo Flanders and Swann?
More here.
Johnson continued, adding that there is a section of Hell where music is played. He says he heard songs there like Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy". Sounds nice, right? No. He said that it's not the original artists who sing the songs, but a group of demons that use the words to torture us.
As the Word of God is “a red-hot iron,” men are inclined to pick it up with a pair of tongs, to hold it at a distance. Too many preachers end up “purring like a tabby cat” instead of “feeling the pain of it”—the wound of the Word that leaves us stripped of pretense, pulling groans for redemption from the bowels of our souls.
Anthony Hecht would have turned 100 on January 16 (my brother would have turned 89.
Essences
For Linda
Gazing at the sky he wondered
If clouds were what they suggested
And only incidentally what they
Were made of. Ingredients of ink tell
Neither tale nor truth and one body’s much
The same as any other’s though nobody’s
Quite the same as anybody else.
What is real is the effect, not the cause,
The painting, not the pigment.
Marx’s own mother, I learned from Johnson, said she wished her freak show of a son “would accumulate some capital instead of just writing about it.” Moreover, the great historian informed us that Marx “never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life,” steadfastly abjured invitations to do so, and denounced fellow revolutionaries who did. He never let a fact or a glimmer of reality stem the flow of poison from his pen. He had no money because he refused to work for it, then cursed those who had it and didn’t share it with him
“I strive to create work that demonstrates the vital force unassimilated language can have, of the power and charge that can pulse through words when they behave differently, against rules and convention, and against forces that collude to render language more utilitarian, more homogenous, and free of nuance and rich complexity,” she writes.
Naturally, the left-wing Guardian would take this position. Paul Johnson was a great writer and a great historian.
Dallas Jenkins making an eminantly watchable program about Jesus and his disciples. His source material is the biblical gospel accounts, with, by his own admission, lots of expert exegetical, doctrinal, and theological advice from various scholars. He draws on the Old Testament and tradition and then works out possible backstories and imaginative reckonings of Jesus’ ministry. As one person I like very much on Twitter put it, it’s basically “historical fiction” in that a lot of what is going on is straight out of the Bible, but then a lot of it isn’t as well.
He was great historian and a great writer. His biography of Eisenhower is outstanding.
This is a wonderful demonstration that philosophy is grounded in asking the pertinent quedtions.
OK, I’m an old guy who had four years of sacred theology and studied Thomism (as well as existential phenomenology). But that at least gives me some grounds for thinking these people are ignorant. Try mysticism, folks.
So where are we today, thirty years after Can Poetry Matter? We are still awash in mediocre verse. The only difference is that now people are reading it. Poets still write flat, fragmented verse to demonstrate they’ve learned the rules of the game and can now teach others those rules. Gioia rightly observed that this is poetry-as-a-means-to-an-end. But the ready-made and sloganeering work of the Instapoets is also poetry-as-a-means-to-an-end, though sometimes a more lucrative one. Political poems always run the risk of turning into propaganda, but the political language of Gorman’s poetry, for example, lacks the earnestness of even the worst kind of political poem. She doesn’t hope to change minds, only to profit from minds that are already changed.
So where are we today, thirty years after Can Poetry Matter? We are still awash in mediocre verse. The only difference is that now people are reading it. Poets still write flat, fragmented verse to demonstrate they’ve learned the rules of the game and can now teach others those rules. Gioia rightly observed that this is poetry-as-a-means-to-an-end. But the ready-made and sloganeering work of the Instapoets is also poetry-as-a-means-to-an-end, though sometimes a more lucrative one. Political poems always run the risk of turning into propaganda, but the political language of Gorman’s poetry, for example, lacks the earnestness of even the worst kind of political poem. She doesn’t hope to change minds, only to profit from minds that are already changed.
One of my favorite writers I will remember him in my prayers tonight.
I am inthe ER with Debbie, who is being checked our head injuries resulting fromfallf.
