One might approach an inferno with caution, for dark words obscure the ill-lit path. Remember the scene in “City Slickers” when Ira and Barry claim to be able to identify the correct ice cream desert for any given meal? Of course there can’t be a correct answer, a right or wrong, yet their answers are persuasive. They seem to get it right. Just so, is there a right invective to suit a given malevolent character? The ubiquitous a__hole is the easily reached standby, a single scoop in a sugar cone. Some invectives the general interest reader might find offensive, even if earned by the target. Joyce used “rabblement” to round up the usual suspects: “Now, your popular devil is more dangerous than your vulgar devil. Bulk and lungs count for something, and he can gild his speech aptly.” Sometimes, though, the stream of invective seems preferred: “You unpatriotic rotten doctor Commie rat,” Bob Dylan’s farmer yells in “Motorpsycho Nightmare.” But the single word rant is probably the perfect invective, like the perfect ice cream desert, a single scoop of the only flavor possible. Still, if one wants to be remembered for one’s invective, perhaps the Spiro Agnew (from a phrase prepared by William Safire) approach is best: “nattering nabobs of negativism.” To what wordly-inferno do we credit this reflection on invectives? Over at one of our blog subscriptions, “My Life and Thoughts,” where we find the energetic and enterprising Elif pondering the right word for the forsoaken characters of Dante’s “Inferno.” Of course, there’s the possibility the discussion is a marketing ploy, which we approached without caution, but no worries, for there’s little invective in a marketing campaign.
Tag: Writing
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Disney’s New “Winnie the Pooh”
Disney’s new “Winnie the Pooh” whimwhams from book to screen, true to the text, blending beautiful, glossy-black letters, like iron icons, into the plot and the characters’ actions. There are no static characters.
The dynamic characters learn the consequences of misreading a text. The academic, wise Owl plays the fool, foisting a bugaboo, mythical creature on the “Hundred Acre Wood” community. Winnie-the-pooh builds a ladder from scattered letters, and Pooh and friends climb the letter-ladder out of a pit of fallen text. Rated E: Excellent for Everyone! -
More on the disappearance of newspapers…
More evidence of the disappearance of newspapers: page 2 of the “a&e” section of last Friday’s Oregonian contains a small announcement: “Regal Cinemas discontinued its movie listings, which were advertising, from The Oregonian.” Regal has a full menu website with links to Hershey’s, Coca-Cola, 200k likes on facebook, 24k tweeters…; what does it need The Oregonian for? Now playing: “What we will miss when newspapers disappear.”
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PLoS One sparks paradigm changes…
PLoS One sparks paradigm changes in academic and research publishing. When will the Humanities catch up? Consider the Atlantic article, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science.” The science community is ahead of the Humanities in recognizing the hoaxes of academic and scholarly publishing. But over at the FQXi Community, the physicists are having a good time writing the new fiction. -
On Another Modest Proposal; or, Twitters with the Editors
We dropped in on our anon friends over at LROD this morning, reading the morning blogs over a cup of Joe, always interested in the latest rejection news, and followed a suggestion to an article by Bill Keller over at the New York Times Magazine, “Let’s Ban Books, or at Least Stop Writing Them,” about the time-consuming, low productivity, empty and worthless promise called writing a book. Bill knows, for in his position as executive editor at the Times, he’s seen many a sabbatical come back with sunburned hands holding a bellyflopped book. He even confesses he’s tried it twice, writing a book, both times coming up for air before finding the pearl, and he’s against the writing of any more books. Bill’s proposal is censorship fullproof: don’t ban books; ban the writing of books.
But these lazy cats at the Times are already writers, wallowing in ink and books, rich with paper and pens, we assume, expert at hammering out the text by deadline, so why do they need a sabbatical to write their boobook? Let them write it on their own time, like all us other hacks, for they’ve already a leg up on the process, not to mention free lunches with the agents, and twitters with the editors. That will separate the wheat from the chaff.
