The Best American Poetry

J'accuse: The "Charlie Hebdo" Outrage, Ten Years Later [by Walter Carey]

J'accuse

On January 7, 2015, thugs emboldened by appeasers murdered the editors of "Charlie Hebdo," the Paris-based satirical magazine. They also killed Jews at a nearby kosher grocery store.  From the BBC report: << The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has been attacked by gunmen, who have killed 12 people at its Paris offices. It is the worst attack on a magazine which has been hit by violence before. >>

Sometimes ideology gets in the way of common cause.  After the murders, PEN, an organization whose mission is to defend the rights of writers, editors, and publishers, decided to honor the fallen editors, and the surviving staff, with its "courage award." Not a truly controversial choice, you would think. Nevertheless, 224 writers signed their names to a petition protesting the award. Francine Prose and Teju Cole  circulated the petition, which argues that << Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering. Our concern is that, by bestowing the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award on Charlie Hebdo, PEN is not simply conveying support for freedom of expression, but also valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.  >>

244 writers affilliated with the organization concurred with the statement that << What is neither clear nor inarguable is the decision to confer an award for courageous freedom of expression on Charlie Hebdo, or what criteria, exactly, were used to make that decision. >>

All they did, the murdered editors, was die for freedom of the press.
All they did was die.

What has changed? On April 22, 2024, the Washington Post reported that PEN America has canceled its annual awards ceremony, because a number of nominees said they would decline the prize. Why? Because, by failing to censure Israel harshly enough, PEN stands accused of “complicity in normalizing genocide.” What offends me most, I ask myself: the use of “genocide,” the hideous barbarism “normalizing,” the blatant virtue signaling, the presumption of foreign-policy expertise on the part of storytellers and bards, or the irrelevance of wars and disputes in assessing the quality of novels and poems?

See Lionel Shriver on this subject:
https://www.thefp.com/p/lionel-shriver-pen-america-rewards

and The Free Press
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/FMfcgzQZSZCCbrpVqzGMNlHSrqqGvqbh

The signatories thought they were on the right side of history. Eleven months and six days after the attack on Charlie Hebdo came Vendredi 13, Friday the 13th of November 2015, when terrorists killed 130 people in Paris, at the Bataclan theater, the Stade de Paris, and six cafes, including Le Comptoire Voltaire and Le Carillon.

Saul Bellow and Günter Grass Duke It Out at the PEN Congress [by Edwin McDowell, New York Times, January 15, 1986]

After reading this account of an acrimonioius session of the PEN Writers' Congress n New York City in January 1986, sip a Manhattan and guess which famous participant turned out to be a forgetful ex-Nazi.

<<<
A day of relatively calm literary discussion was shattered yesterday at the International PEN Congress when Günter Grass forcifully challenged Saul Bellow on his appraisal of the American dream.

By the time the session ended, a half-dozen prominent writers, including Nadine Gordimer, Allen Ginsberg, Salman Rushdie and Susan Sontag, traded charges and countercharges before an overflow audience.

Until Mr. Grass's statement, the afternoon session had been winding down much as had the morning session, after earnest and sometimes philosophical discussions by a variety of writers on their interpretations of alienation.

The audience heard Toni Morrison, the black American writer, declare that ''at no moment of my life have I ever felt as though I were an American,'' and George Konrad, the Hungarian novelist, assert that the Communist Party could not have come to power in his homeland had it not been for the Soviet Army. He added that the authoritarian regime in Hungary could not have lasted except for the military power of the Warsaw Pact.

Exiled Writers Speak

At the afternoon session, exiled writers from four countries expressed their sense of alienation. Comments ranged from a poignant description by Vassily Aksyonov, the exiled Russian poet, of how the exiled author feels when he is deprived of his home, culture and language, to a description by Manlio Argueta, a Salvadoran writer living in Costa Rica, of what it is like for Central American writers to ask questions of life and death when they are regularly faced with ''the very real possibility of death.''

It was during this session that Mr. Bellow spoke. By contrast, he described alienation as something to which American writers sometimes ''have a fatuous attachment.'' Toward the end of his talk he discussed Rousseau, Stendahl and Marx and added that the American middle class has been preoccupied with ''common sense desires,'' such as clothing, shelter and health care.

Mr. Bellow's talk, which included reminiscences of Robert F. Kennedy and of the author's own childhood as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants growing up in French Canada and Chicago, drew heavy applause.

But at the start of the question and answer period, about an hour later, Mr. Grass walked to the microphone in the center of the Casino on the Park in the Essex House and challenged Mr. Bellow.

