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editor
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 Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 11:40 am Post subject: |
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Watch for a sign.
Art and Nature
An Illustrated Anthology of Nature Poetry
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Hardcover
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | ARS POETICA
To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.
To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.
To see in the day or in the year a symbol
of makind’s days and of his years,
To transform the outage of the years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,
To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.
At times in the afternoon a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours.
They tell how Ulysses, glutted with wonders,
Wept with love to descry his Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of wonders.
It is also like an endless river
That passes and remains, a mirror for one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And another, like an endless river.
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine, 1899-1986
(-- p. 64) |
| Quote: | Arte Poética
Mirar el río hecho de tiempo y agua
y recordar que el tiempo es otro río,
saber que nos perdemos como el río
y que los rostros pasan como el agua.
Sentir que la vigilia es otro sueño
que sueña no soñar y que la muerte
que teme nuestra carne es esa muerte
de cada noche, que se llama sueño.
Ver en el día o en el año un símbolo
de los días del hombre y de sus años,
convertir el ultraje de los años
en una música, un rumor y un símbolo,
ver en la muerte el sueño, en el ocaso
un triste oro, tal es la poesía
que es inmortal y pobre. La poesía
vuelve como la aurora y el ocaso.
A veces en las tardes una cara
nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo;
el arte debe ser como ese espejo
que nos revela nuestra propia cara.
Cuentan que Ulises, harto de prodigios,
lloró de amor al divisar su Itaca
verde y humilde. El arte es esa Itaca
de verde eternidad, no de prodigios.
También es como el río interminable
que pasa y queda y es cristal de un mismo
Heráclito inconstante, que es el mismo
y es otro, como el río interminable. |
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| Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 11:35 am Post subject: |
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On the perils of posthumous publication:
From Omens and Lucky Charms:
The First Man
Hardcover
By Albert Camus
His Final Work
| Quote: | ... "I hope you haven't touched the cord."
"No," said the woman, laughing. "We had to leave you something to do."
She got up and gave her place to the doctor, who again blocked the newborn from the sight of Cormery, still at the door, his head uncovered. The doctor squatted and opened his case; then he took the basin from the hands of the Arab woman, who immediately withdrew from the circle of light and took refuge in the dark angle of the fireplace. The doctor washed his hands, his back still to the door, then poured on thos hands some alcohol that smelled a bit like grape liquor; its odor at once filled the room. At that moment, the wife lifted her head and saw her husband. A marvelous smile transfigured that exhausted beautiful face. Cormery went over to the mattress. "He came," she said under her breath, and she reached out her hand to the infant.
"Yes," said the doctor. "But stay still." The wife gave him a questioning look.
Cormery, standing at the foot of the mattress, made a quieting gesture. "Lie down."
She lay back down again. The rain began to come down twice as hard on the old tile roof. The doctor went to work under the blanket. Then he straightened up and seemed to shake something in front of him. A small cry was heard. "It's a boy," the doctor said. "And a good sturdy one."
"There's one who's getting off to a good start," said the owner of the canteen. "By moving to a new home." (-- pgs. 16-17) |
On the impossible odds against the book's publication:
| Quote: | So, in denouncing totalitarianism, and in advocating a multicultural Algeria where both communities would enjoy the same rights, Camus antagonized both the right and the left. At the time of his death he was very much isolated and subject to attacks from all sides designed to destroy the man and the artist so that his ideas would have no impact.
In these circumstances, to have published an unfinished manuscript - 144 handwritten pages, often lacking periods and commas, never revised - might well have given ammunition to those who were saying Camus was through as a writer. His friends and my mother decided not to run that risk. My twin brother and I had no say in the decision, for we were only fourteen years old.
