For All We Know

The maitre'd was looking at us in a funny way
as if he caught the drift I sought between the lines you spoke.

For one word never came across as just itself, but you
would put it over as insinuating something else.

Then slowly, slowly we would draw in on one another
until everything was implicated like wool spooled

from my yawning hands as you wound the yarn into a ball.

(Ciaran Carson, "Second Time Around," For All We Know, 15)

You speak; I seek to understand what you say; I read the expression of the maitre'd. I think he looks as if he understands; if he understands your subtexts, that means that there are subtexts to be understood. My conditional reading of his expression is a sign of my desire for there to be a subtext, a "drift" to catch.

The source of ambiguity is fourfold: it comes from my desire for it; it comes from the attempt by the maitre'd to interpret something unfamiliar; it comes from you and your manner of speaking; it comes from language itself.

But perhaps one should say "implication" rather than "ambiguity." Your words have implications (you "insinuate something else"); they imply more than themselves. But I do not "imply"; I infer, and it seems to me as if the maitre'd also infers.

Ambiguity, implication, insinuation, inference: all this may imply that communication is not happening, that I am not "catching your drift," that something is wrong. But "slowly, slowly," you and I do communicate at this implicit level at which "everything is implicated" (whereby this verb, like "insinuate," has a sinister "drift" that "imply" does not), even if the simile of the winding of the yarn is not simple. What is being implied (insinuated, implicated) does not become explicit, but the feeling, the sensation, of communication ("we would draw in on one another") is generated, how it is when one is in love and words always have a surplus of meaning.

In the yarn simile, I hold up the wool while you wind it into a ball. As "yarn" can also mean "tale" or "story" (with the added implication that the tale might be "tall"), it is appropriate that you, the one telling the story, the one "insinuating something else," the one who has a drift to catch, should be one "winding the yarn." But the simile puts the listener in an unusual, surprising position: I do not unwind the yarn as you tell your tale; I hold the unwound wool up for you to wind.

So the listener here does not just receive the tale from the storyteller; I am not a passive receptacle for your "yarn." "Catching the drift" and understanding "insinuations" are activities I engage in in response to your story, but "everything is implicated" only because I provide a foundation for your storytelling. For the story to have its full effect, the listener must offer not only attention but something that the passage does not name, something prior to attention, something whose drift is caught only in the ambiguous image of "my yawning hands."

[I just noticed that I had forgotten that my original review of For All We Know begins with these same lines.]

The Glass Essay

In my first round of reading Anne Carson back in 1998, I loved her verse novel Autobiography of Red—but the poem that truly floored me was "The Glass Essay," her depiction of recovering from the end of a long-term relationship while reading Emily Brontë's works (I have Carson's poem in the Cape collection from Britain, Glass and God). It does not diminish with re-reading:

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.

This theme gets picked up again later, when the speaker is talking with her therapist, Dr. Haw:

When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not

go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.
This still seems to me a good question.

And then that question gets picked up again:

Why keep watching?
Some people watch, that's all I can say.
There is nowhere else to go,

no ledge to climb up to.

I noticed these connections on rereading. But the image that had stuck with me from my first reading of the poem—for over a decade, that is—was this:

Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself

thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.

Rereading the poem now, I found a gentler version of the same point:

it would be sweet to have a friend to tell things to at night,
without the terrible sex price to pay.

In 1998, I thought "The Glass Essay" was utterly unique and extraordinary. Today, I still do.

Men in the Off Hours

Anne Carson's "Essay on What I Think About Most" (in her collection Men in the Off Hours) contains a much better statement of what I was trying to get at at the end of my post on her book The Beauty of the Husband:

The fourth thing I like
about Alkman's poem
is the impression it gives

of blurting out the truth in spite of itself.
Many a poet aspires
to this tone of inadvertent lucidity
but few realize it so simply as Alkman.
Of course his simplicity is a fake.
Alkman is not simple at all,
he is a master contriver ...

"Inadvertent lucidity" that is the result not of "simplicity" but of a mastery of contrivance that looks like simplicity—the trap I fell into was to talk about "transparency" without talking about "artifice."

Of the many other passages that struck me in re-reading Men in the Off Hours earlier this month, I'll just mention one, from "TV Men: Lazarus," in which Carson puts forward a striking theory about Plato's allegory of the cave:

I have grasped certain fundamental notions first advanced by Plato,
e.g., that our reality is just a TV set

inside a TV set inside a TV set, with nobody watching
but Sokrates,
who changed
the channel in 399 B.C.

Television as the realization of Plato's cave! (I suspect this is something like what Alexander Nehamas argues about television, but I'm just guessing!)

Grayling's biography of Descartes

A. C. Grayling's biography of Descartes helped me see how Descartes used doubt: he was a "methodological sceptic," not a "problematic sceptic" (282); doubt for Descartes was a tool for argument and not a fundamental problem. Grayling states this quite fully:

The sceptical arguments employed in the method of doubt do not themselves have to be plausible or sustainable. They may indeed be far less plausible than what they impugn; but that does not matter. They are simply a device, an heuristic, something that helps one to see how it is that when one says "I exist" it cannot but be true. (284)

Grayling also points out that even the Cogito itself is not entirely original with Descartes:

When St. Augustine wrote in the early fifth century AD that we can doubt everything except the soul's doubting ("On Free Will" II 3:7) he was even then not inventing a new idea, and presumably Jean de Silhon, who published his The Two Truths in 1626 containing the remark "it is not possible that a man who has the ability, which many share, to look within himself and judge that he exists, can be deceived in this judgment, and not exist", must have known St. Augustine's remark or — independently of that — the idea itself in the philosophical tradition. (278-279).

Grayling spends a great deal of time discussing Galileo and his conflict with the Inquisition, because Galileo's punishment had a significant influence on Descartes: it kept him from publishing Le Monde and hence, in the long run, played a great role in the forms his work took. Had Descartes published Le Monde, Grayling's book implies, then he would not have written The Discourse on Method and The Meditations! Galileo's punishment made Descartes back down out of fear of similar sanctions—and, Grayling emphasizes, Descartes backed down because he was a devout Catholic who did not want to run afoul of the Church.

