Culture – Page 13 – God of the Machine

Dog Blogging

 Culture  9 Responses »
Feb 122003
 

I must read the wrong blogs. Where are the Westminster roundups?

Here’s Best in Show, a Kerry blue terrier, Ch. Torums Scarf Michael (The Ch. stands for “Champion of Record.” The standards are complicated; you have to earn a certain number of points at American Kettle Club shows. All the finalists in Best of Show at Westminster are Ch.’s with plenty to spare.):

Ch. Torums Scarf Michael

“There are few or no blue or bluish animals,” wrote Thoreau, but this dog certainly seemed blue on my television, though less so in the photograph. Kerry blues have slight sway-backs, tails that line up with their back legs, and beards, which all conspire to present a remarkable S-curve as they trot. The animal was superb, and deserving, and yet I rooted for:

Ch Luxor's Playmate of the Year

This is Ch. Luxor’s Playmate of the Year, the Ibizan hound, pronounced, for some reason, “Ibethan” by all of the announcers, as though they’d acquired a collective lisp. She won the Hound Group this year in an upset, the first time ever for an Ibizan, and was a huge crowd favorite for Best in Show. Now you see why. Have you ever seen such a magnificent creature?

Finally, this year, after nearly a decade at the helm, Joe Garagiola, America’s preeminent disciple of the I-know-nothing-and-won’t-learn-lest-it-interfere-with-my-rustic-charm school of broadcasting, was given the sack. Pliant weatherboy Mark McEwen, his replacement, studied enough to tell most of the breeds apart without assistance. But like his predecessor, he said a lot of things like, “The dog knows this is best in show.” Why, of course he does. He looks around the ring, sees that the other dogs aren’t in his breed, or in his group either. What else can he figure?

McEwen even memorized a few fictoids for the occasion. When the Puli — the corded dog best known for the lame Super Bowl ad where a guy puts it on his head and pretends to be a Rastafarian — came out, McEwen told us that the plural of Puli is Puli. So I’m thinking, the plural of dreadlocks is — dreadlocks. (Alas, McEwen was wrong. The plural of Puli is Pulik, they’re Hungarian.)

APB to real dog experts: somebody please tell me why poodles are clipped like topiary, while every other breed makes do with a natural, if occasionally elaborate, hairstyle. My girlfriend needs to know. I can’t keep coming up empty on this question every year.

(Poodle Update: Erik Freeland writes: “Originally the dog was a water retriever. The clip had to do with insulation and water resistance. I am not sure if the modern clip is 100% the same as the original, but that I believe is the intent.” Maybe. But then why aren’t other water dogs clipped the same way? I’m still accepting suggestions.)

New York Cab Graft Ends!

 Culture, Politics  No Responses »
Feb 092003
 

About time. Maybe it was the protest vote:

“It’s not working,” Matthew W. Daus, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, said yesterday.

Mr. Daus’s agency conducted a study in recent weeks and found that 67 percent of the 4,000 or so respondents said they did not pay a lick of attention when Eartha Kitt or Plcido Domingo or Michael Buffer (“Let’s get ready to rummmmmmmble!”) asked them, by recorded proxy, to wear their seat belts in a taxicab.

Moreover, nearly 12 percent of those questioned said they purposefully refused to buckle up because the announcements were annoying.

If we must have a goo-goo mayor, this is what he ought to be doing, instead of persecuting smokers: ridding us of these stagnant puddles of graft.

Bad Poets Against the War

 Poetry, Politics  8 Responses »
Feb 082003
 

Sam Hamill was right. He had no business at “Laura Bush’s tea party” — not because of his fatuous politics, but because of his fatuous poetry.

State of the Union, 2003

I have not been to Jerusalem,
but Shirley talks about the bombs.
I have no god, but have seen the children praying
for it to stop. They pray to different gods.
The news is all old news again, repeated
like a bad habit, cheap tobacco, the social lie.

The children have seen so much death
that death means nothing to them now.
They wait in line for bread.
They wait in line for water.
Their eyes are black moons reflecting emptiness.
We’ve seen them a thousand times.