The years went by, my mother died in 1979, and I assumed the responsibility that had been hers. Between 1980 and 1985 voices began to be heard saying that perhaps Camus had not been so wrong, and little by little the old disputes died down. As for me, I first had to learn how to deal with a work of literature. I prepared Camus's Carnet III for publication, and then in the early 1990s my brother and I had to confront the question of Le Premier Homme. Two considerations persuaded us. First, we believed a manscript of such importance would sooner or later be published unless we destroyed it. Since we had no right to destroy it, we preferred to publish it ourselves so that it would appear exactly as it was. Secondly, it seemed to us that this autobiographical account would be of exceptional value to thos interested in Camus. (From Editor's Note, Catherine Camus, March, 1995, pgs. vi-vii) |
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| Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:09 pm Post subject: |
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The Paula Jennings baseline for novice poets:
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A Trilogy in Four Parts
Hardcover
By Douglas Adams
| Quote: | Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Frunthos the Flatulent of his poem 'Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning' four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilation, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.
The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England in the destruction of the planet Earth. ...
The prisoners sat in Poetry Appreciation chairs - strapped in. Vogons suffered no illusions as to the regard their works were generally held in. Their early attempts at composition had been part of a bludgeoning insistence that they be accepted as a properly eveolved and cultured race, but now the oly thing that kept them going was sheer bloodymindedness.
The sweat stood out cold on Ford Prefect's brow, and slid round the electrodes strapped to his temples. These were attached to a battery of electronic equipment - imagery intensifiers, rhythmic modulators, alliterative residulators and simile dumpers - all designed to heighten the experience of the poem and make sure that not a single nuance of the poet's thought was lost.
Arthur Den sat and quivered. He had no idea what he was in for, but he knew that he hadn't liked anything that had happened so far and didn't think things were likely to change.
The Vogon began to read - a fetid little passage of his own devising. ...
The Vogon perused them. For a moment his embittered racial soul had been touched, but he thought no - too little too late. His voice took on the quality of a cat snagging brushed nylon.
'So what you're saying is that I write poetry because underneath my mean callous heartless exterior I really just want to be love,' he said. He paused. 'Is that right?'
Ford laughed a nervous laugh. 'Well I mean yes,' he said, 'don't we all, deep down, you know... er...'
The Vogon stood up.
'No, well you're completely wrong,' he said, 'I just write poetry to throw my mean callous heartless exterior into sharp relief. I'm going to throw you off the ship anyway. Guard! Take the prisoners to number three airlock and throw them out!' (From the first of the series, Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 7, pgs. 55-57) |
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 11:21 am Post subject: |
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On the importance of early exposure to a variety of literature:
From Hosers, eh?
The Merry Heart
Hardcover
By Robertson Davies
| Quote: | Here I should like to speak in praise of the committee, as I suppose it must have been, who chose the material for those old Ontario School Readers. These were graded to meet the reading ability of children between six and twelve, but they were not confined to somebody's notion of what children at that time of life might most easily understand. The Readers contained a good deal of what was commonplace, and much that was of a narrowly moral tendency because in the course time the Little Red Hen changed her name to Benjamin Franklin, and we were confronted with samples of his cautious, cynical, mean-spirited attitude toward life - the boy who was warned against adults who wanted him to turn the grindstone, and the boy who paid too much for his whistle - as if the price of a really fine, heart-lifting whistle could be estimated in money. This was in the vein of the Little Red Hen, whose influence is strong. It is not commonly known that two of her chicks went into the Reader business for themselves, under the names of Dick and Jane. But there were splendid, life-enhancing things, as well. There was Aesop, whose fables were gold, whereas the Little Red Hen and Benjamin Franklin were gilded tin. There was somebody of whom I know nothing, called F.W. Bourdillon, who, when we were eight, told us that -
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
There's a mind-stretcher for children! There is what I think of as an educational time-bomb, for it reaches its target, and explodes later. I suppose it was fifteen years after I read that poem in school before I really understood what it meant, but when I needed it, there it was, ready to mind.
Who put these time-bombs in those Readers? Some unknown teacher who would not have agreed with the later education psychologists who were so earnest in their desire that a child should not be confronted with anything it could not fully comprehend, and who were astonishingly sure that they knew what children could comprehend, and who never understood how warmly intelligent children respond to what they partly comprehend. Another of these time-bombs was this -
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauty see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.
