God of the Machine – Page 34 – Culling my readers to a manageable elite since 2002.

Poetry Corner

 General  10 Responses »
Jan 052003
 

Still-Life

Through the open French window the warm sun
lights up the polished breakfast-table, laid
round a bowl of crimson roses, for one—
a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayed
near it a melon, peaches, figs, small hot
rolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast,
butter in ice, high silver coffee-pot,
and, heaped on a salver, the morning’s post.

She comes over the lawn, the young heiress,
from her early walk in her garden-wood,
feeling that life’s a table set to bless
her delicate desires with all that’s good,

that even the unopened future lies
like a love-letter, full of sweet surprise.

—Elizabeth Daryush

This poem has the most intense sense of foreboding, of impending disaster, of any I know. It reminds me of those photographs of people taken seconds before they are vaporized by bombs or tanks. Yet this feeling is conveyed almost entirely by the shift in rhythm in the ninth and tenth lines. Sound in poetry does not merely emphasize sense; sometimes, as here, it undercuts it.

Reefer Madness

 General  1 Response »
Jan 052003
 

A hearty welcome to those who arrived here via search requests for “adult fuck machine” and “girl who are bound in wheelchair”! Thankfully, you appear not to be the same person.

Seablogging

 General  No Responses »
Jan 032003
 

Andrea Harris and Colby Cosh have noted this story about Brighton’s West Pier concert hall, which could not lawfully be demolished but fell into the English Channel notwithstanding. In its mid-70s heyday National Lampoon used to publish authentic news items as found humor, and one of them concerned environmentalists cleaning off animals after an oil spill. Many birds and animals were shampooed, at some astronomical cost per beastie, and finally the first otter was ready to be rereleased into the sea. There was a big party for it on shore, with reporters from the local papers and a band. The otter was set free, and swam out to the crest of the first wave, where a killer whale appeared and ate it.

Which Punctuation Mark Are You?

 Language  6 Responses »
Jan 032003
 

I await this Internet quiz, which is bound to be more instructive than Christian theologian or Euroweenie. Colby Cosh admits to weaknesses for the em-dash and the semicolon. This is small-time. The semicolon is obsolescent, and its users evince a harmless nostalgia for those glorious days when which was which and that was that and shall and will kept to their proper place.

The em-dash denotes an inability to stick to the point, but far less pathologically than the parenthesis, which I favor. Perhaps the most distinguished contemporary exponent of parentheses is Renata Adler, half of whose really rather good book on the Sharon and Westmoreland libel trials, Reckless Disregard, is between them. (It’s hard to decide which half is better, the inside or the outside. Overuse of parentheses often gives rise to this difficulty.)

The colon is favored by poets, and poetasters, who are obsessed with how their deathless prose sounds when read out loud, like that’s going to happen any time soon. Would-be epigrammatists like it too. Few can write something as good as “Man proposes: God disposes”: many can punctuate it. Wallace Stevens was addicted to the colon. So was Niezsche. I will justify my own addiction to the colon — and I’ve caught myself using as many as three in a single sentence — when I learn to write like Wallace Stevens or Nietzsche.

Question marks, oddly, signify the quarrelsome. Questions in prose are nearly always rhetorical, and writers who employ them are affecting the manner of the high school debater in cross-examination. The truly querulous, like Kierkegaard, rarely use question marks. (Yes, I like question marks too. Yes, I was captain of the debate team in high school.)

The exclamation point used to be for emphasis. But now that teenage girls have hijacked it for use in their diaries — or on their blogs, probably — certain literate devotees, like Mickey Kaus, have begun to use it, half-ironically, to sound less emphatic. A judicious exclamation point gives a sentence some helium, cuts it loose from its moorings. This will be effective until more than three or four people in the world start to do it, when it will grow tiresome.

At least one typographical tic is the exclusive province of the subliterate. Ellipsis Men can often be seen shuffling on the streets, hunched over, muttering to themselves, “Kennedy… radio machines…. Ted Turner Viet Cong… whose job anyway…”

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea?

 Poetry, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 032003
 

(To the tune of “Maria,” from The Sound of Music)

He builds a nuke without rebuke
Then asks for foreign aid.
He thumbs his nose at those who will
Clean up the mess he’s made.
Amassing troops at the border,
Dear Leader’s not an asset to world order.