Soon, the President will speak.
He will have something to say about bombs
and freedom and our way of life.
I will turn the tv off. I always do.
Because I can’t bear to look
at the monuments in his eyes.

I’m not sure how you repeat cheap tobacco, I’m quite sure I don’t want to investigate the question, and I’m 100% sure that’s not what Hamill’s repeating here. This is actually worse than Andrew Motion, worse even than Harold Pinter: those were still possible to parody. Give me the actors against the war. Some of them can actually act.

(Update: Emperor Misha and Cinderella comment. Frederick Glaysher protests to The New York Times, which predictably sided with the poets, and maintains a useful list of links on the whole sorry affair.)

How to Read a Poem IV: Public and Private Reading

 Poetry  41 Responses »
Feb 052003
 

Part I: Statement in Poetry
Part II: External Evidence
Part III: Scansion
(This article should probably be first, not fourth, which is what happens when you embark on a series without any idea where you’re going.)

There are, fundamentally, two ways to read a poem: privately or publicly. A popular but bad poem best illustrates the difference. Since I have an especially persistent correspondent defending it, W.E. Henley’s “Invictus” will serve:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Let’s look at this poem closely. In the first stanza, why would night, a normal enough event, inspire the poet to give thanks for his unconquerable soul? The night may be metaphoric — one hopes so, since literal night is never black from pole to pole unless you’re sleeping in a tent — but still, one wonders, what is the trouble exactly?

In the second stanza we have the cliché “fell clutch.” “Winced nor” is both unnecessary and impossible to pronounce. Chance, not usually very thuggish, more a burglar than an armed robber, appears in the next line to do some bludgeoning, of all things. The last line is deservedly famous and is by far the best line in the poem.

The third stanza confronts us with “place of wrath and tears” as if the contemporaneous “vale of tears” weren’t bad enough. “[T]he Horror of the shade” or a phrase very like it appears in every third poem of the period.

The last stanza introduces the customary Heavenly machinery of gate, punishment and scroll. The poet, who is agnostic (“whatever gods may be”), imagines the afterlife as a possibility, and then asserts, curiously, in the famous close, that he is the master of his fate and captain of his soul regardless. Yet this surely depends on whether this imagined afterlife is real. I don’t think so, but the poet, on the evidence, isn’t sure.

“Invictus” is a bad poem, bad in detail and bad in execution, with one excellent and two other memorable lines. It is bad chiefly because motive is ill-adjusted to emotion. The poet is considerably wrought up about his unconquerable soul and defiant attitude, but he never provides a motive for this emotion, beyond some vague allusions to night, circumstance, chance, and the fact of his mortality. I am unconvinced by the phrase “the place of wrath and tears” that this world is so awful to inhabit. The reader who enjoys this poem supplies his own motive. Many readers are willing to do so, and the pleasure that they take in this poem is genuine. Popular poems are frequently on the “Invictus” model: they contain a couple of famous lines and a lot of unspecified motive for the reader to fill in. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” and MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” are all of this type.

The reader who enjoys this sort of poetry indulges in a private reading. He is interested in his own feelings, not what is written on the page. Those feelings may be profound, but they have nothing to do with the poem. Suppose the first time you kissed a girl was at a junior high school dance and the band was playing “Desperado.” Now “Desperado” is your favorite song, God help you, for reasons that have nothing to do with any actual merits it may possess. Same thing here.

When you insist on a public reading, on restricting yourself to what’s on the page, you sacrifice a certain amount of immediate warmth and sympathy, a visceral appreciation for poems like “Invictus,” for the ability to enter completely into greater minds than your own, operating at their peak. You sacrifice heat for cold. It’s worth it.

Williams, Whitman, Others

 Poetry  12 Responses »
Feb 022003
 

Over at Tightly Wound, in a post appealingly titled, “Note to Poets Everywhere — Basically, You Suck,” Big Arm Woman nominates William Carlos Williams as the all-time poetry villain. It’s a curious choice. I’d have to go with Milton myself, for throwing over the logical structure of the Renaissance, nearly single-handedly, in favor of sentimental associationism. Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” was a syllogism; less than fifty years later Milton is getting away with “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” collections of details loosely related to joy and melancholy, respectively. Milton also wrote a bizarre cognate of English, mixed with Latin, and, as Donald Sutherland says in Animal House, his jokes are terrible.