Invokes Poverty of the Bronx

Speaking in accented English, Mr. Grass, author of ''The Tin Drum'' and other novels, said that while listening to Mr. Bellow talk about democracy giving Americans not only freedom, but also food and shelter, he had to wonder where he was.

''Three years ago when I was here I was in the South Bronx,'' Mr. Grass said. ''I would like to hear the echo of your words in the South Bronx where people don't have shelter, don't have food, and no possibility to live the freedom you have, or some have in this country.''

Mr. Grass, who has frequently criticized the United States in the past, added that America is a powerful country that protects dictatorships in Turkey and Pakistan.

Seated at the head table, with five foreign writers and the moderator, Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher, Mr. Bellow replied:

''I was talking about the majority situation in this country. I was not trying to include every exception one could think of. Of course there are exceptions. I was simply saying the philosophers of freedom of the 17th and 18th centuries provided a structure which created a society by and large free, by and large an example of prosperity. I did not say there are no pockets of poverty. I did not say this is a land of full justice. I didn't try to justify America as a superpower. I was simply saying there was no particular concern in the foundation of the country with the higher life of the country.''

Battle Is Joined

Mr. Grass returned temporarily to his seat, but at that point the literary and political battle was joined.

Breyten Breytenbach, a South African writer living in Paris, and a member of the panel with Mr. Bellow, said the ''freedom and prosperity of the United States rests possibly on the unfreedom and the poverty and the exploitation of many large parts of the world, including South Africa.''

Another panelist, Adam Zagajewski, a Pole who also lives in Paris, praised Mr. Bellow, saying ''he spoke as an old master'' who is a defender of liberty.

Mr. Aksyonov, who lives in Washington, said it puzzled him why West German writers ''are always so eager to criticize the United States.'' He urged them ''to think twice before making parallels'' between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Mr. Ginsberg, the poet, criticized the Soviet bureaucracy and ''the totalitarian grip it has taken on its client states.'' But, speaking of Nicaragua, he wondered what the United States could do ''to correct the devastation we have wrought in Latin America and elsewhere?''

By this time a line was forming behind the microphone, as much to make statements as to ask questions.

Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer, said that hearing Mr. Grass speak reminded her of the role he played in West Germany after the war - a role ''that he played not in his public speeches but in his imaginative writing to re-establish the honesty of the German language to clear it of the garbage that came up during the Hitler time.''

Mr. Grass, back at the microphone a second time, said he has ''a lot of struggles with Communist countries,'' and that he resented in the West having ''to tell everybody I am anti-Communist.''

William Phillips, co-founder and editor of the Partisan Review, added that he was ''rather baffled by some of the remarks that seem to equate terror and repression in this country with terror and repression in Bulgaria, the Soviet Union and Cuba.''

In a response to Mr. Phillips, Miss Sontag, who had been chairman of the morning session, said: ''No one would entertain the preposterous idea that the United States is at fault for all the difficulties and oppressions and tyrannies in the world. That's not even a notion worth discussing.'' >>>

-- Edwin McDowell, New York Times, January 15, 1986

Who Makes the Ball Drop on New Year's Eve? [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

During a recent lunch with my friend Jen, we got to talking about the holidays and other matters when she casually mentioned that in the early days of the last century, her great uncle, Jacob Starr, invented the ball that drops every year in Times Square. Jen knew some, but not all, of the details around Starr, a relative of whom she is understandably quite proud.

My family's New Year's Eve tradition was to go to a kid-friendly movie (The Sound of Music comes to mind) and upon returning home have dinner and later watch the ball drop to welcome the new year. These days billions of people around the world watch the spectacle on television and thousands brave the cold in Times Square to watch in person. While I've marvelled at the Times Square ball, I've never wondered about how it was made and by whom.

Who was the Jacob Starr who had such an outsized influence on our culture and the urban landscape of New York City? 

It didn’t take much more than a quick on-line search to find out more about this gifted man.

The New York Times started the modern-day tradition of dropping a ball on a pole to mark the beginning of the new year. Fireworks displays had already been drawing crowds to Times Square but a ban of such pyrotechnics in 1907 put an end to that practice.

To continue to attract visitors to Times Square, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs commissioned Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant and metalworker Jacob Starr to create an illuminated iron and wood ball to be lowered from the flagpole of the Times Tower. The first ball-drop in Times Square took place at the turn of the year from 1907 to 1908. It was a huge success.

