German-English Anthology

Today, I received copies of a bilingual anthology of English translations of contemporary German poetry. It features my translations of poems by Dieter M. Gräf, Durs Grünbein, and Lutz Seiler, as well as translations of work by six other poets: At Villa Aurora: Nine Contemporary Poets Writing in German (Green Integer, ed. Douglas Messerli). And that is not the whole title, as it is volume 7 of Green Integer's PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century.

Puzzles and Mysteries

The January 8, 2007, issue of The New Yorker, contains an article by Malcolm Gladwell
called "Open Secrets." As is so often the case, Gladwell is happy to have discovered a counterintuitive concept that allows him to discuss everyday issues in a surprising way (the focus of the article being Enron; Gladwell has also been adding new thoughts on the subject to his blog).

Now an article about Enron may not seem like a good place to steal ideas for thinking about literature, but here's the bit I find suggestive: "The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. ... The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much."

This might be a useful way to think about "difficult" poems: some of them are puzzles, providing incomplete information, leaving the reader wondering about the unstated details. Others are mysteries, and the problem is not lack of information, or information that has not been given, but an excess of information, an overdetermination that leaves the reader wondering not what has not been said, but how to sort out what has been said.

I don't have any examples yet, but perhaps I will return to the issue someday soon, if I come across some poems for which the concepts seem to be useful tools (that, of course, is the test of any such concept: is it a useful tool?)

(I should add that I have not read the review that I provided as a link with Treverton's name, but I hope to have a chance to do so.)

Not a Museum

Miles got a huge Lego Star Wars set for his birthday, a Y-Wing Attack Starfighter. Since he finished building it, he has had it on the top of a bookshelf in his room. Today, he wanted to get it down, and I said it was not a good idea.

Andrew: It's not for playing with, it's decorative and just for looking at.

Miles: My room is not a museum!

A couple of minutes later, Luisa opened up Miles's closet full of games, and Andrea said: "Luisa, Miles's room is also not a supermarket!"

Michael Brecker

I saw Michael Brecker with the McCoy Tyner Trio a few years ago in Basel. Since Tyner was the pianist in John Coltrane's Quartet for years, the comparison was easy, but Brecker lived up to the challenge, riding Tyner's accompaniment into his own variations on Coltrane's incredible sound. (And Avery Sharpe on bass was brilliant, too. I don't remember who the drummer was.)

In the summer of 2005, I went to the Willisau Festival to hear the Saxophone Summit of Dave Liebman, Joe Lovano, and Michael Brecker. It became a two-peak summit, because Brecker was in the hospital with leukemia. Liebman and Lovano were stunning; I can only imagine what it must have been like to hear those two with Brecker alongside them. Now I really can only imagine it, as Brecker died on Saturday.

It's ironic to me that Alice Coltrane, who replaced Tyner in Coltrane's band, also died last week, on Friday.

Orders of Infinity

Jacqueline Osherow's "Orders of Infinity" was on Poetry Daily yesterday. For a discussion of the particular concept of infinity she writes about, see the articles about infinity and aleph numbers on Wikipedia.

Fixing "The Lottery"

Warning: Before you read this post, read Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery."

So I had students write about Jackson's story, and one wrote a startling piece about how the lottery in the story is fixed. I was not sure I was utterly convinced, but then I suddenly was. Here's what I wrote to the student:

There's a fascinating point to be made here about the rules of fiction. After all, someone does pick out the victim: Jackson herself determines who the victim of the lottery is—or perhaps I should say of "The Lottery." The rules of fiction require her to have the victim of the lottery be a character she has already introduced to the reader. Further, in a context in which it is important that most of the figures be as nondescript (and hence "normal") as possible, the characters she does introduce to the readers are going to be the ones who "stand out" by stretching the rules of the game in various ways, as you have described.

In a sense, one level of the story's allegory is literary: this is a story about how stories work. They work by assuming a background of "normalcy" against which the outstanding qualities of the main characters can be established. By "outstanding" here, I do not mean "excellent" but something more neutral: the characters might be heroes, or villains, or even hypernormal people, but in one way or another, they have to stand out against that standardized background.

In most fiction, then, the author's job is to give the reader such "outstanding" characters to identify with. In "The Lottery," Tessie stands out in this way: not because of her excellence, but simply because her difference from the crowd makes her worth mentioning, whereas the crowd's standardized behavior, once established, recedes into the background. This makes the horror of "The Lottery," then, as powerful as it can possibly be: the reader identifies with the "outstanding" character, and the object of the reader's identification gets murdered. And all this is done in the most everyday way possible, which only increases the horror.

But all this also proves your point: Tessie Hutchinson's slight difference from the crowd around her selects her to be the victim. But it is not the lottery that selects her as the victim, it is "The Lottery" and its genre that do so. How? The same way that the characters in the story do so: by following the rules of the game.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Reginald Shepherd has published a brief but powerful reading of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" on his blog.

I read the poem in high school, and when I think back on it now, it was one of the first poems that showed me what a poem could do and be. Such memorable phrases and lines, too:

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—an ecstasy of fumbling

...

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin

On Divination by Birds

Another interesting poem on Verse Daily today, "On Divination by Birds," by Kimberly Johnson. If I were to do an interpretation of it, I would pursue the idea that interpretation of poetry has some similarity to divination by birds.

I am always struck when a poem appears both on Verse Daily and on Poetry Daily, as Maura Staunton's "God's Ode to Creation" (which I mentioned here) has now done. Some may say that the two sites are so similar that there need not be two of them, but I like having two daily poems. I usually like at least one of the two!

Facing Reality—Climate Change

Birder Laura Erickson has some powerful things to say about what science is and what is wrong with the current administration's willful mishandling of science in her post "Facing Reality—Climate Change."

Thin Raft Anniversary on March 21

Thin Raft 10th Anniversary Reading
Wednesday, March 21, 6:30-9:00
Bergli Bookshop
Rümelinsplatz 19, Basel

This is your chance to hear local English-language writers read from their works: fiction, poetry, memoirs, etc. Come out and hear the kind of work produced by Thin Raft writers for the writing group, as well as for local and international publications. You can also find out how a writing group works and what it is for; all you need to do is start talking to the writers after the reading.

The Thin Raft group for English-language writers was founded in Basel in early 1997 and has been meeting regularly at various locations ever since. To celebrate the group's tenth anniversary, current members of the group will present recent work, and Padraig Rooney (TR member who teaches English at the International School Basel) will read from his recently published poetry collection The Escape Artist (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2006).

Thin Raft meets on the first and third Tuesdays of every month at Centrepoint in the Lohnhof. New members are always welcome.

Don't blame it on René

Here's a passage I meant to quote quite a while ago, from the Nov. 20 issue of The New Yorker: "Think Again," by Anthony Gottlieb, a review of recent books on Descartes:

'Descartes’s dualism is certainly not quite what it is often taken to be. In the 1994 best-seller “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,” the neurologist Antonio Damasio reports that Descartes believed in an “abyssal separation between body and mind . . . the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism.” This is actually the opposite of what Descartes believed. He held that we “experience within ourselves certain . . . things which must not be referred either to the mind alone or to the body alone,” and that these arise “from the close and intimate union of our mind with the body.” In his best-known writings, Descartes stressed the differences between matter (which occupies space) and thought (which does not). But he also maintained that, in human beings, mind and body are mysteriously and inextricably combined, as he tried to spell out in letters to Princess Elizabeth. (She kept pressing him on the point.) He could not explain how it is that mind and body are united, but he was sure that they were.'

Lake Superior

[This is another one of my "set pieces." I wrote it down back in 2002 and revised it a bit last week.]

In the summer of 2001, while we were planning our trip to Upper Michigan to visit my grandmother, everyone kept saying that Lake Superior is too cold to swim in. So we didn't plan our trip to include a stop there, especially as my grandmother lived close to the Michigan-Wisconsin border, a long drive both from Lake Superior and from Lake Michigan. But as we flew into the Marquette airport, we did get close enough to the lake to pay it a quick visit on the afternoon of my 37th birthday.