Yet a side benefit, though, should we adopt Bill’s idea to ban the writing of books, would be universal atonement for our guilt of not reading them.
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On Poetry
Some days ago, Susan suggested a book I’ve finally opened, Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life. “It is always quietly thrilling,” Bryson says in the introduction, “to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.” He’s discovered a rooftop vista accessible through a hidden door. The experience causes him to realize that he’s a stranger to his house, an English rectory built roughly 150 years ago. He’s had an epiphany, for he decides that “it might be interesting, for the length of a book, to consider the ordinary things in life, to notice them for once and treat them as if they were important, too. Looking around my house, I was startled and somewhat appalled to realize how little I knew about the domestic world around me.”I’d just opened the book, and already I had a bit of an epiphany of my own, for I realized that Bryson’s “quietly thrilling” experience resulting from a new perspective on an old thing is a practical definition of poetry. At least, that is what successful poetry often accomplishes, an image of a familiar thing viewed in a new light, in such a way that we feel a stranger to the thing, as familiar as it might be, and we want to research its origins, its purpose, and to revalue its uses – now that we’ve a new realization of the thing’s importance, as revealed by our newly found perspective; we want to get to know the thing all over again. We want to save it, rescue the thing from the rummage sale, for in poetry we find our own hidden door. Perhaps this revaluing of things, of changing our minds about what we want, is what all successful art accomplishes, and also explains John Cage’s silence as a place to find hidden sounds.
The poet practices legerdemain; he’s a sleight of hand man, as described in Wallace Stevens’s “The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man”: “…So bluish clouds / Occurred above the empty house and the leaves / Of the rhododendrons raddled their gold, / As if someone lived there….” And, as Ferlinghetti added, “…and all without mistaking / any thing / for what it may not be.” For, as Stevens goes on, “The wheel survives the myths.” And finally, “It may be,” concludes Stevens, “that the ignorant man, alone, / Has any chance to mate his life with life.”
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Now Playing at Plato’s Cave: “The Reel World”
Plato opened the first movie theatre, the audience chained to seats, unable to see the projectionist, and there were no refreshments or intermissions. You really had to be a movie buff to enjoy a film at Plato’s Cave.
McLuhan (Understanding Media, 1964) explained that we must be trained to see movies, for “movies assume a high level of literacy in their users and prove baffling to the nonliterate [the unlit].” If a man disappears from the screen, the nonliterate wants to know where he went. “But the film audience, like the book reader, accepts mere sequence as rational.” And perspective is gravity, gravitas. The nonliterate will not sit still and be quiet in a movie theatre. They lack the requisite cultural-etiquette training, which requires the natural, balanced sensorium (the five senses tuned so that no one sense dominates another) to be dominated by the sense of sight. “For those who thus fix their eyes,” McLuhan explains, “perspective results.” This is why hot buttered popcorn is so popular in movie theatres – the nose is hard-pressed to go two hours with nothing to smell. The movie theatre is the new voting booth, where we learn both what we’re missing and what we want. “What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and refrigerators…That is another way of getting a view of the film medium as monster ad for consumer goods,” McLuhan said.
There are things we don’t want to see, movies we’ve no interest in, TV shows we channel surf away from, books we self-remainder to the rummage sale. We avoid certain conversations, too, closing our ears now to the sacred, now to the profane; there are things we don’t want to hear. Yet touch is the most involving of the senses, and the sense of smell is stronger than the sense of sight, and is tied to taste. Thus we say of a bad movie that it stinks. We instinctually avert our eyes from the ghastly, but when we want to see what we don’t want to look at, we go to the movies. “It is a spectacle,” Wallace Stevens said (“Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion,” 1945), “Scene 10 becomes 11 / In Series X, Act IV, et cetera. / People fall out of windows, trees tumble down, / Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old, / The air is full of children, statues, roofs / And snow. The theatre is spinning round,….”
