proper study

In his Worse Than War: genocide, eliminationism, and the ongoing assault on humanity Daniel Jonah Goldhagen says, “In our time virtually all manner of peoples have perpetrated mass murder against virtually all kinds of victims.”

It’s a statement surrounded by examples, of course. And “our time” seems to reach back to Genghis Khan and the Bible. I feel an unlikely optimism when horrors of such intractable and overwhelming nature are approached with reason, scholarship and compassion. Goldhagen, author also of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a study of the ordinary Germans who joined in the extermination of the Jews, seems to think if we study mass murder, figuring out not only what sets it in motion (& who) but what keeps it in motion and what ends it, we will be better able to prevent it. It’s that attitude that gives me that little lift even when reading the horrific details of killing, hate, and indifference to suffering. I then shake my head. Really? We can get a handle on this evil? We haven’t up to now because nobody’s properly studied it?

word of the day: cinereous

context: In the middle of winter Katherine is leaving the midwest for California. Her mother is giving her a ride to the train station. “Cinereous snow lay in half-melted heaps, and a feeble light penetrated the taut canopy of clouds. I kicked a chunk of gritty snow off the car’s wheel well and climbed into the back seat.”

definition: resembling ashes

definition source: dictionary.com

quotation source: Blood Strangers: a memoir by Katherine A. Briccetti

word of the day: diuturnity

context: The Director is in communication with angels (or eldila, as author C.S. Lewis terms them in his space trilogy), and they are helping him head off the final conquest of Earth by the fallen angels. Should the bad angels succeed, “Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state, which, heretofore, they had entered only after death [i.e., Hell], would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits.”

definition: Long duration; lastingness.

definition source: dictionary.com

quotation source: That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

word of the day: slatch

context: Katherine is looking back on her childhood. Katherine’s parents have divorced and her mother, who has custody of her and her younger brother, is marrying anew. The adult Katherine contemplates a photograph from the wedding: “[I]nstead of recording untainted happiness, it captures me with a hazy stare and half-smile. … I see myself as I must have been: waiting. Waiting during the lull, the slatch between my past and my future, between one father and the other.”

definition: “a relatively smooth interval between heavy seas.”

definition source: dictionary.com

quotation source: Blood Strangers: a memoir by Katherine A. Briccetti

word of the day: lamellation

context: Ruth’s father has died. Both Ruth’s parents were Deaf; though Ruth and her brother were born hearing their first language was American Sign Language. “I heard his voice as it was in life. And I saw the gentle lamellation of his signs.”

definition: “an arrangement or structure in which there are thin layers, plates, or scales.”

definition source: dictionary.com

quote source: In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World by Ruth Sidransky

striplings

Now, this is the sort of thing that’s so minor, even charming, that making any kind of deal out of it seems silly, especially since the topic of the book in which this thing appears is a totally serious (in fact, awfully depressing) topic. Among the Great Apes is Paul Raffaele’s account of visiting the regions where the remnant great ape populations are barely holding out – war-torn Africa mainly, where the chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas scrape by, but also the aggressively exploited forests of Borneo where the orangutans are running out of trees.

When I came across the word “stripling” in Raffaele’s book I recognized it as one of the age categories James Davidson discusses in his The Greeks and Greek Love, a book I’d recently worked my way through (it’s long!). A stripling is a youth, a teenager. Age categories were very important to the Greeks.

Raffaele, however, uses “stripling” to mean something entirely different. Sapling, maybe. Slender branch? At first I thought it was just an accidental misspelling of “sapling.” But then he did it again. And in this passage Raffaele does it twice:

“The silverback’s nest resembles an oval throne, fashioned from branches he has snapped to form the foundation, and with a layer of vegetation woven with striplings and leaves to make it soft and springy as a cushion.” A silverback gorilla is the leader of the gorilla family, the patriarch. Nearby are the nests of the females and youngsters. “The two-year old is still practicing nest building and has snapped and bent some striplings together and added a few leaves for comfort.”

