The Best American Poetry

From "What Princeton Did to My Husband" [by Solveig Lucia Gold]

Solveig Lucia Gold, Joshua Katz's wife, rises to the doleful occasion of the dismissal of Katz, the renowned professor of classics at  Princeton.  Princeton "has revoked my tenure and dismissed me," Katz writes. "Whoever you are and whatever your beliefs, this should terrify you." The headline of his op-ed in the WSJ (5/25/22): "Princeton Fed Me to the Cancel Culture Mob."

Solveig Lucia Gold, a Princeton alumnus, reflects on this turn of events in Common Sense

<<< In 2022, it seems, all sex is to be celebrated—except between older men and younger women. Student-teacher relationships are unwise for all sorts of reasons, and Joshua will be the first to tell you why. But when the same people who think that children can consent to puberty blockers claim that a 21-year-old woman cannot possibly consent to a relationship with her professor, it’s hard to take them seriously.

Let me tell you about our relationship. We wake up, we compare Wordle scores (and Dordle and Quordle), I make him exercise. We clean the dishes from the night before while singing made-up songs about bears, he chides me for not squeezing out the sponge, we spend some hours apart writing, I tell him what I want for lunch, he makes it for me, we go back to writing, we pick a new recipe to cook for dinner, I chop the onions, he minces the garlic, and then I make him dance with me around the kitchen. We’re weird, but we’re extremely well-matched.

My point here is that we are a relationship of equals. Power transfers back and forth in any relationship, and my relationship with Joshua is no different. But ask anyone who knows us: I am the alpha.

And as much as the naysayers have tried to get me to feel ashamed about my husband, I am tremendously proud of him.

I am proud to be married to a man who owned up to his one big mistake and repented for it. A man with courage of conviction, who did not walk back his comments about anti-racism when his colleagues demanded he do so. A man who did not let despair and depression win, even as lifelong friends deserted him overnight.

The prospect of no longer teaching at Princeton is devastating for my husband: He loved his job, and he has given his entire adult life to the university. The relentless bad-faith efforts to destroy his career and reputation have driven him sobbing into my arms more nights than I can count.

I suppose Padilla Peralta, who last year made a splash in the New York Times Magazine for his stated desire to destroy the existing discipline of Classics, is getting his wish. As was widely reported, Princeton’s department last year voted to eliminate its language requirement for undergraduates. Now it has eliminated its most legendary language instructor. The great irony is that the elimination of the language requirement was, in part, to encourage students to take ancient languages other than Latin and Greek . . . and Joshua was the only member of his department qualified to teach multiple such languages: Egyptian, Sanskrit, Tocharian, Syriac, Akkadian, Old Norse, Old Irish, etc. Indeed, Joshua’s earliest academic publications concerned Native American languages. His work was the least Eurocentric in the department.

And then there is the chilling message Princeton has sent to Joshua’s colleagues and to academics everywhere: step out of line politically, and we will find a way to bring you down. Show us the man, and we’ll show you the crime. 

Perhaps Joshua’s tormentors have no skeletons in their closets—but then again, several senior administrators who have served in the last few years are or have been in romantic relationships that would now violate Princeton’s official policies. The Ivory Tower is a house of cards. And for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say, I’ll almost be glad to see it fall.
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University cancels SONNETS as "products of white Western culture"

Hello, sucker. Thought you were smart to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet? Think again!

<<<
from the London Daily Mirror 15 May 2022

University of Salford cancels SONNETS from writing course because they are 'products of white Western culture' amid push to 'decolonise the curriculum'

• University of Salford chiefs sideline sonnets from their creative writing course
• Second-year students will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment 
• Historian Dr Zareer Masani called the change ‘patronising’ and ‘outrageous’ 

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

PUBLISHED: 17:34 EDT, 15 May 2022 | UPDATED: 03:42 EDT, 17 May 2022

University chiefs have sidelined sonnets from a creative writing course over concerns they are ‘products of white Western culture’.

The poetic form, notably used by Shakespeare, has fallen foul of efforts to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ at the University of Salford.

Following a drive to make the course more diverse, second-year students at the university will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment. 

Dr Scott Thurston, leader of the creative writing course at Salford, said students would still be required to undertake exercises in composing sonnets.

Acclaimed examples include Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Ozymandias" which includes the line: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10819139/University-cancels-sonnets-concerns-products-white-Western-culture.html

Sonnet 29

 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

 

While it may be obvious to some professors that Shakespeare's sonnet 29 is not only the product of white Western culture but also an act of "colonization," I, a former English major in the king's own regiment, don't understand the logic.  Bragging rights go to anyone who, in the comments field, can explain the reasoning to me. --  DL

Some People [poem by Wislawa Szymborska]

Members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine's defense forces walk with civilians during U.N.-led evacuations from the sprawling Azovstal steel plant in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, after nearly two months of siege warfare on the city by Russia during its invasion, in a still image from handout video released May 1, 2022 by the Azov Regiment. DAVID ARAKHAMIA/AZOV REGIMENT/HANDOUT/REUTERS

Some people flee some other people.
In some country under a sun
and some clouds.

They abandon something like all they’ve got,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now preens.

Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles.
The emptier they get, the heavier they grow.

What happens quietly: someone’s dropping from exhaustion.
What happens loudly: someone’s bread is ripped away,
someone tries to shake a limp child back to life.

Always another wrong road ahead of them,
always another wrong bridge
across another oddly reddish river.
Around them, some gunshots, now nearer, now farther away,
above them a plane sort of circles.

Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or, better yet, some nonexistence
for a shorter or a longer while.

Something else will happen, only where and what.
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
in how many shapes, with what intentions.
If he has a choice,
maybe he won’t be the enemy
and will let them live some sort of life.

—Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

(Ed note: Many organizations are sending aid to Ukraine. If you have a favorite, please note it in the comments. sdl)

Who Will Stop the Madman – A Gogol's Prophecy [by Lera Auerbach]

My mother was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. As Hitler's army marched East in 1941, my grandparents abandoned all their possessions (including their beloved library and cherished collection of musical instruments). They boarded the train – heading towards Siberia. The news of ghettos and the fate of Jews in Hitler's territories had reached them – all they could do was to flee into the unknown.

A few years earlier, my mother's grandfather, Berl Fishbein, the head of the family, was tortured to death by Stalin's secret police). His only "guilt" was being born Jewish. While my family evacuated, their train was bombed by Hitler's armies. Another tragedy occurred: the family lost my mother's grandmother Ettel Fishbein in the confusion and chaos. She was grief-stricken after the death of her beloved husband, frightened and confused over all the changes and sorrows that the war and evacuation brought. Somehow, after the bombing, she was no longer with my grandparents on the train. They never found her and never learned of her fate. 

With my one-year-old mother, my grandparents deboarded in Chelyabinsk – a closed industrial city at the gateway of Siberia. I was born there some thirty years later. They never returned to their abandoned homes in Ukraine.

In today's war, the invading army marches from the East, and more than a million Ukrainian refugees head West – to Germany in a mirror retrograde of history.

Earlier this year, I wrote a cello concerto, Diary of a Madman, inspired by Gogol's famous short story about Poprishchin, a government clerk who gradually descends into insanity. The concerto was premiered last month by the Munich Philharmonic, Giedrė Šlekytė, and Gautier Capuçon. Nikolai Gogol (or, more correctly, romanized from Ukrainian – Mykola Hohol) – was a genius writer, born in Ukraine, father of Russian language literature, and a visionary far beyond his time. I have been fascinated by his work all my life. Ten years ago, while composing my opera Gogol, I read and re-read everything he ever wrote. After my opera's premiere in Vienna, I received an open letter from Russia calling me "Vrag Naroda" (Enemy of the People) – the same terminology used against Shostakovich and many other artists years earlier. My website was hacked, erased, and replaced by the slogan "Death to Jews" and a skull. It felt terrible, but I was not afraid – since 1991, I lived in the West, and since 2001, I no longer had any relatives in Russia. I was responsible only for myself, my words, and my actions. 

While composing the cello concerto Diary of a Madman, I did not think of Vladimir Putin. Now, Gogol's tale carries an eerie resonance. Diary of a Madman is a story of a lowly government bureaucrat with a minimal, easily forgettable personality. In his increasingly demented diary entries, Poprishchin claims that a state cannot "be without a king." As the storyline progresses, he becomes increasingly mad, starts having delusions of grandeur, and, finally, on the "43rd of April of the year 2000" he believes himself as the King. (V. Putin was first elected president of Russia on the 7th of May of the year 2000. Gogol wrote his story in 1835!) Finally, Poprishchin ends up in an insane asylum. 

Perhaps, Gogol, the visionary and one of the greatest writers who ever lived – could see beyond the 19th and 20th century – into the heart of the 21st, where we are doomed to continue the eternal tale.

I think of my grandparents and my child-mother in Ukraine, leaving everything behind, heading into the unknown – evacuating from the onslaught of Hitler's army. Could they have imagined that eighty years later, the land of their birth would face again a very similar nightmare and that refugees would now head West to Germany to save their children?

Gogol's visions and nightmares become a reality, with the whole world turning into a lunatics' asylum as the great tragedy unfolds. Who will stop the Madman? 

 

Reading Milosz with Robert Hass [by Mindy Aloff]

“Reading Miłosz: The Short Course”

Six winter 2022 Thursdays to consider the poetry of Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), Lithuanian-born poet, novelist, lawyer, diplomat, Berkeley professor of Slavic languages, and Nobelist.

Guide: Robert Hass, poet, teacher, Poet Laureate of the United States (1995-1997), and one of the translators of Miłosz’s poetry into English.

Host: Jesse Nathan, poet, Berkeley lecturer in English, and interlocutor for Robert Hass’s Paris Review interview (“The Art of Poetry” 108, Issue 233, Summer 2020).