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John: 20-29). Blessed today might be those who have seen and yet still believe. Yet “a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” Blake said in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (and which the neuroscientists are busy trying to explain). What should we see; what should we read? What are our choices? “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else,” John Cage said, in his “Lecture on Nothing” (Silence, 1973). Just so, Cage gives us 4’33” of silence, but not silence, for we hear what we hear, note what we note, for we have eyes to see, ears to hear. McLuhan predicted YouTube: “Soon everyone will be able to have a small, inexpensive film projector that plays an 8-mm sound cartridge as if on a TV screen. This type of development is part of our present technological implosion.”
The blogger gets McLuhan’s argument: “The typewriter…has caused an integration of functions and the creation of much private independence. G. K. Chesterton demurred about this new independence as a delusion, remarking that ‘women refused to be dictated to and went out and became stenographers.’” Just so, academics are beginning to refuse the traditional forms of sanctioned publishing, for the potential to blog brings about, as McLuhan said of the typewriter, “an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word.” Back inside Plato’s Cave and McLuhan’s (via Joyce) “reel world,” some critic tries to discern what we’re actually seeing and hearing, as if we don’t have eyes to see, ears to hear. Well, yes, but we can’t see the real thing. Behold, human beings living in an underground cave, blogging. This is a world of appearances, through a glass, lightly shuttering.
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Sestina Ends Current Hiatus
Pop Luck Soup
Lettuce dew the cabbage head chop.
Sea hear, old gourd face. The squash is still on the sill.
Radical zucchinis. Carrots pointing and poking.
Turnip, have you no heart? Don’t be rutabaga.
Radish reaction. Thistle never do; wilt thou look?
Please, asparagus more of this.Peas, take off your jackets, mix with us.
Ouch, salt, potato eyes cry, chopped.
Corn fits in hand like a tool. Look,
unknotted legs mush the silly
knuckle-balling tomato out of a rut
with a nice little poke.Habanero the jalapeno poke,
ice cream koan this,
rooting around in a bag
of bluegrass chop.
Mush run it again through the still
to get the right look.Should put this aside now and let it cool,
this pig in a poke,
or something of that ilk.
I’m not sure what this is,
and we’re still chopping,
scrounging at the bottom of the bag.A soup should be like a gab,
like a parade, the curbs full of onlookers,
the marching bands chopping
through the lines of folks pushing and pulling and poking,
heads popping up like thistledowns.
Sure, and fools with painted faces acting dilly,playing out the King’s idylls.
The clowns are the Court of Garbage,
composting that and this,
giving us all for free a new look,
for in the eye they poke,
and to the nose they chop.So long lives this spicy green silliness,
bitter chops of arguing arugula,
this face wears the soupy look of poker. -
Union Maid: Made and Unmade
“Don’t talk old to me,” Norma Rae tells her dad. “I don’t like it.” But in the next scene a foreshadow appears when Reuben mentions Dylan Thomas’s “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” for in the next scene Norma Rae’s dad keels over, dead, into a basket of textile spools. “You load sixteen tons, what do you get?” These days, you get “another day older and deeper in [health care] debt,” augmenting the Merle Travis and Tennessee Ernie Ford classic. Labor laws may have rendered some of the early union causes moot, while many corporations may have also already adopted many if not most of the basic wants of the early unions – in most industries. The problem, as Hendrik Hertzberg explains in his March 7 New Yorker comment, “Union Blues,” is funding collective self-interest into political activism capable of representing the working stiff. Corporations can now marshal any number of deep pockets to advance their interests. Are corporate interests the same as the interests of those employed by the corporation?
But what foreshadowed the fall of unions? When we were kids and Dad was out of work, he went down to the Union Hall, where he put his name on the list. The Union Hall was as important as the Church. We could see the fall of the Church coming, but we missed the foreshadow predicting the fall of organized labor, in spite of, as Hendrik points out, its obvious “failings, all its shortsightedness, all its ‘special interest’ selfishness.”
