tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22132464505120270512023-11-15T06:23:45.297-08:00Commonplace"Mary Wilson Gilchrist, a Civil War-era Ohioan who lived at home until her sudden death at the age of 24...kept in her diary a list of the books she read: Charlotte Bronte, William Makepiece Thackeray, Henry Fielding, William Wordsworth, Virgil, Sophocles, and David Hume ('Difficult,' she wrote of Hume....')"JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-20633006128342744542009-02-26T10:13:00.000-08:002009-02-26T10:14:56.561-08:00"And no doubt it is more comfortable to submit to a blind enslavement than to work for liberation: the dead, for that matter, are better adapted to the earth than are the living."<br /><br />Simone de Beauvoir, from <span style="font-style:italic;">The Second Sex</span>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-52561715938919298962009-01-05T05:57:00.000-08:002009-01-05T06:03:34.840-08:00It [myth] is simply a way controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and suffering which is contemporary history.<br /><br />T.S. Eliot, 'Ulysses', Order, and Myth (1928)JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-82515096479056167192008-12-19T07:21:00.001-08:002008-12-19T07:23:28.628-08:00<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CJOHNMA%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">I had to advise a lot of people who were looking for jobs, and not just at Pan-Am….<span style=""> </span>And I’d tell them the secret to getting a job is to imagine the kind of person the company wants to hire and then become that person during the interview.<span style=""> </span>The hell with your theories of what you believe in, and what your integrity is, and all that other stuff.<span style=""> </span>You can project all that when you’ve got the job.</p><p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p style="text-align: right;" class="MsoNormal">Flight Attendant Recruiter (1983)
<br /></p> JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-57704839488616568142008-12-07T07:47:00.000-08:002008-12-07T07:49:32.219-08:00Now that he has no insurance, Mr. Jackson takes his Effexor antidepressant pills every other day, rather than daily, as prescribed.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Robert Pear, "When a Job Disappears, So Does the Health Care" (Dec. 7, 2008)</div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-8483707786776721672008-12-07T07:44:00.000-08:002008-12-07T07:47:53.777-08:00The number of people on food stamps set a record in September, with 31.6 million people receiving benefits, up by two million in one month.<br /><br />Nearly 4.4 million people are receiving unemployment insurance benefits, an increased [sic] of 60 percent in the past year. But more than half of unemployed workers are not getting help because they do not qualify or have exhausted their benefits.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Robert Pear, "When a Job Disappears, So Does the Health Care" (Dec. 7, 2008)<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-12467967011939844082008-12-07T07:41:00.000-08:002008-12-07T07:44:32.488-08:00Starla D. Darling, 27, was pregnant when she learned that her insurance coverage was about to end. She rushed to the hospital, took a medication to induce labor, and then had an emergency Casesarian section, in the hope that her Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan would pay for delivery. [...] As it turned out, the insurance company denied her claim, leaving Ms. Darling with more than $17,000 in medical bills."<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Robert Pear, "When a Job Disappears, So Does the Health Care" (Dec. 7, 2008)<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-52095170793703007952008-12-05T10:33:00.000-08:002008-12-05T10:34:32.680-08:00Workers Give UpThe share of all men ages 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940s.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">David Leonhardt, "Workers Give Up" (Dec. 5, 2008)<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-74353366550946051042008-12-01T08:53:00.000-08:002008-12-01T09:01:17.720-08:00The pretext for progressive rhetoric is, of course, the idea that man, the creature of reason and benevolence, has only to understand the truth in order to act upon it. But the function of progressive rhetoric is another matter; it is, in Dwight McDonald's phrase, to accomplish "in fantasy what cannot be accomplished in reality." Because politics is for [the liberal] a means of accommodating himself to a world he does not like but does not really want to change, he can find ample gratification in words. They appease his twinges of guilt without committing him to very drastic action. Thus the expiatory role of resolutions in progressive meetings.