 Class I: Thursday, 20 January

Nearly two hundred impressively well-read souls, from locations as far-flung as Taiwan, Oaxaca, and Australia, signed up to take this unusual online course: A survey of English translations for a single poet, the native Polish speaker Czesław Miłosz (one of the world’s most revered poets of the twentieth century) under the tutelage of Robert Hass, a Bay-Area neighbor and friend of Miłosz’s who eventually served his fellow poet as a translator. The Community of Writers developed the course and administers it

It was a coup to enlist  Bob Hass as the class's Virgil, because it was Bob, himself a brilliant poet, who may have done more than anyone else to make Milosz's poetry accessible to English-speaking readers. Working closely with Milosz, Hass translated the verse of the older poet despite his own lack of Polish beyond a battered copy of McLaughlin’s Polish-English dictionary, excursions into Google, and occasional Mayday calls to Polish-speaking colleagues. Periodically humbled by Miłosz’s ironclad preferences for a different approach, the American poet's ego had to muster its capacity for resilience.

Czesław Miłosz: New and Collected Poems 1931—2001 (Ecco) is the course's point of departure for extended reports of such disputes as over whether the narrating I is waiting “peacefully” or “quietly,” disputes that, in Bob’s accounts of them, sound as if they were never less than courteous yet also never less than everything. As Robert Pinsky, working on one of the translations with Bob, put it, the problem with the translation at hand was that, in English, “cabbage” and “grass” don’t rhyme.

Since most of the students would not be able to read the poems in the original Polish, the subjects of discussion are the poems of Czesław Miłosz as filtered through the voices of Hass, Pinsky, and other translators, as well as the English voice of Miłosz. Bob provides personal backstories and he and Jesse Nathan fill in aspects of Miłosz’s biography and of Polish history. Along the way, Bob drops hints as to the formal elements of the poems in Polish: Are the stanzas rhymed? Metered? Are the three-liners related to Dante’s terza rima? Apparently, Miłosz took a dim view of analyzing poetry for its inherited forms. As Bob puts it, “He says form in poetry is like refrigeration—meant to preserve bad meat.” I suppose the fact that a poet with this attitude toward form still managed to produce poetry that never sounds disorganized is part of the proof of his innate magic. And I suppose the fact that the odd Miłosz line can strike some as “Sexist!" just goes to show that even the steeds of Apollo can stumble sometimes. The line in question is the last of this stanza, from “Dedication,” a poem written in the winter of 1945.  The stanza is introduced by two of the most cherished lines in the Miłosz treasury, lines that elevated him on the Starlight Express directly to Olympus:

“What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.”

Before anyone gets hot under the collar about the sophomore girls, you might want to secure a hazmat suit to read the little cantata “The Song,” written in 1934, when Miłosz was barely twenty-three. “The Song” dramatizes humanity, represented by a figure called “Woman,” as remembering her lesbian “Nights of love” with the Earth, her “tranquil sister,” whose “burning touch” can still be felt, and from whose “greedy mouth” the Woman cries to God to “have mercy. . .deliver me, / cleanse me of her untrue songs.”

If you detect a religious note here (and I am among those who do), it might be helpful to know that, as Bob observed, both he and Miłosz were imbued from childhood with the catechism of the Catholic Church, in which they were reared. As a Jew, I probably miss a lot of nuance in their poetry; still, I associate the catechism with an adherent’s pursuit of spiritual perfection and, at times, a sense of great sadness, even, perhaps, guilt, when perfection cannot be found in one’s being. I feel the search—and the lament—quite strongly in the poems of Miłosz. Here, in “The Song,” it is an abstract quality: “Oh, if there were in me one seed without rust, / no more than one grain that could perdure / I could sleep in the cradle leaning by turns/ now into darkness, now into the break of day.”

In a poem from Warsaw, in 1943—when, as Bob related, Miłosz and his friends stood on a balcony, in a beautiful, sweet-scented night, when flowering plants made it feel good to be alive, yet when the air was rent and seared by the screams of thousands of Jews being slaughtered in the ghetto by the Nazis—the poet creates “a guardian mole [who] makes his way, / With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead.” He goes on to make an aristocratic inventory of the unnameable:

“He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on,
He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor,
The ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum. . . .”

The poem concludes with a lament worthy of Jeremiah:

“What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament,
Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.”

Miłosz liked to compare his upbringing among the landed gentry of a rural place to the characters in the novels of Thomas Hardy. I’m not familiar with any comparison he made between the melancholy, even desolation in those characters and the burden that history thrust into the poet’s being, eventuating in a tone of existential despair and a vision continually rippling with premonitions that frequently turned out to be accurate. Yet the search for a perfection, a holistic innocence, that can be found only in early childhood, seems to me to ghost these early poems and, in certain attitudes of reading, to render them sacred.  

*

The Community of Writers, a California institution that is based in a valley in the Sierras renowned for its skiing, brings like-minded individuals together to discuss the whys and wherefores of various genres of writing, among them the usual suspects (poetry, fiction, playwriting) and a few exotics (The Art of the Wild, Writing the Medical Experience). In a triumph of Nature worship at its most imaginative, the Community ordinarily puts on its annual omnium-gatherum of programs in this famous ice palace of the Wild during the summer.  In 2022, because of the pandemic, the wordsmiths were finally able to celebrate their somewhat delayed half century of bonding over baseball games, lakeside dips, and impassioned debate by going rogue, with a program that is, if you’ll excuse the expression in this context, literally virtual -- as well as virtuous.

–Mindy Aloff

"Other News on Page 234" [by Herbert Gold]

Someone famous will die that day,
My day,
And the newspaper will report:
“More obituaries on page 24.”

For the curiosity of some,
the regret of several,
and the grief of a few.

Those few, they matter,
So they have a nice walk
in the Marin headlands
Shadowed by a weary and worn mountain
(still green! still fragrant!
with pine and transplanted eucalyptus,
and most important: Still there!),
where I’m proud that the few gather trash,
But drop my ashes downwind,
And remember as I fly away.

— Herbert Gold

This is one of the poems by novelist Herbert Gold, now 97, that Tablet magazine ran in this  article about the verse correspondence between the writer and his two sons: "We See Exits and Entrances: A poetry correspondence between the acclaimed novelist Herbert Gold and his sons" by Ari Gold, Herbert Gold, and Ethan Gold
in Tablet  January 24, 2022
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/we-see-exits-entrances

From “The hounding of author Kate Clanchy. . ." [by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian, Jan. 23, 2022]

From “The hounding of author Kate Clanchy has been a witch-hunt without mercy” by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian (January 23, 2022)

A few years ago, when I was still getting to grips with the vagaries of Twitter, I inadvertently took part in a social media pile-on. Someone well known said something stupid and I enjoyed tweeting to that effect. But when she shared how upsetting she found the onslaught, I was forced to confront my unwitting bit-part in a collective act of bullying. There was nothing wrong with my tweet by itself, but hundreds of people shouting at you feels like abuse in a way that a single critique does not and the virtual nature of social media makes it harder to know when you are complicit in a form of mob justice.

Things have got worse since then and I find myself returning to this idea of proportionality often, most recently in the case of the author Kate Clanchy. Last week, it was announced that she and her publisher, Pan Macmillan, had parted company “by mutual consent” and that it will “revert the rights” and cease distribution of all her work.

The book that prompted this is Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, her memoir of a 30-year teaching career. Rave reviews and an Orwell prize gave way to mixed reactions from readers: some adored it, others thought she used racial and ableist stereotypes to describe her diverse students. Among the readers of colour I know, reactions were just as mixed: some found her descriptors offensive, others thought they were OK, especially in the context of her honesty about her own naivety and prejudices.

After apologies and safeguarding investigations had been demanded on their behalf, a group of Clanchy’s students wrote of her “unequivocal care and support for us… as poets and as people”, noting the book’s “flaws and imperfections”, but drawing attention to her “empowering methods of supporting and championing youth poetry... from disadvantaged backgrounds”. Supporting Clanchy, a former student railed against criticism of the author’s description of her “almond-shaped eyes” as offensive; another has written of the “unimaginable” positive impact Clanchy has had on her life.

It is true that Clanchy reacted badly to the criticism, denying the phrases in question were in her book. Defensiveness is a flawed but common response when being charged with something you abhor. But both she and Pan Macmillan issued apologies for the offence the book caused and her publisher announced she would rewrite it to address concerns. One might think that that would have drawn a line, enabling the industry to move on to issues about its lack of diversity, which Clanchy has done more than many of her critics to address.

It did not. Pan Macmillan was further berated for giving her the opportunity to make amends by rewriting. After her publisher, Picador imprint’s Philip Gwyn Jones, rightly reflected that he wished he had been clearer about its support for Clanchy and her rights, alongside condemning the online abuse and trolling by her critics, he issued an apology for causing further hurt that read like a hostage note: “I now understand I must use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness.”

Clanchy appears to have been cast beyond the pale, where there is no room for nuance. But it is evident from the testimony of those who know her that she has done a huge amount of good, championing young people whom society too often ignores. Her students have gone on to address the UN, been commissioned to write poetry for the BBC and had their poetry set to music by acclaimed composers.

Clanchy appears to have been cast beyond the pale, where there is no room for nuance. But it is evident from the testimony of those who know her that she has done a huge amount of good, championing young people whom society too often ignores. Her students have gone on to address the UN, been commissioned to write poetry for the BBC and had their poetry set to music by acclaimed composers.

How to make sense of her ostracism? Some people are desperate to see the world cast in black and white. Clanchy’s worst crime is not to fit this mould. Of course she doesn’t: none of us can rise above the imperfectly human. Look at her in the round and it’s obvious she’s done more good than most. This is why the strand of anti-racist thinking that is obsessed with the blame and shame all white people should bear for structural discrimination is so corrosive to common cause and understanding. White people who do nothing to challenge racism are terrible, but white people who trip up when trying to do something about it are even worse. The societal misogyny that infects this movement means it sees older white women as the very worst of all. Any expression of distress is the weaponisation of “white women’s tears”. The witch is not permitted to have feelings; they distract from her role as lightning rod for anger at all of society’s ills.

Publishing’s lack of diversity makes it vulnerable to witch-hunts. It is notoriously posh and white; when someone unfamiliar comes along saying that something is so offensive it should be expunged from the record, publishers assume they speak for all people of colour, as if we constitute a blob of uniform thought.

Pan Macmillan’s overreaction has caused huge collateral damage – it will no longer publish a new anthology of poems by Clanchy’s students – and is no substitute for working at becoming more diverse. “Sensitivity readers”, people who comb manuscripts looking for the potentially offensive, are a crass development: it outsources responsibility and plays on the idea that if a book has the potential to offend, it shouldn’t be published.