Nobody told us that was a Pindaric, and a great one. Nobody said anything about the author, Ben Jonson. They simply said that it meant that you could lead a good life even as a child. That was enough for us at the time. But the splendour of expression is for a lifetime.
(From A Rake at Reading, pgs. 5-7) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 8:18 am Post subject: |
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Beware mischeivous artistic delusions.
From the Fighting Irish:
Bernard Shaw
Selections of His Wit and Wisdom
Hardcover
Compiled by Caroline Thomas Harnsberger
| Quote: | WRITING
3 The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are not for an age but for all time has his reward in being unreadable in all ages.
-- The Sanity of Art, Preface
4 The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
-- Ibid.
...
10 ... An author is an instrument in the grip of Creative Evolution, and may find himself starting amovement to which in his own little person he is intensely opposed. When I am writing a play I never invent a plot: I lte the play write itself and shape itself, which it always does even when up to the last moment I do not foresee the way out.
-- Back to Methuselah, Postscript
11 I never felt inclined to write, any more than to breathe. It never occurred to me that the literary sense was exceptional: I gave everyone credit for it; for there is nothing miraculous in a natural faculty to the man who has it... I never watned to write. I know now, of course, the scarcity of literary faculty; but I still don't want it. You cannot want a thing and have it, too.
-- Sixteen Self Sketches, p. 82
12 When a young man told Shaw he had hopes of being a writer, Shaw said:
Don't. But if you must, write about what you know.
-- The Shavian, May, 1955
...
14 When asked about Dickens' influence on him, Shaw replied:
My work is "all over Dickens." What appeals to me are the monstrous and side-splitting verbal antics that never for a moment come within a mile of any possible human utterance; that is what I call true mastery; knowing exactly how to be unerringly true and serious whilst entertaining your reader with every trick, freak, and sally that imagination and humor can conceive at their freest and wildest.
-- Henderson, Man of the Century, p. 729
WRONG
The gratuitous delusion that the great poet and artist can do no wrong is much more mischievous than the necessary convention that the King can do no wrong and that the Pope is infallible.
-- The Sanity of Art
(-- pgs. 380-382) |
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| Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 9:39 am Post subject: |
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Don't expect critics or readers to understand your work.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Paperback
By California Dreamer Joan Didion
| Quote: | | "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is also the title of one piece in the book, and that piece, which derived from some time spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it was printed. It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart: I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder. That was why the piece was important to me. And after it was printed I saw that, however directly and flatly I thought I had said it, I had failed to get through to many of the people who read and even liked the piece, failed to suggest that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads... I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point. (A Preface, pgs. xiii-xiv) |
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| Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2008 7:57 am Post subject: |
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Write what you know.
Life at Blandings
Somewhat Ungainly Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | A Certain critic - for such men, I regret to say, do exist - made the nasty remark about my latest novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha; but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.
...
The fact is, I cannot tear myself away from Blandings Castle. The place exercises a sort of spell over me. I am always popping down to Shropshire and looking in there to hear the latest news, and there always seems to be something to interest me. It is in the hope that it will also interest My Public that I have jotted down the bit of gossip from the old spot which I have called Summer Lightning. (From the Preface, p. 247) |
On coming up with a title:
| Quote: | | A word about the title. It is related of Thackeray that, hitting upon Vanity Fair after retiring to rest one night, he leaped out of bed and ran seven times round the room, shouting at the top of his voice. Oddly enough, I behaved in exactly the same way when I thought of Summer Lightning. I recognized it immediately as the ideal title for a novel. My exuberance has been a little diminished since by the discovery that I am not the only one who thinks highly of it. Already I have been informed that two novels with the same name have been published in England, and my agent in America cables to say that three have recently been placed on the market in the United States. As my story has appeared in serial form under its present label, it is too late to alter it now. I can only express the modest hope that this story will be considered worthy of inclusion in the list of the Hundred Best Books Called Summer Lightning. (Ibid., p. 248) |
| Quote: | Summer Lightning
Audio CD
Narrated by British actor Martin Jarvis
No idea why publisher wouldn't hire the congenial Jeeves and Wooster duo, Stephen Fry or Hugh Laurie or the excellent Jonathan Cecil. Still, the writing is so sunnily good, it's probably actor proof. Highly recommended as an analgesic to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune punctuating most human lives - esp those of earnest ESL students, who will be jollied along with the gentle Wodehous humor.
