When we moved to Virginia Beach two years ago, we rented a house to get to know the area better. Now we’re buying a place in a small town down the road, which means we’ll be moving (again), which means my hands are needed to lift boxes and drive a truck, which means no Prufrock for the first part of next week. I’ll be back on July 5th, God willing.
Moving is bad, but it could be worse. Earlier this week, for example, I could have been stuck in room LK 250 Berg C on the second floor of the Li Ka Shing Conference Center at Stanford University measuring the decline of civilization at the Emoji 2018 conference, where researchers gathered to discuss “how emoji are changing the way we communicate online, how gender and political affiliation are reproduced online through emoji,” among other things.
Harlan Ellison has died. He was 84. A few years ago, Matthew Continetti wrote a nice evaluation of the man and his work. Here’s a snippet: “Who is Harlan Ellison? Novelist, essayist, short-story writer, television critic, anthologist, screenwriter, lecturer, activist, gadfly, he is the author of dozens upon dozens of books, and the winner of numerous awards. You can read a partial list here. Praised by Isaac Asimov (‘He is never anywhere without you knowing he is there’), Michael Crichton (‘He is a genuine original, one of a kind, difficult to categorize and unwilling to make it any easier’), and Stephen King (‘The man is a ferociously talented writer’), Ellison’s career has been marked by disputation, controversy, and braggadocio. He can be frustrating, off-putting. But he is also inspiring.”
Ange Mlinko talks about her poetry and writing process at LitHub: “I’m always trying to balance conspicuousness and invisibility—I love anagrams and sight rhymes, I love using a sight rhyme and then embedding a perfect rhyme in a surprising place. I love a witty, Byronic rhyme much more than an orthodox rhyme. I let the rhyme have its way with me, because a more interesting stanza will come about that way, one I could never have planned with my rational brain. I believe in pattern, if nothing else, as an antidote to garrulousness.”
Stefan Kanfer writes in praise of black-and-white films.
Forgive me if I don’t share Carey Lovelace’s opinion that 600 tons of neatly arranged 55-gallon barrels floating in London’s Serpentine Lake is “quietly miraculous.” It is colorful, however, and thankfully “completely self-funded.”
John McWhorter brings the thunder on racial preferences in college admissions: “Much can be said about how slavery, Jim Crow, and white racism have conditioned a people to underestimate their own cognitive abilities. However, the nasty truth is that racial preferences, in being maintained so far past their sell-by date, now maintain rather than break with toxic preconceptions we should be long past. To wit, lowering standards for black and Latino applicants is now a retrogressive rather than progressive approach. Or, racist, at least. I know of no more vivid indication of racism today than the idea that brown people are human history’s first who can only truly compete under ideal conditions. I know of no more vivid hypocrisy on the part of those who style themselves black people’s fellow travelers than to earnestly dismiss claims that black people’s average IQ is lower than other peoples’ while in the same breath nodding vigorously that a humane society must not subject the same people to challenging tests. Moreover, I know of no more tragic indication of a people’s internalization of the oppressor’s racism than a bright black NAACP lawyer arguing with proud indignation that if black people don’t do well on a test it’s society’s job to eliminate the test or make it easier.”
Essay of the Day:
In the New York Times Magazine, Adin Dobkin revisits the work of poet Alan Seeger—an American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion during WWI:
“You don’t find much Seeger among the poems revered for their chronicling of World War I. Not like those of Wilfred Owen or Robert Graves, two of the most popular poets of a war whose verse defined its cultural legacy. Death in their poems has none of the glimmer Seeger gives it. Owen describes ‘Knock-kneed’ soldiers ‘coughing like hags’ before a gas attack hits. ‘His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin . . ./Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, — ‘ is what’s left of one who doesn’t secure his gas mask quickly enough. The poem ends with its title and war’s enduring lie: ‘Dulce et Decorum est/Pro patria mori.’ It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.
“Poets don’t command much attention these days, but you can still hear Owen’s and Graves’s poems on television specials about the war. Their depictions of life in the trenches match up with the images most commonly associated with World War I. It’s no coincidence: Their poems helped form that picture. The war’s cultural history and its actual one have become entwined over time so that the work of these two poets are more memorials — stone scrolls that speak of death by gas and sightless charges over the edge of trenches — than that of writers with whom modern-day readers genuinely engage. Seeger is something still less: not a writer who faded away to acclaim of a ceremonial sort, but one who became unfashionable to even the most hospitable critics of the postwar years. Knowing what they knew, the literary crowd found Seeger’s poems antiquated, if not outright dishonest. They felt that readers should see the depth that European society had sunk to in World War I.
“A poet whom many critics found unremarkable, whose efforts ended before his prime, who depicted a war that may not have ever existed in reality — is there any reason to remember his poems from among the tens of thousands written during the war? What is lost along with Seeger when he’s passed over?
“It’s not that Seeger was an inadequate craftsman. What his poems lacked was by design. The vision of the war that Graves and Owen presented was secondary to Seeger. He saw what they saw, recognized it and looked elsewhere. He witnessed the truth of the war, sometimes before others who are remembered for their cold honesty. In December 1914, while others still harbored hope they might make it home by Christmas, Seeger wrote to his father that the ‘war will probably last a long while.’ He described being ‘harried like this by an invisible enemy and standing up against the dangers of battle without any of its exhilaration or enthusiasm.’ This knowledge didn’t dent his outlook of the war. To him, it was ‘the supreme experience,’ a part of nature humans were destined to take part in.”
Photo: Flamingos
Poem: Elizabeth Poreba, “Kenosis”
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