Five articles in one newspaper

Today's International Herald Tribune contains not the usual one or two interesting articles but, count 'em, five!

There's an article about five neuroscientists taking a kayaking trip off the grid (and off-line), in which they reflect on the ways that the brain responds to the information society and to their temporary escape from it. (It's a little ironic that my response to this article is to want to provide a link to it for my friends.) My small version of the same is that I did not go on-line at all on Sunday (not even with my iPhone), and that it is always a bit of relief to "disconnect" myself.

Robert Pinsky's review of Andrew Pettegree's The Book in the Renaissance, a new study of the first century or so of movable type and the central problem printers faced: how can you make money from publishing? Pinsky praises Pettegree for refraining from comparisons between then and now, but it's certainly easy to do so, given that Pettegree argues that printers only made money when they focused on "news, sensation, and excitement." So there was no Golden Age of printing when people bought classic literature and philosophy and read them; sensationalism has always been the best way to make money with printing and publishing.

Timothy E. Williamson's opinion piece on the imagination has a dozen or so fascinating points in it, but for me the best point is his brief discussion of the contemporary philosophical contrast between "contexts of discovery" and "contexts of justification":

In the context of discovery, we get ideas, no matter how — dreams or drugs will do. Then, in the context of justification, we assemble objective evidence to determine whether the ideas are correct.

I've come across this idea quite a few times before, but I've never seen it explained so tightly and clearly. (Well, my student Michael Luscher explained the distinction in my verse-novels seminar in 2009, but we were discussing Christoph Ransmayr's Der fliegende Berg, so that discussion was in German, and I did not register that he was using the German equivalents of these terms. Now, in retrospect, I can see how appropriate and precise his use and explanation of the terminology was!)

Then there's Lawrence E. Joseph's article on the threat caused by solar storms, which can produce huge bursts of electricity that destroy transformers on Earth, and Paul Krugman's vigorous defense of the Social Security system in the U.S. against its detractors.

This post is an excercise in multi-tasking, in a way, with all the different points it has to make, and is thus subject to the analysis that appears in the first article I linked to, about the kayaking neuroscientists. But it's worth noting that I read all these articles in the newspaper, and not on-line, in the old-fashioned way—that is, in a desperate search for "news, sensation, and entertainment". :-)

Ciaran Carson's Dante

Ciaran Carson's translation of Dante's Inferno was such a rush to read that I was still buzzing from it a day after finishing it. It's chock full of quotable passages, but I was particularly pleased to find a fantastic bit of trash talking between two sinners in Canto XXX:

"Though I'm kept back,"
he quipped, from moving by my watery weight,
I have this arm that's well-prepared to smack."

The other said: "You weren't so free with it
the time they put you to the fire; the alloy
that you'd coined with it had sealed your fate."

The dropsied one: "You speak the truth, old boy;
but not so truthful were you, truth to tell,
when you were asked to tell the truth at Troy."

"If I spoke false, your coin spoke false as well,"
said Sinon. "I'm here for a single falsehood;
you, for more than any fiend in hell."

"Remember, perjurer, the horse of wood,"
replied the Paunch, "and may it torture you
to know the whole world knows that you're no good!"

"With thirsty tongue may you be tortured, too,"
the Greek shot back, "and with the dropsied piss
that swells your gut to keep the world from view!"

The forger then: "Your filthy orifice
spews out the usual ravings of your brain;
and if my thirst has bloated me, your sickness

makes you burn, and gives your head a pain;
and were Narcissus' mirror conjured here
for you to lick, I don't think you'd abstain."

Virgil threatens to chew Dante out for lingering too long—and as I noted when I read the Aeneid last year, Virgil was just as good at representing trash talking as Dante himself!

*

And this passage from Canto VII seems like a nice comment on our contemporary financial crisis (Virgil is commenting on the avaricious):

My son, see how the wheel of fortune whirls!
Observe them, as they dance to money's tune,
in money wars eternally ensnarled!

Not all the gold that lies beneath the mon,
or ever did, could buy a moment's rest
for even one of these misguided fools.