Grayling's discussion of Galileo, then, taught me something that I had not registered previously (neither when reading Galileo in SLE nor when studying Brecht's Leben des Galilei in graduate school):

Galileo published his telescopic discoveries in a little book called Sidereus Nuncius (the Starry Messenger). But in the next couple of years he made more accurate observations of the moons of Jupiter and, while puzzling over inconsistencies in his data, realized he had to take into account variables in his own position relative to the motions he was observing—specifically, variables which had to be caused by the motion of earth round the sun, thus showing that Copernicus's model was not, as Copernicus himself had taken it, merely a convenience for simplifying calculations of the motions of heavenly bodies, but actually correct. (166)

The new point to me is that Galileo did not just believe that Copernicus's model was an accurate description of the universe; instead, he demonstrated that it is. (For a fascinating book on the Catholic Church's ambivalent relationship to astronomy, I recommend J. L. Heilbron's 1999 study The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories. The Church needed astronomers to calculate the correct dates for Easter, but feared the implications of their research.)

Finally, Grayling also nicely summarizes contemporary theories of consciousness (all of which dispense with Descartes's mind-body dualism):

Consciousness has arisen amongst higher mammals, according to these theories, because of its survival advantage—an organism’s appropriate use of energy and protection from harm are much enhanced when it is able to place itself in a map of the environment and make plans about the best courses of action in it. Creatures which are merely biological automata, even if highly sensitive to their surroundings, would not be as adaptive as creatures that are genuinely conscious. (288)

This succinctly captures the role of evolution in the development of consciousness, while also emphasizing, pace Descartes, that animals are also conscious beings (and not mindless machines). Or rather, Grayling points out how human beings are also animals and are as subject to evolution as any other living species is.

Descartes

Reading Descartes as preparation for the discussion of Durs Grünbein's Vom Schnee, oder Descartes in Deutschland in my forthcoming course on verse novels, I discovered several passages that seemed like anticipations of post-Cartesian developments in science. This is not at all surprising, of course, given how fundamental Descartes was to the laying of the philosophical foundations of science. But I was still struck to find a passage in the Discourse on Method that sounds like a description of the Turing test. Descartes is talking about "machines" with "a likeness to our bodies" and argues that "we would still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not ... real men":

Of these the first is, that they could never use words or other signs, composing them as we do to declare our thoughts to others. For one can well conceive that a machine may be so made as to emit words, and even that it may emit some in relation to bodily actions which cause a change in its organs, as, for example, if one were to touch it in a particular place, it may ask what one wishes to say to it; if it is touched in another place, it may cry out that it is being hurt, and so on; but not that it may arrange words in various ways to reply to the sense of everything that is said in its presence, in the way that the most unintelligent of men can do. (75)

Less surprisingly, a passage a few pages later describes how science is supposed to develop (at least in a world without "scientific revolutions" à la Thomas Kuhn):

[Descartes thought he should] urge good minds to try to go beyond this [his own results] in contributing, each according to his inclination and his capacity, to the experiments which must be made, and communicating also to the public everything they learned; so that, the last beginning where their predecessors had left off, and thereby linking the lives and the labors of many, we might all together go much further than each man could individually. (79)

Then there's this bit from the Meditations that reads like a peculiar combination of an anticipation of calculus ("infinity of parts") and an early formulation of Nietzsche's "genealogy" ("each of which depends in no way on the others"):

For the whole time of my life may be divided into an infinity of parts, each of which depends in no way upon the others ... (127)

The Meditations also includes a moment Grünbein surely enjoys, as he has mentioned "phantom pain" in his work in more than a few contexts (note that Wikipedia says that the earliest recorded reference to this phenomenon was made in 1551; the Meditations were published in 1641):

And yet I have sometimes heard people say, who have lost arms or legs, that they still sometimes seemed to feel pain in the limb which had been amputated ... (155)

The edition I have (which I bought in Glasgow last week, and which all the page references here come from) is from Penguin Classics, translated by F. E. Sutcliffe; it also includes the "Letter from the Author to the Translator of the Principles of Philosophy, to serve as a preface," which I found almost even more fascinating than the Discourse and the Meditations, as it is a looser, almost chattier text (as Descartes says in the Meditations, "my mind likes to wander"—108). It includes one extended passage on what science is for: first, the satisfaction of finding truths; secondly, the development of one's ability to "judge better"; thirdly, the resolution of disagreements (because it can "remove all causes of dispute"); and finally, the discovery of further truths (186). I was especially struck by the particular sequence of these points, with satisfaction first.

I read Descartes in SLE at Stanford, and I had actually remembered the overall arc of the text quite clearly. But I had not remembered how clearly the Meditations are framed by the conceit of doubt. Descartes begins with his heuristic of radical doubt: "The slightest ground for doubt that I find in any[thing], will suffice for me to reject [it]" (95). This leads, of course, to the Cogito: "I am, I exist, is necessarily true, every time I express it or conceive of it in my mind" (103). But I had forgotten (and, it seems to me, "we" generally forget) that Descartes concludes by dismissing that doubt: "And I must reject all the doubts of these last few days, as hyperbolical and ridiculous ..." (168).

Finally, in the "Letter from the Author ...," Descartes beautifully dismantles the cliché that experience and reading are opposed, when he says that the best way to demonstrate the validity of his argument is "through experience, that is to say, by inviting readers to read this book" (180). And then he says how this book should be read, and the passage is so exemplary that I will close this long post by quoting it in full. This is a good way to read:

I should wish [this book] to be read straight through completely, like a novel, without the reader straining his attention too much or stopping at difficulties he may encounter, in order simply to know in broad outline what the matters are of which I treat; and that afterwards, if he considers them to merit further examination, and has the curiosity to know their causes, he may read it a second time in order to observe the development of my reasonings; but that he must not then give it up in despair, if he cannot follow it completely throughout or understand all the reasonings; he has only to mark with a stroke of his pen the places where he comes across difficulties and to continue to read without interruption to the end; then if he takes up the book for the third time, I feel sure that he will find the solution of most of the difficulties that he marked before; and that, if any still remain, their solution will eventually be found in a further reading. (181)

At Home, by Franz Hohler

I'll be reading my translation of a poem by Franz Hohler at this event on March 11:

Wednesday, 11th March, from 6.30 pm
Talk Party and reading

Celebrating with Franz Hohler his new book in English - At Home

Franz Hohler is one of the most popular and successful writers and performers in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Liechtenstein. His stories, sketches and performances combine facts, fiction, satire and fairy-tales. Bergli Books is publishing At Home, a selection of his most popular and talked about stories in English. This event will take place at the beautiful Schmiedenhof-Zunftsaal on the other side of Rümelinsplatz since we expect a large number of people to want to celebrate with Franz Hohler. It is best if you let us know as soon as possible if you will be attending this special event. Tickets are available immediately for a token fee of CHF 10.00 each. RSVP to info@bergli.ch

Hudson Review

I have two translations of poems by Jacques Réda in the latest issue (Winter 2009, vol. LXI, no. 4) of the Hudson Review: "The Inspection" and "Lament of the Old Pole."