What has happened to Clanchy is a sad tale for our ages. No individual is to blame: it is the product of brittle and cowardly institutions, and the collective social media frenzy that prizes heads on a platter over change. But what I cannot understand is the lack of humanity at Pan Macmillan. One of its authors writes about feeling suicidal, as Clanchy has done recently, and, rather than offering her support, it walks away.

For all our differences of opinion, our eagerness to call out right and wrong, the one thing we must never let the digital age allow us to forget is the duty of care we owe each other as human beings.

See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/23/the-hounding-of-kate-clanchy-has-been-a-witch-hunt-without-mercy
Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist

In "Stay Thirsty," Ten New Daily Poems [by David Lehman]

<<<
Stay Thirsty Magazine is honored to present the following ten, never-before-published, original poems by David Lehman and to continue our special relationship with him that began with a Conversation in the Fall 2014 edition of our magazine.

From my work-in-progress, which will reflect my practice of writing a poem every day since August 1, 2020.                                             -- David Lehman on the following ten poems.

Mudcat
(June 12, 2021)

Mudcat Grant died today
possessor of one of the great baseball monikers
victor in game six of the 1965 World Series
the year Koufax refused to pitch game one
because Yom Kippur fell on that day
and did more for Judaism with that one gesture than
even Harry Belafonte singing Hava Negilla,
but I stray from the point,
the passing of Jim “Mudcat” Grant
who won twenty games that season,
and even though he pitched for the opposition
I couldn’t help admiring him
on the mound on the day before
Koufax shut out the Twins on two days’ rest

The Master of Gamblers (II)
(June 23, 2021)

You begin with a title,
“The Master of Gamblers”
by Caravaggio,
and you run with the idea,
the words, not the painting:
a school for gamblers
with majors in casino science
(roulette, poker, blackjack)
and track management,
the stock market,
and the aesthetics
of athletics (the next big thing)
with required readings
in Pascal, Baudelaire,
Dostoyevsky and
mandatory viewings
of Guys and Dolls
and The Cincinnati Kid.

The French Revolution
(July 15, 2021)

The French Revolution
still leads the league
with the Russian Revolution
a distant second
and the gap is widening
as the Jacobins stage an uprising
while the Russians renounce the Soviet idea
(except for the KGB)
and we wonder: can we expect
dictators along the lines of Napoleon before long,
and what about Metternich and the Congress of Vienna?

For the other seven poems, all from Summer 2021, click here for the rest of the feature in Stay Thirsty.

In the same issue you will find a q-and-a with Robert Olen Butler, Jerome Charyn on "The Golden Age of Hollywood," April Gornik on her paintings, and much else. https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/

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Letters and Comments from All Over: an End of Summer Special

<<< On August 10, 2021, Barbara Lemon said: I was very interested and studied "New Trilling Essay the Talk of the Town" at my leisure. To be honest, I really liked it. In fact it displays a high level of professionalism. I recommend my own blogsite in addition to "The Liberal Imagination," which is boss, also "The Opposing Self," although I didn't get all the references, and "Beyond Culture," which really points the way forward by looking back over the other's shoulder and seeing something as grim as what Lot's wife may have witnessed, although reports of that event disagree. >>>

<<<Martha Ullman West said: This is a wonderful interview with [Suzanne] Farrell, questions and answers, both. Farrell, in describing the specifics of working with Balanchine, says many of the same things Todd Bolender told me and and many others about working with him in the studio (which he did from 1940 to 1960, originating roles in Four Temperaments, Ivesiana, and Agon, to name a few). I interviewed Bolender extensively for my book, Todd Bolender, Janet Reed and the Making of American Ballet; Bolender, who was arguably Balanchine's first choreographic apprentice, was particularly interesting about analyzing roles, which Balanchine left up to the dancers, never in fact seems to have mentioned. And Emily [Fragos], my copy of the Everyman anthology of dance poetry was given me by Ursula Le Guin. I value your work.>>

<<< Bruno Anthony said:
I totally agree with Ms. [Lilly] King and hate the idea of "going for gold" and "settling for silver" as if the latter were a consolation prize. Another thing the announcers can do to improve their presentation is to shut up -- to allow some silence rather than talking all the time. Also, to honor the athletes who finished two seconds slower than the top three. >>>

Howard Bass wrote regarding Gardner McFall's "First Kiss", our pick of the week, on July 4, 2012):

<<<This terrific poem brought back a vivid memory from my own elementary school years. In 4th grade (or thereabouts) we were taught to make candles by dipping our wicks (ok, there's a vulgar image for you) into a big vat of melted wax. We'd file into the school kitchen, dip, and go out, circling in and out of the kitchen as the wax hardened and our candles thickened. So some students were in the kitchen, others outside waiting to go back in. A couple of the boys kissed Lynn Kaiser and they dared me to do it, too. So I did, kissing her on her forehead, just at the moment when the teacher looked out at us from the kitchen (no doubt we caused something of a commotion). So while Larry and Mark got away with it, I had to stay after school and receive a stern lecture from said teacher. I was not, she declared, a gentleman! I took my punishment like a gentleman and did not implicate the other kissers. Poetry can have a powerful effect on memory--this one really worked for me! Many thanks for posting it, T >>>

On June 13, 2021, Dr. Earle Hitchner said, re a "pick of the week" selection by Terence Winch:
<<< Among the questions simmering in Mary Jo Salter’s skillfully constructed poem is this: What gets erased in the formation of character by inculcating and then enforcing acquiescence in adolescents? Salter shakes off the dusty notion of rote compliance and imposed silence as conducive to learning. The noisy boys turn affliction into fun, thus temporarily thwarting their martinet nun’s discipline by speaking and behaving as the boys they are. Brava to Salter for this bravura verse lending voice to these “unrecorded voices,” including her father’s. >>>

 

On May 14, Ken Deifik said, responding to Lera Auerbach's "Viennese Traffic Lights":

 

<< I'm sure you know the German saying that the Austrians want us to think Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German. I got to visit with my mother in '75. She was born and raised there, and sent to America at 16. She showed me the concrete tool shed on the Ringstrasse where she was imprisoned overnight for the crime of sitting on a bench while Jewish. It was still there 36 years later, probably still holding tools. Her parents got her out of the country ASAP after that. They were not so lucky, themselves.>>

May 14, 2021 on Viennese Traffic Li…

 

On January 31, Don Berger wrote appreciatively of Ron Padgett, whose poem "Morning" was chosen by Terence Winch as his "pick of the week." << This fable is characteristically fabulous work from Ron Padgett, whose poems I've loved since first learning of him from James Tate in the late seventies. His translation of Cendrars is my Bible and will always be (I own two copies, just in case!). In this poem "Morning," myth marries history--imagination's in its highest gear, clarity and direct speech form the great groundwork, fun wins! >>> Posted by: Don Berger | January 31, 2021 at 12:30 PM

On May 7, 2021, Emily Fragos responded to Mindy Aloff's piece on Jacques D'Amboise: <<< I well remember seeing Jacques d'Amboise partnering the great Suzanne Farrell in Balanchine's late masterpiece, Davidsbundlertanze, music by Schumann. It was at the end of his glorious career. When he carried Farrell offstage, the audience gasped. It was one of Balanchine's most breathtakingly beautiful and haunted moments. What genius! What divine dancers! I am so grateful that I got to see it. >>>

On May 6, 2021 in resonse to "On Freud's Birthday: The Definitive What Do Women Want?", Jill Newnham wrote:
<<<
Peace Corpse is typo or error for Peace Corps.
>>>

<<< Emily Lloyd said, regarding this post by Jenny Factor on the subject of Sappho:

"Transgressive love has to unmake the world a little before it gets on with loving. All other love only has to knock over the Self. So Sappho (who existed in the day when Hera could still order Zeus around) was the first non-transgressive lesbian erotic poet because there's not an iota of shame in her. Take a look at this fragmentary sample..." Yes, but--for whom was Sappho writing? Herself, her lover/beloved? In which case, the idea of apology or shame or identity consciousness or politics wouldn't really enter (or be near as likely to enter) into it, would it? How often are we writing in such deliriously pure circumstances? Good post. Thanks. >>>

 

<<<

Timothy Swain said, re "An Interview with A. E. Stalling by Aspen Matis":

A.E. Stallings is one of our greatest poets today. I've been following her for years--her translations, too; everything is superb!

May 29, 2021 >>>

 

 

<<< Molly Arden said, in response to "Larkin, Uncensored":

Bill Lawgen und Mary Syer

Wurden letzten Mittwoch Mann und Frau.

Hoch sollen sie leben, hoch, hoch, hoch!

Als sie drin standen vor dem Standesamt,

Wusste er nicht, woher ihr Brautkleid stammt,

Aber sie wusste seinen Namen nicht genau.

Hoch!

Wissen Sie, was Ihre Frau treibt? Nein!

Lassen Sie Ihr Lasterleben sein? Nein!

Hoch sollen sie leben, hoch, hoch, hoch!

Billy Lawgen sagte neulich mir:

Mir genügt ein kleiner Teil von ihr!

Das Schwein.

Hoch!