Jacob Starr was quite a remarkable person and it’s understandable that my friend Jen would be proud to be his relative. He came to the United States from the Ukraine--a dangerous place for Jews--in 1897 and in 1903 went to work at a small New York sign company founded by Benjamin Strauss. While occupied with menial tasks during the day, he attended Cooper Union, the highly competitive tuition-free college in lower Manhattan that offers a world-class education in art, architecture and engineering. Starr graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. Starr, along with his partner Strauss came to be known as the “lamplighters of Broadway” for the many spectacular signs atop buildings in the Great White Way. Jacob Strauss owned the company since 1931 until his death. The Artkraft archive resides at the New York Public Library and makes for fascinating reading. Artkraft designed and built some of the most memorable signs in New York City--the fizzing Coca Cola sign, the painted Camel cigarette sign that blew smoke rings, and hundreds of glittering billboards, theater marquees and illuminated signs that symbolize New York City to visitors from around the world. The neon landscape of Times Square is almost entirely the handiwork of the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation.

This year, when you join the billions of people who count down the final seconds of 2024 while watching the famous Ball-drop, remember that it was created by a Jewish immigrant with humble beginnings whose genius found its full expression in the USA.

--sdl

Defining cultural times: big booms, social movements and individual experience [By Tracy Danison]

“That Is No Longer Our Smoke Sign” (1950s) by Justino Herrera. Photo © Smithsonian American Art Museum

One of the unique things about the experience of people born after 1935 is the frequent cognitive dissonance induced by living long enough to have experienced the “eras” and “ages” of contemporary (potted) history.

Take the “Civil Rights Era 1950-1963”.

Born in 1955, I do remember the shock of running into a segregated water fountain in South Carolina and buying some candy in a “Negro” grocery in Georgia (and, notably, getting warned off afterwards, by a white man). I witnessed then, have witnessed since, witness now a lot of racism, legislated and cultural, have benefited a lot from legislation made to remedy it. But I can’t for the life of me locate a “Civil Rights Era”.

That’s because if “history” is something that has happened, which events, effects and outcomes are known and accounted for, then I’m living, along with others born on the tail-end of the Baby Boom, the struggle for race equality right now. Maybe the “Civil Rights Era” references a time period when elites were obliged to notice; Jim Crow may be down by law but not, by any means, out. The South is still solid, too.

“Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll” (1945) by Salvador Dali. Photo © Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali

Again, born in 1955 and placed in a Catholic elementary school in Wadsworth, Ohio, I learned early to squat correctly under a school desk in the event of atomic attack. Also, I remember, am still today touched by, the scene from the Time Machine where the elderly Filby (Alan Young) urges George (Rod Taylor) to get to the shelter, atomic satellites, you see. I reckon, then, as well as the Civil Right Era, I’ve been living, have lived, am living the “Atomic Age”.

But “Atomic Age” doesn’t name the time I’ve experienced, nor the outlook I’ve developed or, for that matter, those of my fellow humans. “Atomic” is not the right adjective, “Age” not the right noun.

Uranium (Pink), Urangestein (Rosa),1992. Photo, Sigmar Polke © The Estate of Sigmar Polke 

“Atomic” puts aside the awful realization that “the bomber will always get through” as well as the actual experience and effects of the non-atomic firestorms at Dresden and elsewhere, the flattening of Warsaw, the flattening of Stalingrad, the flattening of Germany and then of Viet Nam, then of Afghanistan, now of Ukraine. If “Atomic Age” names the politics and social psychology involved in threats of indiscriminate mass killing with ecocide, why so? With a single exception none of the experienced horror has involved atomic booms.

Since 2022, for instance, not a week has gone by without Vladimir Putin, a fascist strongman who runs a now capitalist, neo-colonial Russia, threatening atomic war. It is said, and I believe it, the United States promises a non-atomic response more than adequate to such occasion. As previously, both sides hesitate. That all seems to me to be about getting in the best boom, not the atomic-est one.

“Bomb, Canopic Jar, Victims” (1967) by Nancy Spero © Nancy Spero

Instead of “Atomic Age”, why not “Best Boom Age” or “Age of Boom”, then? Because the absurdity of “Age of Boom” points, at least for poets and lovers of irony, the absurdity of using “Atomic Age” to name humanity’s urgent struggle to get a grip on its relationships with each other and the rest of nature.

So, cognitive dissonance was my first reaction to the exhibition Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique(“Artists confronting history – the Atomic Age”), which recently opened at the Musée de l’art moderne de Paris. The curators say that the invention of the atomic bomb and its use marked a turning point in the modern history of the atom, starting a “new”, second Atomic Age. Since that big boom at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, art, science and politics have become indissociable.