"Lament of the Old Pole" will be on Poetry Daily next Wednesday, February 18.

Practices and Expression

Joseph Duemer posted an interesting response to a reading he participated in the other day, in which he discusses the "distinction between poetry as a set of practices and poetry as a mode of (self) expression."

He articulated that difference as "professionals" and "amateurs," terminology which he himself does not seem to feel comfortable with. But I appreciate his emphasis on the difference between those who write poetry to express themselves and those who, although they surely started out that way, have kept writing poetry for reasons "beyond" self-expression.

It's perhaps important for "professional" poets to keep this distinction in mind, which seems primary to me—and far more significant than differences among the "professionals" (who, whatever type of poetry they write, are all focused on "poetry as a set of practices," to borrow Joseph Duemer's precise formulation).

*

I once attended a workshop in Geneva with Ellen Hinsey (this would have been about 1998 or so), and at one point, when I raised my hand to answer a question she had asked (after waiting a bit to see if anybody else wanted to try), she said to me that I was a "professional" and she thought it would be good to hear what the others had to say. (She had already come to this conclusion based on a comment I had made earlier in the workshop.) That was a breakthrough moment for me: I may not have had many poems published at the time, but my emphasis on writing poetry "beyond" self-expression had been recognized, and from then on, I was more sure of myself as a poet!

Edinburgh Reading, Feb. 8, 2009

Here's Rob Mackenzie introducing the poets at the "Poetry at the Great Grog" reading on February 8, 2009, in Edinburgh.
If the venue does not look like a bar (which is what the Great Grog is), that's because it not: it's a beautiful room at St. Cuthbert's Church. The reading was relocated after Rob realized that the Great Grog would probably be full of rugby fans in the evening after a Scotland-Wales match in Edinburgh!

The first reader was Alan Gay.

Then came me.
My set list:

The Day after Writing a Poem
Doggerel
Expat
The Seven-Year-Old Atheist
Edge
Pipe Smoke
Origin (by Dieter M. Gräf, tr. AS; note that the poem is incorrectly titled at the link)
In the breaks between the trees (by Ilma Rakusa, tr. AS)
The Letter Scale (by Jacques Réda, tr. AS)
Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong
Aftermath
City
September Rain

After me came Jane McKie.


And then Tim Turnbull.


When I'm a participant, I find it hard to comment on the other readers, but I did enjoy them all, each in their own way! One thing's for sure: I'm glad I did not follow Tim, who is a wonderful performer!

Moon Guitars in Glasgow

Here's me with Jimmy Moon at Moon Guitars in Glasgow last Friday. Jimmy made my octave mandolin, and that's a beautiful £1750 mandolin that I got to fiddle with for a few minutes. I had been planning to buy one of his other mandolins for £575, but I had to abort that plan when Andrea had a toothache in December!

John Taylor on German poetry

John Taylor was so kind as to send me an offprint of his review of several recent volumes of German poetry in translation, which is in the current issue of the Antioch Review (Winter 2009, vol. 67, no. 1). John takes a look at five books: Michael Hofmann's anthology of Twentieth-Century German Poetry (which features two of my translations of Lutz Seiler and which I discussed here), Hofmann's translations of Durs Grünbein in Ashes for Breakfast (which I discussed here), Rosmarie Waldrop's translation of Ulf Stolterfoht's Lingos I-X, and my two volumes of translations of Dieter M. Gräf, Tousled Beauty and Tussi Research.

Reading at Tchai Ovna, Glasgow, Feb. 6, 2009

I ended up reading at Tchai Ovna in Glasgow at the last minute last night. I was there to hear Eleanor Livingstone and someone else did not turn up, so I was a stand-in. I had my chapbook with me just in case, so I had something to read! My set list (all from my chapbook "Cabinet d'Amateur"):

Torso
Cabinet d'Amateur
Flugelhorn
Slide
Puppets
Reception

Unfortunately, Eleanor and I had to run off to the train, so I had to leave right after my reading!

On Buddy Holly's lyrics

Ben Zimmer does some nice things with Buddy Holly's lyrics here and here. I especially like how he connects "Not Fade Away" to the stuttering "Why don't you all f-f-f-fade away?" in "My Generation."

Troy Town

"La vraie vie est ailleurs," said Rimbaud, before he went elsewhere.

Sometimes, poets admit as much, as in "Hutt River Province," from Matt Merritt's Troy Town:

So I'll secede from the stutter
. . . . . . . . . and slide
of everyday. Make myself
one of those outback kingdoms
come of the refusal to accept the inevitable.

Some sad station of low scrub and stubbornness
way beyond the black swamp,
rough grazing by a stagnant bend of a backwater
that's all ox-bows and dead-ends,

with a sun fit to sear shadows
into the backs of my eyes.

It's not as simple as that, of course, as the "stutter / and slide / of the everyday" is at least in motion, while the landscape of this imagined, desired "elsewhere" is completely static.

This is not a representative poem from Troy Town, except insofar as it marks the way Merritt likes to shape his poems: with at least one sharp turn somewhere, and often two or three. These turns are sometimes logical (working with "but" and "or") but often temporal (marked by "then" and "until"). Such poems work best when the shifts do not coincide with the stanza breaks, as in "Paradise Tanager":

Suddenly it's there, presumably having roosted
somewhere about my person all the way home.
Certainly the first in these parts, a whole hemisphere

out of place, but seemingly none the worse
for its long confinement. No song, but no need
to announce its arrival to us anyway, in terms other

than a palette of primary colour daubed along
the bare branch. Already we can't think
how we lived without it, facing down the weather,

getting stuck into the DIY, or organizing
a full social life, yet it draws just a passing glance
from the blackbird wrestling a worm out of the lawn,

or the tabby dozing in the border. No matter.
The moment it alights again on the edge
of the kitchen roof, we decide it has an answer

for everything, even the questions we're not yet asking.
Like how will it cope with the British winter?
The sparrowhawk? The traffic? The council tax?

And will it ever sleep? And when? And where?

The movement of the lines and the stanzas and the sentences provide three different rhythms through the poem, and the surprise of a South American bird in Britain generates the surprising movement of the images and the shifting focuses of the poem.