-- Brecht und Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper

 

 

 

Richard Kirschenbaum said re Lawrence J. Epstein's post "The Little-Known Film That Changed History" (Pimpernel Smith, 1941), a post that went up on July 12, 2013:
<<< All true with the possible exception of the Churchill inspired mission to keep Spain out of the war. By June 1943 there was little danger of Spain joining the Axis. Franco was far too savvy for that. Hitler had pressured Franco to join him in October 1940 when nobody could give you a reasonable scenario by which the Nazis could lose. Even then Franco said no, causing Hitler to state that he would rather have three or four teeth yanked out than have to deal with Franco again. Still a great film with no small amount of humor from that "Finest Hour" of British history when they held the line for civilization and all looked bleakest. The author of this post is sooooooo correct about the significance of the time line.  May 21, 2021 >>>

 

Alan Ziegler writes, re this post of May 14, 2021 ("Poets, Law and Order, and Criminal Intent")

<<< And there's this dialogue from [Dick Wolf's] Law and Order the Original:

Librarian: Verlaine was the real talent, you know. Rimbaud just latched onto his coattails and wouldn’t let go.
Briscoe: We were just saying that on the way over here.
Librarian: He shot him.
Briscoe: Who shot who?
Librarian: Verlaine popped Rimbaud. Paul loved Arthur. Paul also loved Matilda. It was a whole mess. The French—what do you expect?
Briscoe: So can you tell us if you sold any copies recently?
Librarian: If you really want decadent, I’d stick with Baudelaire.
May 19, 2021 at 09:04 AM  >>>

Alan Ziegler writes, re this post on The Asphalt Jungle:

<<< My father told me it was essential that I see The Asphalt Jungle in order to understand his father, a bank robber, jewel thief, and frequent convict. My grandfather always worked with a crew of specialists (he was the one who could crack the safe).>>> April 20, 2021 at 05:22 PM

On "Remembering Bob Hershon" by Terence Winch, Justin Jamail writes on March 24, 2021.
<<<<
Bob published my first book. He and Charles North invited me to read with them at Zinc Bar. Just two of countless generosities large and small. I used to bring beers and my children to his house for talks. When we would leave, he would say "goodbye sweetheart" to my then two year old daughter in his gruff voice and she would shout in a tiny voice "goodbye sweetheart!" in return, and Donna would wonder what was going on downstairs. He was a good hugger and a good neighbor.

I think I never left a conversation with Bob without learning the names of writers or other interesting people who had been part of his life in one way or another. >>>

[Pictured left to right: David Lehman, Bob Hershon, Bill Zavatsky, Michael Lally]

Also re "Remembering Bob Hershon" by Terence Winch, Maureen Owen writes on March 25, 2021 09:19 AM:

<< One of my greatest joys has been hanging out with Bob and Donna [Brook] in their kitchen, talking poetry and perfect avocados. Whenever I visited NY, after I moved to Denver, Bob and Donna would insist I stay with them and even set up museum visits and readings we must go to. In the evenings we would walk over to one of their favorite Brooklyn restaurants, having invited others to join us, and have amazing delicious rollicking dinners. Pure fun to be in the presence of Donna, who could tell all wonderful stories about Hanging Loose authors, and Bob, a rigorous, generous, co-editor of one of the most important small presses ever and all his incredible, passionate energy transforming the space around him. That energy and zen-of-the-moment presence flooded his poetry and gave us all a bigger than life poem that was totally a poem about everyday life and all of its sense and nonsense. A poet of his beloved Brooklyn, of place and all place, his voice spoke to and for us all. He will be sorely missed, but never missing. >>>

Joanie Mackowski wrote, in response to "Most Popular Funeral Songs" (March 6, 2021):

<<< Great post. Songs to go out to, to be gone by. I second or third Denise's nomination for "Is That all There is"-- such a weird & wonderful song. My own nomination is "Words of Love," as sung by Mama Cass Elliot: a song for going to new places-- https://youtu.be/2b6rm5yTx44 >

Hey, that’s not Mama Cass, that’s Helen Forrest!

 

 

 

Mark C Minton said, re "The Haiku Masters of Japan Drop in For a Visit" by David Lehman (Feb 15, 2021)

Thanks, David. This might be a bit more Japanese:

Pond
Splash
Frog

The reason I worried this small point is that the second half of the haiku is very ambiguous in Japanese. The first item in the sequence referring to the "old pond" is followed by the "cutting phrase" "ya," which separates it as an object from the remainder of the haiku. The second half is meant to be read as one flowing unit -- frog jumping and water sounding. Basho chose to express this grammatically in a way so that the leaping frog modifies the water sound. So, it is literally something like "frog-leaping water sound." So, in English word order this would conventionally lead to putting the frog last in the sequence, such as "the sound of water made by a frog leaping into it" But this is pedestrian, awkward and not mysterious in any way. The manner in which Basho did this, however,creates a "which came first, chicken or egg?" feeling, fusing the splash and the leaping frog into a single phenomenon. This is reinforced because Basho places no cutting phrase "ya" between the mention of the leaping frog and the water sound. Thus, he enacts what haiku is made for: like a koan, a bit of cognitive confusion provoking thoughts about the true nature of perception. Seems to me the sequence I suggested -- Pond,Splash, Frog-- best recreates this authorial intention in English. Best, Mark
February 22, 2021
>>>

Ron writes, in response to "The Master of Gamblers" (January 17, 2021)

"Do not, beloved, regret that you yielded to me so quickly:
I entertain no base, insolent thoughts about you.
Arrows of Cupid work divers effects. Some do but scratch us:
Slow and insidious these poison our hearts over years.
Yet with a head freshly honed and cunningly fledged, certain

     others
Pierce to the marrow, inflame rapidly there our blood.
When gods and goddesses in days of heroes made love, then
Lust followed look and desire, with no delay, was indulged.
Surely you don't think the goddess of love lost a moment

    reflecting
When, in Idean grove, Anchises caught her eye.
Nor did Luna delay about kissing that beautiful dreamer—
Jealous Aurora had else hastily wakened the lad.
At the loud banquet Hero regarded Leander—then promptly
Into dark waters he plunged, ardently swam toward his love.
When Rhea Silvia, princess and virgin, came down to the Tiber
Just to fetch water, a god seized her and that is the way
Mars begat himself sons, a pair of twins whom a she wolf
Suckled. Today a proud Rome claims to be queen of the

    world..."

 

 

On April 10, 2021,Suzanne said in response to "Who Said It?"

<<< What is Ava Gardner doing in this post? Answer: Ava Gardner knows who said "If the Kennedy White House was decadent, the Clinton White House was sordid." But -- as we can tell by the expression on her face -- she's not talkin'. Where can I redeem my points? >>>

 

 

 

 

<<< On August 21, 2012, Derrida invoked his concept of the Pharmakon in relation to this New York Post cover of 8/21/21:

“(the pharmakon is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing; the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, neither penis nor vagina; the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference; the clitoris is neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, neither the inside nor the outside, etc., but hidden as if by common tribal consent; the left tit is neither a signifier nor a signified, the right tit is neither a sign nor a thing, neither a right wing presence nor a left wing absence, neither a position nor a nightgown, etc.; spacing is neither space nor time; nyet; et la langue Doc (Papa); neither you nor he nor any of my envious enemies can define what you can’t define and that includes deconstruction, the big-time bug spray at the border of Plato and solider Aristotle; the incision is either the circumcised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, and the orgone-box lather as prescribed by Wilhelm Reich, no longer in favor, but tested only in theory; that is, simultaneously either or, but also, and not even; the mark is also the marginal limit, the march, etc., and not just the victim of a hoax.”) >>>

On August 30, 2021 at 08:33 AM David Beaudouin responded to Chaucer Gets Canceled 
<<< Sadly, this critical attitude, couched in current correctness, is strangely blind to the fact that folks in the 14th century simply did not behave or think the way we do today. It's thus a specious argument to expect them retrospectively to do so or else be censored. And may I add that Chaucer authored what's considered to be one of the first feminist narratives in the English Language, the Wife of Bath's Tale. >>>

Chaucer Gets Canceled (part III)

Two excerpts from Calls to cancel Chaucer ignore his defense of women and the innocent – and assume all his characters’ opinions are his [plus a link to TheConversation.com

 

July 19, 2021 8.12am EDT

Spying is a risky profession. For the 14th-century English undercover agent-turned-poet Geoffrey Chaucer, the dangers – at least to his reputation – continue to surface centuries after his death.

In his July 2021 essay for the Times Literary Supplement, A.S.G. Edwards, professor of medieval manuscripts at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, laments the removal of Geoffrey Chaucer from university curricula. Edwards says he believes this disappearance may be propelled by a vocal cohort of scholars who see the “father of English poetry” as a rapist, racist and antisemite.

The predicament would have amused Chaucer himself. Jewish and feminist scholars, among others, are shooting down one of their earliest and wisest allies. This is happening when new research reveals a Chaucer altogether different from what many current readers have come to accept. My decades of research show he was no raunchy proponent of bro culture but a daring and ingenious defender of women and the innocent.

***

As for Jews, Chaucer salutes their ancient heroism in his early poem “The House of Fame.” He depicts them as a people who have done great good in the world, only to be rewarded with slander. In “The Prioress’s Tale” he shows them being libeled by a desperate character to cover up a crime of which they were manifestly innocent, a century after all Jews had been brutally expelled from England.

Chaucer’s own words demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that when his much underestimated Prioress tells her antisemitic blood libel tale, Chaucer is not endorsing it. Through her own words and actions, and a cascade of reactions from those who hear her, he is exposing such guilty and dangerous actors as they deploy such lies.

And was he a rapist or an abductor? It’s unlikely. The case suggests he might well have been targeted, perhaps even because of his work. Few authors have ever been more outspoken about man’s inhumanity to women.

It is bizarre that one of the strongest and earliest writers in English literature to speak out against rape and support women and the downtrodden should be pilloried and threatened with cancellation.

But Chaucer knew the complexity of his art put him at risk. As his character the Squire dryly observed, people all too often “demen gladly to the badder ende” – “They are happy to assume the worst.”

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312

Chaucer Gets Canceled! (part II)

These "Letters to the Editor" appear in the TLS of July 23, 2021 

It is indisputable that Chaucer was charged with “raptus” and that one of the meanings of the term (but not its only one) is “rape”. The question of his guilt is far less clear. The body of scholarship, both inculpatory and exculpatory, is extensive. But ultimately the issue remains unresolvable in any conclusive way. More widely, does the charge itself mean that the possibility, and only the possibility, that a writer had, or might have had, an unpleasant personal life mean that his works should not be studied?

Should “me too” become “you too”? The writers in the Chaucer Review ask “whether the time has come for feminists to move past Chaucer, to demand a new object of study less burdened by moral insufficiency.” The grounds of “moral insufficiency” are never defined and are not demonstrated. These “feminist scholars” are not trying “to deal with Chaucer in new and important and – yes – difficult ways”, as Tom Bailey asserts. (He never explains what these “ways” are.) Their explicit aim is to expunge him from both canon and curriculum. Just like the University of Leicester. Different forms of political correctness create improbable bedfellows

A. S. G. Edwards
Enfield

I am the medievalist who resigned from the editorial board of the Chaucer Review in protest against the prefatory statements made by the two guest editors of Issue no 54.3 (2019), on “new feminist approaches to Chaucer”. I have as good a claim to the title of feminist as these two editors, as is shown not only by my published works but also by the fact that the permanent editors of the Review dedicated a subsequent issue in this feminist series (55.4, in 2020) to me and Carolyn P. Collette, as “feminist scholars who ave done so much to shape the study of Chaucer and direct its future”.