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Arthur Schlesinger, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Vital Center </span>(1949)<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-52629930171111307142008-11-28T11:56:00.000-08:002008-11-28T12:13:05.669-08:00On B+ movies and literatureIn short, the contemporary apocalypse pits family values against the cannibalistic universe--the good guys versus the bad guys, in McCarthy's unironic terms. And so, with the end of civilization, the age-old conflict between sexual love (<span style="font-style: italic;">eros</span>) and love of one's neighbor (<span style="font-style: italic;">caritas</span>) also disappears; and the grown-up Jesus' exhortation to his followers that they leave their families if they wish to pursue righteousness is as little remembered as among Christian fundamentalists today. No one pauses to reflect that in our civilization, pre-collapse, it was invariably the defense of the individual household that justified a nation's warlike international posture or its profligate use of energy. Nuclear war might be averted, went the insipid Sting hit of the late cold war, if the Russians love their children too. But if global warming is not arrested, it will be because we (and the Russians) want for our children everything we have and more.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Benjamin Kunkel, "Dystopia and the End of Politics" (2008)<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-19200024335272606942008-11-27T07:17:00.000-08:002008-11-27T07:33:33.611-08:00ConvolutionsFor us, paradox reduced itself to the simplest terms: it was the ability to say what was not expected, to fool one's audience. If, during a thunder shower, another boy looked out the classroom window and said, "It isn't raining, is it?" expecting us to answer "no," we would say "yes." By doing so, we were giving what we called a First Convolution answer. <br /><br />The theory of convolutions was evolved in Pittsburgh, at Peabody High School, but it might have appeared in any city during those years before the war. [...] The process seems capable of indefinite extension; it can be applied, moreover, to any form of art, so long as one is less interested in what one says than in one's ability to outwit an audience. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Malcolm Cowley, <span style="font-style: italic;">Exile's Return </span>(1934)<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-83299095314449038212008-11-25T06:56:00.000-08:002008-11-25T07:02:38.846-08:00A Pretty Idea<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CJOHNMA%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]-->The premise of secular humanism (or of just old-fashioned humanism) is that the examples of action and thought portrayed in the enduring works of literature, philosophy and history can create in readers the desire to emulate them. [...] It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so.
<br />
<br /><div style="text-align: right;">Stanley Fish, "Will the Humanities Save Us?" (2008)
<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-81658123115071822502007-10-27T06:36:00.000-07:002007-10-27T06:49:51.611-07:00The use of science to regulate industry and trade has gone on steadily. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was the precursor of the industrial revolution. In consequence, man has suffered the impact of an enormously enlarged control of physical energies without any corresponding ability to control himself and his own affairs. Knowledge divided against itself, a science to whose incompleteness is added an artificial split, has played its part in generating enslavement of men, women and children in factories in which they are animated machines to tend inanimate machines. It has maintained sordid slums, flurried and disconnected careers, grinding poverty and luxurious wealth, brutal exploitation of nature and man in times of peace and high explosives and noxious gases in times of war. Man, a child in understanding of himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of incalculable power. He plays with them like a child, and whether they work harm or good is largely a matter of accident. The instrumentality becomes a master and works fatally as if possessed of a will of its own--not because it has a will but because man has not.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">John Dewey, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Public and Its Problems</span> (1927)<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-41591670447776454662007-09-15T06:28:00.000-07:002007-09-15T06:32:21.799-07:00The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-64483414545289489782007-07-28T06:05:00.001-07:002007-07-28T06:07:32.963-07:00[Such a thesis] would hold that whenever the playing field for disputes is tilted--where some individuals have more power than others (in other words, <span style="font-style: italic;">always</span>)--fairness cannot be expected to win out over arrangements that benefit the powerful.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Mark Engler, Review of Joseph Stiglitz's <span style="font-style: italic;">Making Globalization Work</span>.<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-68146618405627810342007-07-09T06:07:00.000-07:002007-07-09T06:11:52.732-07:00<p class="MsoNormal">“The problem for good-hearted Westerners…is that they seem fated to live out their lives as idiots (in the old sense of ‘idiot,’ in which the term refers to a merely private person, one who has no part in public affairs.)