There are a lot of bird poems in the book, as Merritt is a birdwatcher (with 87 posts about birds on his blog!), and that must have finally led him to write "Another Bloody Poem about Birds":

You ask me why
there are so many
birds in these poems

as if you don't know

but you're right, of course.
It isn't fair to ask them
to keep bearing this burden
when all they really want
is to sing, fly, or eat.
Most likely all three.

All we want
just now is a life
free from metaphor and simile

but still you insist on listening to me
with your head cocked
very slightly to one side.

This seems to me to provide an insight into why we use figurative language at all, and beyond that, into why we use it all the time!

I was going to type in the wondrously funny "Sex after 36," too, but I just decided not to. If you want that bit of bawdy comedy, you have to buy the book, and with it you'll get many more poems with birds in them, as well as sharply outlined scenes of life here (England, for Merritt) and elsewhere that highlight the play of the desire to be in both places at once.

Hardscrabble

Okay, I admit it: I'm a sucker for any collection of poems that mentions my favorite band, as in Kevin McFadden's poem "Die Satan!", from his collection Hardscrabble:

(The Stones alone show him sympathy,
the Grateful Dead call him friend.)

But McFadden's collection is worth reading even for those who aren't Deadheads. The only reason to avoid it would be if you hate puns and anagrams, because the book is full of them, and is also full of reflections on punning and anagramming.

Here's a taste from "Famed Cities," one of the three longer pieces in the book:

My friends I teased about the leave in Cleveland;
they teased back Brunswick's run. Home not,
as the saying goes, a place to hang your hat—
home where the hat, by name, by chance, hangs you.

McFadden's attention to the letters that make up his words might seem to get out of hand at times, but he relates his interest in letters to his own biography, as in this passage from the long prose section, "It's Tarmac," that is the second of the longer pieces here, in which he talks about his mother's name: "Her maiden name (Bretmersky) was a clerical error on a baptismal certificate (Pretmersky)."

His attention to letters and anagrams even colors his brief comments on poetics, in this later passage from "It's Tarmac":

Contemporary American poetry is fond of dichotomies. I'm feeling a little punchy, so I'll hazard my own one-two: those interested in who and those interested in how. Cults of who and schools of how.

The third of the long pieces here is called "Time"; section XV ("Another, Cleveland": yes, McFadden is from the Cleveland area) begins with a line that recalls a theme I appreciated in Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude ("The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't"), and then it ends with a bit of philosophy and a bit of deflation:

What are we, but what we mistake ourselves for?
The brashest fact of my childhood—was I five?—
learning there were other Kevins. Might have said seven
for the rhyme, but you'd probably think I was slow
("Second grade, the lad hadn't grasped that?") and
good thing, too, since you're counting, I wasn't named
Nate, the temptation would be too (don't say it)
powerful. Do you even believe a syllable of this?
This life is a living remembered over a shoulder:
breadcrumb trail remapped into meaning years after
from crowshit cairns which pigs mistake for truffles.
Three days in your life that no art will recapture:
the day you were born, the day death sank in deep,
and the day you divined you weren't so damn special.

Thus, even when he's playing with anagrams and puns (pursuing the "how" of poetry), McFadden never turns fully away from a biographical approach centered on epiphanies (or the lack thereof), the "cult of who."

One feature of the book that I have left out until now is its focus on the theme of America, from anagram poems built around lines about America from Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg to a poem about the Statue of Liberty that outlines his mother's peculiar use of idiomatic phrases like "brand spanking new" to a poem about being "At Rushmore" that also deflates its subject in the conclusion, though here the deflation is also an opening up of the monumental subject at hand:

... Near the base, rubble remains—
a talus of blasted stones, dropped names—
the part of the image we may come closest to.

Buddy Holly

I wanted to find a video of Buddy singing "Not Fade Away," but there does not seem to be one, at least not on Youtube (just a video that shows the record playing). So here's "Peggy Sue" on American Bandstand.

So (hat tip to Marc Krebs) Buddy died fifty years ago today. "February made me shiver ..."

Humoresque

"Humoresque" is a chapbook by E. Tracy Grinnell, published by Blood Pudding Press. (Tracy is the publisher of Litmus Press.) It's a series of Sapphic quatrains circling around Moreau's painting of Sappho. It's a quick and beautiful read that also deserves a second reading right away. It made me smile the "archaic smile" that Grinnell refers to (doubling the title of A. E. Stallings's first book, Archaic Smile), with its "tangled" music:

Betrayed or awash in a mere while tides are
Slow to tempest, slower unleashing songs of
Tangled instruments and the faceless cries for
Precision, collapse

The sequence's "operatic I" puts a new spin on Descartes: "I think therefore I cannot see undoubtless."

A. E. Stallings on rhyme

Here's an energetic manifesto about rhyme
by a favorite poet of mine!

(A. E. Stallings, that is.)

The best bit:

"Translators who translate poems that rhyme into poems that don’t rhyme solely because they claim keeping the rhyme is impossible without doing violence to the poem have done violence to the poem. They are also lazy."

I would not say they are lazy, but it would just bore me to translate rhymed verse as unrhymed verse.

Song & Dance

John Fuller's previous book, The Space of Joy, triggered a lengthy post from me back in 2007. I don't have as much to say about his new book, Song & Dance, but then I don't think he expects one to have a lot to say about it: it's a collection of light verse and occasional poetry, something read for the pure pleasure of his humor and his technical skill.

So I especially enjoyed "Florio's Drinking Song," with its verses all ending with similes with wine, for example, "the wine like a widow remembers the grape."

"Song of Absence" describes what it's like to miss somebody, concluding with the worst time of all when it comes to missing somebody:

But worst is the stillness of night-time,
For ever a quarter-past-two
When dwelling on shapes in the darkness
Is no nearer to sleeping, or you.

"Rights," the first of "Two Secular Hymns," concludes with a punch:

And the silence of the wretched
Drowns the drivel of the damned.

"How Far?," with its opening line (repeated throughout), "How far is it to Carcassonne?", made me laugh because of the game Carcassonne. (An excellent game.)

The couplets of "At a Distance" spin out a response to an epigraph from André Maurois ("We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity—gunpowder, and romantic love"). It includes a couplet about couplets:

Couplets were shelved with a Romantic curse
In favour of blank, free, Projective verse.

(You can find the whole poem in this PDF.)