Williams, it is true, is usually a bore, though never as resounding a bore as Milton, and his slogan, “No ideas but in things,” indicates Williams’ distant acquaintance with the intellect. Nonetheless his talent was real, and his poems only superficially resemble the slack stuff that you find in the poetry journals nowadays. His best poem, I am sure, is “To a Dead Journalist”:

Behind that white brow
now the mind simply sleeps —
the eyes, closed, the
lips, the mouth,

the chin, no longer useful,
the prow of the nose.
But rumors of the news,
unrealizable,

cling still among those
silent, butted features, a
sort of wonder at
this scoop

come now, too late:
beneath the lucid ripples
to have found so monstrous
an obscurity.

Any mildly attentive reader can hear that the rhythms are of verse, not prose. The metaphor for the experience of recognizing death is better than anything outside of Emily Dickinson. The three near-spondees, ending with “too late,” cleave life and death absolutely.

Even the notorious red wheelbarrow:

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The first line is unforgivable, and the poem is tiny, but the miraculous “glazed” stamps the image in my mind indelibly. Nothing so well-executed is to be despised.

Big Arm Woman may object more to Williams’ influence than to Williams himself. There are writers — Wyndham Lewis calls them “literary barrens” — who are great themselves but disastrous as influences; Joyce is the best example. Except Williams wasn’t one of them. He was the opposite of an innovator: he adopted uncritically a literary movement (Imagism, the brainchild of Pound and H.D.) popular in his youth, never strayed, and brought it to its highest polish.

She mysteriously proceeds to plump for Whitman, who, um, sucks. He doesn’t even scan. Maybe it’s because he’s patriotic. He sounds patriotic, anyway, but Whitman is a transcendentalist. Remember Mikey in the Life cereal commercials, the kid who hates everything? Transcendentalists love everything, America included. It’s all part of the universal current:

One thought ever at the fore —
That in the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and Space,
All Peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination.

Bad as the verse is, the thought is worse, and both are characteristic.

Big Arm Woman points out that Whitman served as a nurse in the Civil War, which is supposed to make his war poetry, which she discreetly refrains from quoting, “haunting and moving in ways that Adrienne Rich should weep over.” Unfortunately his service failed to endow with him talent. The most haunting and moving novel I know about war is The Red Badge of Courage, written by a man who had never seen a shot fired. I have no use for Adrienne Rich either, but if any of Whitman’s war poetry is half as good as the Williams poem I’ve cited, I’ve yet to encounter it.

More Popularity

 Culture, Literature  7 Responses »
Feb 012003
 

Ian Hamet isn’t sure if it is true, as I claim, that popularity is entirely irrelevant to a work’s ultimate value. After all, he asks plausibly, “a work endures because it maintains a kind of popularity, does it not?”

Yes and no, but mostly no. A work, regardless of its ultimate value, is no sure bet to endure at all. There are almost certainly many great works of literature that have been forgotten. No work survives unless some distinguished person campaigns for it. One of the loveliest sonnets in English, “Fra bank to bank”, was written by Mark Alexander Boyd in the 16th century and received no attention for 250 years. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch saw fit to include it in The Oxford Book of English Verse in 1919. Ezra Pound picked up on it, writing in The ABC of Reading in 1934: “I suppose this is the most beautiful sonnet in the language, at any rate it has one nomination.” The poem is now well-known, at least to Renaissance specialists; but it would likely still be obscure had Quiller-Couch not anthologized it, and Quiller-Couch need never have been born.

F.G. Tuckerman’s great poem “The Cricket” went unread for 50 years until Witter Bynner and Edmund Wilson began to champion it in the early 20th century. It is now a standard, but if these men are forgotten it may disappear again. Even Shakespeare had periods, like the middle of the 17th century, in which he was scarcely read at all, and Bardology as we know it today is only about 150 years old. Artistic survival, in short, is precarious. It is inspiring that a few anthologists and critics, or even one, can by themselves resurrect a worthy work of art; and sobering that, even to greatness, survival is not guaranteed.

(Update: The Fredosphere comments.)

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