Poetry on the Web & Camille Paglia

I like to hear poetry read aloud. A great source is sound files on the Web. I like to cruise over to one of the "Canterbury Tales" web sites and listen to recordings of professors reading it aloud. (The best source is here.)
My favorite is The Wife of Bath's Prologue. I'm working on memorizing the whole thing for myself, but right now I only know the first three lines:

Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynough for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage:

Recently, humanities professor Camille Paglia was a guest on the public radio show, "On Point." Paglia and show host Tom Ashbrook listened to some interesting examples of poets reading their own work: Sylvia Plath reading "Daddy," Robert Lowell reading "Man and Wife," and William Carlos Williams reading "The Red Wheel Barrow."
It gives me the shivers to hear Plath say:

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time --

Robert Lowell, meanwhile, has a reputation as New England's chosen son, but he sounds like a Southerner to me. I love the way he recites:

... Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:

You can hear the interview with Paglia here; the poems are interspersed.
I strongly recommend listening to that interview; it's fascinating. Paglia's new book, "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems" is simply wonderful. It will particularly please those who enjoy poetry but have little patience for academic jargon. She writes plainly but with great intellectual rigor. Her book has very much stimulated my interest in poetry.
I love how Paglia is essentially conservative -- she takes on the poems honestly, not trying to subvert the author's intention. But she's also willing to see contradictions, sexual connotations, or pop culture implications. She's an old-fashioned nonconformist.
Paglia's web site is here.

Commencement Speeches

There are two truly fine commencement speeches floating around the Internet right now. Both are from actual, bonafide 2005 graduation ceremonies. Both go beyond pithy aphorisms. And both are a pleasure to read.
The first is from Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer. He spoke at Stanford University; read the entire speech here. Jobs talks about loving your work, taking risks, and finding the connections in your own life story. And he talks about death.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

The second speech is by Senator Barack Obama, who spoke at Knox College; read it here. His speech is quite different -- it's closely reasoned political rhetoric, in the best sense of the term. He argues, in a wonderfully down-to-earth style, that the American experiment has been built on the importance of community. Maintaining the value of community in the face of a global economy is the best thing we can do for our country, he argues.. In this brief passage, he urges the graduates, for their own sakes, to embrace the challenges of making America a better place. I love how he ends up bringing it back to his central point.

There is no community service requirement in the real world; no one is forcing you to care. You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and go chasing after the big house, and the nice suits, and all the other things that our money culture says that you should want, that you should aspire to, that you can buy.
But I hope you don't walk away from the challenge. Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. You need to take up the challenges that we face as a nation and make them your own. Not because you have a debt to those who helped you get here, although you do have that debt. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate than you, although I do think you do have that obligation. It's primarily because you have an obligation to yourself. Because individual salvation has always depended on collective salvation. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

McSweeney's Humor

The good folks at McSweeney's have a new book out, this time a humor compilation. Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor Category is brainy, pop culture fun. I almost don't know where to start on this one, but here's a few gems from the table of contents:

• Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002 for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring DVD (Platinum Series Extended Edition), Part One
  
• Four Things I would Have Said to Sylvia Plath If I Had Been Her Boyfriend
  
• On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor

My favorite, though, is "Goofus, Gallant, Rashomon." If you ever read the kid's magazine "Highlights," you'll be familiar with illustrated vignettes of Goofus and Gallant (i.e., "Goofus runs and pushes ahead of everyone; Gallant holds the door open and lets others in first.")
Now we get the real story from their friends and family.

Paul, Gallant's college acquaintance:
Gallant just didn't get it when it came to relating to people. He would say words the "proper" way that no one normal ever does -- you know, "Don't act immatoor." Always the authority. One night I'm walking to dinner with him and another student, a friend from England, and we're ragging on each other -- he's calling me Yank and I'm calling him Limey. Gallant breaks in to inform us that "Limey" comes from the British navy, eating limes to avoid scurvy, blah, blah, blah. Gee, thanks Gallant. Dork.