"Variation on Shapcott" is a sexy version of the Fall from Eve's perspective. I googled it to see if it was on-line somewhere, and it was once posted on a Guardian blog, but now it's been removed from there!

"A Dozen Victorian Autograms" are sort of like anagrams: each of the poems is written in the style of a particular poet using only the letters in that poet's name. I recognized Emily Brontë, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and a hilarious Oscar Wilde.

"Laurel-Crowned Deceptions" responds to a Czeslaw Milosz poem in which he envisions finding himself in the encyclopedia "Next to a hundred Millers and Mickey Mouse." (Strange alphabetization there.) Fuller teases Milosz for apparently complaining about being famous and concludes:

But Czeslaw, pause before those pearly gates:
St. Peter keeps two keys. The first is God's key.
The second (help!) belongs to Joseph Brodsky.

Finally, I also really enjoyed the sinister "The Captain's Galop," a poem in the voice of a sea captain who first seems to be celebrating the passengers' dancing and later seems to be forcing them to dance:

Keep the dancing line unbroken, dance together, never stop.
Dance the Captain's dance. The bouncing, hectic, thunderous Galop!

Bernstein on poetry

I've sometimes wondered whether poetry's closest relative is stand-up comedy. Here, in sixty seconds, Charles Bernstein seems to agree (hat tip to Al Filreis):

The Beauty of the Husband and poetry's "layered elusiveness"

To say Beauty is Truth and stop. Rather than to eat it. But even if beauty is truth, the beautiful person—here, in Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband, "the husband"—may still be a liar, even a compulsive liar. "All poets are liars," Carson quotes the ancient Greeks: And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things? But it is not the lies of poets that are the issue here, but the lies of the husband: My husband lied about everything. And the horror of the compulsive liar is that he cannot recognize his lies as lies (as reported to the narrator by her husband's friend Ray): Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied. The lie is not in the speaker, then, but in the words, according to this theory. From this perspective, the poet's lies are in the words, too, not in the poet. But this way madness lies, or at least the abyss of irony: Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive. Or beneath the strata of figurative language: Waiting coils inside her and licks and licks its paws. Or this: A cold ship moves out of harbor somewhere way inside the wife and slides off toward the flat gray horizon, not a bird not a breath in sight. Or this: But words

are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend

to the ground. Carson's Autobiography of Red is a masterpiece of similes; here, the comparisons are rarer, and metaphor abounds—the poet's "lies" to counteract the husband's, each apparently compulsive, the latter's surely more damaging, as more truly lies. "No doubt you think this a harmless document," the narrator says of the (now ex-)husband's brief letter accompanying Ray's obituary: "Why does it melt my lungs with rage?" * One of the passages quoted above deserves some further consideration: Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony because this is the look of truth: layered and elusive. Or to abbreviate the claim in a perhaps oversimplifying way: "Poets prefer to be layered and elusive." This might provide a tool for understanding differences between poets about what poetry's aims should be. All poets with any kind of ambition (from Ted Kooser to Ron Silliman, say) want to produce work with several "layers," work that "eludes" the reader in some way ("resists the intelligence almost successfully," as Wallace Stevens put it, though I might be misquoting the phrase). One important difference between poets lies right on the surface: how "elusive" is the immediate sense of the words? Many poets (and I number myself among them) want the top "layer" of the poems they write to be relatively transparent; their ideal is to create the "elusiveness" of poetry by allowing for further "layers" in the poem that can be explored further on the basis of that initial transparency. Many other poets (and Dieter M. Gräf, whose work I translate, is surely among them) produce a top "layer" that is in itself elusive. Instead of producing a transparent surface that can be seen through in elusive ways, they produce an opaque surface whose meanings are immediately elusive. For me, the key issue with the poets whose top "layer" is transparent is whether or not the poem generates any elusive "depth" at all. If all there is to it is the immediate meaning of the words, without any "strata" (whether of irony or of something else), then the poem is a banal failure. In contrast, for me, the key issue with the poets whose top "layer" is itself elusive is whether or not that immediate "layer" provides any sort of compensation for the absence of such immediacy of meaning, be it musical (metrical energy, alliteration, rhyming), paradoxical (counterintuitive moments, for example), allusive (distorted but recognizable variations on cliches or quotations, say), or formal in the most general sense (Ernst Jandl's "ottos mops," say, whose only vowel is "o"). In either case, if the poem does not offer some kind of immediacy to me, then it cannot draw me into its layers; it cannot lead me to chase down what eludes me. It is not enough for the surface to promise depth; the surface itself needs to make me interested in pursuing whatever depth is there. That's why—to choose a poet famous for his "obscurity," and one of my favorite poets—I love the poetry of Paul Celan: the surface meaning of a Celan poem may not be immediately apparent, but his poems always offer some sort of immediacy to the reader, as in the opening of "Corona" (with Michael Hamburger's translation): Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde. Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn: die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale. Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk: then time returns to the shell. The immediate "meaning" of the lines may, in a narrow sense, be obscure, but the poem offers so much to the reader at an immediate level: the vivid, powerful image of "autumn" seen as an animal eating from the speaker's hand; the alliteration of "frißt" and "Freunde", of "Hand" und "Herbst"; the assonance of "lehren" and "kehrt"; the cyclical quality of the image doubling the cyclical implication of any reference to seasons. I may not immediately know what Celan is talking about, but I am immediately drawn into the poem, and I want to pursue what initially eludes me. Or to put it another way, I feel something when I read the poem, and the feeling derives from its "immediacies," and the feeling is what makes me want to understand the poem with my intelligence. But as a reader, it's often enough to just be able to feel it, to sense that the poem promises more without necessarily actually pinning down what that more is. And since responses to poems are grounded in feelings (which includes the feelings one has when using one's reason), the "layered elusiveness" of any given poem rarely opens up for all its readers. "From the nuts, we shell time": before we shell a poem, it has to make us want to shell it, and all readers choose different poems to shell. And the best poems of all are like Celan's "time": after we have "taught them to walk," they "return to the shell."

John Martyn

My friend Dave turned me on to John Martyn's "Live at Leeds" CD ten years or so ago. And Sarah just told me he died and posted him doing "May You Never," which I did not realize was one of his (I only knew the Clapton version before). Check that one out, with his beautiful solo-guitar work and sad, mumbling singing, by going to Sarah's post on Martyn's death.

Then check out this one, "Solid Air," which I cannot embed here because Youtube says "embedding disabled by request." The tune is on "Live at Leeds," too, with Danny Thompson on bass there, too. I did not know he had written it for Nick Drake!