We had left Basel the day before, by train to Zurich, where we caught a flight to Newark and then to Boston, where we spent the night in a hotel near Logan Airport. Miles was then twenty months old and new to jet lag, so when he woke up at 2 a.m. (eight a.m. Basel time), he was ready to start the day. We managed to keep him in bed with us until 3:30, by which time we, too, were wide awake. We passed the time until the hotel's breakfast room opened at 6 a.m. by opening a couple of small presents Andrea had brought along for me and by reading books and playing games. Breakfast took long enough, then, that it was time for us to go to the airport to catch our next flight, to Detroit, where my mother met us at the airport and joined us for the next leg of the trip, the flight to Marquette. (As her children and grandchildren never ceased to point out to her, my grandmother was then living in the middle of nowhere, and it took a long time to get to her place for a visit!)

At the Marquette airport, we were met by my Aunt Marge, my mother's younger sister, who had come to pick us up for the trip's last leg, by car to Iron River. It was a beautiful August afternoon, and after we had realized that we would probably not get another chance to see the lake, we decided to go into Marquette to look for a beach — not with the intention of going swimming but only to look.

We found ourselves on Lakeshore Drive (echoes of high-rent Chicago penthouses) and parked by a beach separated from the road by a small brushy dune. The beach was nearly empty, but there were a few people around, including two guys in baggy swim trunks throwing a Frisbee back and forth while standing in the low waves. The water looked cold, but it didn't seem to bother the Frisbee players, so I slipped off my sandals and waded in a little bit. At least at this beach in the bay in Marquette, the lake belied both its reputation and its appearance: while the water was not really warm, it was not freezing cold either, and on such a warm, clear day, it was positively inviting.

But there was a slight problem: our swimsuits were packed away in the trunk of the car, and it had been hard work to get all the luggage stowed there. So, despite the lure of the low waves, Andrea did not want to get her swimsuit out, and I didn't really want to get mine out, either. Skinny dipping was the obvious solution, but there were just a few too many people around.

But it was my birthday, and I wanted to celebrate, and I wanted to be able to say that I had swum in Lake Superior on my 37th birthday. (The day was already becoming a story.) So I took off my jeans and my T-shirt and charged into the water in my underpants —which had a plaid pattern that, from afar, made them look like a Speedo bikini swimsuit.

Oh, the water! So much for the story that Lake Superior is too cold for swimming! I was so exuberant that my shouting and splashing almost upset Miles, but Andrea managed to keep him calm. Our camera was also stowed away somewhere, so I have no photographic evidence of my birthday swim, but wife, mother, and aunt were witnesses. (Miles was, too, of course, but I can't count on him to remember it later, except as a story his father likes to tell.)

When we walked back to the car, I solved the next problem by putting my T-shirt (which had also just served as a towel) on the car seat and sitting there in my "swimsuit" to dry off while we began the drive to my grandmother's house. About halfway there, Marge stopped at a little tiny crossroads gas station, so I took the opportunity to change out of my wet "trunks." I put on my T-shirt and sandals, grabbed my jeans, and headed for the toilets, which were inside the station's little shop. And then came the story's unexpected punch line: there, on the door, was a sign that had not anticipated a case like mine: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service.

Soppy?

Julian Barnes's "The Past Conditional," a brief memoir published in the Dec. 25/Jan. 1 issue of The New Yorker, is a good read, but the best part of it is the first paragraph:

I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I once asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: “Soppy.”

James Brown on New Year's Eve

I was not that moved by the death of James Brown, as I have never listened to his music in more than bits and pieces. Obviously, that also means that I was never that moved by his music, or I would have explored it further.

But the drawing in the "Goings on about Town" section of the Dec. 25/Jan. 1 issue of The New Yorker did move me: a red-black-brown-and-green image of James Brown singing, one arm raised in the air to celebrate or preach, with the caption "James Brown plays B.B. King's on New Year's Eve." Since he died on Christmas Day and I read the issue only during the first week of January, this picture became very moving suddenly (reminding me of the photos William Hurt looks at in Smoke, thinking they are all the same, but suddenly his dead wife is in two of them).

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

I love the way people talk about Wallace Stevens's poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm." Adrienne Rich discusses it beautifully in her book "What Is Found There." Alex Ross just discussed it here (he also quotes the whole poem).

Most important finger

Miles got a paper cut on the tip of his left middle finger yesterday. In the evening, he noticed how it bothered him while we were playing cards, especially since he is a lefty.

This morning, he said, "It's a good thing I did not cut my left index finger. My left index finger is my most important finger, I think."

Not unfair

Miles: The world is not unfair. It's just what it is.

Andrew: "The world is not unfair. It's just what it is." That's good; can I quote you on that?

Miles: Yes. I am right.

(January 5, 2007)

Beauty and immortality

This is my comment on Don Brown's thoughtful piece "Getting Serious/Having Fun" (which is in part a response to my essay on Frost):

I keep coming back lately (for various reasons, both positive and negative) to Peter von Matt's "Die verdächtige Pracht." Von Matt describes two important characteristics of poems: they want to be beautiful, and they want to be immortal.

Neither of these desires necessarily has anything to do with meaning or with interpretation. Frost's "The Mountain" marks how the desire for meaning is, in a sense, derivative—always preceded by a desire for pleasure.

But as you suggest, Don, that does not apply to literary criticism. I have often considered "quality" to be the cat that criticism does not want to let out of the bag, but there are two cats in there: quality and pleasure. If they get out, then the project of criticism is ironized, as you suggest, and the critic becomes insecure and rejects the work that has let those cats out.

Von Matt's book is interesting in this respect, too: whenever he begins to do hard-core close reading, he apologizes to his audience, asking them to bear with him while he does a necessary bit of "philology." This allows him, as a friend of mine suggested, to maintain his status as "the one in the know," his professional status. He lets the cats out, but he still wants to hold the bag.

Hitchens on Ford

Here's some more grist for the mill of my previous post on Paul Constant's article about the death of Gerald Ford: Christopher Hitchens on the same.

God's Ode to Creation

I'm kind of curious what my resident curmudgeons (DMB? Mr. J?) might make of this poem, "God's Ode to Creation," by Maura Stanton.

Frost's "Mountain"

NATURE, CULTURE, AND LANGUAGE IN ROBERT FROST'S "THE MOUNTAIN"

Visiting an unfamiliar region, the narrator of Robert Frost's poem "The Mountain" engages in a dialogue with a farmer. Their discussion of the mountain dominating the landscape establishes the usual contrast between nature and culture (between the mountain and the farms and towns around it). The similes that come up confirm, unsurprisingly, that attempts to domesticate nature are necessarily doomed to failure. But this is not the poem's last word: as figurative language itself becomes a theme of the poem, language in general and poetry in particular can be seen as creating the very contrast between nature and culture the poem would otherwise overcome.

In fact, the poem begins with a simile: "The mountain held the town as in a shadow." The implications of this shadow depend on a second simile a few lines later:

Near it seemed: I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.

The mountain's apparent proximity makes its shadow a source of shelter from the elements. In the comparison to a wall, the natural shelter of the mountain appears as an artificial shelter protecting the town from threatening outside forces (here, the wind). However, this sense of protection later proves misleading:

Then I was wrong: the town of my sojourn,
Beyond the bridge, was not that of the mountain,
But only felt at night its shadowy presence.

The mountain may have felt like a shelter, but all one really has its "shadowy presence," with its much less protective implications.

At night, the comparison with a wall domesticates this "shadowy presence." During the day, in his dialogue with the farmer, the narrator identifies another way to domesticate the mountain:

"That looks like a path.
Is that the way to reach the top from here?— "

The route the narrator identifies could provide a means of ascent, but appearance is again belied by reality: "There is no proper path," the farmer explains. With the chance of an easy ascent blocked, the mountain remains wild in the midst of the farms surrounding it. There may be a way up "five miles back" that was "logged ... last winter"—but it is not here.

The mountain's relationship to the surrounding landscape is later even more unstable. The farmer describes the township's geography to the narrator, concluding with a description of the houses closest to the mountain:

... a few homes sprinkled around the foot,
Like boulders broken off the upper cliff,
Rolled out a little farther from the rest.