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 8:13 am Post subject: |
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Study the favorite works of writers you admire.
From The Horses:
Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
The History Boys
In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman - unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated - while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that's preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halbertsam asserts that Bush's "history," like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.
August, 2007
| Quote: | ... when I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty - take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army. ...
You don't hear other members of the current administration citing the lessons of Vietnam much, either, especially Cheney and Karl Rove, both of them gifted at working the bureaucracy for short-range political benefits, both highly partisan and manipulative, both unspeakably narrow and largely uninterested in understanding and learning about the larger world. As Joan Didion pointed out in her brilliant essay on Cheney in The New York Review of Books, it was Rumsfeld and Cheney who explained to Henry Kissinger, not usually slow on the draw when it came to the political impact of foreign policy, that Vietnam was likely to create a vast political backlash against the liberal McGovern forces. The two, relatively junior operators back then, were interested less in what had gone wrong in Vietnam than in getting some political benefit out of it. Cheney still speaks of Vietnam as a noble rather than a tragic endeavor, not that he felt at the time - with his five military deferments - that he needed to be part of that nobility.
Still, it is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn't see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world. As in Vietnam, our military superiority is neutralized by political vulnerabilities. The borders are wide open. We operate quite predictably on marginal military intelligence. The adversary knows exactly where we are at all times, as we do not know where he is. Their weaponry fits an asymmetrical war, and they have the capacity to blend into the daily flow of Iraqi life, as we cannot. Our allies - the good Iraqi people the president likes to talk about - appear to be more and more ambivalent about the idea of a Christian, Caucasian liberation, and they do not seem to share many of our geopolitical goals.
The book that brought me to history some 53 years ago, when I was a junior in college, was Cecil Woodham-Smith's wondrous The Reason Why, the story of why the Light Brigade marched into the Valley of Death, to be senselessly slaughtered, in the Crimean War. It is a tale of such folly and incompetence in leadership (then, in the British military, a man could buy the command of a regiment) that it is not just the story of a battle but an indictment of the entire British Empire. It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude. The arrogance of power, Senator William Fulbright called it during the Vietnam years. (-- pgs. 124, 168) |
The New York Review of Books
Magazine Subscription
Cheney: The Fatal Touch
By Joan Didion
Oct. 5/06
| Quote: | | It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, 'called Yale and told 'em to take this guy.' The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave. (Sample paragaph online) |
The Reason Why
Paperback
By Cecil Woodham-Smith
| Quote: | The vital period in the formation of Britain's policy towards her Army was the period of government by Cromwell's Major-Generals. The people of England were thensubjected to a military dictatorship, they were ruled by Army officers who were professional soldiers, and, who, though admittedly the finest soldiers in the world, usually had no stake in the country, and often were military adventurers. Their government was harsh and arbitrary, and the nation came to detest the very name of the Army.
After the Restoration, nation and Parliament were equally determined that never again should the Army be in the hands of men likely to bring about a military revolution and impose a military dictatorship. With this object, purchase was introduced when a standing Army was formed in 1683. Men were to become officers only if they cold pay down a substantial sum for their commission; that is, if they were men of property with a stake in the country, not military adventurers. As a secondary consideration the purchase price acted as a guarantee of good behaviour, a man dismissed the service forfeited what he had paid. From that date it was the settled policy both of Parliament and of the Crown to draw the officers of the British Army from the class which had everything to lose and nothing to gain from a military revolution. The formation of an Army on the lines of Continental models, offered by professional soldiers, dependent on their pay and looking to the service to make their fortunes, was deliberately avoided. "Parliament has never sought to attract to the command of the army men dependent on their payk, either to hold their place in Society as gentlemen, or to maintain the higher social status assumed by Military officers over the civil community," wrote Clode, the nineteenth-century authority on military administration (see Charles M. Clode, The Administration of Justice under Military and Martial Law, as Applicable to the Army, Navy, Marines, and Auxiliary Forces. 2d ed. rev. and enl. London: J. Murray, 1874. LCCN: ltf91025900. KD6290 .C56 1874). Men of no fortune were not wanted; if they chose to come in it was at their own risk. ... (-- pgs. 22-23) |
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| Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 1:45 pm Post subject: |
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Expect the unexpected. You never know where poetry might take you.