<span style=""> </span>They are ingrates and dilettantes—ingrates because their affluence is made possible by the suffering of the poor and dilettantes because they are no longer able to relate thought to action.<span style=""> </span>They cannot imagine how things could be made better.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;" align="right">Richard Rorty, review of Ian McEwan’s <i style="">Saturday</i></p>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-61295195702945951652007-04-06T17:12:00.000-07:002007-04-06T17:16:41.257-07:00Parquet<p class="MsoNormal">J.J. Redick writes poetry:</p><a href="http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FA0914F73E540C768EDDAA0894DF404482"> http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FA0914F73E540C768EDDAA0894DF404482<br /></a><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">But you could have guessed that.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">What you could never have guessed is that <a href="http://www.nba.com/celtics/0102images/cowens1.jpg">Dave Cowens</a>, former Celtics great who, famously, in the prime of his career, left professional basketball to drive a cab, only to return later that year and make the All-Star team, is the author of an only recently discovered epic-poem titled <i style="">Parquet</i>.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Scholars who have read it say that it is the poem Charles Olson would have written had he played taller than his height—but at six feet seven, Olson was afraid to bang, and you know what kind of poetry that makes for.<span style=""> </span><i style="">Maximus </i>my ass.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></p>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-61767052491271975562007-03-18T16:56:00.000-07:002007-03-18T18:25:27.438-07:00Bong Hits 4 JesusOr: "who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull...."<br /><br />As reported here:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/washington/18scotus.html?ex=1331870400&amp;amp;amp;amp;en=29ab231ec7765f0c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/washington/18scotus.html?ex=1331870400&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;en=29ab231ec7765f0c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss</a><br /><br />Those of you not registered at the NYT, here is the story in brief:<br /><p style="font-style: italic;">As the Olympic torch was carried through the streets of Juneau on its way to the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City, students were allowed to leave the school grounds to watch. The school band and cheerleaders performed. With television cameras focused on the scene, Mr. Frederick [a senior at the school] and some friends unfurled a 14-foot-long banner with the inscription: 'Bong Hits 4 Jesus.'</p><p style="font-style: italic;">Mr. Frederick later testified that he designed the banner, using a slogan he had seen on a snowboard, “to be meaningless and funny, in order to get on television.” Ms. Morse [the principal of the school] found no humor but plenty of meaning in the sign, recognizing “bong hits” as a slang reference to using marijuana. She demanded that he take the banner down. When he refused, she tore it down, ordered him to her office, and gave him a 10-day suspension.</p>Mr. Frederick is now suing Ms. Morse and the school district for violating his first amendment rights. The case, like a soul from a dead body, has risen from the vulgar depths of the lower courts to the heavenly sphere of the Supreme Court, which will soon pronounce judgement on its righteousness or villainy.<br /><br />The case is fascinating for any number of reasons, perhaps not least because Ms. Morse apparently had to stop to decipher that the inscription was some kind of "slang reference to using marijuana." Principals are so lame. But the case is also fascinating because, as the New York Times plays it up, it has temporarily aligned the Felix religious right with the Oscar American Civil Liberties Union (odd couples indeed), and (again, a series of firsts) because it pits the religious right against the Bush Administration, which can't look past its hatred of drugs and its apple-polishing respect for authority long enough to see that if students are not allowed to hold up a banner that says "Bong Hits 4 Jesus," then they may not be able to hold up a banner that says "John 3:16."<br /><br />I tend to be a first-amendment absolutist, willing to protect all speech, even the most hateful, so long as it does not threaten or seek to incite violence or physical harm against a group or individual. So I think the kids are alright here, as Pete Townsend might put it. At the same time, though, I recognize that schools must silence some speech part of the time just in order to function. I silence my students all the time. How else would I get them to listen to or think about poetry? But a prank banner at an already campy torch-passing ceremony does not seem to disrupt the function or purpose of schooling. It's a kid with a bong sign.