The issue here is not feminism; it is literary criticism. The guest editors declare flatly that “Chaucer does not share our beliefs, we know. His historical persona, his ill-hidden prejudices, drift to the surface again and again within his works. He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence”. This is not “quiet questioning”, as Tom Bailey puts it, but self-righteous assertion, which dictates to the reader what she is supposed to find in Chaucer before she turns the first page. And of course she will not so much find it as bring it there. To approach Chaucer with this mind-set is to substitute a grotesque caricature for the humane values that distinguish him from many other writers of his time, and that students, in my experience, are quite capable of appreciating.

One wonders whether the guest editors (or Tom Bailey) have actually read Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, in which he opens his retelling of the rape of Philomel with passionate questioning of God – why did he allow the birth of the rapist Tereus, whose mere existence pollutes the world and the minds of all who read his story, even the mind of God himself? As for Chaucer’s alleged rape (about which there cannot be absolute certainty), his sensitivity to the paramount need for female consent, as well as the wide range of meanings covered by the word “raptus”, are evident, for example, when Troilus refuses Pandarus’s urging that he should “ravysshe” Criseyde, because, says Troilus, “ravysshyng of women” caused the present sufferings of Troy; so he insists he will not “ravysshe hire” – that is, elope with her – unless she wishes him to (but of course she prefers her own plan). I also cannot refrain from quoting Hector’s superbly dignified response to the Greek envoys who request the exchange of Criseyde for the Trojan captive Antenor: “‘Syres, she nys no prisonere,’ he seyde; / ‘I not [do not know] on yow who that this charge leyde, / But, on my part, ye may eftsone hem telle, / We usen here no wommen for to selle’”.

Of course, these matters deserve fuller discussion, which my published work on Chaucer has tried to provide. But the final issue with the guest editors’ manifesto is that they wish to close down discussion, to “move past Chaucer”, and “demand a new object of study less burdened by the weight of moral insufficiency”. To those of us who deeply admire and love Chaucer, the charge of “moral insufficiency” rebounds on its makers.

Jill Mann
Cambridge

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-is-chaucer-disappearing-from-the-university-curriculum-leicester-essay-a-s-g-edwards/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/chaucer-today/

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312

Chaucer Gets Canceled! (part I)

Two excerpts from "Gladly wolde he lerne? Why Chaucer is disappearing from the university curriculum"
By A. S. G. Edwards

Times Literary Supplement, July 2, 2021

It was announced in January that the University of Leicester was to remove Chaucer from the English curriculum. Along with the rest of medieval literature, and some from later periods, he was to be replaced with courses on “race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity”. The announcement prompted widespread and ineffectual protests. Several medievalists at Leicester have now lost their jobs, and incoming students will henceforward be denied the opportunity to study the father of English poetry (among much else).

The reason initially given by the University for this decision was economic: these courses were not popular with undergraduates. This assertion has been questioned and the University has not presented evidence to substantiate its claim. It has been frequently asserted in the media that the real motive is a desire to “decolonize” the curriculum, a suggestion that the University has denied.

***

This is a passage from a recent essay by Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Sidhu in the Chaucer Review, a scholarly journal:

<<<
[Chaucer’s] historical persona, his ill-hidden prejudices, drift to the surface again and again within his works. He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence. Many feminist scholars now ask … whether the time has come for feminists to move past Chaucer, to demand a new object of study less burdened by the weight of moral insufficiency. And perhaps that will be the conversation of future years, of future incarnations of medievalist feminism.
>>>

This is critical thinking in the age of Donald Trump. (I know of one eminent Chaucer scholar who resigned from the Editorial Board of the Chaucer Review over these words.) It is also another form of the impulse felt by Leicester’s administrators: the desire to remove Chaucer from the university curriculum and find “a new object of study”. But here the motives are based on pseudo-ideological grounds that seem close to personal loathing. It is easy to respond with simple arguments that refute the simplistic assumptions of these academics: to point out that the depiction of character and event by a writer is not an invariable or necessary reflection of the author’s own assumptions. But to have to do so is a stark demonstration of the ways in which thought has been replaced by kinds of unreflective dogma in some parts of academe.

The actions of radical feminists and of the University of Leicester are different forms of political correctness, one striving for “relevance”, the other seeking to suppress literary history by the invention of grounds for seeing it as offensive. Both seek a simpler academic world shaped by the doctrinaire. The proper study of Chaucer involves the appreciation of difficulty, of complexity, as, of course, does the literary and historical analysis of any significant literary figure or work. This ought not to need to be said. But difficulty and complexity have become danger words in academe. They impose on both teacher and student the pressure of effort. In the case of Chaucer, the extent of that effort is compounded by the extent of the linguistic and cultural distance that separates us from his writings. It is attractive in various quarters to find reasons not to make such effort, to assume that students are afraid of difficulty and that teachers should not challenge them. A scholarly world where we seek not to disturb or be disturbing is one in which Chaucer will not be welcome as a subject for study

A. S. G. Edwards is General Editor (with Julia Boffey) of a new edition of The Works of Chaucer, which is forthcoming.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/why-is-chaucer-disappearing-from-the-university-curriculum-leicester-essay-a-s-g-edwards/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/chaucer-today/

https://theconversation.com/calls-to-cancel-chaucer-ignore-his-defense-of-women-and-the-innocent-and-assume-all-his-characters-opinions-are-his-152312 

Olympic Musings [by Walter Carey]

"You know what expression I hate the most?"
"What?"
"When they say she, quote, settled for silver."
"That's why I say fuck 'em."

-- in support of which I refer you to today's New York Post reporting that Lilly King won silver, and Annie Lazor bronze, in the 200-meter breastroke in Tokyo and noting that King "pushed back against the media and American public, who, in her view, often downplay a silver or bronze finish."

"Pardon my French but the fact that we're not able to celebrate silver and bronze is bullshit," King observed.  

Mycology [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

photos 2021 (c) Jessica Kerns

This summer we have had so much rain here in the Finger Lakes that mushrooms, both edible and toxic, are popping up everywhere and the hunters are out. Better be careful! Over on Facebook, where friends are posting photos of their fungus finds, polymath Jessica Kerns responded with an emphatic "NO!" when I asked if I could serve up a spectacular mushroom I'd spotted while walking the dog. Elsewhere she notes that "[t]he forests are magical right now. Hunting mushrooms for harvest is therapy." Scroll through her photos, above, and you'll see what she means. "Not all of these are edible," says Jessica, "but two of them are and they are delicious!" Extra credit if you can guess which to saute with butter and garlic and a splash of wine and which belong in an Agatha Christie novel.  

I'm reminded of this poem: 

Mushrooms

        by Sylvia Plath

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
>>>

And this passage from The Debt to Pleasure, a favorite contemporary novel by John Lanchester, also comes to mind: 

    On the seat beside me were my wicker basket, my Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass (hardly ever used or needed), and my copy of Champignons du nos pays by Henri Romagnesi (ditto, though I also keep all six volumes of Champignons du Nord et du Midi by Andre Marchand back at the house).

    In the following account, the alert reader will notice that I am being a little bit coy about the geographical specifics. Forgive me, but we amateur mycologists, especially amateur mycologists of a culinary bent, passionately guard our favored patches of land--a promising batch of cèpes-yielding beeches here, a cropped roadside thronging with ink-caps there, a yonder patch of nettles known to feature spectacular examples of Langermannia gigantea, or the giant puffball, and somewhere else a field with a healthy quantity of cow excrement conducive to the fructation of the nasty tasting but currently popular halucinogen Psilocybe semilanceata, appropriately known in English as the Liberty Cap. (This, by the way, is not as it is sometimes taken to be, the hallucinogen used by the notorious shamans of the Koryk tribe in far Siberia, the Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, ingestible via reindeer or indeed human urine, most often popularly reproduced in the image of a re-capped white-dotted toadstool, providing a convenient seat for any momentarily resting elf or fairy. The shamans call that mushroom the Wapag, after a body of magical beings who inhabit the fungi with a view to passing on secrets from the realm of the spirits.) We mushroom hunters are a secretive and wary breed, and it is through ingrained force of habit that I confine my account of the site of my labors to the description: a patch of land somewhere in the south of France. . .

Bon Appetit! 

Ishmael Reed on Tokenism

<<<
On Tokens and Tokenism

From George Washington to Jill Biden, Black literature has long been plagued by ignorant white patrons, who arbitrarily anoint a few writers as symbols of the Black experience

BY

ISHMAEL REED

JULY 07, 2021

Tokens are the bane of Black literature, and for that matter, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American literature. They are often selected arbitrarily as symbols by those who know little about Black literary traditions or literature in general, and their work overshadows the production of writers who might write as well or better.

From George Washington, who anointed the poet Phillis Wheatley back in the day, to Jill Biden, who gave Amanda Gorman the nod earlier this year, a powerful white patron can offer a Black writer huge sales and exposure. In return, these writers become the go-to sources about the Black experience for readers as well as academics who are spared the trouble of viewing Black writing as a tradition that extends at least to the 1700s. This includes Black writer-slaves who wrote in Arabic. Instead, we are limited to renaissances, each generation canceling the previous ones.

Both John A. Williams and John Oliver Killens, who wrote as well as any of the tokens, agreed that once a powerful white literary trend-maker or institution selects a token, segments of the Black cognoscenti line up to ratify the choice no matter their politics. Before the decline of the Black newspapers, those writers who were neglected by the outsiders, who control the patronage networks, could get some space. Langston Hughes, John A. Williams, and Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote for newspapers. Dunbar’s newspaper, The Dayton Tattler, was supported by his classmate Orville Wright. Black writers had influence over which of the younger writers would receive support.