The houses are compared to boulders that fall from the mountain—that is, to the very thing that threatens them. The earlier attempts to "domesticate" the mountain failed, perhaps inevitably, but here, the mountain's "shadowy presence" makes even shelters that might otherwise seem safe into images of the failure to create reliable shelter, of the instability of the domestication of nature.

Earlier, the farmer makes an apparently paradoxical statement about the stream that flows down the mountain: "It's always cold in summer, warm in winter." At the poem's end, he clarifies the point:

"I don't suppose the water's changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it's warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm.
But all the fun's in how you say a thing."

That is, when opposites are compared, when a paradox is presented, how one says it is more important than what one is actually saying. The poem itself does this when it expresses a desire for shelter or refuge through similes—the fun way to say something. But the poem goes on to undermine these similes of shelter, ultimately in the final simile itself (comparing the houses to the falling rocks that could destroy them). All this makes the poem's implications for poetry itself clear. As Timothy Steele's use of the phrase as the title of his book about prosody suggests, "all the fun's in how you say a thing" is a statement about poetry itself. Poetry is the fun way to say a thing that might not be as mysterious as the poem suggests. But "The Mountain" as a whole goes even farther: insofar as the similes in the poem are themselves examples of the "fun" way to say something, the mysteries and puzzles they generate are implicitly as easily explained as the paradox of the mountain stream. The mystery is not in the objects described; instead, it is generated by the language describing them, that is, by the linguistic pleasure of saying things in fun ways.

In this light, "The Mountain" acts out how poetry creates the contrast between nature and culture it purports to dissect. That contrast is the product of a desire not for shelter but for pleasure. "All the fun's in how you say a thing"—and only through that fun, "The Mountain" implies, through the excess created by poetry and by language itself, is the problem of nature and culture created.

[I used Frost's poem as a text for a composition class earlier this semester, and I was inspired to try to do something on the poem in the same amount of space I had assigned the students: 400-600 words. I failed the assignment: this is 825 words! :-) ]

[God I hate it that HTML won't let you indent first lines of paragraphs!]

Macmillan New Writing

Another interesting article from the Jan/Feb Poets and Writers is about the Macmillan New Writing imprint in England: "The imprint was controversial because, according to the press, Macmillan would not pay its authors an advance and would accept only complete, word-perfect novels—if the text needed editing, it would point the writer in the direction of a good freelance editor, but it would not pay for editorial work. ... The manuscript has to be finished (contrary to those press reports, however, Macmillan will assign an editor), must be a first novel, and is usually submitted by e-mail. Nothing in the contract is negotiable, so there is no need for an agent."

A Novel in Three Days

In "A Novel in Three Days," in the January/February issue of Poets and Writers (an article that is unfortunately not on-line), Patricia Chao writes about how she did indeed write a novel in three days, as part of the 3-Day Novel contest. One good line that has nothing to do with the contest: "To begin a novel takes inspiration, to continue takes endurance, and to end takes character." None of that matters in the three-day-novel contest!

Réda and Grünbein in Poetry, January 2007

The January 2007 issue of Poetry includes two of my translations: "Return from the Ball," a poem by Jacques Réda, and "The Poem and its Secret," an essay by Durs Grünbein. I recommend them both, of course, but I am especially fascinated by Grünbein's essay and recommend it highly.

Gerald G. Ford

I remember that John Denver song, the full text of which is:

"This is the ballad of Gerald R. Ford,
And all the things he's done."

Now take a look at Paul Constant's article from The Stranger:

"What Gerald Ford saved us from was a nation where Richard Nixon went to jail or committed suicide, a nation where politicians would have to face real legal consequences for their actions, a nation where politicians are responsible for the people under them, and to the people who voted for them. What Gerald Goddamned Ford gave to America is the wave of cynicism that has dominated politics and ensured wave after wave of ever-worsening Republican presidents, preying on our basest fears."

A Barred Owl

The I-shuffling of my CD collection (largely on my external hard drive) just offered me Richard Wilbur reading "A Barred Owl." You can listen to this stunning little poem, too, at the Poetry Archive link I just added to the title.

New Yorker cartoons

Here's a fun article from the Washington Post about how cartoons are chosen for the New Yorker.

The article mentions Matthew Diffee's acceptance rate: 1 cartoon out of 10 in a good week. Otherwise none. That reminds me of what Ted Williams supposedly said when asked about how it felt to hit .400: "How would you feel if your boss gave you ten jobs to do and you did four of them successfully?" I always wanted to add, "And how would your boss feel?"

No old haunts

We go to Kassel at Christmas, to Andrea's parents. Where would I go in the U.S.? No old haunts: Detroit, where I was born? Nobody there. Palo Alto, where I lived the most before moving to Europe? No family there. Toledo, of the late seventies? God forbid (at least since my Dad finally escaped there to go to Seattle). Ann Arbor? My Mom moved to Wisconsin.

So wherever I would go, it would not be to haunts from childhood and university!

Year in Review

Birdchick posted a version of this, which comes from Faux Real Tho: collect the first sentence of the first entry of each month of one's blog.

January: Welcome.

February: Miles: T-Rex was a bad guy.

March: I got Geoffrey Hill's "Without Title" from the Poetry Book Society right before I went to the United States ten days ago, and finished it on my trip.

April: Two poems by my friend A. E. Stallings were on Poetry Daily on Monday, April 11.

May: The April 17, 2006, issue of The New Yorker contains a wonderful coincidence in its profiles of Maurice Sendak and Pete Seeger

June: Since class did not take place on Tuesday, May 23 (as I was on paternity leave after Sara's birth), the votes for week 7 (Tuesday, May 16, to Monday, May 22) and week 8 (Tuesday, May 23, and Monday, May 29) both took place in class on Tuesday morning, May 30.

July: The vote for the 12th and final week of the Daily Poem Project (poems on Poetry Daily from June 20, 2006, to June 26, 2006) took place on Tuesday morning, June 27.

August: I have been meaning to make more comments about verse novels since March, when I bought quite a few new ones while traveling in the US.

September: A student of mine sent me a link to the Wikipedia page for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a parody of Intelligent Design that has taken on a life of its own: the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

October: In another entry from the category of misheard lyrics, there are these lines from "Touch of Grey"

November: Miles and I don't play cribbage any more since we invented doublage, which is kind of "double cribbage."

December: On a September evening in 1987, I watched the television broadcast of the baseball game when the San Francisco Giants clinched their place in the playoffs.

Goodnight Mush

I enjoyed Elizabeth Kolbert's article "Goodnight Mush" in the Dec. 4 issue of the New Yorker:

'If, as Joan Didion famously put it, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” why do we tell stories to our children? In my experience, mostly it is to get them to shut up. A book read to a toddler who, after running around the house all day, has had to be stuffed, quite literally, into his pajamas, may traffic in imaginative freedom and wonder, but it is still an instrument of control. I will read this to you, and then you will go to sleep. End of story.'

The article lives up to this opening (and it is nice to see that EK can write well about other things, and not just about her usual terrifying topic, global warming).

Lying in submissions

C. Dale Young writes, in his post "Lies and Garbage" (and in his role as poetry editor of New England Review):

"Why do writers lie in their cover letters? I mean, they not only lie but they lie like dogs. Not all of them. Not even the majority of them. But the ones that do just about kill me. It is never a good idea to lie about something like having work in The New Yorker and POETRY. These can be checked in less than a minute. And even if your lie gets your work past the screeners and into the hands of the poetry editor, s/he will know almost immediately that you are lying. So weird."

My comment to him:

1) I, too, am astonished that somebody would lie about the really biggest names, where it is, in the age of the web, astonishingly easy to be caught in one's lie.

In composition classes and academic work, it is easy these days for students to steal essays from the web (or essay-like texts from blogs), but it is also incredibly easy for their teachers to find them, too (and the stolen material sticks out like a sore thumb, because of the change in style—and, with my students, the sudden absence of the common mistakes made by German speakers). In fact, the English Seminar in Basel subscribes to a service that can identify plagiarized texts—the flip side of students' buying essays from web services.