<br /><br />And, truth be told, I'm inclined to believe that Jesus does in fact deserve bong hits. Even if I'm wrong, though, and he doesn't, people still have the right to say so.<br /><br /><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-21775521957554038912007-03-06T06:02:00.000-08:002007-07-30T11:48:29.924-07:00Not worthless<div style="text-align: right;"><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">I cannot believe that it has been three weeks or so since I have updated this commonplace book. Even more unbelievable is that I have left that Frank O'Hara ploop poem up in the interval. Fortunately, though, we have no readers to disappoint or offend.<br /><br />But it is a sign of how low we have fallen if our criteria is whether something had some, however miniscule, value.<br /></div></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-17808682905189141922007-02-13T18:42:00.000-08:002007-02-13T18:45:51.204-08:00And then, just because, and turning to a poem at random...POEM<br /><br />Wouldn't it be funny<br />if The Finger had designed us<br />to shit just once a week?<br /><br /> all week long we'd get fatter<br /> and fatter and then on Sunday morning<br /> while everyone's in church<br /><br /> ploop!<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">--Frank O'Hara (1959)<br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-20834432993542417242007-02-13T18:37:00.000-08:002007-02-13T18:41:33.734-08:00Amen!"But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them."<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Frank O'Hara, "Personism: A Manifesto" (1962)<br /><br /></div>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-22247684156707673472007-01-30T10:03:00.000-08:002007-01-30T10:06:49.460-08:00How to Read a Modern Poem<p class="MsoNormal"></p>In 1913, Ezra Pound advised <br />poets to go in fear of abstraction; <br />one should find the image that symbolized <br />the age’s usurious malefaction. <br /><br />Eliot, finding Hamlet deficient, <br />wanted an object that could correlate <br />with a given emotion, an efficient <br />formula traditioned readers could translate. <br /><br />William Carlos Williams had his version <br />“Say it!” he said, “no ideas but in things”: <br />Things like Elsie, wheelbarrows, an excursion <br />to the contagious hospital in spring. <br /><br />Modern poems are a junk yard, a heap <br />of broken images, but strip the paint, <br />or glue the pieces, and you find the cheap, <br />naked, lovely, poetry of complaint. <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-79058254658799408452007-01-26T09:32:00.000-08:002007-01-26T09:35:19.108-08:00Can Poetry Matter? Part II<p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Despite Gioia’s sound proposals for saving poetry from itself, his justly-famous essay nevertheless falters on a couple of points.<span style=""> </span>First, he seems too conservative in imagining the audience poetry might have.<span style=""> </span>He wants poetry to speak again to the “2 percent of the U.S. population” that represents our “cultural intelligentsia,” “the people who support the arts—who buy classical and jazz records; who attend foreign films, serious theatre, opera, symphony and dance; who read quality fiction and biographies; who listen to public radio and subscribe to the best journals.”<span style=""> </span>Given how small poetry’s audience has become, Gioia can perhaps be forgiven his realistic hopes about the audience poetry might plausibly win back.<span style=""> </span>Still, as the editor of an anthology of poems written in the 1930s by workers and organizers and published in their various union newspapers, and as a critic who reveres the public role poetry played in various political movements of the twentieth century, I would prefer not to limit poetry’s imagined audience from the outset to the “cultural intelligentsia.”<span style=""> </span>It has had a more democratic audience in the past, and we shouldn’t rule out from the start it having another one again.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">More serious, though, is the—to be brutally honest about it—the lame case Gioia makes for <i style="">why </i>poetry should matter.<span style=""> </span>His first reason concerns the relation between poetry and language.<span style=""> </span>Because poetry forces us to pay attention to language, readers of poetry may be less taken in by “intellectual leaders”—politicians, preachers, copywriters, newscasters—who seek to enslave us through their manipulations of language.<span style=""> </span>Poetry can thus help to keep “the nation’s language clear and honest.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">I like that reason a lot, actually, but it is almost spoiled by the second one Gioia offers, which is that as the fate of poetry goes, so goes the fate of other forms of American high culture.<span style=""> </span>In other words, if we can rescue poetry from its marginal position, we can rescue serious drama, jazz, and classical music as well.<span style=""> </span>And while that sounds nice in principle, it also seems hopelessly circular.