The subtitle to Marche’s essay is: “The College Essay is Dead.” Perhaps because Marche no longer teaches, he does not realize that the obit is a bit late: the college essay died years ago. During my three decades of teaching at a public university, I have encountered a dwindling number of students who can write a declarative sentence, much less a clear thesis. Perhaps more important, they have no desire to learn how.
He and I spent a very pleasant evening dining and tslking many years ago.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for Svoronos came in 2020 after he reprimanded a student who came late to class, saying to her what he has said to many other aspiring med students: “a doctor who comes in late is called an undertaker.”
Now and Then
Circumstance, as usual, conducted
His affairs, flourishing life's ornaments.
So now, grown old, he finds himself, as years
Before, alone at times, and finds as well
He thinks as then, and sees how that is good.
He has not strayed too far: Usual birds
And garden, standard house plants, strolls still grand,
Though slower. God's about, and always has
Been. So he pays scant heed to time and deed
Once over. Here and now is where he means
To be, though here and now just now
Only draw him back, suspending tense,
Elsewhere and here conjoined in palimpsest —
Faded parchment, layered script — time in between
So long ago and now dissolving into somewhere
Once before, as if his mother were nearby,
Attaching her heart to flowers, vines, and thorns,
Allowing him to be what he's become.
I am actually not feeling well today and had a very restless night. So I’m mostly going to lie low.
During the hot mixing process, the lime clasts develop a characteristically brittle nanoparticulate architecture, creating an easily fractured and reactive calcium source, which, as the team proposed, could provide a critical self-healing functionality. As soon as tiny cracks start to form within the concrete, they can preferentially travel through the high-surface-area lime clasts. This material can then react with water, creating a calcium-saturated solution, which can recrystallize as calcium carbonate and quickly fill the crack, or react with pozzolanic materials to further strengthen the composite material. These reactions take place spontaneously and therefore automatically heal the cracks before they spread. Previous support for this hypothesis was found through the examination of other Roman concrete samples that exhibited calcite-filled cracks.
In the early '80s I attended an APA session organized by a group that called itself PANDORA: Philosophers Against the Nuclear Destruction of Rational Animals. One of the weighty topics that came up at this particular meeting was the very name 'Pandora.' Some argued that the name is sexist on the ground that it might remind someone of Pandora's Box, which of course has nothing to do with the characteristic female orifice, but in so reminding them might be taken as a slighting of that orifice. ('Box' is crude slang for the orifice in question.) I pointed out in the meeting that the name is just an acronym, and has nothing to do either with Pandora's Box or the characteristic female orifice. My comment made no impression on the politically correct there assembled.
This life story would be impressive under any circumstances, but especially so when you consider that Therese Schroeder-Sheker had a brilliantly successful career as a recording artist and concert hall performer. She could have spent her entire life as a music star, but instead put her primary focus on serving those in the most dire and hopeless situations.
Oddly, the only famous musicians I’ve got to know were mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves and tenor Luciano Pavarotti, both of whom turned out to be just nice people. Of course, Temple Painter, who was a world-famous harpsichordist, wax simply a dear friend.
Her problem was that Karl had no marketing sense. He had a perfectly workable car that should, by then, have been flooding the streets of Germany and beyond. Instead he just kept trying to make it better. It was as if Steve Jobs had gone all the way to the iPhone 10 before bothering to put his phone in the shops.
… Mattix rightly notes that Christian poetics asserts that a poem’s life is a sign of the higher creative principles at work in the world. So Christian poetry “is inherently double – both surface and depth, material and immaterial.” The poems in this book are accordingly multifaceted and stamped with the poets’ lives, from the psalm-like directness and fluid cadences of the late North Dakotan poet-farmer Timothy Murphy, to the unadorned Mennonite physicality of Pennsylvanian Julia Spicher Kasdorf, to Louisianan Jennifer Reeser’s blend of Anglo-American prosody with Native American prayer and song.
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