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April 29, 1962. White House dinner and reception in honor of Nobel Prize winners. Front row: President Kennedy chats with Pearl Buck, while Jackie lends an ear to Robert Frost. Buck's back is turned to Lady Bird Johnson, wife of the Vice President, looking "lovely," smiling crookedly. Pretty sure that is Ethel Kennedy, wife of the attorney general, seated behind the president.
Quiz: Which of the front row authors won the Nobel Prize?
Analyze the body language of President and Mrs. Kennedy.
Pearl S. Buck :)
Posted by: Laura Orem | August 11, 2008 at 05:34 PM
Analysis of body language --
JFK - "Sorenson told me there'd be chorus girls."
JBK - "How long is this damn poem, anyway?"
Posted by: Laura Orem | August 11, 2008 at 05:41 PM
laura is absolutely right about body language analysis! i believe nixon was actually much more literary than kennedy. kennedy was really into ian fleming. such a bright guy but debilitated by physical pain (which led to non-stop horniness), the horrible influence of his father, and laziness. at some point i will post a really great phone conversation he had with eisenhower during the cuban missile crisis. that was the one time that there was such a mess that kennedy actually had to do some work!
Posted by: Mitch| August 11, 2008 at 06:47 PM
Sandra Bullock Reveals Baby Boy!
I don’t know much that I thought I knew.
I have been stupendously surprised.
Ever since balloon boy, I have been
scanning the skies,
but I did not see this coming.
There is, after an Oscar win,
a history of damaged joy,
not so tiger-sized, but not without an element
of a role reprised. Now this surprise!
Lucky for him, the kid looks wise.
My dearest bleaders,
I offer you this occasional on the fly as my grad students require my immediate attention. Stay alive and I shall return to encourage you further.
Love,
Jennifer
In the UK, poets seem, like fish, to first appear in schools - darting about and flashing their stuff in unison, thus often establishing a period style, or styles, that define a moment. One thinks, especially, of the Fifties, synonymous for many with The Movement - or the 30s, and the Auden generation. Tensions arise because, of course, there are other poets, and other modes and manners, that don't get to swim with the big fish. So for every Movement there must be the Mavericks. One of the ways that schools, or generations, used to emerge, in the UK, was through education (the poets would have attended the same university) - another, through being discovered by a critic or editor, as DH Lawrence was (and, indeed, though I have implied there are no important British poetry critics anymore, I did not mean to exclude the impact of established older figures like a Mark Ford, or Ricks, or poet-critics like Tim Dooley and Sean O'Brien and Fiona Sampson. What I have been driving at is the absence of anyone like a Randall Jarrell, more precisely - a poet of the age wading into becoming a symptomatic arbiter of taste for that moment with full authority)
Then, more recently, - and controversially in some quarters, promotions were established, with Arts Council funding, to generate interest in emerging poets - most famously, "The New Generation" in the 90s, which arrived around the same time as Britpop and New Labour - and which was followed by The Next Generation. Also, for decades, there have been other markers for young poets of talent - placing in major national poetry competitions; appearances in key journals, like Poetry Review or Poetry London; being included in anthologies - and winning an Eric Gregory Award. Each year, the admirable Gregory process introduces Britain to five or six younger poets under the age of 30, without a full collection. Competition is fierce - and most who win go on to soon after get an offer of publication. All this by way of introducing today's Young British Poet, Emily Berry.
Berry, is, to my mind, another of the top five or ten younger poets now working in the UK - of the group without a debut collection out, one of the most anticipated, among many of her peers (along with, say, Helen Mort and a clutch of others). Her work is very much in the school of Kennard - often employing a flat, deadpan prosaic line; sinister or bizarre monologues or poetic speakers; morbid and blackly comic situations. What distinguishes Berry is her willingness to combine the very weird and even taboo, with more traditional poetic pleasures, especially emotionality, and sometimes oblique romantic confession. A fan of The Smiths, she has learned from Morrissey to explore sentimentality and the strange hand in hand.
Continue reading "Young British Poets: Emily Berry by Todd Swift" »
Shmerl the Narr is a much loved stock character from Jewish folklore -- a "wise fool." In this comic strip version of a well-known story, Shmerl has "foolishly" gone to the wilderness in order to find a sexual partner. Why didn't he just go to a singles bar? Because he's too "foolish!"