By context you know no gorilla is snapping or bending or weaving together youthful human males. But I wasn’t able to find any other definition of “stripling” in a dictionary. Raffaele, by the way, does also know the word "sapling" and uses it elsewhere.

Christianity in space

“[T]he vast astronomical distances … are God’s quarantine regulations …”

So says the narrator in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra.

I’m really bogging down in this book. While the previous novel in Lewis’ space trilogy was a decent adventure story this one is turning into a theo-psychological argument. Not exactly boring because Lewis writes well. But I am wondering why I’m bothering. Oh yeah. Because for years as a teen I shopped at a comic store called Perelandra and I’m still curious what that was all about. I’m not convinced I’ll really have an answer when I get to the last page. It’s just Christianity in space?

I remember one of Perelandra’s owners had the last name: Christ. He insisted Christ rhymed with ‘wrist’ – rather than ‘priced’, say.

“He knew now why the old philosophers had said there is no such thing as chance,” says the Perelandra narrator referring to the main character’s name – Ransom. Christ was a ransom, too?

“It’s awful to read his complete works.”

“Yes, the poet can say only a little and says one and the same thing all the time. It’s awful to read his complete works. It’s awful, you think, how much can one go on about one and the same thing!”

-- Evgeny Kharitonov, from “Tears on Flowers"

source: Crossing Centuries: the new generation in Russian poetry, edited by John High, et al.

“a splended time for poetry”

Evgeny Bunimovich on the change in fortune for poets in Russia after the fall of the Soviet government:

“I think this is a splendid time for poetry. The prestige which writers formerly enjoyed has largely disappeared, and the prestige of poets most of all. As a result, only those who truly need to write poetry still do so. Today you can’t build a career as a poet, or gratify your ego, or make a political statement. You produce a text, and that’s it.”

Yup, no more poets filling stadiums or being celebrated for standing up to the propaganda. Just you & your poem. Kinda like here.

source: Crossing Centuries: the new generation in Russian poetry, edited by John High, et al.

what an autograph is worth

In a profile in The New Yorker by John Lahr, the actor Ian McKellan proudly recalls helping found the UK gay rights group, Stonewall, after his public coming out in 1988. (Hey, that’s the same year I spent a semester in London.) The struggle of the time (besides AIDS, of course) was against “legislation that aimed to prohibit local authorities from publishing material condoning homosexuality or from referring to it in state schools as an acceptable lifestyle.” The proposed law was dubbed Clause 28.

Lobbying against Clause 28, McKellen used his connections to buttonhole politicians, including one of Britain’s most fervid anti-gay spokesmen, Michael Howard, who was later to become the Conservative Party leader. After a fruitless meeting, Howard requested an autograph for his children. McKellen obliged. “Fuck off! I’m gay,” he wrote.

source: The New Yorker, August 27, 2007

“with dignity and respect, proud and free”

I've been reading The Trouble with Harry Hay: founder of the modern gay movement, a biography by Stuart Timmons. One of the first gay rights groups was the Mattachine Society, which Hay helped found in the early 50s during a time in which it was illegal to be gay in most of the country - and I don't just mean sodomy, I mean just being alive.

Here's a pledge they recited as they held hands:

Our interlocking, sustaining and protecting hands guarantee a reborn social force of immense and simple purpose. We are resolved that our people shall find equality of security and production in tomorrow's world. We are sworn that no boy or girl, approaching the maelstrom of deviation, need make that crossing alone, afraid and in the dark, ever again. In these moments we dedicate ourselves once again to each other in the immense significance of such allegiance, with dignity and respect, proud and free.

Brodsky

“’More than a crime against language or a betrayal of the reader, the rejection of meter is an act of self-castration by the author.’”

- Joseph Brodsky, as quoted by J. Kates in an essay on translation at the back of the anthology In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian poetry in a new era.

I’ve tried. I’ve tried to say something in response to this. It’s one of the awfulest statements of poetics I have ever read. I try again. I erase everything. Based on the above I suspect Brodsky has never written a word worth reading.

what $10 & a poem got me

I went to the Small Press Distribution open house today. I bought a book for a poem. Then I bought ten more for a dollar apiece. I wrote about all that on LuvSet.