Out of the Blue

Up until now, the best poems I have read about September 11, 2001, have been Martin Espada's "Alabanza" and Glyn Maxwell's verse novel The Sugar Mile. But now I can add a third item to that list: Simon Armitage's "Out of the Blue."

In a 24-page sequence, Armitage puts himself into the head of an English trader who works at the World Trade Center. In section 4, he presents a catalogue reminiscent of Günter Eich's "Inventory":

Arranged on the desk
among rubber bands and bulldog clips:

here is a rock from Brighton beach,
here is a beer-mat, here is the leaf

of an oak, pressed and dried, papery thin.
Here is a Liquorice Allsorts tin.

A map of the Underground pinned to the wall.
The flag of St. George. A cricket ball.

Here is calendar, counting the days.
Here is a photograph snug in its frame:

this is my wife on our wedding day,
here is a twist of her English hair.

Here is a picture in purple paint:
two powder-paint towers, heading for space,

plus rockets and stars and the Milky Way,
plus helicopters and aeroplanes.

Jelly-copters and fairy-planes.
In a spidery hand, underneath it, it says:

'If I stand on my toes can you see me wave?'

Section 7 is a prose poem of the responses of the World Trade Center workers after the planes hit the buildings. Shortly before I got to the end of it, I realized that it reads the same backwards as forwards, trapping the people in the poem, as it were, along the lines of how they were trapped in the doomed building.

The sequence's timing is excellent—it is just long enough to make you forget section four, so when you get to the list of things found in the rubble in the final section, the return of the items from section four is all the more powerful.

And then the sequence concludes (reminding me, as I typed it in, of this):

Five years on
what false alarm can be trusted again,
what case or bag can be left unclaimed,
what flight can be sure to steer its course,
what building can claim to own its form,
what column can vow to stand up straight,
what floor can agree to bear its weight,
what tower can vouch to retain its height,
what peace can be said to be water-tight,
what truth can be said to be bullet-proof,
can anything swear to be built to last,
can anything pledge to be hard and fast,
what system can promise to stay in place,
what structure can promise to hold its shape,
what future can promise to keep its faith?

Everything changed. Nothing is safe.

More Dieter M. Gräf on Lyrikline

I have three more translations of poems by Dieter M. Gräf up at lyrikline:

Vézelay Jihad
The Naked Ginsberg
Zuni NY

I especially like "The Naked Ginsberg"!

Two Readings

I'll be reading in Edinburgh on February 8 as part of the Poetry at the Great Grog series organized by Rob Mackenzie. Rob has posted a poem of mine on the Poetry at the Great Grog blog. He's also put together a Facebook event page for the reading if you want to tell us in advance that you can come! Also reading that night are Tim Turnbull, Jane McKie, and Alan Gay (see the Poetry at the Great Grog blog page for links to their work).

I'll also be reading at the Literaturzoll in Basel on February 22. My reading will be in English (mostly); the other readers will be reading in German. The event is hosted by Guy Krneta, Katrin Eckert, Martin Zingg, and Andreas Mauz; the other readers are Daniel Berner, Martin Gelzer, and Regula Schröter.

Comments on blogs

Arnold Zwicky on Language Log:

I resent the idea that Language Log should not only be expected to provide blogging space to everyone who wants to write — if you enable comments, then the space belongs to the commenters, not to you, as any number of people have explained to me now, contemptuously — but should also allow commenters to conceal their identity, even from the bloggers.

I fully agree with Arnold here: the comments on my blog are part of my blog, of which I am the editor, and I decide which comments I accept and which ones I delete.

I am lucky, I guess, in that I have never had to deal with offensive comments, but if I ever get any, they won't make it onto my blog!

Alexander on Colbert

This is truly wonderful, but I have one question: why couldn't Elizabeth Alexander have read her poem the way she talks here? She talks so beautifully, so fluently, so smoothly, with wit and charm, but she read the poem so flatly. In my previous post, I talked about the lack of oratory in her presentation, and I suspected that few contemporary American poets would be able to be "oratorical" in the way Obama and Lowery were. But EA's speaking on the Colbert show suggests that she could well have presented her poem in an oratorically more satisfying way!

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Elizabeth Alexander

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

On Elizabeth Alexander's reading of her poem

Reb Livingston has once again thrown water on the fire of pettiness that burns through contemporary American poetry, this time in connection with criticisms of Elizabeth Alexander's poem for the inauguration and her reading of it. I recommend her post highly.

Here was my comment:

Thanks, Reb, for pointing out the absurdity of the criticisms of EA and her poem. I enjoyed the poem, myself, both as she read it and when I saw it with its correct lineation on Mark Doty's blog.

As you correctly point out, contemporary poets don't stand a chance when reading their work before or after politicians or preachers. But I also noticed that both Obama and Lowery are not shy of being *orators*, while EA (like just about any contemporary poet who might have accepted the gig) completely avoids anything "oratorical" in her presentation.

It made me wonder how the poem might have sounded if read by someone experienced in public oratory. I think it would have held its ground much better then.

That's not EA's fault, of course; the miniscule audience for contemporary poetry is quite shy of oratory.

Silliman takes his terms too far

The other day, Ron Silliman suggested that what the "School of Quietude" (as he dubs it) needs is someone who will "take on the responsibility for describing with much greater accuracy its mand sub-tendencies and internal points of contention."

Fair enough. But he later goes on to say that this "conservative tradition ... extends back not to Dickinson & Whitman, but to Jones Very, James Russell Lowell, Sidney Lanier & their peers. One of the great questions for the School of Quietude is why does it let its history languish so?"

This is nonsense. The poets Silliman derides as quietists did not grow up reading Very, Lowell, and Lanier. Among American predecessors, they read Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson, as well as the same Modernist poets that Silliman presumably read. In fact, the Modernists themselves were the last generation of poets to grow up reading Very, Lowell, and Lanier; the success of the Modernist overthrow of such poets was so great that both "the School of Quietude" and "the Post-Avant" (or as Bill Knott puts it, "the School of Noisiness") derive from the Modernists.

It's not completely persuasive to argue that there are two fundamentally opposed strains of work in contemporary American poetry; it is utterly ahistorical to project that opposition back onto the history of American poetry.

Whisky, by Ciaran Carson

Sometimes literature can make you thirsty. The late fifties and early sixties novels of Marguerite Duras (such as Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia) all made me want to get drunk on whatever the characters were drinking, even before I found out Duras was an alcoholic.