<span style=""> </span>Indeed, it tells us nothing about what poetry can do for us—unlike Gioia’s lesson about poetry and language—only about what it might do for the other arts.<span style=""> </span>What those other arts could do for us, though, remains unclear.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">To be fair, no one is asking Gioia to also justify these other forms of American high culture; but at the same time he cannot rest half of his defense of poetry on them either.<span style=""> </span>If my spouse asks me why I’m tearing up the fence in our backyard, and I answer that because otherwise the shovel wouldn’t get used, she is not likely to find my answer very persuasive.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">After all, it could well be that a culture does not truly need poetry or any of these other forms of American high culture.<span style=""> </span>Surely there are other, even more democratic ways, to teach people how to keep our language—and our politics—honest and clear.<span style=""> </span>Nor can one necessarily appeal to our desire for beauty or aesthetics to justify poetry since people already seem to be fulfilling that desire quite nicely, and d<span style="font-size:100%;">oing so through genres, modes, and forms of culture—fiction, popular music, film, sports—that have nothing to do with poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">So “Can Poetry Matter” is a slightly different and, indeed, easier question to ask than “Should Poetry Matter?” and, if so, “Matter for What?”</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-12872086724666537502007-01-24T05:56:00.000-08:002007-01-24T05:57:43.702-08:00Can Poetry Matter? Part I<p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" >“Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Montana</st1:place></st1:state> rancher might keep a few buffalo around—not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition’s sake.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;" align="right"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" >Dana Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter?” (1992)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;" align="right"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" >Poetry, as we concluded last Monday, qua Auden, “makes nothing happen.”<span style=""> </span>Instead, it “survives/ In the valley of its saying, where executives/ Would never want to tamper,” providing us solace in the “raw towns” of “isolation” and “busy griefs” that “we believe and die in.”<span style=""> </span>If Dana Gioia is right, though, poetry is providing that solace to fewer and fewer people, surviving, if that description is still even apt, on the life support of creative writing programs and English Departments.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" >But let’s first pause and note the irony that Gioia, a well-known American poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was also a former corporate executive at General Foods.<span style=""> </span>So whereas Auden celebrated that poetry would remain beyond the grasp of executives, for Gioia, the problem is that all too few executives can be bothered to tamper with it.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" >In his influential essay, “Can Poetry Matter,” which originally appeared in the April 1991 issue of the <i style="">Atlantic Monthly</i>, Gioia lamented the marginal space poetry occupied in the contemporary art and intellectual world.<span style=""> </span>This was intended to be a surprising claim since poetry appeared to be anything but marginal.<span style=""> </span>Indeed, from a certain perspective, it appeared to be thriving.<span style=""> </span>Just under a thousand new volumes of poetry appeared every year, and anthologies and literary magazines published still more poetry.<span style=""> </span>Moreover, roughly 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> and more than 1,000 undergraduate ones provided several thousand jobs for poets and several tens of thousands of homes for aspiring poets. What’s more, poets and aspiring poets alike were supported by grants and fellowships offered by federal, state, and local arts programs as well as by private foundations.<span style=""> </span>In short, given the number of resources devoted to it, “an observer might easily conclude that we live in a golden age of American poetry.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" >Not so, Gioia charges, because despite all the resources devoted to it, American poetry is “no longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life.”<span style=""> </span>It has become, instead, “the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group.”<span style=""> </span>Indeed, Gioai elsewhere compares the poetry world to “subsidized farming,” which “grows food no one wants.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" >It shouldn’t take you more than one, at most two guesses to determine who makes up that “relatively small and isolated group” poetry now feeds: other poets.