Trading Dante references with the AC guy

I've been thinking about Dante this week, because our air conditioner is out. It's been three weeks now. Nights are miserable. So I was on the phone with one of the many repair guys we've been dealing with, and he was being a wise guy. So I said, "Look, we don't have air conditioning. And it was like the sixth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno here last night!"
Dropping in a good Dante reference was fun. But then I got to thinking, I just said "sixth circle" because it's alliterative. Maybe that's not the best circle to use in this case? A quick check reveals the sixth circle is home to heretics, locked in their burning tombs. So that's not bad. Mostly I just wanted to make sure that the sixth circle=HOT. Imagine the embarrassment if I had said "ninth circle." Then the AC guy would have come back with something like, "Well, we better call the HEATING guy to come unthaw you from the frozen lake of ice!"
A good summary of Dante's vision of hell is here.
Here's my favorite passage from the Inferno; it's so lyrical. This is from "The Portable Dante," (Penguin Classics) edited and translated beautifully by Mark Musa. In this passage, Dante has not yet started the descent through hell. He meets his guide, the Roman poet Virgil. Virgil tells him about limbo, the netherworld that's neither heaven nor hell.

Then the good master said, "You do not ask
what sort of souls are these you see around you.
Now you should know before we go on farther,

they have not sinned. But their great worth alone
was not enough, for they did not know Baptism,
which is the gateway to the faith you follow,

and if they came before the birth of Christ,
they did not worship God the way one should;
I myself am a member of this group.

For this defect, and for no other guilt,
we here are lost. In this alone we suffer:
cut off from hope, we live on in desire."

The words I heard weighed heavy on my heart;
to think that souls as virtuous as these
were suspended in that limbo, and forever!

"Tell me, my teacher, tell me, O my master,"
I began, (wishing to have confirmed by him
the teachings of unerring Christian doctrine),

"did any ever leave here, through his merit
or with another's help, and go to bliss?"
And he, who understood my hidden question,

answered: "I was a novice in this place
when I saw a mighty lord descend to us
who wore the sign of victory as his crown.

He took from us the shade of our first parent,
of Abel, his good son, of Noah, too,
and of obedient Moses who made the laws;

Abram, the Patriarch, David the King,
Israel with his father and his children,
with Rachel, whom he worked so hard to win;

and many more he chose for blessedness;
and you should know, before these souls were taken,
no human soul had ever reached salvation."

Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, June 16th, the day when Leopold Bloom wandered through the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's "Ulysses." (Read about Bloomsday here.)

It reminds me again of how I've never read it.

I have this idea, I want to start the Very Challenging Book Group.

Here would be the first several books we would read:
Ulysses by James Joyce
"The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann
"Remembrance of Things Past" by Marcel Proust
"Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace.

The only one of these I've read is Infinite Jest, but I would like to read it again.

Won't you join my Very Challenging Book Group?

g-r-a-s-s-h-o-p-p-e-r

An enormous grasshopper lives in my front yard. He is at least four inches long, with a green body and crimson spidery veins on his head and haunches. I have dubbed him the King of Palm, for he is a mighty creature.
Pay tribute to the King of Palm! Read e.e. cummings' poem "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" here.

A Case Study in Archiving

Last week's New Yorker has a story on the vanishing language of Eyak, spoken by a dwindling group of indigenous people in Alaska. According to Elizabeth Kolbert's report, Marie Smith Jones is the only living speaker of Eyak, and she's 87.
In part of the article, Kolbert writes that a reporter named Laura Bliss Spaan learned of Eyak years ago when she was covering a local festival. She became fascinated with the language and got in touch with the only Eyak linguist, a man named Michael Krauss.
Kolbert writes:

Bliss Spaan arranged for Michael Krauss to give a series of lessons on Eyak grammar, which she videotaped. She then gathered up all the records of the language which she could find -- Krauss's hand-typed dictionary, transcriptions he had made of Eyak legends, audio recordings of an Eyak speaker from the nineteen-seventies, video of Marie Smith Jones -- and computerized them. Altogether, the archive fit on five DVDs. When I arrived in Cordova, Bliss Spaan was there to deliver the archive to the local cultural council. She offered me an extra set of disks that she had brought along. As I took them from her, I had the odd sensation of holding in my hand all that there was -- or ever would be -- of Eyak.