Shmerl's bald head symbolizes his phallus, which of course is circumcised. The seemingly dead bear in the last frame is also symbolic of Shmerl the Narr's phallus. It seems to be dead but isn't. It's only sleeping or hibernating. The bear is also an allusion to the bear that the prophet Elijah directed to attack some children who were mocking him (2 Kings 2:23-25.) And it's a reference to the bear in Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale" ("Exit, pursued by a bear.") Finally, the bear connects us to the song "Bear Necessities" from the animated film version of Kipling's "The Jungle Book."
Can anyone explain the tiny picture between the second and third frames????
Click on the comic strip to enlarge.
-- Paul Violi
I urge you to watch tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad, which finds Bryan Cranston’s Walter White adjusting to the dissolution of his marriage while declining to abandon one big reason it dissolved: He still wants/needs to make meth to pay the bills. He goes to a new location to ply his chemistry-teacher skills and acquires a new assistant, played by David Costabile (the scruffy villain from last season’s Damages, among many other credits).
New Assistant finds it comforting to quote Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer” to justify his illegal, and let’s face it, immoral ways to God and to himself. Cut to our Walt sitting in his new cheap apartment, a copy of Leaves of Grass on his lap, poring over the pages silently.
It’s a terrific moment in a terrific new season of Breaking Bad, which digs deeper, with each succeeding episode into questions of what makes a man or woman “bad,” what needs to be done to protect one’s loved ones, and constantly asks the viewer: “How far would you go? Not here, you say? You’re lying to yourself, then.”
Breaking Bad airs on AMC, home of Mad Men, which returns with a new season in July, it was announced earlier this week. Me, I can easily await MM when there are new hours of Breaking Bad to watch. The two shows could not be more different. If Mad Men is a novel of manners for TV (John O’Hara meets Louis Auchincloss in Updike/Cheeverville), Breaking Bad is working thriller territory mapped out by the likes of Charles Willeford, David Goodis, and Jonathan Latimer.
It’s
lean and
mean (a cop takes an axe to the back of the head in the opening minutes
tonight), but thanks to the inspiration of creator Vince Gilligan to insert a
middle-class nebbish into the role usually occupied by the cynical sharpie in
most thrillers, it never lets ordinary folks like you or I to step back and
say, “Oh, I’d never do that.” Breaking Bad is all about what you’d do if you
were desperate enough. “And from time to time,” as Whitman writes, the show
makes sure that you have “look’d up in perfect silence at the stars,”
contemplating the full measure fate.
--Ken Tucker
From a distance, Britain (the UK), can appear a weird place – especially these days. It’s just had a week of travel chaos with its skies completely shut down due to an Icelandic volcano. It is in the midst of a major election (to be decided in 12 days) that has been wildly galvanised by its first ever leaders debate on television (!). And one of its most popular TV shows is (still) Doctor Who, about an undying eccentric “time lord”. Current hit records include Kate Nash’s “My Best Friend Is You” where a chirpy British lass writes about sex and dating in frank terms, and Paul Weller (of The Jam) wanting to “Wake Up The Nation”.
Britain has been slow to come out of the recession, and, with its youth knife crime, wildly drunken villages and inner cities, class divides (whole swathes of the population still can’t easily access college education), and obsession with celebrity (especially overpaid footballers and size-zero models and starlets) is sometimes called Broken Britain. For others, like Harry Potter star, Daniel Radcliffe, richer than Prince Harry, Britain seems to be working just fine. It’s been observed that America and England are divided by a common language, and, as Hugh Kenner was one of the first critics to point out, the British love-affair with international modernism in art and poetry was of limited duration, to say the least.
Charles Bernstein and John Ashbery are coterie poets here, read by few and feared by most who do read them – let alone Hart Crane or William Carlos Williams. Few American (or Canadian) poets are published in the UK. There is a sense of isolation, even xenophobia, in some poetry quarters – and why not? The popular Tory party wants to pull out of membership in Europe. This is a kingdom united, more often than not, in the idea of its superior difference.
Here are some of this week's findings, confirming to the idea that life may indeed be worth living:
This is a wonderful TED talk on creativity, pressures, self-destructive tendencies that artists are prone to, and possible solutions:
Glenn Glould in all his glory at home:
One of the greatest living performers:
and a clip form Death on Venice, as interpreted by John Neumeier:
It’s Saturday and I’ve spent the whole day running around the East and West Village on a puzzle hunt called DASH. It happened in cities all over the country today, same puzzles, different location (Different Area Same Hunt!). My crazy husband has been doing things like this his whole life and I’ve been doing them the last ten years, since I met him. They are fun and pretty tricky and hard, so you have to work, but they have lots of parts so you can help even if you don't always feel like you're on top of everything that's going on, and you are outside and get some exercise. Our team came in third I think, which was pretty good. This was an excellent hunt. I met the cute girl who made the whole thing up and she said I should publicize it, so ok: It was totally fun, you should all do it next time! How's that Debbie Goldstein?