I don't recall ever reading something that made me want to get stoned or do other illegal counterfactuals. (Not that I was unable to find other reasons ...)

This one from Ciaran Carson's 1996 collection Opera Et Cetera made me want to drink some whisky, among other things (it also made me want to try to interpret it, but I'll leave it at typing it again to see how the lines feel under my fingers):

Whisky

Of how the life of water is distilled to liquid gold; how the water of
The Liffey becomes Guinness; how explosive cocktails take the name of Molotov;

How the wild mountain thyme blows around the blooming heather, and the perfumed smoke
Of poteen rises high into the azure sky; how turf is the conducive agent, and not coke;

How coke is crack, not heroin, nor smack; how marijuana is La Cucaracha,
Maryjane, or blow; how many States of mind there are in Appalachia;

How you turn into an insect overnight, or after-hours, from eating
Magic mushrooms; how the psilocybin got your brain and led to some 'Strange Meeting';

How the tongue gets twisted, how 'barbarian' is everyone who is not Greek;
How things are named by any other name except themselves, thereof I meant to speak.

While I was typing, the associations began to flow:

The wild mountain thyme brought to mind Penelope Houston, whose punky folk I loved so much in the early to mid nineties (shortly before I read this book for the first time, in September 96): she did a burning cover of that song.

Poteen made me think of Brian Friel's Translations, which I played a small part in and co-directed in Saarbrücken in 1994.

Turf made me thirsty for Laphroaig.

The Appalachian States of mind made me think of Brad Mehldau playing "New York State of Mind" as solo jazz piano. Far-fetched? I don't care!

Turning into an insect overnight? You know what I thought when I read that; you thought the same thing after all.

But after-hours made me think of the movie "After Hours", whose basic idea I would like to steal for my long unwritten tale "The Clerk," which started being pondered in the main Basel Post Office years ago.

For me, Strange Meeting is a tune by Bill Frisell I once began to write some words for.

barbarian is everyone who is not Greek: this idea always reminds me of Adorno's claim about lyric poetry after Auschwitz being "barbaric"—"not Greek"?

Perhaps this is all free association; perhaps this is "naming things by any other name except themselves."

Turned in Time live at Parterre

Turned in Time


Here's a tune from my Human Shields duo gig at the Open Mic at Parterre in Basel on January 14.

This one was written by my friend Markus Bachmann. He wrote it in Basel German, then recorded it with me in High German on our CD "Noch und noch." I did the English version two or three years ago.

(Added later for easier surfing: a video of "Rumpus," another song from the same gig, is here.)

Rumpus live at Parterre

Rumpus


Here's a tune from my Human Shields duo gig at the Open Mic at Parterre in Basel on January 14. (Without our bassist, unfortunately. You just have to imagine the contrabass ...)

This tune is a survivor: I wrote it for my band Petting Zoo at Stanford in about 1985!

(Added later for easier surfing: a video of "Turned in Time," another song from the same gig, is here.)

Lieder gegen die Kälte

[Click on the image for a larger version.]

Human Shields at Parterre Open Mic, January 14, 2009

Two-thirds of Human Shields played at the Parterre Open Mic last night (January 14, 2009). The setlist:

Raining (With the Sun in the Sky)
Turned in Time
Third Base
Better Never Than Late
Rumpus

More photos here (of the other groups as well).

The Toss of a Lemon 3

So Hanumarathnam has laboured to create a middle ground: a detailed map of the holdings for Sivakami to walk through with her eyes and mind. Hanumarathnam has accurately portrayed those properties: real and perceived distances, sizes, and productive capacity of each plot. It is not simply a matter of drawing a map to scale; one must choose what sort of scale: physical? psychological? This map has to show how a property relates to its owners, to itself, to tenants, to the community. This is business—not geography, not math.

(Padma Viswanathan, The Toss of a Lemon)

As in my previous post about The Toss of a Lemon, the context is astrological: Hanumarathnam's horoscope has predicted his death, and he is preparing his wife Sivakami for her widowhood.

The "detailed map of the holdings" described here is for someone who will never see the land described by the map: at the time when the novel begins (around 1900) a respectable Brahmin widow remained in total seclusion from the public eye, so Sivakami could not walk the lands to inspect them.

The reader of a novel is not forbidden by custom to inspect the landscape a novel describes, but the novelist is no less involved in an "accurate portrayal" of the "real and perceived" and the relationship between them than Hanumarathnam is. The novelist may not do so for "business" purposes, but here, the novelist is closer to the businessman than to the geographer or the mathematician.

There are echoes here of the starting point of my last post on this novel: "He finds knowledge more interesting than ignorance." But I'll just let them remain echoes for now.

Carter, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama

This picture was in the International Herald Tribune this morning and it almost made me cry. There's Obama, and he's really going to be President in 12 days. It was the first time since election night that the full impact of that fact hit home again. I felt like Jesse Jackson, moved by the whole thing once again.

There's Probably No God

This was in the New York Times today (I read it in the International Herald Tribune, with a different photograph). I like the idea that a comedian came up with the idea for the campaign, after seeing something like this:

My take on athletes who thank Jesus is here; my own militant Darwinist convictions are here. Full disclosure: I'm an atheist who had his kids baptized!

The truth about teens and sex

That's the title of this article by Ellen Goodman, whose narrow focus is the effect (or lack thereof) of abstinence pledges on the sexual activity of teenagers, but whose broader point is that politically-motivated programs that are demonstrably ineffective should be discontinued!

I also like the amusing way she connects New Year's resolutions and abstinence pledges by pointing out that the latter are about as likely to be successful as the former.

She also mentions that Sarah Palin is for abstinence pledges—which did not keep her daughter from getting pregnant, of course.

All this reminds me of this article from a recent New Yorker, "Blue Sex, Red Sex," which develops similar points in greater depth. One point I had meant to quote from the article but forgot to is this:

Symbolic commitment to the institution of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating—hence the drive to outlaw gay marriage—but the actual practice of it is scattershot.

A Grateful Dead Analysis

Deadheads will enjoy this statistical analysis of the relationship between the Grateful Dead's performance of songs and the fans' listening habits. (Thanks to Ron Silliman for the link.)

One thing I noted in my comment on Silliman's blog is that the most-played songs are all Weir tunes, but the most popular tunes are largely Garcia tunes. This might not be statistically significant, though, since Garcia simply had more tunes in the repertoire, so he did not have to repeat songs as often as Weir did.