James Surowiecki, in his January 17th New Yorker piece, “State of the Unions,” explains the unions’ fall from public grace: unions are now mostly public unions, and their wages and benefits no longer positively influence non-union wages and benefits. Solidarity, or any hint of symbiotic relationship, is lost. Envy and bitterness over disparate working environments have replaced any sense of brother-sister-hood. “Labor,” Surowiecki concludes, “may be caught in a vicious cycle, becoming progressively less influential and more unpopular. The Great Depression invigorated the modern American labor movement. The Great Recession has crippled it.” And will the crippling further atrophy gains made over those years to labor conditions that prevailed prior to the Great Depression?
The last company town is closing, with little or no foreshadowing. The story was filler in the LA Times; almost without notice, Empire, Nevada is being surrounded by chain link fence as its citizens strike out for elsewhere, forming a tiny diaspora of folks who once owed their souls to the company store. Empire, Nevada, the home of a gypsum mining plant, is being fenced off, and all the folks are getting out, for the gypsum mining plant was home to Empire, Nevada. The edge of the popped housing bubble has reached this far. The company closes; the town closes. “If living were a thing that money could buy, Then the rich would live and the poor would die, All my trials, Lord, soon be over,” goes the protest song of the folk movement. But living is a thing money can buy, as the health care crisis proves, yet the poor just can’t seem to die.
Jill Lepore’s “Objection: Clarence Darrow’s unfinished work” (May 23 New Yorker) gives us some idea of labor conditions prior to improvements attributed to the rise of unions. Lepore quotes Darrow: “The only difference I can see between the state prison and George M. Paine’s factory is that Paine’s men are not allowed to sleep on the premises.” The Darrow quote comes after Lepore describes that “the factory doors, Paine doors, were locked once the workers got in, at 6:45 A.M., and kept locked, except for a lunch break, until the guards came and turned the key, when dusk fell.” At question in the case, according to Darrow, Lepore reports, was “whether when a body of men desiring to benefit their condition, and the condition of their fellow men, shall strike, whether those men can be sent to jail.” Meantime, the Wisconsin governor had called the National Guard into Sawdust City, where the city and company were essentially the same working entity: thus the government was the corporation.
The extent to which labor and management can feud was colorfully described in Caleb Crain’s January 19, 2009 New Yorker piece, “There Was Blood: The Ludlow massacre revisited” (Caleb’s piece begins as a review of the Thomas G. Andrews book, Killing for Coal, but becomes much more than that; see his follow-up on his blog). Crain concludes: “When a representative democracy wins people’s trust, it is capable of moderating disputes among corporations, the market, and the individual. Time suggests that nothing else can take its place, though from time to time corporations have offered to do so.”
Who or what will solve the disputes surrounding our public schools? According to Joel Klein, for eight years chancellor of New York City’s school system, in his June Atlantic piece, The Failure of American Schools, the conflict and divisiveness isn’t between management and labor but between management working with a co-opted union and politicians in conflict with children’s needs. Says Klein, “The school system doesn’t want to change, because it serves the needs of the adult stakeholders quite well, both politically and financially.” Klein concludes: “We need to foster a culture that supports innovation.”
For all their “special-interest selfishness,” most of our successful corporations have advanced and compete on their capability to innovate, while schools have declined due to their inability to innovate. But is there foreshadowing in the current economic crisis suggesting yet more implosions: Health Care’s inability to innovate; lack of innovation in energy and other green-sustainable industries; corporation management further removed from their work force as a result of globalization, automation, and the replacement of specialized manufacturing or trade skills with generalized office work capabilities; further declines for schools. Corporatism is not capitalism; unionism is not organized labor.
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Good Grief, Robert Duncan
…tome views for the eye weary
this failure of sound is song lost
the sinking touch, just out of reach
“grandeurs”? you want to speak
of Hopkins?“the world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.”
Meantime, Word.docx
Objects
Casually
Questioning
yr txt
my txt
evrybdys wrds.
The Coming of the Toads 