Eighty years on, V-discs "for our servicemen overseas"

There's a thin young man named Frankie hanging around the theater.
who is glad to be making more V-discs for the men overseas.
Now he'd like to sing
"If You are but a Dream."
"Sunday, Monday, and Always" -- "Dick Haymes, Dick Todd, and Como."
"There'll be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlim"

On Ten Years of “Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets” [by Andrew Epstein]

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I decided to create a website devoted to the New York School of poets and artists and name it Locus Solus, after the legendary little magazine that briefly served as the movement’s house journal. Even at the time, I knew it was swimming a bit upstream to launch a blog just at the very moment that the blogging era seemed to be crashing to a close. But I did so because I’d long felt the need for a place to find commentary, news, reviews, and links related to a movement that I found endlessly fascinating and that others seemed to as well. As I noted on the fifth anniversary of Locus Solus, back in 2018, I didn’t have a clear picture of what this site might become or what kind of audience it might find – and had no idea that I might write about 350 posts over the next decade! — but was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was both fun and rewarding to do and that others seemed to find it useful and interesting too.

To mark the occasion of this anniversary, the Flow Chart Foundation (the wonderful organization devoted to the legacy of John Ashbery) and the critic Mandana Chaffa have generously invited me to have a conversation about the blog, its mission and history, and the New York School more broadly, which will be held virtually next Wednesday, 6/15. You can find more information about the event and how to register here. Please join us for the conversation!

Over the past five years, I’ve continued to chronicle the New York School’s ongoing influence on poetry and its legacy in contemporary culture, track the rich critical conversation it continues to provoke, and comment here and there on poems, books, podcasts, and performances. It’s almost impossible to keep up with all things New York School-related – from new art exhibits and books, sightings in the broader culture and surprising cameos in music and television, and the sad news about deaths and losses and the passing of a generation or two.

Over the past five years, I’ve posted on everything from O’Hara’s unexpected influence on fashion, on Jennifer Lawrence’s accessory choices, and on contemporary fiction to mourning the loss of jazz musicians with ties to the New York School; from how the study of mathematics is related to John Ashbery’s embrace of indeterminacy to Ted Berrigan’s influence on indie rock; from Ben Lerner’s oblique elegy to Ashbery to the time O’Hara met Marlene Dietrich.

If you’re curious about the range of topics and types of things I’ve posted about here over the past decade, click on the “Categories” and “Archives” drop-down menus on the right side of the screen and browse around.  (And to keep up with new stuff, some of which doesn’t make it on to this blog, be sure to follow the “Locus Solus” Facebook page and my own Twitter account, as well as this site, to get timely updates and information and links about the poets and artists of the New York School).

I have been consistently surprised and heartened by the broad and vibrant community of readers and writers that the New York School continues to inspire. It’s been wonderful to hear from so many fans, fellow scholars, poets, and interested readers, and I appreciate all the tips, suggestions, questions, and enthusiastic responses that have come my way — please keep them coming.

Thanks, as always, for reading and for visiting this site. As Ashbery writes at the end of “The System,” “The past is dust and ashes, and this incommensurably wide way leads to the pragmatic and kinetic future.” Onward! 

by Andrew Epstein

https://newyorkschoolpoets.wordpress.com/2023/06/09/on-ten-years-of-locus-solus-the-new-york-school-of-poets/

 

JA & Paul Auster remembered in "The Forward"

By Daniel Witkin

How Poets And Novelists Are Mourning John Ashbery

September 6, 2017

John Ashbery was among the very greatest poets of the postwar era, one of the most imaginative and accurate chroniclers of what he called “the experience of experience.”

But he might have blanched to hear himself spoken of in such portentous, non-poetic terms. Following Ashbery’s passing on September 3, his friends and acolytes offered reminiscences that shed light on the person behind some of our era’s most challenging and enchanting verse.

David Lehman, a poet and the editor of The Best American Poetry series, included in his remembrance for The American Scholar a mention of sharing an office with Ashbery in the 1970s. He noted that “It was also fun to observe as things JA said in interviews entered the general discourse. For example, ‘Often people don’t listen to you when you speak to them. It’s only when you talk to yourself that they prick up their ears.’ And: ‘I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.’”

Reflecting on him in the Times, poet Rae Armantrout reflected on how Ashbery’s down-to-earth humor manifested within his poems. “He is one poet who can somehow be simultaneously elegiac and playful, even goofy,” she wrote. “If you could find the impossible space where Franz Kafka overlapped with the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, John would be sitting there happily, grinning like the Cheshire cat.”