*

The other verse Inferno I have read is Robert Pinsky's, which I read with delight back in 1998. But while that delight was made possible by Pinsky's translation (I don't know Italian), its source was, I now realize, Dante's magnificent work itself. In contrast, Carson's translation crackles with a ferocious energy that had me gasping at times, I was so impressed, and often had me laughing out loud (as with the trash talking). For comparison, here's Pinsky's version of the same passage from Canto VII:

"Now you can see, my son, how ludicrous
And brief are all the goods in Fortune's ken,
Which humankind contend for: you see from this

How all the gold there is beneath the moon,
Or that there ever was, could not relieve
One of these weary souls."

Pinsky's Virgil: majestic, sonorous, oratorical. Carson's Virgil: temperamental, impatient, aggressive. At least in this reader's experience, that stands for the difference between the two, and it explains why Pinsky's book is a good read, while Carson's is a great one.

A Measuring Worm; The Magic Kingdom; The Saws

By now, as far as I understand, the poetry in the latest issues of The New Yorker is Paul Muldoon's responsibility, not Alice Quinn's. So perhaps it is thanks to Muldoon that one can read this Richard Wilbur poem, "A Measuring Worm", in the February 11 issue (which I have not yet held in my hands, though, thanks to Perlentaucher, I already the poem on-line).

I love Wilbur's use of this stanza, here and elsewhere:

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Each stanza is a haiku, with the first and third lines rhyming.

*

After writing the above, I went on to read the next poem on-line from that issue, Kathleen Graber's "The Magic Kingdom." Now (assuming that Muldoon picked that one) that is a poem that, as far as I can tell from years of reading the poems she edited, Quinn would not have chosen.

*

And just to make the list complete, here's the third poem from the same issue, Robert Pinsky's "The Saws." Not a bad set of poems for once! I cannot remember the last time there were three poems in the New Yorker and I did not think, about least one of them, "why would anyone want to publish that bland piece of boredom?"

Daily Poem Project, Weeks 7 and 8

Since class did not take place on Tuesday, May 23 (as I was on paternity leave after Sara's birth), the votes for week 7 (Tuesday, May 16, to Monday, May 22) and week 8 (Tuesday, May 23, and Monday, May 29) both took place in class on Tuesday morning, May 30.

The vote for week 7 had a clear winner: Ingeborg Bachmann's poem "I Step Outside Myself," as translated by Peter Filkins, received six votes. Three poems received three votes each: Robert Creeley's "Talking," Luciano Erba's "Without a Compass (as translated by Ann Snodgrass), and Davis McCombs's "The Elgin Marbles." As for me, I voted (along with only one other person) for Henry Taylor's "A Crosstown Breeze," the only poem which made me go "wow" when I finished reading it. I enjoyed Taylor's smooth transitions between present experience and past memory (and, as usual this term, the poem's rhyming).

Creeley's poem was very memorable, too, so I did consider it carefully before deciding to vote for the Taylor. I even exchanged some email with my friend Angie Harris about it: Creeley's sharp observations about how conversation sometimes works came back to me when Angie made a comment about her own "special conversational backwardness," that of the philosophy student who often sees everyday discussions as examples of philosophical debates (something that I love to experience).

The vote for week 8 was closer: 6-5 for the first two poems. The winner was "The Nosebleed," by Rachel Hadas, with Robert Pinsky's "Pliers" in second place. Hadas's beautiful description and interpretation of an everyday scene is impressive and memorable: the speaker observes a woman and her daughter on the street, having thought (correctly) that the daughter was having a nosebleed. She concludes:

love as rocking cradle that two can rest in,
bodies nested, cupped in one curve of shelter;
question, answer; need met as it arises.
Trouble breeds comfort.

I wonder if it was the well-earned power of that final line that caught people's attention.

For the first time ever, the poem I voted for received no other votes: J. Allyn Rosser's "Gym Dance with the Doors Wide Open." Again, I surely fell for the poem's lovely rhyming, but I was probably also inclined to vote for Rosser because she is an acquaintance of mine from days in Philadelphia, one whose work I have been enjoying for several years now. Hadas's poem came close for me, but I decided to vote for Rosser instead.

Of special mention here is Yves Bonnefoy's spectacular "Let This World Endure," as translated by Hoyt Rogers. This long poem reads like a beautiful prayer, and Rogers's translation is wholly convincing.

Week 6
Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1 (with explanation of project)