From Gambling on God:
Galileo's Daughter
A Historical Memoir of
Science, Faith and Love
Hardcover
By Dava Sobel
| Quote: | Galileo, now fifty-nine, also stood boldly alone in his worldview, as Suor Maria Celeste (*his equally brilliant daughter whom he cloistered in a nunnery because despite his 'genius' he lacked the foresight to imagine what hell his decision not to marry his mistress would cause his subsequent children - esp the girls!) knew from reading the books he wrote and the letters he shared with her from colleagues and critics all over Italy, as well as from across the continent beyond the Alps. Although her father had started his career as a professor of mathematics, teaching frist at Pisa and then at Padua, every philosopher in Europe tied Galileo's name to the msot startling series of astronomical discoveries ever claimed by a single individual.
In 1969, when Suor Maria Celeste was still a child in Padua, Galileo had set a telescope in the garden behind his house and turned it skyward. Never-before-seen stars leaped out of the darkness to enhance familiar constellations; the nebulous Milky Way resolved into a swath of densely packed star; mountains and valleys pockmarked the storied perfection of the Moon; and a retinue of four attendant bodies traveled regularly around Jupiter like a planetary system in miniature.
"I render infinte thanks to God," Galileo intoned after those nights of wonder, "for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries."
The newfound worlds transformed Galileo's life. He won appointment as chief mathematician and philosopher to the grand duke in 1610, and moved to Florence to assume his position at the court of Cosimo de' Medici. He took along with him his two daughters, then ten and nine years old, but he left Vincenzio, who was only four when greatness descended on the family, to live awhile longer in Padua with Marina (his mistress).
Galileo found himself lionized as another Columbus for his conquests. Even as he attained the height of his glory, however, he attracted enmity and suspicion. For instead of opening a distant land dominated by heathens, Galileo trespassed on holy ground. Hardly had his first spate of findings stunned the populace of Durope before a new wave followed: He saw dark spots creeping continuously across the face of the Sun, and "the mother of loves," as he called the planet Venus, cycling through phases from full to crescent, just as the moon did. ...
... In 1616, a pope and a cardinal inquisitor reprimanded Galileo, warning him to curtail his forays into the supernal realms. The motions of the heavenly bodies, they said, having been touched upon in the Psalms, the Book of Joshua, and elsewhere in the Bible, were matters best left to the Holy Fathers of the Church.
Galileo obeyed their orders, silencing himself on the subject. For seven cautious years he turned his efforts to less perilous pursuits, such as harnessing his Jovian satellites in the service of navigation, to help sailors discover their longitude at sea. He studied poetry and wrote literary ciriticism. Modifying his telescope, he developed a compound microscope. "I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration," he reported, "among which the flea is quite horrible, the gnat and the moth very beautiful; and with great satisfaction I have seen how flies and other little animals can walk attached to mirrors, upside down." (From She Who Was So Precious to You, pgs. 6-7) |
* Reason 4, 3444, 119, 567, 689 why many of us have a hard time admiring the 'genius' men of science - PU!
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editor
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| Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 8:34 am Post subject: |
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Never underestimate parental influence.
From Celebrated Women Gamblers:
This England
THE MATHEMATICAL GENIUS OF AN
ENGLISH COUNTESS
By Bel Bailey
Summer, 2007
| Quote: | The famous Lord Byron fervently hoped that his daughter, Augusta Ada, would never become a poet like himself. His wish was granted as she was destined to become famous for her scientific and mathematical genius instead.