<span style=""> </span>“Over the past half century,” Gioia writes, “as American poetry’s specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined.”<span style=""> </span>It cannot come close to matching the audience for literary fiction, and it is rarely if ever reviewed in daily newspapers.<span style=""> </span>“The <i style="">New York Times</i>,” Gioia observes, “only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to anyone, that is, except to other poets.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" >Gioia blames poetry’s retreat on a number of figures: poets, who at public readings celebrate and sing themselves (that is, read only their own work) rather than the genre of poetry as a whole; anthologists, whose editorial principles seem driven less by poetic quality than by collegial clubbiness; reviewers of poetry, who are almost always “overwhelmingly positive” and therefore neglect their role as evaluators and guides; academics, who base their decisions about employment on quantity of publications and not necessarily on quality, which floods the market with bad or only hastily-assembled poems; and finally poets themselves, who have isolated themselves from the public by taking up residency on campuses.<span style=""> </span>This last, of course, is in contrast to poets from the first half of the twentieth century, who were either professionals (Wallace Stevens the insurance executive, William Carlos Williams the doctor), literary journalists (either editors or reviewers), or unemployed ne’er do wells hanging on in bohemian genteel poverty.<span style=""> </span>The result, Gioia argues, was an audience made up of “artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen, educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers,” a “group of nonspecialists who took poetry as seriously as fiction and drama”—exactly the audience poetry is so grossly missing today.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" >At the conclusion of his essay, Gioia offers a number of proposals for restoring poetry’s nonspecialist audience.<span style=""> </span>They are, for the most part, unobjectionable.<span style=""> </span>I especially like three: “<i style="">When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people’s work</i>”; “<i style="">Poetry teachers, especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more time on performance</i>”; and, finally, “<i style="">Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively</i>.”<span style=""> </span>Number three—poets writing prose about poetry—has come to pass to some degree as David Orr is writing honest, incisive, and even occasionally humorous poetry reviews for <i style="">The New York Times</i> and other journals.<span style=""> </span>Not surprisingly, Gioia would point out, Orr is a lawyer, not an academic.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:130%;" >But as much as there is to applaud in Gioia’s diagnosis of poetry’s ills and his prescriptions for them, the doctor also has some rather strange things to say about the patient.<span style=""> </span>We’ll take these up in Part II. <o:p></o:p></span></p>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-6094393869624526932007-01-19T07:33:00.000-08:002007-01-19T19:56:41.095-08:00Which Dying Child Will Fix My Furnace? Part II<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">There are two reasons why I did not contribute my fair share--not to mention all that I reasonably and comfortably could--to preventing needless deaths. Neither of the reasons is in any way exculpatory, but they are worth pausing over.<span style=""> </span><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">One, as a good social democrat, I tend to think that fighting global poverty ought to be the domain of governments, both in organizing and distributing aid but, equally so, in levying taxes towards that end and compelling its citizens—compelling me—to give my fair share.<span style=""> </span>(Or, for that matter, it need not raise more taxes at all but, rather, redirect some of the 470 billion dollars it annually spends on, say, defense towards something a bit more laudable.)<span style=""> </span>But that is neither here nor there.<span style=""> </span>Indeed, that the state does not play this role does not in the least absolve me of my responsibility—quite the opposite in fact.<span style=""> </span>Two wrongs do not make a right.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">The second reason I haven’t given my share of our household’s roughly $1300 is because, quite frankly, I am cheap.<span style=""> </span>Now, let me say what I mean by cheap.<span style=""> </span>At age 31, with a somewhat secure job that has a salary slightly higher than the US average, I am, now, for the first time in my life, after years of that special sort of relative poverty known as student and graduate student poverty—for the first time in my life I am able to save some money, and now that I have a taste of it, I guard every penny like a miser.<span style=""> </span>I do so not out of greed, really, but because, having grown up not exactly poor, but not quite middle class either, I fear perhaps more than anything not having enough money to pay for some emergency should it befall me or my household.