But since I write about books on this blog, this is where I’ll tell you what I got.

For a poem:
The Geography of Home: California’s poetry of place, edited by Christopher Buckley & Gary Young

Each for a dollar:
The Androgyne Journal, by James Broughton
An Inn Near Kyoto: writing by American women abroad, edited by Kathleen Coskran & C.W. Truesdale
Stories in the Stepmother Tongue, edited by Josip Novakovich & Robert Shapard
The Notebooks of David Ignatow, edited by Ralph J. Mills, Jr
Sound Off, poetry by Spencer Selby
Island People, a novel by Coleman Dowell
Three Vietnamese Poets, edited & translated by Linh Dinh
The Talking of Hands: unpublished writing by New Rivers Press authors, edited by Robert Alexander, Mark Vinz, & C.W. Truesdale
The Stuttering of Wings, poetry by Sheila E. Murphy
Bite to Eat Place: an anthology of contemporary food poetry and poetic prose, edited by Andrea Andolph, Donald L. Vallis & Anne F. Walker

“a terrible Chinese”

Paisley Rekdal has a mother of Chinese heritage and a father of Scandinavian. As with many multiracial people, new meets frequently try (& fail) to name her ethnicity. Rekdal spent a year abroad, teaching English in Korea. At the end of her trip she traveled in China. Though as a child she heard her grandparents speaking Cantonese, she never spoke it herself. On her trip she finds herself speaking in a muddle of English/Cantonese/Mandarin/Korean:

“[T]he language … bubbles up out of me. Guttural or singing, a swift collection of monosyllables I recognize as the roots of the Korean I’ve been studying, this language comes to me faster and more instinctively than I would have dreamed. But my rising and falling is more Cantonese than Mandarin; I am speaking a terrible Chinese triggered in a brain part only now unearthed, taught or reconstructed by these faceless teachers. Like a resuscitated grudge this language oozes and seethes from my throat with impoliteness and anger. No one can really understand me – I can barely understand myself – but somehow the Chinese pretend to believe what I am saying is Chinese. ‘Where are you from?’ they ask, and a few even look surprised to hear it’s America.”

source: The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: observations on not fitting in by Paisley Rekdal

notes toward an autobiography by others, part 9

“I felt that in choosing literature as a career I’d placed all my money on a single number and it had lost.

“When I made this melodramatic declaration to a friend, he said, ‘What else were you planning to do with your life? Be an accountant? Civil engineer?’”

That’s from Edmund White’s City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ‘70s. Ed had published his first novel but no one seemed interested in a second.

As I’m in my 40s now and I’ve yet to publish a full-length collection (o slim volume of verse!), it’s pretty clear I’m not much good at this game. I like my poems. After I’ve read books full of work by others then turn to my own I’m struck again – surprised! – by how much I like my poems. I did a year without poems – 2008. I pledged never to write another poem. After all, I’d written so many. It would take all my writing energy just to go back through them and decide which were ones I wanted others to see. A little cleaning and polishing, and some sending work to magazines and ezines, and I could have that thing that looks so stunted and faded currently in its little pot in the corner – a poetry career!

In Ed White’s case a career at least had the potential to pay the bills. He wanted to write novels.

But the friend who said to me, What else are going to do with your life?, was me. It’s not like I didn’t write any poems at all in 2008. I reworked some old ones (you can see ‘em in the LuvSet blog archives), and I must have scratched a new one out here or there. And the habit of mind that makes poetry kept going on in my head. Choosing not to write any of it down began to seem an arbitrary decision. Nobody was reading the poems I’d written? Nobody was going to read the ones that were scrawling themselves across the inner walls of my head.

What my year off poetry seems to have helped me do is unshackle myself from the worldly ambition that pushed me to very occasional success and a lot of hurt feelings. It’s not that I don’t still want people to read my poems – I sent a batch to Fence Magazine last month with my usual hopeful fatalism – but … But needing the approval of others (editors! publishers!) in order to assign value to the poems was pernicious.