The Toss of a Lemon 2

He finds knowledge more interesting than ignorance.

I posted this as my Facebook status while reading The Toss of a Lemon, by Padma Viswanathan, because I could identify with this, too (as with the moment of identification I already commented on).

The context: the Brahmin Hanumarathnam, a man who is both a healer and an aristocrat with lands to manage, has read in his horoscope (and that of his wife) that he will die soon. He has found a boy in his village, Muchami, to train as an overseer of his lands after his death.

Knowledge is more interesting than ignorance: the immediate point of the statement is that both Hanumarathnam and Muchami enjoy the work of keeping track of the goings on on Hanumarathnam's lands—all the information about their tenants, who they are, how they work, what they are growing, which plots should be fallow, and so on.

But a further nuance of this for Hanumarathnam is that he prefers to know that he is going to die, because then he can prepare things for his wife and children. This nuance is ironized for the contemporary reader, however, by the fact that Hanumarathnam's knowledge of his forthcoming death comes from astrology; that is, his knowledge is based on superstition, which we now consider ignorance.

That irony is further ironized by the fact that he does die at the predicted time! So his knowledge may have been based on ignorance, but because he knew he was going to die, he was able to prepare the administration of his wealth for his family.

Hindsight

I don't remember where I came across this the other day, and I was unable to find out who put the image together (sorry, whoever you are), but I laughed out loud about it:

Phil Lesh on the Grateful Dead

"All we did was steal what jazz musicians did and apply it to rock 'n' roll. If we didn't do it, someone else would have," he says.

That's Phil Lesh from this interview about the Dead's forthcoming tour. His comment reminded me of the reaction of Deadheads when Branford Marsalis first sat in with them on March 29, 1990.

The Deadheads were blown away by Branford's brilliance, and by the fact that he seemed to play along so well, even though he openly stated that he had never heard the Dead's music before.

And all I could say was, "Duh!" Of course Branford fit in with the Dead; any jazz musician would have, because the Dead applied jazz methods to rock and roll, which is admittedly harmonically and rhythmically simpler than jazz, and thus a piece of cake for jazzers!

The Toss of a Lemon

Today, I finished two novels. This afternoon, I finished was my friend Padma Viswanathan's The Toss of a Lemon, and this evening I finished Christoph Ransmayr's Der fliegende Berg. I had started the Ransmayr first, back in December, because it is one of four books I'm teaching in my verse novels course next semester, but I put it aside over Christmas and New Year's because I had been planning to read Padma's novel "between the years" since she sent it to me in September.

There is a great deal of say about the excellent Toss of a Lemon, but let me begin with one small, very personal response:

Rukmini ... is tall, with broad shoulders, and an exceptionally good cook, which her in-laws appreciate, though they're more likely to tell others this than tell her.

That was the first thing I marked in the book, right near the beginning, a description of one of the novel's minor characters (the neighbor of the main character, Sivakami). The phrase that struck me was the last bit I quoted; it reminded me of my father's tendency to never praise his children directly, but only indirectly, by praising them to others. My mother (my father's second wife) is not like that; she praises openly—but apparently, my dad's first wife is just like him, and over the years I heard at least one story about her praising her children and concluding by explicitly asking that the praise not be passed on to the children in question.

Human Shields, Parterre Open Mic, January 14, Basel

My band Human Shields (well, part of it, singer Dany Demuth and I will be performing as a duo, without our bassist Christoph Meneghetti, as the Open Mic is only for duos or solo performers) will be playing at the Open Mic at Parterre in Basel on Wednesday, January 14, along with several other performers:

Phil Dolby
Evelyne Péquignot & Raphael Neubauer
Julia Grütter
Angel
Blauson
Kelly and Micha

The concert is free and starts at 8:30 p.m., with the order of the acts to be determined shortly before the show starts.

Parterre is at Klybeckstr. 1b in Kleinbasel!

Virgil's Sixth Eclogue

One theme in Horace's poetry is that he does not want to write epics, but only his poems of everyday life. Since I read Virgil backwards (first the Aeneid, then the Eclogues and Georgics), I found it especially amusing to come across Virgil making the same claim in the Sixth Eclogue:

When I began to write, my Muse did not

Disdain to play Sicilian games nor did

She blush to live in the woods, and when I thought

Of singing of kings and battles, the god Apollo

Tweaked my ear and said to me, "A shepherd

Should feed fat sheep and sing a slender song."
So now—since there are plenty to sing your praise
And plenty to celebrate grim deeds of war—
I'll study how to play the pastoral reed
And win the favor of the country Muse.
I'll will not sing what I'm not supposed to sing.

But of course Virgil went on to write a great epic of praise of the Muses and the "grim deeds of war," so this is probably more a matter of "sing what you want to sing now and don't force yourself to sing things that aren't really what you want to sing now just because you think you ought to." :-)

David Ferry's translation again.

Top 5 songs of 2008

Once I factor out the Grateful Dead tunes, here are my top five tracks from my last.fm charts for 2008:

Greg Brown, Canned Goods
World Saxophone Quartet, Hattie Wall
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
Greg Brown, If I Had Known
Greg Brown, Cold and Dark and Wet

The next highest one that is not by one of those guys/bands is Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," followed by Chris Smither's "Leave the Light On."

An old Deadhead who loves jazz and folk, that's me. :-)

Virgil's Third Eclogue

One of my posts last summer about Virgil's Aeneid was about trash talking, and his Third Eclogue begins with a vigorous exchange of insults between Damoetas and Menalcas, before concluding with their singing competition, which their judge, Palaemon, ends up calling a draw. Here's a nice example of the trash, from Damoetas:

Maybe it was the day, right here, near these beeches,
When you broke Daphnis' bow and his arrows, too,
Because you couldn't stand the idea, you prick,
That that boy was given them as a song prize.
You were dying to get back at him.

As for me, I vote for Damoetas as the winner (which will of course lead Menalcas to shower me with insults), for this couplet:

Pollio loves my songs, however clumsy;
Muses, offer a calf to placate readers.

All this in David Ferry's translation, by the way.

Dead people voting

This cartoon from the New Yorker in November made me wonder how many people who voted early were dead by Election Day. Shouldn't the Republicans have been up in arms about that? Did Obama's grandmother vote for him before she died the day before the election?

*

Some people are disappointed by Obama already, and he's not even in office yet! I'd rather be disappointed by Obama than surprised by McCain any day.