2) Why do editors need bios at all? I just read the guidelines page at NER. It does not ask writers to submit a bio in their cover letters. Have you thought about asking people to NOT send bios?

What is the purpose of a bio with a submission to a literary magazine, anyway? If the editors are really serious about the idea that they look only at the poems themselves and not at the names of the poets who wrote them, then a bio should be superfluous. If a good bio increases the poet's chances of being published, then the editors are looking at more than just the poems themselves, aren't they?

Of course, even without bios in cover letters, editors will still recognize the names of many of the poets who submit to them. But short of blind submissions (as in prizes), there's nothing to be done about that.

Early Comics

Thanks to Pierre Joris, I came across this stunning site: Andy's Early Comics Archive. Endless browsing pleasure: ancient Bible illustrations, tapestries, even Roman-era illustrations.

Walt Disney

Anthony Lane's article about Walt Disney in the Dec. 11, 2006, issue of The New Yorker is worth checking out. Lane makes a wonderful comparison between Disney and Dickens, by way of G. K. Chesterton:

'As G. K. Chesterton wrote, irrefutably, "Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted."'

But Lane (a writer I have been enjoying for years now) does not need Chesterton to heighten the insight of his own writing: "[Disney] became an industry, but the one thing that links the industrialist, whatever the product, with the auteur, whatever the form, is obsessive pedantry—the will to get things right, whatever the cost may be."

One especially interesting factoid in the article has to do with Disney's decline after the end of his peak period in 1942. His last five films at the time had been "Snow White," "Pinocchio," "Fantasia," "Dumbo," and "Bambi" (not a bad run!). But the decline was not purely creative: Disney's animators went on strike in 1941. The resulting changes in his relationship to his animators meant that the intensive labor that made those five movies so deep and brilliant became too expensive.

Nicholas Manning on Celan

Nicholas Manning made some interesting points about Paul Celan and interpretation (with three beautiful photos of Celan, one with his wife Giselle). My comments:

1) The worst thing you can do when teaching Celan is what Gerhard Sauder did on the first day of an otherwise wonderful Celan seminar I sat in on in Saarbrücken years ago: "Es freut mich, dass so viele gekommen sind, um diesen schwierigen Lyriker mit mir zu lesen." Once you declare Celan difficult, you've closed off the students to direct access to the poems' beauty. Perhaps I say this because when I first read Celan in a "Literature of the Holocaust" course with John Felstiner, John did not say anything about difficulty, and I read Celan, and the stunning effect of the poems was utterly clear. In terms of reference, the poems had opacities, of course; but as I was able to get right to them as works of art.

2) I find that Celan can be read using careful close-reading techniques as long as my starting point is that I take things literally. The poems may not be referential in the sense of describing realistic scenes, but they do describe scenes.

Poetics

Multiple blogs (Silliman from Wed., Dec. 13; Jonathan Mayhew, from Dec. 14) led to this, from John Gallaher:

"... to me the idea of a poetics is best left to someone other than a practicing poet."

Which led me to comment on JG's blog:

Generally, the best theorists of poetry are not the poets themselves. Or as my friend Geoff Brock once said to me, "One does not need a degree in Comparative Literature in order to write poems."

The irony of this, of course, is that Geoff and I both have degrees in Comp. Lit. (though we both wrote our dissertations on novelists), and even that we became friends in grad school. :-)

In the starting point of this discussion, Ron Silliman wrote this about Alice Notley: "She may choose to deny that what she does constitutes a poetics, but that denial, it seems to me, is not just a part of that poetics (as surely it is), it’s also part of the conscious loneliness that makes Alice Notley’s work instantly unmistakable, regardless of the forms it may take."

I would agree that the work of Alice Notley (or any poet) can be analyzed in such a way as to describe that poet's "poetics" (as something ever mutable, in the case of a living poet, as something complete and potentially even fully describable, in the case of a dead poet), but it is certainly not necessary for Alice Notley herself to do that analysis in order to write poetry.

Style is culture-dependent

As I just wrote to a student here in Basel:

I had a student once in Saarbrücken who wrote a seminar paper in English after taking my class and was praised for the dramatic improvement in his writing skills. Then he wrote a seminar paper in German, again putting my suggestions into practice. I don't remember the professor's exact words (this was over ten years ago), but basically the student was told that the paper was too straightforward, too "thesenhaft."

Jeet Thayil in Softblow

I enjoyed Jeet Thayil's poems in Softblow, especially the poem "To Baudelaire":

To Baudelaire

I am over you at last, in Mexico City,
in a white space high above the street,
my hands steady, the walls unmoving.
It’s warm here, and safe, and even in winter
the rain is benign. Some mornings I let
the sounds of the plaza—a fruit seller,
a boy acrobat, a woman selling
impossible fictions—pile up in a corner
of the room. I’m not saying I’m happy
but I am healthy and my money’s my own.
Sometimes when I walk in the market
past the chickens and the pig smoke,
I think of you—your big talk and wolf’s heart,
your Bonaparte hair and eyes of Poe.
I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you when
I open a window and light fills the room
like water pouring into a paper cup,
or when I see a woman’s white dress shine
like new coins and I know I could follow
my feet to the river and let my life go
away from me. At times like this,
if I catch myself talking to you,
I’m always surprised at the words I hear
of regret and dumb boyish devotion.

*

Or, as Greg Brown put it:

I'll be happy happy happy happy happy, just by myself.

Other than that

There's the old line that you say when somebody had a bad time somewhere: "And other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

Once, my wife, my sister-in-law, and I started playing around with that: "Other than that, Mrs. Kennedy, how was your stay in Dallas?" We went through a lot of variations, and then came up with something from an event that, at the time, had just occurred: "Other than that, Mrs. Rabin, how did you like the demonstration?" It was only then that we realized how truly morbid the joke is.

Maxwell's color photo

I enjoyed this article about James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist famous for "Maxwell's equations," which explain light, electricity, and magnetism in four lovely formulas. I especially enjoyed the bit of trivia that Maxwell produced the world's first color photograph.

Patterns in book manuscripts

A while back, C. Dale Young made some comments about the patterns in submissions to the New England Review (he is the poetry editor). Just now, he made some comments about patterns in book manuscripts (I take it he is working as a reader for a prize):

"Over the past 2 days, I screened 100 first book mss. What did I learn?

1. people seem to love the word "ochre"
2. the simple, present-tense sentence is still the choice of most poets out there
3. Abortion is a fairly common topic for poems (I saw no less than 20)
4. a good story does not always make for a good poem
5. many seem capable putting together a 90+ page ms. without difficulty
6. Rothko is making a comeback
7. most poets are like me in that they come up with god-awful titles for their mss. (I always have to have friends guide me to a better title)
8. a lot of people must visit Italy (I mean A LOT)
9. many poets use spell check but don't check the spell chack changes!
10. God and religion is everywhere in these mss."

I stopped submitting my book manuscript for a year (though I am going to start again in January), so all I can do is take Dale's comments as advice, rather than respond with a list. So I will avoid "ochre" and Italy. :-)

But seriously, the most important of these points is number two: so many poems today are written in the present tense when they would surely work better as the past-tense narratives that they "really" are (but see number 4!).

Becoming a neurosurgeon

I posted this as a comment on the post 'Tis the Season on Of Looking at a Blackbird:

Rosellen Brown told me that she was once at a dinner party where she was sitting next to a neurosurgeon. When the neurosurgeon found out that she was a novelist, he said that he was considering taking a sabbatical in order to write a novel. She said something like, "That's interesting. I've been considering taking a year off from writing in order to do neurosurgery."

As she commented, once in a while you say the right thing at the right time.

Why German-language poets don't write blogs

I wrote this as a comment on a post on John Gallaher's blog:

I recently tried to locate German-language poets who have blogs, and I was unable to find any. So I wrote to my friend Ulrike Draesner, a poet and novelist who lives in Berlin, to ask her if she knew of any German poets who write blogs. In my note to her, I wondered if German poets might avoid writing blogs because most of them are making a living as free-lance writers; she agreed that that might be the case when she wrote me back to say that she knew of no German poets producing blogs.