What's so compelling about this archive is that is probably didn't take an unusual amount of skill to create. The papers would be scanned as pdf documents, the recordings would be turned into sound files, and the videos would be digitized. Almost anyone with a small amount of technical expertise or technical help could do it. Rather than skill, the archive needed vision and will -- seeing the culture as valuable and then committing the effort to its preservation. As an archivist, I find this story so inspiring, and I'm going to keep the methodology in mind for the future.
Unfortunately, I'm unable to find Kolbert's story on the web, so I can't link to it. (It's in June 6. The New Yorker with the cover that shows people thinking about housing floor plans. ) I wish prestige magazines like The New Yorker would leave their archives online longer than they do; it seems like it would only garner them more readers in the long run. Though I question whether the Eyak article was ever posted in the first place. But that's a whole 'nother story. (See my previous post on letting the archives run free. )
On a positive note, I did find Kolbert's compelling series on climate change, which includes more of her reporting from Alaska. Part I is here; part II is here; part III is here. Treat yourself: Print them out and bring them with you to the local cafe when you have a couple of hours to spend.

Chicago, City of Books

The alternative weekly New City Chicago has ranked the top 50 most important people in Chicago's book world. It's an intriguing list; it makes me want to live in Chicago!
Check out the entire list here. Entries of note: talk show host and book club maven Oprah Winfrey, legal-thriller novelist Scott Turow, and "Middlesex" author Jeffrey Eugenides.
I was particularly thrilled to see a library representative at No. 4:

Chicago Public Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey is the unstoppable driving force behind keeping our civic literary resources alive. Dempsey has kept "One Book, One Chicago" running strong, this year putting the vintage Western "The Ox-Bow Incident" into the hands of a city of readers. But she's not just perpetuating past treasures: A free wireless network was unveiled in the city's libraries last winter, allowing residents access to all of the city's digital resources.

The NYT, Class and Literature

The New York Times has been publishing an ongoing series on class. A recent installment looked at how popular culture tackles the issue of class, concluding that yesteryear's novels were obsessed with issues of status, money and social mobility. The article (read it here) mentions a lot of classic American literature, including Theodore Dreiser's "American Tragedy" and Frank Norris' "McTeague." Somebody very smart at the NYT linked the book titles to pdf documents of the original reviews --now that's how you use multimedia to write about literature!

In a separate article in the series, the esteemed David Cay Johnston uses two titans of literature to kick off his story about how the tax code benefits the wealthiest Americans.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich "are different from you and me," Ernest Hemingway's famously dismissive response was: "Yes, they have more money." Today he might well add: much, much, much more money.
The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

I've written about David Cay Johnson before; he wrote the book "Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else." I just can't say enough good things about his journalism. Read my previous post here.
The entire Times series on class can be accessed here.

Drunk Dialogue

Some years back, a friend gave me an anthology called Drinking, Smoking & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times. It's a better idea than the book itself ... probably because of permissions and copyrights, that sort of thing. Its omissions are pretty substantial. It doesn't have Hunter S. Thompson (though I suppose that's more drugs than drinking). It doesn't have any D.H. Lawrence (a little sentimental but still quite good). It doesn't have anything from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row (i.e. Mack and the boys).
It also doesn't have any of the best drunk dialogue in English literature, which must be from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. So much of it is good, but I'll content myself to quote just a few little lines here:

"Certainly like to drink," Bill said. "You ought to try it some times, Jake."
"You're about a hundred and forty-four ahead of me."
"Ought not to daunt you. Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public."
"Where were you drinking?"
"Stopped at the Crillon. George made me a couple of Jack Roses. George's a great man. Know the secret of his success? Never been daunted."
"You'll be daunted after about three more pernods."
"Not in public. If I begin to feel daunted I'll go off by myself. I'm like a cat that way."

Top Ten Most Harmful Books?

A conservative weekly called Human Events has ranked the top 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. No. 1 is "The Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. (Read the whole list here.)
"Traditional values" groups come out with these lists from time to time, and usually they're jeered by librarians and the press. But I don't jeer them. If books matter, if ideas matter, then books that advocate bad ideas can indeed be classified dangerous. Maybe I'll compose my own list of dangerous books ... Although I think TV shows and commercials are much more dangerous than books. Buy enough crap and have enough supermodel sex and you'll be happy for ever and ever! ... But I digress ...
My disagreement with dangerous books lists are twofold: First, I usually disagree with what ideas are dangerous ("The Kinsey Report"? "The Feminine Mystique"? I don't think so. And I dearly love Michel Foucault, who made their list of honorable mentions.) Second, even if a book is dangerous, these lists usually get used by people who want books removed from library shelves. That's wrong, wrong, wrong. You combat dangerous ideas with better ideas, not with statist oppression.
On a final note, I find it truly ironic that John Maynard Keynes has made their list of dangerous books, since the current "conservative" administration seems to have utterly abandoned balanced-budget fiscal policies for raging deficits intended to stimulate economic growth. And if you don't believe it, read today's New York Times Magazine story by Stephen Metcalf on rising gold prices here. Pertinent excerpt:

A low-level panic about the debt crisis, and its possible effect on the American economy, is gathering strength. ''Our little post-bubble workout is not over, not by any stretch of the imagination,'' Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley and himself a noted pessimist, told me recently by phone. Roach says he firmly believes that an adjustment is necessary and inevitable, and that when it comes, it will be very, very painful. From appearances, Warren Buffett, the savviest investor who ever lived, agrees. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has placed a $21 billion bet against the U.S. dollar.

I hope they're wrong; I fear they're not.

If you move ...

This is a little esoteric, but I can't get it out of my head, so here it is:
I read a story last week in The New York Times about metabolism, and how scientists conducted a study that shows people who fidget a lot are much thinner than people who don't fidget.
Here is the lede (the beginning of the story):

If you move, they will measure it. If you don't move, they will measure that, too, along with what you eat.

The full story is here.

I strongly, strongly suspect that this lede was inspired by Rudyard Kipling's story of Rikki Tikki Tavi. Rikki is a mongoose who lives with a boy named Teddy and his mother and father. Rikki and the father work together to kill Nag, a deadly Cobra. But Nag's wife Nagaina is still on the loose, until ...

Teddy and his mother and father were there at early breakfast; but Rikki-tikki saw that they were not eating anything. They sat stone-still, and their faces were white. Nagaina was coiled up on the matting by Teddy's chair, within easy striking-distance of Teddy's bare leg, and she was swaying to and fro singing a song of triumph.
``Son of the big man that killed Nag,'' she hissed, ``stay still. I am not ready yet. Wait a little. Keep very still, all you three. If you move I strike, and if you do not move I strike. Oh, foolish people, who killed my Nag!''
Teddy's eyes were fixed on his father, and all his father could do was to whisper, ``Sit still, Teddy. You mustn't move. Teddy, keep still.''
Then Rikki-tikki came up and cried: ``Turn round Nagaina; turn and fight!''

You can read the rest of Rikki Tikki Tavi's tale here.

Jim Wallis on his book tour

We don't get many authors coming through Tampa, so on the rare occasions that I attend a book signing, I will make an extra effort to document it here.
I saw Jim Wallis speak recently at a book signing here in Tampa. Wallis is the author of God's Politics: How the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. Wallis is what I would call a progressive evangelical; his book makes the case for an anti-poverty, anti-war social movement that would demand accountability from both political parties.
I enjoyed Wallis' speech -- just the fact that he questions the Republican/Democratic dyad made him interesting to me. He took questions afterward. Most of the crowd seemed pretty anti-war. But one woman asked him why he downplayed the evangelical mission of conversion. He said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that you can convert people more effectively when they see you living out your religious convictions consistently.
Here's an excerpt from his book (read more at Wallis' web site here):

The values of politics are my primary concern. Of course, God is not partisan. God is not a Republican or a Democrat. When either party tries to politicize God or co-opt religious communities to further political agendas, it makes a terrible mistake. The best contribution of religion is precisely not to be ideologically predictable nor loyally partisan. Both parties, and the nation, must let the prophetic voice of religion be heard. Faith must be free to challenge both the Right and the Left from a consistent moral ground.

"God's politics" are therefore never partisan nor ideological. But God's politics challenge everything about our politics. God's politics remind us of the people our politics always neglect - the poor, the vulnerable, the left behind. God's politics challenge narrow national, ethnic, economic, or cultural self-interest, reminding us of a much wider world and the creative human diversity of all those made in the image of the creator. God's politics remind us of the creation itself, a rich environment in which we are to be good stewards, not mere users, consumers, and exploiters. And God's politics plead with us to resolve, as much as possible, the inevitable conflicts among us without the terrible destruction of war. God's politics always remind us of the ancient prophetic prescription to "choose life, so that you and your children may live," and challenge all the selective moralities that would choose one set of lives and issues over another. This challenges both the Right and the Left, offering a new vision for faith and politics in America and a new conversation of personal faith and political hope.