Now, I’m perfectly aware that this insight is banal. Since I was a kid I told myself what other people told me, that the work had to be the thing, regardless of what other people thought of it, and the place a poem would take me, a space of concentration and engagement, was one I rarely approached otherwise, and I liked that place. But delighting in a poem included the idea that others would, too. “Poetry will publish this one, surely! It’s better than anything in the last issue. And they say they could barely find enough good work to fill the last issue.”

I learned long ago that what I think is good and what the editor of Poetry thinks is good often fail to coincide – I know they reject work I would like and were I in their place I would turn back poets long comfortable in the Poetry stable. Nothing personal.

Same goes for every other magazine in the world. Or book publisher, probably.

Yet rejection balks me, hurts me. So I avoid it. I guess what happened during the year off was that the censorious voices I’d internalized gradually quieted. I will send poems out in the future. And I will occasionally take advantage of opportunities to self-publish. Print on demand services are more affordable than ever. Whatever. I’m not betting everything on one number. I’m diversified.

“the hidden present”

“In the first week of December, 1980, [John] Lennon bought an early Christmas present for five-year-old Sean. He was never able to give the present to his son; on December 8, John was murdered. Amid the grief and chaos in the Lennons’ home that followed the unthinkable event, the hidden present – a tiny Akita puppy – was almost forgotten. When Sean was finally given the present his father had left behind, the puppy was thin and weak. Sean named her Merry [after] Merry Christmas.”

source: the liner notes for Working Class Hero: a tribute to John Lennon, a compilation of Lennon songs covered by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Screaming Trees, Blues Traveler, Collective Soul, et al.

“’They weren’t allowed to land…’"

“’When American bombers were coming back to Thailand from runs over Vietnam and they couldn’t hit their targets, they would drop their bombs on Laos, anywhere. They weren’t allowed to land in Thailand with their bombs.’”

- quoting a member of the “Mine Advisory Group, a British aid organization attempting to clear unexploded mines and bombs from Laos.”

source: The River’s Tale: a year on the Mekong, by Edward A. Gargan

“house built mainly of Oz books”

from a letter by Jack Spicer to his friend James Alexander, c. 1958:

“Went down to Duncan and Jess’s Friday … Their house is built mainly of Oz books, a grate to burn wood, a second story for guests, paintings, poems and miscellaneous objects of kindly magic. Cats.”

Duncan is Robert Duncan, the poet. Jess is Jess Collins the artist.

source: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: the collected poetry of Jack Spicer

word of the day: reredos

context: During the gold rush in Brazil “there was a proliferation of handsome churches built and decorated in the baroque style characteristic of the region. Minas Gerais attracted the best artisans of the time. Outwardly the churches looked sober and austere, but the interiors, symbolizing the divine soul, glistened with pure gold on their altars, reredoses, pillars, and bas-relief panels.”

Microsoft Word dictionary: reredos - “an artistic decoration behind the altar in a church, for example, a wood or stone screen or a wall-hanging”

source: Open Veins of Latin America: five centuries of the pillage of a continent by Eduardo Galeano

an attack of poetry

“A clapperless blue bell hung overhead,immense, flawless, infinitely clear. Stapled to it like the nub end of a rivet flared a white-yellow sun, naked and small. … On some hillocks, at a distance measured in exhausting hours, like a bag of spilled coffee beans on sparse carpet, herds of stoop-shouldered yaks gnawed at the touch, crew-cut grass.”

Edward Gargan has traveled to Tibet to the headwaters of the Mekong River, his plan to trace the river’s progress from Tibet down to the sea, passing through Burma, Laos, Camobia, and Vietnam in the process. Gargan’s prose otherwise rarely strays from the plain, descriptive prose of the journalist. The quoted paragraph is a spasm of metaphor that had me blinking. I like the bell-like sky. The coffee bean yaks? Less convinced.

source: The River’s Tale: a year on the Mekong by Edward A. Gargan