Then came the ascendancy of critics who are housed in universities and paid by foundations. These critics decide which writers will receive grants that might provide them the time to complete creative projects. Critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. controls the patronage of at least three foundations. He often provides grants to his Harvard colleagues instead of awarding them to creative writers. Contrast this with the generosity that Richard Wright extended to a struggling James Baldwin. In 1948, Wright used his influence to provide Baldwin with a Eugene Saxton Memorial Trust fellowship from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

For my part, after the publication of my novel Reckless Eyeballing I was left as literary roadkill because I took aim at some of the dizziest ideas of bourgeois feminists, among them women who regarded Valerie Solanas as a hero, viewed male ejaculation as “an act of war,” or argued that Emmett Till, who allegedly whistled at a Southern white woman—who confessed on her deathbed that she lied—was just as guilty as his murderers. Luckily, I received a cash award from the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks that helped to sustain me, financially.

Who are some of the writers that have been neglected by these guardians of patronage more likely to extend grants to fellow professors than to struggling artists? One of today’s most important Black female writers is homeless. Fortunately, her classic novel is in the midst of a revival as a result of a boost from The Paris Review. She could use a grant.

So could Louise Merriweather. Ninety-five-year-old Merriweather had to raise $36,000 through GoFundMe for round-the-clock care after she contracted COVID-19. Her 1970 Harlem novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner, was as good as any Harlem novel including Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. But those who curated Black culture at the time might have found some of her characterizations uncomfortable. For example, her novel reports that Harlem girls had to submit to fondling by lecherous shop owners in exchange for food (a practice that still goes on in my Oakland inner-city neighborhood, except the predators might be Muslim immigrants who have a traditional family in the suburbs and a “baby momma” in the ghetto.) Merriweather might have also been obscured because of her role in halting the film production of William Styron’s 1967 Confessions of Nat Turner, in which the Black hero was subjected to trendy pop psychoanalysis by the author—to which she took objection.

Mrs. Merriweather is a writer who doesn’t hold back. She could have used the backing of Karen Durbin, the white feminist former editor at The Village Voice who takes credit for Gates’ rise as a public intellectual. A Black writer who worked there told me that the white women who had editorial positions were always encouraging her to attack Black men.

Durbin and her ilk are part of a tradition of token creators that reaches back to George Washington. So flattered was Washington by Phillis Wheatley’s 1775 tribute to him that he offered to publish her poem, a panegyric to his achievements, but decided that it would be vain and instead sought to have the poem published by another publisher. Washington sold a slave for rum, raffled off slave children to pay his debts, and was a dedicated fugitive slave hunter. Maybe Ms. Wheatley was not aware of Washington’s treatment of slaves who lived in miserable conditions, according to a visitor to Mount Vernon as he worked to have her poem published. Regardless, Phillis Wheatley became the most famous Black person of her time, and the first Black American literary token. I’m sure that some other poets and storytellers of her time were just as good.

I often get into arguments with liberals, Black and white, when I direct them to writers who write as well as the tokens. They are invested in the belief that because they’ve read Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) they have Black literature covered. Very few of the tokens had as much support from powerful sources as did Baldwin, whose champions were the members of the New York literary elite—literary modernists like William Phillips of The Partisan Review, and Philip Rahv, who was responsible for Baldwin’s receiving a contract for Giovanni’s Room. One of the reasons that Phillips published Baldwin’s Everybody’s Protest Novel, a fierce critique of notable Black protest novels like Richard Wright’s Native Son (albeit with an ironic title, since protest also runs through Baldwin’s novels), was because Phillips regarded Wright as lacking patriotism.

Phillips was the chairman of a literary organization of which I was a member. Without having read their work, Phillips deemed two of my nominations to the board to be unqualified. They were the late Toni Cade Bambara and Leslie Marmon Silko, both of whom are now part of the canon. Silko was just elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

If the champions of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which promised to redeem white liberals instead of harming them, had read works other than The Fire Next Time, they would have discovered that by the time he wrote Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, a roman à clef, in 1968, Baldwin had given up on redeeming liberals. In this novel, he gave his sponsors on the white left the finger in such a scathing manner that Mario Puzo was hired to do a hatchet job on the book in The New York Times Book Review on behalf of The Family, the New York literary establishment, which has been laying tokens on Black writers for over 100 years.

After that rebuke of those who brought him fame, according to Truman Capote, who was interviewed by Cecil Brown, and published in Quilt magazine by the late Al Young and me, the New York establishment then treated him like “shit.” Baldwin was replaced by Eldridge Cleaver, who, according to Ralph Ellison, another token with powerful white sponsors, was also “publicity sustained.” The same issue of Quilt carries a story by Mona Simpson, then a student. She is now the publisher of The Paris Review.

Presently, there are more Baldwin imitators than Elvis impersonators. Every token and his brother are writing letters to their nephews. But Baldwin was shrewd. He was writing to the “Chorus of Innocents” who was looking over his shoulder. His was a variation of the old indulgences game that was promoted by the Catholic church in the late Middle Ages. Buy my product and you’ll only have to spend one year in purgatory instead of two. Of course, the Baldwin cult neglects to mention the Black writers that he stepped on during his ascendancy.

The newest star creator is Jill Biden, who heard Amanda Gorman read poetry and chose her as an inaugural poet. Predictably, the Black cultural elite swooned all over this choice, and powerful whites with media power who know little about Black literature chimed in. A chorus of academics and intellectuals, who display their militancy at every opportunity, endorsed Ms. Gorman’s trite, platitudinous high school patriotism, the poetic equivalent of the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Chinese American poet Genny Lim was called a “racist” for pointing out the flaws in the poem.
>>>
 from Tablet (July 7, 2021)
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/tokens-tokenism-black-literature

The Poets House Controversy: The Protest and Monica Youn's Response

from Poets & Writers

<<<
The letter protesting the temporary closing of Poets' House during the pademic, because the institution is saddled with debt] recognized the work and commitment of the board, [executive director Lee Ellen] Briccetti, and [pmanaging director Jane] Preston to sustain Poets House, but described being “saddened and deeply unsettled that, through whatever combination of financial and intra-staff/management crises, the organization has fired its entire staff in an abrupt, unkind, and otherwise questionable manner.” Belladonna* added that the board’s press release did not “assuage the appearance of anti-union, anti-whistleblower retaliation around the timing of this extraordinary move.”

The letter went on to ask the board of directors why they did not opt to furlough staff if they intend to reopen the organization, and why they did not organize a “community-wide fund-raising campaign.” (The iconic San Francisco bookstore City Lights, for example, launched a GoFundMe in April after the pandemic forced it to close; it has since raised nearly $500,000.)

“Without pretending to be versed in the full specifics of institutional culture at Poets House,” the letter continued, “the grievances we are reading about are familiar to us: a personality-driven system of management; exploitative wage labor structures that use the poverty of poetry to take advantage of committed workers, who are often young; desired donors actively being protected from having to reckon with or curb their racist and transmisogynist habits. These are dishonorable and corrosive practices that your staff was correct to call out—for their own workplace environment and for the larger causes at hand.”

The letter concluded by urging the board to reverse their decision to fire staff and to let them unionize. “We want other organizations to learn by your example (take note) because they are no different. There is no poetry in exploiting workers and protecting power. We ask you for an honest engagement with your community. We ask you to commit resources not to lawyers and stonewalling but to positive change. We ask you to accept the need to change and respond ethically, with care for all concerned.”

On December 9, board member and poet Monica Youn responded to several of the questions raised in the Belladonna* letter, and reinforced that the organization temporarily closed because it was operating at a $200,000 deficit and running out of operating funds. She noted that, unlike many literary nonprofits, Poets House faced the challenge of financing and fund-raising for its main service—operating a free, physical library and event space—that was now closed due to the pandemic.

Youn went on to address the charge of union busting: “I am a member of the UAW. I spoke at a UAW rally during which I pulled my child out of school rather than cross the picket line in October. I also work on antiracism and gender equity issues both as part of my job and in my nonprofit involvements. If I thought for one second that that the closing of Poets House was in some way a pretext for either union busting or retaliation for complaints about DEI issues, I would resign from the board immediately.” She added: “Along with other board members, I reviewed financial and other documents as well as the plan to address DEI issues. I didn’t just take management’s word for it. My fiduciary duty is to the institution and to its continuing mission to the public. Although we were focused on the financial crisis rather than on the unionization issue, I and what seemed to be a majority of the board felt that a union rep could serve as a useful liaison, as it has for other arts nonprofits.”

As for the timing of the decision to suspend operations, Youn pointed out that the staff filed the union petition when the organization was nine months into the pandemic and “basically teetering on the edge of the cliff.” She added: “That was just when we were running out of money.” She repeated that the board made the decision when they did so they could pay severance and back vacation pay.

As to why the organization did not opt to launch a public fund-raiser, Youn said it wasn’t seriously considered by the time it became clear that their emergency fund-raising campaign—which they had launched to a smaller group of donors and members of the board itself, raising $189,938, of which the board gave $125,632—was not going to cover payroll for much longer; Youn says payroll expenses amounted to $17,000 per week. Youn also noted that the board did not furlough staff because they are not positive what form Poets House will take in the future. “We did not want our staff to not be seriously looking for jobs and to think that this existential crisis was only short-term—this was a long-term crisis for our revenue model, and Poets House was likely to change its structure and functions in order to survive in this new reality,” she said.

Youn also noted that “the pandemic created challenges for more informal workplace conversation,” and that it was exacerbated by Briccetti being on bereavement leave from late February to mid March, and then on personal leave from June through October.

When asked about the depiction of the workplace shared in Di Liscia’s November 20 piece for Hyperallergic, Youn acknowledged that staff had raised issues about the workplace, but added: “We are taking these issues seriously and we are taking the steps to address them. Yes, there are communication problems. I think a lot of organizations are going through similar periods of self-assessment at this point. We have heard about incidents that made staff uncomfortable and that we plan to address as part of our DEI efforts going forward, including DEI training for the staff and board. Our last communication with staff about specific candidates for DEI facilitators was on November 2, and we had applied for and received funding for this training, which will take place when we resume operations.”
>>>

See "Former Poets House Workers and Board Dispute Reasons for Suspension" (by staff; December 11, 2020). Pictured: Monica Youn.

https://www.pw.org/content/former_poets_house_workers_and_board_dispute_reasons_for_suspension

In Defense of Ange Mlinko [by David Lehman]

Ange Mlinko is one of our most astute and courageous critics.  She is unafraid to speak her mind; she has a subtle intelligence, does her homework, arrives at an opinion and states it with precision and without worry about crossing the boundaries of conventional wisdom. It is this rare quallity of critical intelligence brought to bear on poetry, something she cares deply about, that would make her valuable even if the times were not as inimical to free spech as they are. Herself a poet, she has a vigorous and lucid prose style.