Born in 1815, Ada's parents separated when she was only a few months old and her father left Britain forrever. He never fought his wife Annabella for custody of their child so Ada was brought up by her mother. Unfortunately, she was a harsh and narrowly religious woman who dominated her daughter all her brief life.
Ada was educated privately by tutors and then self-taught. Augustus de Morgan helped her in her advanced studies however. He was first professor of mathematics at London University and developed the theories and techniques behind modern computer programs.
Another early computer pioneer, Charles Babbage, was also introduced to Ada and they became close friends and allies. Learning that he was in the process of designing a revolutionary calculating machine - the first of all computers - Ada eagerly offered to help him.
She was rather an enigma to her friends in society as she was an attractive and high-spirited girl, fond of fashion and dancing, yet sincerely claimed that subjects they regarded as heavy - astronomy, algebra, trigonometry - were "true refreshment!"
By the age of 18 she was very interested in Babbage's machines. Even her marriage two years later, the birth of her three children and her becoming the Countess of Lovelace in 1838, did nothing to diminish that interest.
Ada was one of the first mathematicians to see that Babbage's "Analytical Engine" had tremendous implications and would be one of the great breakthroughs of the century.
An Italian engineer and mathematician, Luigi Federico Menabrea, had written an article on Babbage's invention and this was translated by Ada in 1843, and expanded with her own notes and examples based on computing mathematics.
After publication, Ada's clear explanations were praised as extremely helpful, especially her description of how Babbage's "Analytical Engine" could be programmed to compute Bernoulli numbers. She described the engine "weaving algebraic numbers, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves," an original and striking thought!
Alas, so keen were Babbage and Ada to raise money for this great invention which obsessed them both, and they wanted to develop further, that they created fresh problems for themselves. The pair gambled desperately, working on systems to predict the outcome of horse races. Here they came badly unstuck in an unscientific field. Their money-raising efforts were a disaster and the pair came close to financial ruin.
This worry caused Ada's very robust health to deteriorate and she died at the early age of 37 - just one year older than her father had been at his death.
She had always craved to know her father better and mourned his passing when she was only nine years old. Byron would indeed have been delighted with her fame in a field so different from his own.
Since the time of King John the name Ada had been in the Byron family and today it lives on in a different context. As she was the first computer programmer, the universal programming language developed by the American Defence Department in the 1970s was called Ada in honour of the unique Countess of Lovelace. (-- p. 53) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 10:59 am Post subject: |
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Don't second-guess your publisher and NEVER underestimate readers.
Screams from the Balcony
Selected Letters 1960-1970
Paperback
By an old friend, Charles Bukowski
Edited by Seamus Cooney
| Quote: | [To Tom McNamara]
May sicks, 1965
writers are a sick-head lot, a gathering of neon-light tasters, spitting out their words, their absurdities, their bile, their orange-juice blood. we are down in submarines; we don't know; a nervous nasty lot...
I'd rather sleep for 3 or 4 days than do anything, so what happens? I can't sleep at all. I worry about motor tuneups and the death of sparrows. and all the women walking around and me not fucking them. then, sometimes I think I am too much topsoil, I want to get under, forget the toteboard and gambol with the worms (later, I know), so the other night I am wandering around at 4 in the morning and I pick up something by a Chinaman, 300 or 200 B.C., a couple of centuries after Confucious, and here's this guy running around giving the word to Dukes and State Ministers and Kings, but it doesn't reach me, I don't have any armies or loyal subjects or disloyal subjects, only a matter of keeping myself alive another 15 or 20 years if I feel like it. more wasted time. now I've got a pain under the collarbone; I've been going a pack and a half but my pecker is hard when I awaken the few times I've slept. I am angry with white Spanish walls and sound of tires on pavement. no, I don't read much anymore - Dunleavy, anybody. it's a matter of the juices saying no, no, no. no. there's simply no intake. if I power it down against the grain I am deader than I am now and that wd. be some horrible thing, ah.