In other words, to put in the crudest terms, the German-language poets don't write blogs because they have to sell as much writing as they can to make a living, while many poets in North America do not have to sell writing to make a living (because they teach writing instead), so they can write blogs just for the pleasure and community of it.

"Humanity's Place in Nature"

"... the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified."

Steven Pinker, "Less Faith, More Reason"

No Man's Land

No Man's Land is a new, Berlin-based journal of German literature in English translation (the English version of lauter niemand). I translated three texts for the first issue: Nina Lucia Bußmann's story "The Tree" and two poems by Florian Voß. It's all done with frames, so I can only link you to the NML website. From there, click on "Issue #1" to check out the work they are publishing.

Human Shields, 20061122, Parterre, Basel

Photos by renew. Thanks, man!

News Poet News

News Poet News is a site I wish I liked more than I do: every day a new poem that comments on the news. The cool thing about the poems is that they are in verse, but that is also the problem: the verse is not regular enough. As Don Brown wrote in a comment on my "What are Critics for?":

"No formalist myself, I do believe formal patterns should be adhered to if attempted. The ... sloppy ... attempts at form just make us all look bad. If you can't come close to John Hollander, get out of the game."

Of course, if you want to read formally sharp light verse that occasionally ventures into the political, you should check out Light Quarterly. (Yes, I know LQ publishes my poems, which makes this shameless self-promotion!)

Two interesting discussions of poetry and criticism

Here are two posts I found interesting:

Death and Critical Transparency
Some Like It Hot

I commented on the latter:

"You can become immersed in something that is initially difficult to enter. Learning how to enter is what comes with more reading. You can come to love best the literature that excels in being both writerly and readerly simultaneously if you have loosened those barriers enough."

That is very well put. All I ask of the "difficult" work is that it provide *some* entrance for me, whether it be sarcasm, prosody, or beauty, or some undefinable thing. To pick up on Diane K. Martin's metaphor, if the text wants to seduce me, it has to offer me *something* that will get me interested in responding. If it just sits at the bar and nurses its difficult beer, I won't even notice that seduction is what it's after.

George and John in heaven

I enjoyed this poem by Reyes Cardenas, "What George Harrison Saw When He First Got To Heaven."

What are critics for?

I wrote this as a comment on an entry in C. Dale Young's blog:

When I was at Stanford in the mid-eighties, the Stanford Daily's film critic was a man named Steve Vineberg (who, a quick Google search just revealed, is now a professor at Holy Cross). Almost everybody I knew who read is reviews hated them: he was extremely tough on everything, and he rarely seemed to enjoy any movies. (Sounds a bit like William Logan, actually.)

But I learned to appreciate his reviews. In the final analysis, it was not his opinion on a given film that mattered, but the fact that, when I read a review of his, I could tell whether or not I would like the movie. And this feeling did not depend on whether or not he liked the movie!

That, then, became the mark of a good critic to me: the sense that, if you read the critic regularly, you could learn to parse his or her comments and opinions so that they could be a filter for your own interests.

But I also have to admit that I am still not sure whether Logan is a good critic in that sense. His critical persona might be too much that of a curmudgeon.

Don on Orson

Just a quick note to point anyone who reads this in the direction of my friend Don Brown's extraordinarily insightful and beautiful discussion of Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight. "Nothing Falstaff does or has done is lost on Falstaff; he is always equal to the task of being himself."

Name Wizard

Matt Grant had a link to this on his talent blog: the Baby Name Wizard. Superb live graphics as you search for how popular names were at any given time over the past 100+ years. A great thing to play around with for a few minutes (and check your own names, of course). Andrew peaked in the early 1980s at over 7000 kids per million babies, as did Jonathan, my middle name, that J in my blog address.

Miles just reached 400 kids per million babies. It's never been as popular before. Luisa stopped being used in the US in 1930! Sara also peaked in the early 1980s. In fact, so did Andrea. Even Andrea as a boy's name peaked around the same time. So with the exception of Miles, we are the family of outmoded names. :-)

Jesus!

[This is another set piece, one I wrote in December 2001]

JESUS!

On a September evening in 1987, I watched the television broadcast of the baseball game when the San Francisco Giants clinched their place in the playoffs. After the game, the commentator, Gary Park, went to the Giants locker room with a camera crew to do some interviews during the players' champagne celebration. Park was especially interested in interviewing one of the team's leaders, Will Clark, then a young player on the verge of stardom. But when Clark appeared, he ignored Park's questions and kept jumping around like an excited kid, screaming phrases not usually heard on television: "Shit, this is the greatest fucking thing that's ever happened to me!" Park's discreet but unsuccessful efforts to let Clark know his excitement was being broadcast live were amusing, and the moment as a whole was enjoyably honest: Clark, the All-American boy, was being one in the most truthful sense. After all, all-American boys can cuss with the best of 'em.

While watching the game the following evening, I was disappointed to hear Park read Clark's apology. It said just what one would expect, in the very words one would expect: he got carried away; he didn't know it was live; he hoped he hadn't disappointed the fans — the usual things athletes have to say when they haven't lived up to their status as "role models for young people." Of course, Clark was probably under pressure, but still, anyone who really thought about the scene could have understood it without any apology being necessary. And anyone who wanted to "protect my kids," as people so often say in such contexts, didn't know (and had forgotten) what kind of language kids actually use when there are no adults around. Kids are usually just as good as Clark himself at knowing when and where they can use "such language." In fact, "register control" is an everyday skill mastered by the vast majority of the population — those who don't master it end up in asylums or on street corners. Clark's mistake was not cussing as such, but inadvertently cussing in public.

I would certainly have forgotten the entire incident if it weren't for another baseball game a few weeks later. On the last day of the season, I watched a true classic, a game so memorable all the details have stayed with me, so I don't even have to look them up: with the pennant on the line, Frank Tanana of the Detroit Tigers and Jimmy Key of the Toronto Blue Jays both pitched complete games, with the Tigers winning 1-0 on an early home run by Larry Herndon. Unlike Clark, Tanana knew he was live when he was interviewed after the game, so he didn't say anything was "fucking great." But before he answered the first question, he said: "The first thing I'd like to do is thank my lord and savior Jesus Christ."

"Well," I immediately thought, "if other people can be offended by Will Clark's excitement, I'm going to be offended by this! If I ever have kids, I don't want them to think Jesus Christ has anything to do with success or failure in sports." It would, of course, have been futile to try to get Tanana to apologize for what he certainly would not regard as "taking the lord's name in vain" (though such a statement is tantamount to that), but if others can use the "protect my kids" argument, why can't I?

In the United States, such rhetoric from athletes is not rare, but in Europe, it is: the French tennis fans at Roland Garros in 1989 were quite taken aback when Michael Chang, having just become the youngest player to ever win the tournament, began his remarks by thanking not his coach or even his family but "my lord and savior." And now, twelve years later, two more non-Europeans have caught my attention in another European sporting event, this time two Brazilians in a German soccer match between Bayer Leverkusen and Nuremberg. After scoring the match's first goal, Nuremberg's Cacau pulled up his jersey to reveal an undershirt that read, in German, "Jesus lives, and he loves you." As if that weren't enough, Leverkusen's Ze Roberto scored a goal a few minutes later and pulled up his shirt: "Jesus loves you." Then Cacau scored again and did the shirt thing again, and to top it off, the two players traded jerseys at the end of the match, as soccer players are wont to do — but they didn't put them on, so they did their post-match interviews with their message clearly visible.

Sometimes one would really like to be an athlete. If I were a player in the German soccer league, I'd wear a special undershirt until the next time I scored a goal, and then I'd celebrate by pulling up my jersey: "Jesus didn't score; I did!"

Set Pieces (2001)

[This is a set piece I wrote in September/October 2001]

SET PIECES
I first noticed the odd literary use of the expression "set piece" in book reviews. In my favorite example, quite a few reviewers used the term to refer to the opening section of Don DeLillo's novel Underworld. This lengthy prologue is a description of the 1951 baseball playoff when Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit a game-winning home run The New York Times dubbed "the shot heard round the world" (even though the issue's other lead story reported the Soviet Union's first detonation of a hydrogen bomb). The expression "set piece" not only does not do justice to such a virtuoso performance, it is also—independent of the passage's quality or style—not really applicable to it at all.