Speaking of exercise. Did you see this article on exercise in the Times last week? It's well worth reading the whole thing, but I'll cut and paste the last two paragraphs here, if you don't feel like reading them, at least read the last few sentences.
Streaming through much of the science and advice about exercise and weight loss is a certain Puritan streak, a sense that exercise, to be effective in keeping you slim, must be of almost medicinal dosage — an hour a day, every day; plenty of brisk walking; frequent long runs on the treadmill. But the very latest science about exercise and weight loss has a gentler tone and a more achievable goal. “Emerging evidence suggests that unlike bouts of moderate-vigorous activity, low-intensity ambulation, standing, etc., may contribute to daily energy expenditure without triggering the caloric compensation effect,” Braun wrote in the American College of Sports Medicine newsletter.In a completed but unpublished study conducted in his energy-metabolism lab, Braun and his colleagues had a group of volunteers spend an entire day sitting. If they needed to visit the bathroom or any other location, they spun over in a wheelchair. Meanwhile, in a second session, the same volunteers stood all day, “not doing anything in particular,” Braun says, “just standing.” The difference in energy expenditure was remarkable, representing “hundreds of calories,” Braun says, but with no increase among the upright in their blood levels of ghrelin or other appetite hormones. Standing, for both men and women, burned multiple calories but did not ignite hunger. One thing is going to become clear in the coming years, Braun says: if you want to lose weight, you don’t necessarily have to go for a long run. “Just get rid of your chair.”
If you follow this site you may be aware that several weeks ago I wrote a little thing about Gyms. Actually, several weeks before that I wrote a little post called Gyms and Poets that was picked up by the Boston Globe Ideas section online, called Brainiac, in a cute piece called, Forget About Gym Guilt, Says Poet I was flattered (and frumped that he said i didn't get to the point fast enough) (yes, i too am a big baby) and it moved me to write a second post on my anthropological reading of gyms in our culture, "A Short Packed Serious Argument Against Gym Guilt." (see the ps -- i make a total confession. i am a silly person.) I wrote a book called The Happiness Myth, among others, which I'm always hawking around here in which I do a lot of this sort of anthropological study of our own culture, especially in ways the that harm a lot of people's happiness (like gym-guilt and gym-obsession).
Now what is interesting to me is not whether anyone goes to the gym. I myself have enjoyed periods of my life in which I went regularly to a gym. Fun! What is interesting to me is that I was able to figure out that the gyms were not what they were pretending to be without recourse to science. I could tell by looking at history. I think that is delicious. That is all.Love,
pss I went to the memorial for RW the other night, at the 92nd street Y. My hearts a little rebroken from it. Oy. The rest of you, as usual, stay alive to the best of your short term ability (I mean, smoke if you want to, I'm not the police, but if you are going to take a lot of weird pills don't do it alone. And if you ski, jeeze, mind the trees.)
Here's to William H. Pritchard, an old-line English professor who takes his reading seriously and writes about it for the Sewanee Review.
In the Winter 2010 issue of the venerable journal, Pritchard reviews an edition of Graham Greene's letters (Graham Greene:A Life in Letters, ed. Richard Greene; Norton). It's an exemplary review -- well-written, enjoyably opinionated, tactful.
I love it that Pritchard thinks more highly of The Ministry of Fear (1943) than of The Power and the Glory (1940), though this reverses Greene's own valuation. What Greene called his "entertainments," such as The Ministry of Fear or This Gun fir Hire, are generally superior to his journeys into high despair, such as e Power and The Glory or The Heart of the Matter.
But the best things in the review are the quotations from Greene. The writer said that he traveled as much as he did -- to Cuba, Panama, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Vietnam -- not "to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity" to which the London blitzes had addicted him. I believe it.
Here's Greene's take on Havana, capital of luxury and vice, in the days before Castro seized control: "Havana has been a fascinating city, quite the most vicious I have ever been in. I had hardly left my hotel door before I was offered cocaine, marijuana, and various varieties of two girls and a boy, two boys and a girl, etc." According to Pritchard, Richard Greene (no relation) seems to like his namesake, a refreshing change from Greene biographer Norman Sherry, who, in a display of "prurient absurdity," gave "a list of the novelist's forty-seven favorite prostitutes -- surely a new kind of labor of love on a biographer's part."
Now I will read the book.
-- DL
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