I hear Lyle Stuart is going to charge $7.50 for Crucifix in a Deathhand, my new book of poems. It has expensive paper, format, plates of artwork and so on, but I can't see anybody paing $7.50 for a book of poems, and he has 3,000 books of poems, and so I guess he's going to have to stack them wall to wall and forget it. most of the people, I think, who might go my poems, most of them don't even have $7.50 and if they did they'd prob. buy something to drink. well, I write the stuff and what they do with it is theirs. the paper is supposed to last 800 years or 1800 years I forget which and I don't know, except one bomb or bad poetry will take care of all that. ... (-- pgs. 151-152) |
Crucifix in a Deathhand
New Poems 1963-1965
By Charles Bukowski
and New Orleans artist Noel Rockmore
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editor
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| Posted: Fri May 30, 2008 8:47 am Post subject: |
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Stand on the shoulders of giants, yes, but be original.
Screams from the Balcony
Selected Letters 1960-1970
Paperback
By an old friend, Charles Bukowski
Edited by Seamus Cooney
| Quote: | | [***]like any individual with individual experiences I have impaired vision. the capitalist goes by his experiences and instincts. I am afraid I would make a very good rich man and I am AFRAID I would keep my money. I would build walls. I would create a Greecian Art from the souls of my slaves. I would fuck young girls until I got tired of fucking young girls. I would not worry about the lettuce pickers of Salinas. I would feel pretty good: I would feel pretty brainy; I might still even have a soul. THE WHOLE THING NEEDS TO BE CLEANED UP BY FUCKING WELL REALIZING EVERYBODY. you see, your boy Dan gets me to thinking about these things. I think of Norse sick sick dying cornered, I think of the good men everywhere being swallowed by the iron sky. and it just isn't government and capitalism and MAN BEING VICTIMIZED BY OTHER MEN, IT IS MEN BEING VICTIMIZED BECAUSE THEY WERE BORN TO DIE. all this is basic, all these things are basic - yet I have never read them anywhere. why? I suppose it is in the libraries somewhere, but IT IS SO DILUTED AND TRICKY AND ARTY that it flips off like a live fish out of the hands. truly, there has been very little good clear plain and true Art created within the life of Man. in Music, yes; in Painting yes - but in the written word, no no no NO! - the written word is still sucking its own tits, crying for mama, posing. let's take a case. Burroughs. all right. he is reaching, shuffling into a NEW DIMENSION. he is bored, mad, pissed with the ordinary product. rightfully so. any sane man is, any sane insane man. but Burroughs in mixed and mixing new paints, combos, finds, flicks, colors, discoveries. ... surcharged with butter and fire, much of it not bad. Art. fine. but still he is sliding off the horizon. in trying to discover a New Reality he is losing the actual REALITY. this is his failure. let me illustrate - the only true forward-moving art is an art that discovers new form by still retaining actual reality - perhaps the best example of this is Finnegans Wake by Joyce. he moved the word out of the concept of the word but still gave us the actual world. the instance came not by accident but by the force of innards and the lonely madness of luck and the way. Burroughs pasteups of the clipped-up London Daily Herald or whatever, or standing on his knees upside down reading the bible through a film of boiling skimmed milk is often entertaining and REAL but more often a trick, a falling together of an insignificant world by tricks and a lot of glue. now it is possible to get a FREE WORLD WORD, a REAL SHOT FROM THE SKY BY WORKING THE TRICK, but down in us we know, finally, that the only way is to slug it down the river. not because our masters and schoolteachers taught us this but because the masters and schoolteachers must go, and Burroughs is only pasting their dry canine flicks upon our murdered brows IN DIFFERENT ORDER. not enough. we need new blood, new miracle not the mixing of old soup. and now that I have killed Burroughs, enough of that. (From letter [To Carl Weissner] [January 28, 1967] the next day following earlier letter (1967), pgs. 290-291) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 1:29 pm Post subject: |
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The ultimate study guide to the poetry of Robert Frost:
Homage to Robert Frost
Hardcover
By Joseph Brodsky Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский,
Seamus Heaney and
Derek Walcott
| Quote: | ... Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of his own negative potential - with his sense of what he is capable of. And it is the latter that was Frost's forte, not the former. In other words, his posture is radically different from the Continental tradition of the poet as tragic hero. And that difference alone makes him - for want of a better term - American.