In a set piece in sports, players do a series of planned things in order to achieve a particular goal: the hit-and-run in baseball; the pick-and-roll John Stockton and Karl Malone of the Utah Jazz perfected in basketball and executed thousands of times over the years; corner kicks or free kicks in soccer, so sublime when performed by David Beckham or Roberto Carlos, with all their power, grace, and precision. In a sense, every single play in American football is a set piece, at least at the beginning. In all these examples, a series of "set" moves has to be executed with precise timing in order for the action as a whole to succeed. In this light, regarding a passage in a novel as a "set piece" seems quite odd: the point of such a play is that it can and should be done over and over again in the same way, while DeLillo's prologue in Underworld—to return to my example—can only be done once.

The verbal set piece is in the realm not of the writer but of the raconteur. Think of those people who are so present at parties because of their virtuoso storytelling. Their narratives can occasionally be annoying, but such "set pieces" are more often thoroughly entertaining, full of wit and energy, told with precise timing and complete control of digressions and little ironies. Tucked into the flow of conversation, these little morality tales, however indirectly, comment on or correct statements made by others. Still, the raconteur does not finally aim to "score points," as it were, but to perform, to keep the conversational ball in play as artfully as possible—so as to provide openings for further stories down the line.

Those who hear such stories often urge their tellers to write them down—but good raconteurs rarely have the temperament to be good writers. They are gregarious improvisers, not solitary composers; their pieces evolve in performance, not through the painstaking revision a writer like DeLillo puts into his work. The writer aims at the unrepeatable; the raconteur's story may evolve with time, so that if you hear it again, even years later, you may wonder why some of the details have changed, but the point of the set piece—or more precisely, of its telling—is finally its repeatability.

Oh Hell; Bored; Lucy

I've been meaning to post this little gem from the September 18, 2006, issue of The New Yorker for quite a while, from the profile of Bill Clinton:

"For decades, including the White House years, Clinton’s game was hearts (or, when he lacked a posse, solitaire), but he dropped it when Steven Spielberg, a longtime Friend of Bill, taught him Oh Hell—a lesser cousin of contract bridge. ... Clinton’s appeal for ... tycoons is obvious: in exchange for giving money to a good cause—the Clinton Foundation’s budget last year was thirty million dollars—you not only have the usual tax break and the knowledge that you are doing good but also get to play Oh Hell until five in the morning with a two-term ex-President who knows how to have a good time."

Hey, Bill! I love playing Oh Hell, call me anytime. Spielberg can join us. :-)

Finally, Clinton visits the National Museum in Addis Ababa:

'Then, at Clinton’s command, we visited the National Museum, which houses the bones of “Lucy,” a hominid who lived more than three million years ago. The museum was dingy and underfunded, but the guides were thrilled to open the place to Clinton, even though it was their day off. As he walked past the exhibits, Clinton listened a little and talked a lot. He talked about the giant pigs, the razorbacks, that roam his home state. And as he walked past some of the display cases he started talking about the wonders of the bonobo apes.

'“They have the most incredibly developed social sense,” he said. “When one of them makes a kill, they share the food, unlike all the other apes.” And then, Clinton said, with a laugh, “they fall down to the ground and have group sex! It’s a way of relieving aggression!” Such behavior, he said, “would drive the Christian right crazy!”'

Bush wouldn't be caught dead near Lucy, would he?


About his days as a Rhodes scholar, Clinton says: "I was very happy in England. I was young, I didn’t mind, I travelled a lot alone. I was alone a lot as a kid. I was never bored."

If he was never bored, he must have Inner Resources.

To get her

To get her
ego, Rhett,
go tether
hot egret
to get her
ghetto—er,
tog ether
together?

Thanksgiving Blog Blues

The main way that this expat in a country that did not have a holiday this week has noticed that people in the U.S. do have a holiday this week is that I keep checking blogs that otherwise get updated on a near-daily basis and that have now fallen silent! I'm looking forward to tomorrow and Monday, when people begin writing again, once they have fully digested their turkey!

Dinosaur

A student wrote an essay-story whose purpose was to end a text with the sentence, "When I woke up, I felt alive."

This reminded me of a one-sentence short story cited by Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (which means for us): "When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there."

I found a reference to this on the web: it appears to have written by a Guatemalan writer named Augusto Monterroso. The Wikipedia page on Monterroso provides a different version of the story, in the third person! I don't have Calvino's book (I read it long ago, having borrowed it from a friend or the library), but I am sure he quotes it in the first person.

I also remember (perhaps incorrectly) how Calvino refers to Monterroso in his section on "quickness," but also refers to Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities as a book characterized by brevity, despite its being well over 1000 pages long (and unfinished). "Quickness" is a matter not only of length, but also of focus.

Habitat destruction

Some interesting points about habitat destruction are at birderblog today. Here's a summary:

"In tropical rain forests, for example, land conversion exceeds habitat protection by a ratio of 2 to 1. ... But in Mediterranean habitats ... the disparity is 8 to 1. We have protected only one acre of land for every eight we have lost. ... And in temperate grasslands ... we have protected only one acre for every 10 we’ve lost."

In other words, the attention paid to tropical rain forests has helped (if not as much as it could), but it has distracted "westerners" from their own local destruction of habitats, ones that they barely recognize as being habitats. I'm going to keep this in mind the next time I read about how horrible it is that rain forests are being burned for farmland: what about the grasslands in the Great Plains?

How Terrible Is It?

Max Rodenbeck's "How Terrible Is It?", from the Nov. 30, 2006, issue of the New York Review of Books, begins with the official documents called "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" from September 2002 and March 2006. You can tell from the title of the article, of course, where MR is coming from! But my reason for citing it here is Rodenbeck's discussion of Louise Richardson's book What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat.

Richardson is "a Harvard professor who not only has been teaching about terrorism for a decade, but brings the experience of an Irish childhood, including youthful enthusiasm for the IRA, to understanding the phenomenon. As she explains, she had always thought it wise for academics to stay out of politics. The sheer boneheadedness of Washington's incumbents, who have ignored decades of accumulated wisdom on her subject, prompted her to write a belated primer."

Rodenbeck summarizes a dozen of Richardson's basic points as follows (his elaborations are longer than I have quoted here; I've just quoted the beginning of each point):

1. Terrorism is anything but new.

2. Terrorism is obviously a threat, and the deliberate killing of innocent civilians an outrage, but it is not a very big threat.

3. The danger from terrorist use of so-called weapons of mass destruction is not as large as scaremongers profess.

4. Many terrorists are not madmen. The choice to use terror can be quite rational and calculated.

5. Groups that commit terrorism, in many cases, believe they are acting defensively, using the most effective means at their disposal. Their justifications can be self-serving and morally repugnant, but are often carefully elaborated.

6. Suicide attacks can also represent a rational policy choice. They are cheap. They can be a means of access to difficult targets. They are effective in frightening people, and in advertising the seriousness and devotion of those who undertake them.

7. There is no special link between Islam and terrorism. Most major religions have produced some form of terrorism, and many terrorist groups have professed atheism. If there is a particular tenacity in Islamist forms of terrorism today, this is a product not of Islamic scripture but of the current historical circumstance that many Muslims live in places of intense political conflict.

8. Electoral democracy does not prevent terrorism, which has flourished in many democracies, typically being used by groups representing minorities who believe the logic of majority rule excludes them.

9. Democratic principles are no impediment to prosecuting terrorists. On the contrary they are, Richardson asserts, "among the strongest weapons in our arsenal."

10. Military action is sometimes necessary to combat terrorism, but it is often not the best way to do so.

11. Armies, in fact, often create more problems than they solve.

12. To address the issues terrorists say they are fighting for cannot automatically be dismissed as appeasement.

I highly recommend the whole article, and Rodenbeck highly recommends Richardson's whole book.

Glass Beads

Brian Campbell's comment on one of C. Dale Young's entries led me to BC's essay "Can Poetry Matter?--15 Years After."