Here are two brief sections of her characteristically engaging review of two books, Adrienne Rich's Of Women Born and Hilary Holladay's biography, Ther Power of Adrienne Rich (Doubleday, 2020). The review appeared in the London Review of Books (15 July 2021) under the heading "Waiting for the Poetry."  I have a feeling the piece is causing a ruckus in some circles, but it should be read -- the whole piece, not just excerpts -- because of its heartfelt, mindful engagement with an important poet, whatever your politics or your affection (or lack of same) for Adrienne Rich. -- DL

<<<

The collections that mapped Rich’s personal and ideological trajectory during the tumultuous aftermath of [her late husband] Conrad’s suicide include The Will to Change (1971), Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978). Stylistically Rich broke no new ground: when she abandoned formalism, she found her footing in the confessionalism of Lowell’s Life Studies and Plath’s Ariel – which, as Holladay points out, ‘had driven a stake in the heart of New Criticism’. But her work was now getting exhilarated responses, such as Margaret Atwood’s review of Diving into the Wreck, with its twist on Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry:

‘When I first heard the author read from it, I felt as though the top of my head was being attacked, sometimes with an ice pick, sometimes with a blunter instrument: a hatchet or a hammer. The predominant emotions seemed to be anger and hatred, and these are certainly present; but when I read the poems later, they evoked a far more subtle reaction. Diving into the Wreck is one of those rare books that forces you to decide not just what you think about it; but what you think about yourself.’

Atwood wasn’t alone. Elaine Showalter, Catharine MacKinnon, Robin Morgan and Susan Griffin were among her admirers. Reporting on the crowd that descended on a women’s bookstore when Rich gave a reading in New York, Holladay says that she ‘was welcomed as a sort of messiah’.

Overall, however, the verdict was mixed and would remain so throughout her career. Holladay refers to an ‘enigmatic’ review by Rosemary Tonks, but there’s nothing enigmatic about it: it is the frank confrontation of a poet of the Nerves with a poet of the Will:

‘In Miss Rich’s work, the moral proportions are valid, the protagonists are sane, responsible persons, and the themes are moving on their courses. Why is it then that we are still waiting for the poetry?’ Reading the poems, Tonks suggests, we are given ‘the illusion, at moments, of having gained an objective picture of events, even of our own thoughts’:

'This is well done, so that we really believe while we are reading it that it is how thoughts behave. In this instance the idiom has justified its impersonal quality by an ability to produce convincing objective effects. It is the clean diction used by all good reporters (the method of Tolstoy when he is reporting), and it is insidious because of its invisibility.'

But what really puzzles Tonks is Rich’s fixation on secondhand suffering. She describes the milieu of the poems as ‘living a life very close to the life of newspapers; Manhattan is a living newspaper’ – a brilliant observation – and marvels at the mind’s ‘intellectual toil of taking on emotions not its own ... Tears of rage can come to our eyes in the street, but usually, if we are scrupulously truthful, from less abstract causes.’ She’s right: Rich’s poetry is overwhelmingly one of sirens heard in the night, cataclysm streamed from the radio. ‘I find myself in tears,’ she writes in ‘Merced’. And then:

I think of Norman Morrison
the Buddhists of Saigon
the black teacher last week
who put himself to death
to waken guilt in hearts
too numb to get the message
in a world masculinity made.

It’s this that makes her so relevant today – when otherwise comfortable people live in thrall to newsfeeds and phone alerts. Rich’s Collected Poems is a century’s compendium of emergencies, telegraphed in proper nouns:

Mississippi, Harpers Ferry, Jaurez, Catalonia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Central America, Lebanon; ‘Appomattox/Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma’; ‘Beirut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here.’

Helen Vendler wrote dismayed reviews of Rich’s work, excoriating the stereotypes, the bombast: ‘One longs, reading Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, for the poem to take an unexpected byway, to reverse itself, to mock itself, to question its own premise, to allow itself, in short, some aesthetic independence. In Rich, the moral will is given a dominating role that squeezes the lifeblood out of the imagination.’ But one doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort – unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal. Yet Holladay reveals the extent to which actual, first-hand suffering also informed Rich’s aesthetics: diagnosed in her early twenties with rheumatoid arthritis, she struggled with bouts of debilitating pain and underwent successive surgeries, including one to screw a metal ‘halo’ to her skull to relieve pressure on the spinal cord. She suggests that Plath’s unkind description of Rich in her twenties – ‘little, round & stumpy’ might be explained by the steroids Rich took for her condition.

. . . . .

Is there a moral here about the futility of self-willed ‘identity’? Or is it a cautionary tale about the religion of achievement? Was Rich afraid that her deepest identity, that of a poet, would vanish without endless revolution? (Remember she was only six when her father published her first poems.) Whatever the case, a stable identity eluded her. That didn’t deter her from creating a poetic record that amounts to more than a thousand printed pages. Her admirers see a woman who stood up to authority, lived by her principles and modelled resistance to racism, misogyny, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, militarism, antisemitism, and class privilege – they won’t be deterred by Holladay’s revelations of interpersonal difficulties. When Lowell died, she wrote to Carruth that ‘his death left me feeling virtually nothing at all’ – though they had been lovers only ten years earlier. Even her relationship with Cliff was fraught with power struggles and substance abuse. They endured until Rich’s death from complications of rheumatoid arthritis in 2012, aged 82. Cliff followed in 2016, aged 69: ‘Alcoholic hepatitis and chronic alcohol abuse were identified as conditions leading to the cause of her death.’

Animus was Rich’s muse. While many were struck by her courage in rejecting the National Medal for the Arts in 1997, it was the culmination of a series of highhanded refusals: in 1977 when Loyola College of Maryland offered her an honorary doctorate, she copied her letter of refusal to the Baltimore Sun. Honorary degrees, she claimed, were a ‘ritual of tokenism’. The same year, she refused to write letters of recommendation for the Guggenheim, and instead wrote to the foundation condemning its discriminatory criteria. As she had been a recipient not once but twice, this repudiation was aimed partly at her own earlier self, the driven ingénue and Harvard wife, who used the ‘St Gugg’ largesse to fund her Oxford education and then to go to the Netherlands (a rejuvenating sojourn part funded by a concomitant spousal award to Conrad). ‘She had made a Talmud out of her life,’ Holladay suggests, ‘the multiple meanings of which demanded endless study, debate, and interpretation.’ But the image that sticks with me is of Adrienne Rich at home in Santa Cruz, recently liberated from the metal halo, tending to a collection of cacti.>>>>

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/ange-mlinko/waiting-for-the-poetry

Photograph of Ange Mlinko from University of Florida (Department of English); caricature from The New Yorker. 

Against Censorship [from Len Gutkin in The Chronicle of Higher Ed]

We note the efforts of Len Gutkin, in The Chronicle Review, to push back against the worrisome censorship, self-censorship, and shaming on social media that have made it difficult for writers of all kinds, in all genres, from speaking out and expressing ideas that may go against the grain of contemporary orthodoxy. Here's a sample from his post dated July 12:

<<<

You Can’t Say That

Last month, the New York Post reported that Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center had published an “Oppressive Language List,” enumerating terms that one should strive to avoid. The list is real, and many of the suggestions seem quite reasonable, if rather obvious (ethnic slurs and so on). But others raised eyebrows. For instance, is the word “picnic” really associated with lynching? (No, as Reuters explains, and the word was eventually removed from the list.)

And what about phrases like “take a stab at,” “killing it,” and “take a shot at” — all rejected as “Violent Language” by Brandeis? Such prohibitions might seem to have less to do with ethics than with the metaphysical dream of a language free of all figuration. “Truth,” Nietzsche wrote, is a “mobile army of metaphors.” But “mobile army” sounds awfully violent. I suggest instead: “Truth is a roving ad hoc committee of administrators.”

&

• “I’m almost 60, and in these many decades I’ve seen people — some of them good friends — taken down by all kinds of things. Alcohol and drugs, mostly … You know what finally took me down? F—ing Twitter.” In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan on trying to shake an addiction. For more Twitter-skepticism, check out two Review articles: Justin E.H. Smith’s “How Social Media Imperils Scholarship” and Gordon Fraser’s “The Twitterization of the Academic Mind.”

• At Critical Inquiry, Frances Ferguson reviews The Teaching Archive, by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan: “It is a history of literary study pitched against the accounts of literary professionalism that have given us the sense that we should guide our thinking about literature by doctrinal statements.” In the Review, Buurma and Heffernan previewed a portion of their argument.

• At the London Review of Books, Ange Mlinko writes, not entirely admiringly, about the poet Adrienne Rich: “You have to be accustomed to winning prizes, and quite certain of your place in the pecking order, to grandstand like this … One doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort — unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal.”

Write to me at: opinion@chronicle.com or len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/chronicle-review/2021-07-12

>>>

Len Gutkin

Len Gutkin is a senior editor at The Chronicle Review. His first book, Dandyism: Forming Fiction From Modernism to the Present, was published in February 2020 by the University of Virginia Press

The Final Season [by Greg Pattenaude]

RALPH FASANELLA (1914 - 1997) | Sandlot Game

Thursday was the most glorious day on the calendar, one filled with childlike dreams and unmatched optimism. No, I’m not referring to April Fool’s Day, but Major League Baseball’s Opening Day.  Never mind that there was wet snow falling most of the day at my house. The sun would be shining somewhere. What I did not count on was a Covid outbreak among Washington Nationals ballplayers cancelling the Mets first game of the season, and as I write this, it was just announced that the entire weekend series is cancelled. So on Thursday, I settled for a few innings of the Blue Jays – Yankees game which lasted three hours and thirty minutes, tied 2-2 after nine innings. The 10^th inning then showcased Major League Baseball’s latest game “enhancement” – putting a runner at 2^nd base to encourage scoring and forcing a quicker ending. The Blue Jays scored in the top of the 10^th; the Yankees did not in the bottom frame. This enhancement might be nice in youth sports where parents can get home earlier, but it has no place in professional sports. But I digress and this leads me to my main topic.  