On the surface, he looks very positively predisposed toward his surroundings - particularly toward nature. His fluency, indeed, his "being versed in country things" alone can produce this impression. However, there is a difference between the way a European perceives nature and the way an American does. Addressing this difference, W.H. Auden, in his short essay on the poet), suggests something to the effect that when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it's a tree made familiar by history, to which it's been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, laying down this or that law - something of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed but unchanged by that encounter, returns to his inn or cottage, finds his friends or family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up. Basically, it's epidermis meeting bark. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror.
Now, this is obviously a romantic caricature, but it accentuates the features, and that's what I am after here. In any case, the second point could be safely billed as the gist of Robert Frost's nature poetry. Nature for this poet is neither friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is the poet's terrifying self-portrait. ... (On Grief and Reason, by Joseph Brodsky, pgs. 7-9) |
Literary heavyweights converge on one of America's best-loved poet laureates. The student's best guide to writing an essay on an individual poet or poem.
Do you agree with Brodsky? Here's the poem:
| Quote: | COME IN
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music--- hark!
Now if it was dark outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went--
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.
(-- p. 9) |
| Quote: | The Poetry of Robert Frost
Audio Cassette
Narrated by Various Artists, including popular
U.S. actors Elliot Gould and Alfre Woodard,
both of whom enjoy the gift of good diction
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| Quote: | | All questions and comments gratefully received and posted. Send them to legal@pokerpulse.com. |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 8:53 am Post subject: |
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It may be wise to omit the author's photo from the book jacket.
The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
Hardcover
By Frostback Robertson Davies, alter ego of
humorist Samuel Marchbanks
| Quote: | OF THE UNSIGHTLINESS OF AUTHORS
I rarely play cards, but I was taken to the cleaners this evening by a couple of young women in a spirited game of "Authors." I reflected as I played upon the appearance of authors, as a class. They are a mangy lot. Shakespeare appears to have been a dapper fellow, but look at James Fenimore Cooper, who kept turning up again and again in the hands I was dealt. And look at Ralph Connor and Sir Gilbert Parker, the two Canadians included in the game. Scarecrows, all of them. Authors should be read, but not seen. Their work unfits them for human society. (From The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks, p. 274) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 2:19 pm Post subject: |
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On the cultivation and the valuation of the art of poetry:
From Gambler's Nosh:
The Door
Poems
Hardcover
By * Margaret Atwood
| Quote: | where do we both get off?
Is this small talent we have prized
so much, and rubbed like silver
spoons, until it shone
at least as brightly as neon, really
so much better than the ability
to win the sausage-eating contest,
or juggle six plates at once?
What's the use anyway
of calling the dead back, moving stones,
or making animals cry? I
think of you, loping along at night
to the convenience store, to buy your pint
of milk, your six medium eggs,
your head stuffed full of consonants
like lovely pebbles
you picked up on some lustrous beach
you can't remember - my feather-
headed fool, what have you got
in your almost-empty pockets
that would lure even the lowliest mugger?
Who needs your handful
of glimmering air, your foxfire, your few
underwater cyrstal tricks
that work only in moonlight?
Noon hits them and they fall apart,
old bones and earth, old teeth, a bundleful
of shadow. Sometimes, I know, the almost-holy
whiteness rooted in our skulls spreads out
like thistles in a vacant lot, a hot powdery
flare-up, which is not a halo
and will return at intervals
if we're grateful or else lucky, and
will end by fusing our neurons ...
(From Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later, pgs. 30-31) |
| Quote: | | *Note: ... and despite countless well-deserved awards, who nevertheless made time on a holiday in the Loire Valley to send a quick note to a desperate housewife fan alone and palely loitering in a foggy California bedroom community - a note we include with pride and gratitude among our own collection of 'glimmering air, foxfire and underwater crystal tricks that work only in moonlight.' |
Poetry - it's like religion. You get it if you need it.
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