Brian looks at a number of essays that responded to Dana Gioia's original "Can Poetry Matter?" essay. One of the issues that always comes up is the role that Creative Writing programs play in the development of poetry in North America. One point that I always make and that I rarely come across has to do with health insurance.

Perhaps it takes an expatriate living in a country with a functioning health-insurance system to notice this, but one very good reason for poets to want to get credentialed (MFA) and tenured (Professor of Creative Writing)—or even just working for a university in some way—is to get health insurance.

In the jazz world, it is striking how often older musicians who get sick are dependent on benefit concerts from their fellow musicians in order to be able to pay their health costs (Billy Higgins, Sun Ra)—or at least are dependent on staying on the road (or going back on the road) after life-threatening heart attacks or strokes (Oscar Peterson continued touring even after his stroke partially disabled his hand: try playing piano like that!).

So it's more than understandable if creative people try to get themselves a gig at a university, which will usually involve some sort of health coverage. When Adrienne Rich left UC Santa Cruz to teach at Stanford in the mid-eighties, the story we students heard was that (even though she apparently would have preferred to stay at UCSC) she got much better treatment for her rheumatoid arthrities through Stanford than from a public school.

Of course, Brian's essay made me think of some other things, too. He quotes Jake Berry's response to Gioia:

"Should we as poets be prepared to accept, even embrace, obscurity in order to practice an art that is important to the deeper, more complex, conditions of our species? For what reason? Does reason have anything to do with it? Do we not practice this art out of some obsession that forever seems to remain just beyond our ability to describe and name? Or do we practice it to keep the poetic faculties alive regardless of who or how many may subscribe to that experience?"

The last of these questions reminds me of a book I read long ago, Das Glasperlenspiel, by Herman Hesse. Not a great novel, but a very memorable one: the main character is a monk-like figure living in a future in which civilization has collapsed, and he and his fellows in the cloister-like place where they live spend their days playing "the glass-bead game," which is a means of preserving knowledge for future generations.

I recently read Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, by Lionel Gossman, and one of the things that kept coming up was how much Burckhardt (and Bachofen, who is the other major figure in Gossman's book) saw his scholarship as a way of "shoring up fragments against our ruin" (to quote anachronistically). In a sense, Burckhardt saw scholarship as a "glass-bead game" even before Hesse wrote his novel.

There's one other moment in Brian's essay that I would like to draw attention to:

"As Simon DeDeo, one of my blog interlocutors, put it so well, does theoretical science matter to anyone? Not really, except for the practitioners, the aficionados, and the students. Similarly for poetry. As theoretical science is not in a bad way, neither is poetry."

Wonderful!

Elixir, volume 5, no. 2

My poem "Tarah's Maid" appears in volume 5, number 2, of Elixir, which has just been published. (The issue is so new that they don't even have it up on their web site yet.)

The worst in American history?

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker of November 6, 2006, before the mid-term election:

There’s a lively debate among historians over the question of whether the record of the forty-third President, compiled with the indispensable help of a complaisant Congress, is the worst in American history or merely the worst of the sixteen who managed to make it into (if not out of) a second full term. That the record is appalling is by now beyond serious dispute. It includes an unending deficit—this year, it’s $260 billion—that has already added $1.5 trillion to the national debt; the subcontracting of environmental, energy, labor, and health-care policymaking to corporate interests; repeated efforts to suppress scientific truth; a set of economic and fiscal policies that have slowed growth, spurred inequality, replenished the ranks of the poor and uninsured, and exacerbated the insecurities of the middle class; and, on Capitol Hill, a festival of bribery, some prosecutable (such as the felonies that have put one prominent Republican member of Congress in prison, while another awaits sentencing), some not (such as the reported two-million-dollar salary conferred upon a Republican congressman who became the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbyist immediately after shepherding into law a bill forbidding the government to negotiate prices for prescription drugs).

Human Shields, Parterre, Open Mic, November 22, 2006

Human Shields

Dany Demuth (g, voc)
Andrew Shields (g, songwriting)

"How you gonna get the cat back in the bag?"

Open Mic
Parterre
Kaserne, Klybeckstrasse, Basel
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Time: sometime after 8:30 p.m.

"In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

Just call me Maya, honey.

I took The Which Famous Poet Are You Test and came out as Maya Angelou!

Gay marriage in South Africa

In today's International Herald Tribune is an article about a new South African bill allowing gay marriage. The catch is that it includes an "opt-out clause" for "religious and civil officers to refuse to marry same-sex couples on moral grounds." Considering that the starting point for this bill was a South African Constitutional Court decision that "existing marriage legislation was unconstitutional because it discriminated against same-sex couples," it is surprising that this law still allows for such discrimination.

In the same newspaper is an article about how traditional customs in Africa can contribute to the spread of AIDS. For example, an HIV-positive mother who is advised not to breast-feed her baby did so anyway, because she had to breast-feed the baby for two weeks as part of a traditional ritual. Of course, there are those who say that the traditional rituals should not be subject to any challenges from science.

From Atheism to Baptism

Okay, I'm a Militant Darwinist and an atheist. But my children get baptized, so I am not, I guess, a true full-scale militant Atheist. Andrea wants them to get baptized, and I like the ritual.

So Sara is being baptized on Sunday, one day before she turns six months old. In Switzerland (as in Germany where Miles was baptized), the parents are asked to choose a verse from the Bible as a Taufspruch (baptismal motto, or something like that). For Sara, we chose this:

Meine Kindlein, laßt uns nicht lieben mit Worten noch mit der Zunge, sondern
mit der Tat und mit der Wahrheit. (1. Johannes 3:18)

That's how Luther put it. King James's team put it like this:

My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed
and in truth.

I like the way this seems to undermine Luther's emphasis on faith, as opposed to works, by keeping the focus on what one does ("in deed") as well as on what one believes ("in truth").

We also considered this beautiful verse from Proverbs (31:25), in Luther's words:

Kraft und Schöne sind ihr Gewand, und sie lacht des kommenden Tages.

The KJ team put it like this:

Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.

We like the German version, with its beautiful echo of the way Sara (also known as "the rooster" in our household) often wakes up at around 5 a.m. and begins to laugh and coo and enjoy the very fact of being alive. (I also like the lovely genitive of "lacht des kommenden Tages," but I'm funny that way.)

Gary Wolf on Atheism

Here's an interesting article from Wired in which Gary Wolf pursues the idea of being a militant atheist, including interviews with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.

My favorite line:

"... there are certain actors in history who change the world by staging their own defeat."

What's on my desk

C. Dale Young posted a list of everything on his desk. I posted a comment with what is on my desk, but actually only with what is on the top of the piles, plus a few stray things:

These are the things on TOP of the piles:

The latest issue of Conduit.
Bill Coyle, The God of this World to His Prophet (which I received because I did not win the New Criterion Prize for 2005)
Two DVDs of Greg Brown concerts.
Amy Clampitt, The Kingfisher (waiting to be given to a friend, since I have her Collected Poems)

Then some stray things:

A pink highlighter; a lost pen cap; a small post-it pad; a black Pentel mechanical pencil; some ungraded papers; a guitar tuner; an electronic letter scale; a green clothespin; a small package of Kleenex.

What do you have on your desk?

Updated list of publications

It has been years since I last updated my list of publications on the Basel English Seminar website, but I have finally done it again. The list also contains updated links to publications that I have been able to locate in on-line versions. (If you do happen to try any of the links and discover that they are incorrect, please tell me so that I can fix them.)

Light Quarterly 52-53, Spring-Summer 2006

The latest issue of Light includes four more poems of mine. If that sounds like a lot, well, they add up to a grand total of fourteen lines. The titles:

Walk with a Five-Year-Old
Certain Persons
Postcard after a Visit
The Day after Writing a Poem

There are more words in the four titles than lines in the four poems! :-)

Poetry Calendar 2007

My poem "Cabinet d'Amateur" appears as one of the 365 poems in the Poetry Calendar 2007 published by Alhambra Publishing in Belgium. I have been enjoying the 2006 calendar published by the same house, not only because it includes my poem "Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong," but because it is full of interesting poems, both contemporary and historical, often nicely paired (as when my poem is preceded by Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush").