Since its establishment in 1876, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs has had nine players in the lineup. In one half of an inning, nine players are in the field.  In the other half, those nine players take a turn batting. This repeats for nine innings, or if tied after nine, to extra innings. In the 1950s and 60s, the National League was seen as more exciting than its junior counterpart, the American League, formed in 1901. With sagging attendance in the late 1960s, American League owners sought a way to boost fan appeal. Ideas like yellow baseballs were ruled out. The Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley introduced bright colored uniforms for pizazz. But his biggest proposal, one that other American League owners agreed with, was the idea that pitchers, not being the best hitters, should be replaced in the lineup with someone else. That tenth person would be known as the Designated Hitter, or DH.  In 1973, the Yankees’ Ron Bloomberg had the distinction of being the first major league player to bat multiple times in a game while never having to put on a glove.  Since then, the two leagues played by different rules and whether you love or loathe the DH still is as heated as any political discussion.

Much has happened in the nearly 50 years since the DH’s introduction. In 1976, players were granted the right to free agency, boosting salaries by exponential proportions. The leagues added teams several times, to the current 15 teams in both leagues. In 1994, playoffs were expanded to allow more teams to participate in the post season.  Interleague baseball was introduced in 1997. And in 2000, the National and American Leagues, as legal entities, were dissolved. And during this past winter, Major League Baseball exercised its muscle to take control of minor league baseball, and in the process left forty communities around the country without a team. But through it all, pitchers hit in the National League, despite the DH being used in the minor leagues and colleges. I like to think of it as a badge of honor connecting the 19^th century to future generations – nine gloves and the same nine batters.

Baseball, by nature, is bucolic; it’s played on a field. Sure, there may be 50,000 seats surrounding that field, and, pre-Covid, fans are screaming. But there also are moments of parents and children or groups of friends sitting there watching the action, second-guessing managerial moves, cheering and clapping.  The best applause is saved for a starting pitcher coming to bat for the fourth time in a game.  

With the current collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players ending this year, it’s nearly certain that the DH will be adopted in the National League. From the players’ standpoint, it means a roster spot where a one-dimensional player can earn a lot of money or an aging player who can’t field his position anymore but can still hit can still earn big bucks at the end of a career. For the owners, its protection for a high-priced pitcher having to do anything other than throw a baseball and encourage the opportunity for more runs in a game. There is this notion that fans, particularly younger ones of the video game era, want more runs at any cost.

The fan base who enjoys a more cerebral experience of talking to your neighbor, second guessing managers, bunting a runner over to 2^nd and double-switches--I’ll call this strategy--will come to an end.  During the Covid-shortened season of 2020, the DH was used in the National League, under a “health and safety” protocol to protect pitchers from overly exerting themselves. It was pretty clear that this was a trial run, like the silly runner on 2^nd to start extra innings rule.  

So this is it. My Mets, welcomed into the National League in 1962, appear to have a very strong team this year, and just paid 27 year-old Francisco Lindor $340 million to play shortstop for the next 10 years.  And they have new ownership for only the third time in their history. As far as the National League, it had a good run. With the inevitable ahead, I’ve branded this as The Final Season.  Let it begin.

New Trilling Essay the Talk of the Town

The emergence of a previously unknown and uncharacteristically fiery essay by Lionel Trilling is all the buzz in intellectual circles. Our stringers at far-flung campuses report the excitement at faculty clubs and academic production centers where Trilling's essays in criticism, particularly those written between 1940 and his death in 1975, command a respect accorded to few contemporaries, not because he had a penchant for oracular pronouncements (he did not) but because of the nuanced style of exposition in his writing, which reflected a mind of immense subtlety, irony, and complexity. By indirections he found directions out.

The reputation for what champions admired as subtlety (and detractors considered coyness) may change with the posthumous appearance of an essay Trilling was said to have begun in 1967 but never completed to his satisfaction. The essay's working title was "I Hate the Liberals." Victor Mathis, the archivist who discovered the draft in Trilling's papers, insisted that marginal handwritten comments in the legendary Columbia prof's distinctive script imply "that this jest was a place-holder for an ultimate title along the lines of 'The Liberal Dilemma in an Age of Economic Decline'."

That Trilling, author of "The Liberal Imagination," had commenced on an essay critical of New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and of what was vulgarly known as "limousine liberalism," a phrase Trilling dissects, made news wherever talking heads shmooze. "It's like an intellectual version of Tom Wolfe's outing of Leonard Bernstein's black panther party as 'radical chic'," said Jenna Clauss of the Brookings Institute. Marvin Murdeck of the McLuhan School of Public Information emphasized that the title, though evidently a joke Trilling enjoyed, was "deliberately reductive of his thoughts on the whole question of political hypocrisy among union-smashing NIMBY elites who are incredibly full of shit but should not be caricatured nevertheless."

Handmade signs declaring "I Hate the Liberals" (or variants, including celebrations of poetry as the antithesis of sociological claptrap, have sprung up in affluent parts of Ann Arbor, Madison, Colorado Springs, Ithaca, Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. Some say this is happening in the spirit of a joke. "It's post-modernism, man," said Josh Lucas, a freshperson at Northwestern, who has not yet declared a major but is leaning toward sociology. But there are those who see in the outpouring of anti-liberal sentiment the hyperbolic release of impulses long repressed. Professor Leon Elson, the Hayte-Ashbery Professor of Applied Kenesiology at Florida Ache, compares the "I Hate the Liberals" fad with people screaming out the windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more." Elson's point: "It's not so much a matter of art following life, or life following art, but life following life, and art, art, depending on how you define it."

from the archive; March 31, 2011.

Professor Trilling, asked to comment for the record, replied with this link but said he was of "mixed minds, because of the implicit inaccuracy in the record of any correspondence between two persons, neither of whom is alive." The court decided in favor of the plaintiff, who affirmed his belief in the "irony of circumstance," as he termed it, and a distrust of any idea that, if stated flat out, could be construed as signifying both itself and its opposite. "You know, Fitzgerald was right about consciousness," he said to me one afternoon, sneaking a cigarette. -- DL

From the archive: The Black Swan [by David Lehman]

<<<
I write in self-imposed isolation. The Corona virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and is spreading with the speed of a medieval plague, has mandated “social distancing,” a phrase now commonplace. In Wall Street lingo, we have suffered a fearful “black swan event” that no economic model could have forecast. The shock to our systems of living and of thought has not yet been fully absorbed, but already the stock market has tumbled, main streets look like ghost streets, schools are closed, colleges have sent their students home, the NBA has shut down, “March madness” was canceled, and spring training, too. Even politicians have taken notice. Emergency measures are taking effect. The effort to create an effective vaccine is under way. We can hope that an antidote is in a chemist’s test tube even now. Medical scientists are doing their best to “flatten the infection curve” – to limit the spread of this ultra-contagious virus that has already killed many thousands of people and caused whole nations to close down.

Confined to quarters, I have the luxury of thinking about this plague in relation to those in our literature and history – the ten plagues god visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus; the plague Oedipus brought on Thebes when he committed the twin sins of parricide and incest; the bubonic plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It is possible to regard the current situation allegorically as a punishment we have brought upon ourselves or possibly as a prophecy of geopolitical warfare or a radical solution to the problem Malthus posed. Whatever else it is, the disaster is also a failure of the imagination inasmuch as we were as unprepared for it as we were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reassuring thing is that we did win the war that we entered on that day.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” gained a new currency. The most famous line of that poem – “We must love one another or die” – was brutalized in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times (March 19, 2019), which substituted “help” (and “assist”) for “love.” The more important point is that Auden’s poetry endures. Poetry matters. American poets will be living through a crisis worse than any in my lifetime, and how they respond to it will prove a fascinating test and challenge.>>

from the archive; first posted March 20, 2000

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I write in self-imposed isolation. The Corona virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and is spreading with the speed of a medieval plague, has mandated “social distancing,” a phrase now commonplace. In Wall Street lingo, we have suffered a fearful “black swan event” that no economic model could have forecast. The shock to our systems of living and of thought has not yet been fully absorbed, but already the stock market has tumbled, main streets look like ghost streets, schools are closed, colleges have sent their students home, the NBA has shut down, “March madness” was canceled, and spring training, too. Even politicians have taken notice. Emergency measures are taking effect. The effort to create an effective vaccine is under way. We can hope that an antidote is in a chemist’s test tube even now. Medical scientists are doing their best to “flatten the infection curve” – to limit the spread of this ultra-contagious virus that has already killed many thousands of people and caused whole nations to close down.

Confined to quarters, I have the luxury of thinking about this plague in relation to those in our literature and history – the ten plagues god visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus; the plague Oedipus brought on Thebes when he committed the twin sins of parricide and incest; the bubonic plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It is possible to regard the current situation allegorically as a punishment we have brought upon ourselves or possibly as a prophecy of geopolitical warfare or a radical solution to the problem Malthus posed. Whatever else it is, the disaster is also a failure of the imagination inasmuch as we were as unprepared for it as we were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reassuring thing is that we did win the war that we entered on that day.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” gained a new currency. The most famous line of that poem – “We must love one another or die” – was brutalized in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times (March 19, 2019), which substituted “help” (and “assist”) for “love.” The more important point is that Auden’s poetry endures. Poetry matters. American poets will be living through a crisis worse than any in my lifetime, and how they respond to it will prove a fascinating test and challenge.>>

from the archive; first posted March 20, 2000

Comments

On August 30, 2021 at 08:33 AM David Beaudouin responded to Chaucer Gets Canceled 
<<< Sadly, this critical attitude, couched in current correctness, is strangely blind to the fact that folks in the 14th century simply did not behave or think the way we do today. It's thus a specious argument to expect them retrospectively to do so or else be censored. And may I add that Chaucer authored what's considered to be one of the first feminist narratives in the English Language, the Wife of Bath's Tale. >>>