<span style=""> </span>And my overactive, paranoid imagination has no trouble whatsoever inventing more and more costly emergencies that might befall us, from the very small, like what if our furnace stops working and we have to buy a new one, will we have enough money?<span style=""> </span>To the very large, like, what if I get dreadfully sick and cannot work?<span style=""> </span>How will we live?<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">In short, I am a pessimist, always imagining a series of never-ending worst-case scenarios for which I will need what little money I have in fact managed to save.<span style=""> </span>Nor would increasing the amount of money I am able to save—say, by moving to a smaller house—likely alter my behavior or lead me to give away the surplus.<span style=""> </span>I would still save whatever money I managed not to spend out of fear for what imagined or unimagined calamity lies around the next corner.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Now, one could argue that I may ultimately absolve myself of these sins if, assuming that none of these worst-case scenarios actually befall me and I keep saving money, I ultimately (after I die, say) give away all the money I managed to save.<span style=""> </span>The problem with that, though, is that it does nothing in the meantime, when people continue to live in poverty and die and when, in theory at least, I could reasonably and comfortably give now what I intend to give at my death.<span style=""> </span>In other words, I am still guilty of valuing my life—my furnace, my health—unconscionably more than others.<span style=""> </span>I cannot imagine saying to a dying child that while I would like to help, they—or, not necessarily them but some other dying child in the future—will have to wait for me to die first before I will lend them a hand.<span style=""> </span>In other words, I cannot imagine that they will care very much about my broken furnace--not to mention <i style="">the mere possibility </i>of my broken furnace.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">I am, then, by any definition, acting callously, indecently, and wrongly by letting children drown all around me for no good reason.<span style=""> </span>Still, it is worth trying to understand why I—and perhaps others—do not do what we should do given our beliefs.<span style=""> </span>Singer would do well, too, to devote more thought than he does to why people do not give what he thinks they ought to.<span style=""> </span>It is not always a result of consumption, the effect of our frivolous desire for new shoes, even though imagining that that is the final reason for our inhumanity helps to make us seem all the more inhumane.<span style=""> </span>Rather, we may withhold our giving not because of our desire for new shoes but out of fears of being left shoeless ourselves.<span style=""> </span>If so, then we might need to change the terms of our argument in order to persuade everyone to give what they should. It might also help if we felt like we lived in a society that would take care of each other if an emergency did arise, but our safety net has so many tears in it right now that it leaves us obsessed with keeping our balance on the trapeze above.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">But the final moral of the story, I suppose, is that having saved a little bit of money this past year, and having worked through the insufficient reasons for why I did not give, I am resolved to contribute at least my fair shair this coming year. Perhaps more if I think I can coax another year out of our furnace.<br /></span></p><br /><p class="MsoNormal"></p><br /><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span><span style=""><span style=";font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" ><br /></span><span style=""><span style="font-size:130%;"> </span> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2213246450512027051.post-12974971814537157912007-01-18T07:27:00.000-08:002007-01-19T19:51:39.457-08:00Which Dying Child Will Fix My Furnace? Part I<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">“In an article I wrote more than three decades ago, at the time of the humanitarian emergency in what is now <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Bangladesh</st1:place></st1:country-region>, I used the example of walking by a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning.<span style=""> </span>Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that if we can save the child at a minimum inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so.<span style=""> </span>Anything else would be callous, indecent, and, in a word, wrong.<span style=""> </span>The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown.<span style=""> </span>Similarly, if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;" align="right"><span style="">Peter Singer, “What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?” (2006)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;" align="right"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">The passage above comes from a recent article by the <st1:place st="on">Princeton</st1:place> philosopher Peter Singer, which appeared in <i style="">The New York Times </i>Sunday Magazine over the holidays.<span style=""> </span>In it, Singer argues that if we in fact believe what we profess to believe—that is, that all human beings have an inherent dignity and that no single human life is any more valuable than another—than we ought to be doing a lot more to eradicate global poverty and disease than we currently do.<span style=""> </span>According to Unicef, for example, “more than 10 million children die every year—about 30,000 per day—from avoidable, poverty-related causes.”<span style=""> </span>Yet, as Singer notes, “the amount of foreign development aid given by the U.S. government is, at 22 cents for every $100 the nation earns, about the same, as a percentage of gross national income, as Portugal gives and about half that of the U.K.”<span style=""> </span>In other words, the citizens of the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> are watching a lot of children drown as they make their way to the mall to buy a new pair of shoes.<span style=""> </span>These deaths, after all, are avoidable: it is within our capacity, assuming the will, to prevent them.<span style=""> </span>That we do not, then, makes us—and our new shoes—in some sense responsible for their deaths.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">The remainder of Singer’s article is given over to determining how much one should give in order to satisfy the basic ethical principles that we purport to live by.<span style=""> </span>There are two sides to the debate.<span style=""> </span>Either one should give their fair share, or one ought to give as much as they reasonably and comfortably can regardless of their fair share since, of course, not everyone will give their fair share and, thus, children will continue to needlessly drown.<span style=""> </span>Singer favors the second position, and calculates, for each income bracket, the amount he believes households can and should give.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">The top 0.01 percent of <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> taxpayers, for example, all 14,400 of them, earn on average $12,775,000 per year and together $184 billion per year.<span style=""> </span>Singer argues that it “seems reasonable to suppose that they could, without much hardship, give away a third of their annual income, an average of 4.3 million each, for a total of 61 billion.<span style=""> </span>That would still leave them with an annual income of at least 3.3 million.”<span style=""> </span>Moreover, that 61 billion would more than cover the 48 billion that Jeffrey Sachs has calculated the UN would need to make good on its Millenium Development Goals, which include reducing by half the number of the world’s people who live in extreme poverty, ensuring that children everywhere take a full course of primary schooling, reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5, and a host of other unarguably laudable goals.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">But that 61 billion comes from just the very rich.<span style=""> </span>Singer also calculates what the top 0.1 percent, the top .05 percent, the top 1 percent, and the top 10 percent of <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> income earners could comfortably give.<span style=""> </span>The income bracket that my household belongs to, for example, the top 10 percent (who earn at least $92,000 annually, with an average $132,000), could, if it gave 10 percent of its income ($13,200 per household), contribute 171 billion dollars to the cause.<span style=""> </span>And if those households were to give only their fair share—that is, their share of the 48 billion dollars that would be needed to meet the UN Millenium Development Goals—those households should, by my quick and dirty calculations, be giving roughly $1300 per year.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">But here is the problem.<span style=""> </span>Our household gives nothing.<span style=""> </span>Not a penny.<span style=""> </span>And being reminded of this, as Singer surely intends, is disconcerting.<span style=""> </span>Indeed, for someone who purports to care very deeply about national and global poverty, I do comparatively little about it.<span style=""> </span>I started and direct a free college-accredited course for low-income people in our community, but the students who enroll in that course, while relatively poor, are not absolutely poor in the way that someone living on less than $1 per day or whose children die from diarrhea before age 5 is poor.<span style=""> </span>I think and write and teach about poverty, but, as the saying goes—and seems especially apt here—I don’t put my money where my mouth is.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Why not? And why should I nevertheless? We'll see in Part II.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11530650111729843914noreply@blogger.com0