The 2007 calendar also includes poems by my friends Geoffrey Brock and A. E. Stallings, along with many other fine contemporary poets.

The same company publishes poetry calendars in French and German, as well.

Great Uncle Andrew

I hope that my nieces and nephews all think that I am a great Uncle Andrew, but now I am a Great Uncle Andrew: my German nephew Nils and his girlfriend Jessica had a baby on Sunday (Jessica's own birthday), Luca Jannis Delpho. And Andrea (who has always been a great Aunt Andrea) is now also a Great Aunt Andrea.

This, by the way, is my 100th post to my blog.

The Neighborhood Bully

Back when George H.W. Bush talked about the "line in the sand" after Iraq invaded Kuwait, I finally understood why I had always disliked him: it was because he was a bully.

Like father, like son, then: the morning after the election in 2000, a student asked me why I disliked Bush so much, and since I knew she was a fan of Harry Potter, I told her it was because he was a bully, just like Draco Malfoy. She immediately understood. :-)

It's nice to see others coming to the same conclusion; here's Paul Krugman on GWB:

"At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job."

And here's Joan Didion on Dick Cheney:

"The personality that springs to mind is that of the ninth-grade bully in the junior high lunchroom, the one sprawled in the letter jacket so the seventh-graders must step over his feet."

Don Brown on Fall

My friend Don Brown's reflections on fall today are quite beautiful. I recommend his post highly!

Math and German

C. Dale Young wrote today about his decision to do medicine and poetry, instead of Studio Art.

Twenty-two years ago, I decided to drop the Math part of my planned double major in Math and German. Later, I switched to English, still writing poetry all the time. Today, I wonder why I thought I could not do mathematics and literature at the same time. I have even considered doing a B.S. in Math part-time here in Basel. Maybe I'll still get around to it, but not before Sara goes to kindergarten, which will not be until August 2011.

My reflections on this, as well as CDY's, reminded me of John Koethe's poem "Hamlet."

Doublage

Miles and I don't play cribbage any more since we invented doublage, which is kind of "double cribbage." Instead of dealing six cards and putting two in the crib to create two four-card hands and one four-card crib, play with two decks (104 cards), deal nine cards, and put three in the crib to create two six-card hands and one six-card crib. All other rules are the same, except that we go four times around the board rather than twice. (You need 241 points to win instead of 121.)

The highest possible hand is 112 points (seven fives); the next highest is 91 (jack, six fives, nibs; the equivalent of the 29-point hand in cribbage). The highest-scoring hand we have had is a 58-point hand that Miles had once (when he needed only 20 to go out); my best hand was thus ruined: a 50-point hand that I did not get to peg because of his having won already!

The funniest thing to have was double nibs, when I had two jacks of the suit of the card that was cut. Finally, in doublage it is nearly impossible to get a dry hand or crib.

Senators who voted for the "enemy combatant" law

Garrison Keillor has helpfully provided this list in his article "A Shameful Retreat from American Values":

Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.

As Keillor points out, "If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo, suspected of 'crimes against the state,' and held in prison, you'd assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore. Be forewarned."

Further: "None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor."

And finally: "Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them."

Paint my love a morning sky

In another entry from the category of misheard lyrics, there are these lines from "Touch of Grey":

Must be getting early
Clocks are running late
Paint by number morning sky
Looks so phony

Until I had occasion to look them up a few minutes ago, I thought the second line was "paint my love a morning sky." Which is a beautiful line, actually, just not what Robert Hunter wrote!

20 Science Myths

I enjoyed this page about common "facts" that are not true. I had only recently read that it is not true that water drains one way in the northern hemisphere and the other way in the southern hemisphere, so I was pleased to see that confirmed.

Fire on the Mountain, Ventura, July 13, 1985

Mr. Jumbo has posted some pictures of wildfires currently burning along his biking route in Southern California. They reminded me of a Dead show in Ventura, CA, on July 13, 1985. From the fairgrounds, in the mountains on the other side of the city, a quiet drama was taking place before the show: a wildfire was creeping down the hillside toward some houses. My sight might have been playing tricks on me (or my memory is playing tricks now), but I can still picture how the arcs of water were playing over the roofs of houses to keep them dry. Then the Dead came out and opened with "One More Saturday Night" seguing nicely into, you guessed it, "Fire on the Mountain."

I thought I'd put a link to the Live Music Archive recording of the show here, but for some reason it is no longer available. So anyone who wants to hear that version of FOTM will have to get a copy from me!

What Miles Heard

Miles likes the Rolling Stones. This is how he heard the chorus of the song "Happy":

I need a loan to make me happy!

Good poets steal

Bob Dylan's been at it again, borrowing lines and images from one source for Modern Times, this time from a nineteenth-century American poet named Henry Timrod. One article on the subject is in The Independent.

As for the Eliot line that I stole the title of this from, I have always heard it as "bad poets imitate; good poets steal," but the web is full of references to "bad poets borrow; good poets steal." The former sounds like a better maxim to me, and since TSE was good at maxims, I hope he said "imitate" and not "borrow." But the web is not very useful in answering this question, since a search only gives you a zillion unreferenced citations of the maxim, in both forms!

(I'm expecting at least one occasional reader of my blog to be able to provide an immediate answer to this question!)

Timrod, by the way, wrote South Carolina's official state anthem, "Carolina."

Eggcorns

Here's a site for language fans (and nitpickers): the Eggcorn Database. "Eggcorns" are misused words or phrases, like "mute point" for "moot point" or "eggcorn" for "acorn," and this database has collected over 500 of them!

One of them is "ten year" for "tenure." When I was growing up, my father was a tenure-track professor in Math at the University of Toledo. I was always puzzled about the fact that "getting ten year" meant "getting a permanent contract" when it ought to mean "getting a ten-year contract"!

DMB on BD's MT

My friend Don Brown has some wonderful things to say about Bob Dylan and his new album Modern Times.

Trying to be double-skunked II

We tried again. This time Miles was trying to be double-skunked—and he failed. He ended up with 70 points, for two primary reasons: I was not scoring many points; and, over and over again, he was getting bad cuts (that is, he was getting what would usually be good cuts, turning a dry hand into a five-point hand, say, but since he was trying NOT to score, they were bad cuts).

Our conclusion based on this very slim sample: it is VERY hard to double-skunk anyone in cribbage. I, for one, do not remember having ever seen or been involved in a double-skunk. Are double-skunks as rare as 29-point hands?

Trying to be double-skunked

Miles and I did a cribbage experiment this morning: Could I be double-skunked on purpose? It turns out it is quite hard to avoid scoring points! I did manage to let him double-skunk me, but I still ended up with 48 points, and part of the reason he was able to do so is that he got a couple of quite powerful hands (16 or 17 points). It's hard to strip a good six-card hand of points! So that makes it clear why double-skunking is so rare. I wonder if it is as rare as a 28/29-point hand?

August and September photos

I've just put some new photos on a web page. As I don't want to post the link publicly, send me an email if you'd like to have the link!

Dewey Redman obit in English

The NYT obit is here. See my thoughts in my previous post.

Dewey Redman (1931-2006)

I never had a chance to hear Dewey Redman live, but I used to play lots of albums featuring his brilliant sax playing on the radio back in my KZSU days. Pat Metheny's "80/81," Keith Jarrett's American Quartet in the 70s (with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian), Ornette Coleman LPs, and the wonderful band Old and New Dreams all made frequent appearances on my radio show. Now Charlie Haden is the only survivor of that last group, which also featured Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell (another great player whom I never heard live). Live long, Charlie.

I haven't yet found an English obituary; a German one appeared in the NZZ.

Flying Spaghetti Monster

A student of mine sent me a link to the Wikipedia page for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a parody of Intelligent Design that has taken on a life of its own: the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The founder, Bobby Henderson, gets a lot of hate mail.

As for me, I am still a Militant Darwinist, but I am sympathetic to the Pastafarians, as the followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monsters call themselves.