He’s always breaking treaties,
But his penitence is real.
If things have worked out badly
He’ll just make another deal.
I hate to have to say it
But I very firmly feel
Dear Leader’s not an asset to world order!

I’d like to say a word in his behalf.
Dear Leader makes me laugh!

Chorus
How do you solve a problem like Korea?
How do you reason with the barking mad?
How do you find the words for our Dear Leader?
A cineaste! A communist! A cad!

New Year’s Resolutions for You

 General  1 Response »
Jan 012003
 

I have no New Year’s Resolutions for myself, because I am perfect just the way I am. But I have a few for my blogroll.

The 2 Blowhards should resolve to lose the epistolary format, as the English novel managed to do about 200 years ago.

Colby Cosh should resolve to write less well, and less frequently, to make me less envious. (He demurs.)

Cinderella must resolve to stop reading The Guardian.

Sasha Castel should resolve to get married, and merge her blog, and move to England.

Steven Den Beste should resolve to heed Pascal, and make his articles shorter because he has time. (Floyd McWilliams makes the same point, but longer.)

AC Douglas should resolve to be more peremptory and superior.

Gene Expression should resolve not to shy away from controversial topics.

Mark Riebling should resolve to stop changing the picture of himself. You look mahvelous. Really. I mean that. (He has disregarded me already, a mere week into ought-three.)

The Man Without Qualities should resolve to stop mixing italics with bold and bold italics, seemingly at random.

Eugene Volokh should resolve to keep his nasty temper in check.

Those of you I missed, there’s still plenty of room for improvement, believe me. And thanks to all of you for all the great reading this year.

And Shun the Frumious Bandersnatch

 Culture  3 Responses »
Dec 312002
 

I hate to distract AC Douglas from his battle with the benighted Elvish forces with a flank attack, but I haven’t quite finished with the Jabberwocky yet. AC’s argument, to review, was in two parts. First he argued that the criterion of art is that it fills the heads of its auditors with ideas. (The ideas are supposed to be vague.) I objected that this definition is impressionist — it depends on the auditor, different auditors react differently, and sooner or later we arrive at rank subjectivism. Later AC elaborated, or clarified, or amended his position as follows:

The J Test in no way depends on the tester finding the work under test to be personally appealing. What it does depend on is the depth of the tester’s knowledge of the domain to which the work belongs, and his ability to put aside his personal likes and dislikes, and make his judgment based on the qualities of the work itself.

“Personally appealing” is a bit of a red herring. The Jabberwocky test relies on the evocation of a response in the auditor, and its nature is beside the point. All such theories are impressionist. But in the meat of this passage AC argues, against accusations of subjectivism, that even to apply the Jabberwocky test one must be a qualified auditor. Now let’s imagine two qualified auditors, both with deep domain knowledge and the ability to set aside their personal preferences. What happens when these auditors disagree? According to AC this never happens; as he writes in his comments to my first post:

It’s quite impossible that two persons of the same degree of knowledge, and the same capacity to distance themselves from their own prejudices, likes, and dislikes, would disagree on the binary question of art or not-art for the work under test, although they may differ in their assessments of the degree of quality of that work if determined to be art.

His experience must be different from mine. Certainly in English and American poetry, a field I know pretty well, distinguished scholars disagree radically on evalulation. As best I can tell, AC would mediate such disputes by presentation of scholarly credentials; yet scholarship has little to do with talent, and judging art takes talent. C.S. Lewis read more 16th century English poetry than I ever hope to, yet he misevaulates it generally, by elevating the “Golden” style (Spenser, Sidney) over the “Drab” (Ralegh, Gascoigne, Jonson), and as a result consistently fails to find the best poems. This failure is not of scholarship but of taste.

AC may reply that Lewis never errs on the “binary” matter of distinguishing art from non-art. Since there appears to be no room in AC’s categories for “bad art,” I can’t be sure, although I doubt it. (If I am wrong about this I would find an example of “bad art” helpful.) In any case, calling a criterion binary does not make it so. The Jabberwocky test, to be useful, must be capable of finer distinctions than “art” or “non-art.” If we are to use Jabberwocky strictly to eliminate the non-art, and then substitute some new criteria for evaluation once we’ve pared down the field, then what are these new criteria, and why weren’t we using them in the first place?

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