In a piece for The New Yorker, poet and novelist Ben Lerner imagined Ashbery inserting some jokes into his tribute in an august periodical, like Tom Sawyer spying on his pomp and ceremony of his own funeral. “I’m dizzied by my luck at having overlapped with John Ashbery, one of the good things about being born when I was,” Lerner wrote.

"Marx Was a Jew" [poem by David Lehman]

"Marx Was a Jew "

It’s the turning point of The Stranger (1946),
the moment Edward G. Robinson
wakes up in the middle of the night
knowing Orson Welles gave himself away
by saying “Marx wasn’t a German,
he was a Jew.” Only a Nazi
would make the distinction, he reasons.

On the other hand, in “On the Jewish Question” (1843),
Karl Marx wrote that money is the jealous god
of the Jews, turning men into commodities,
hucksters all, look at them haggle.
“The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew,”
he wrote, and the road to a free world requires
“the emancipation of humanity from Judaism.”

So are you saying that a Jew can be anti-Semitic?
Or that the Left has a love-hate history with the Jews,
the hate reserved for (or projected onto) Israel,
itself a concept in a cloudy world of concepts
rather than a state containing millions of souls?
And along comes a smartass academic pronoun to explain
Marx’s essay is actually a critique of anti-Semitism.

-- this poem first appeared on August 20, 2024, in Tablet magazine.

"The doorknob came off in my hand!" (on Les Gottesman) [by Bruce Kawin]

Kawin to Gottesman

 The elevator didn’t stop
this morning, the
solenoid’s
failing.

Every day
the long ones and
the short ones
you’re missing.

The Doorknob: Les Gottesman, Columbia Review, and the 1968 Student Protest

I met Les Gottesman in a Columbia dorm in 1963. All freshmen in the college had to spend their first year in a dorm. Our rooms were two doors apart. Most of the rooms were doubles, but I don’t remember anything about his roommate or whether he had one. Les and I became friends with another freshman, Aaron Fogel, and the three of us used to hang out and talk about books. All three of us wanted to be writers, and we all joined the college literary magazine, Columbia Review. In time, each of us became its editor.

An editor served for a year after spending at least a year on the editorial board. When Les and I were freshmen, Phil Lopate was the editor and Ron Padgett was on the board. The issues they produced were inspiring, brilliant work, authentically literary. Lopate and Padgett were seniors, and after they graduated, the next editor was Alan Feldman. In addition to the commercially printed literary review, we began to publish mimeographed books as Columbia Review Press. The first book was Six Arguments, a novel by Carol Lopate.

Aaron Fogel became the editor after Alan, and I was next. Les stayed on an extra year, and in his fifth year he was the editor. His competition had been David Shapiro, the poet who had published January, a hardcover book of poems, in his freshman year. Les was editor of the Review in 1967-68, the year of the student protest against Columbia’s plan to build a gym in a nearby park in Harlem, with no consideration for the people who used that space. To clear out the protestors, Columbia called the cops. (The more recent student protest and Columbia’s reaction may echo some of this, but the university president we had to deal with was both inadequate and inflexible, consistently ignoring what students and the community were trying to tell him.)

Les and the next (joint) editors, Hilton Obenzinger and Alan Senauke, were among those who occupied forbidden buildings on the campus. One of our greatest English professors, Frederick Dupee, was one of the faculty who tried to intervene between the students and the police, and like many of the students he was clubbed by a policeman—in the head, and he fell to the ground. Steve Vinocor, a guy I’d gone to high school with who was at that time enrolled in the Jewish Theological Seminary and studying to be a rabbi, was dragged down one of the narrow circular staircases in the library’s stacks by a cop who pulled his feet while Steve’s head dropped onto each steel step. A photo of David Shapiro smoking a cigar in the office of Columbia’s president went the predigital equivalent of viral.

David Shapiro, who died only a few months ago, went on to teach art and to publish volumes of poems that are essential reading. Les Gottesman, who died only a few years ago, had moved to the Bay Area, gotten married, worked in the school system, continued to write poetry, and among other things created Omerta Publications. He was the editor and publisher of Omerta’s books: original poetry and prose, there must have been more than 30 of them. As an editor he was both generous and ruthless. The last book Les told me about acquiring for Omerta, and he was very happy about it, was by Diane di Prima. Shortly after that I heard from David Lehman that Les died.

Les missed today, just as he missed, and was missing from, the recent day I wrote the poem. The doorknob came off in his hand. By which I mean:

One day when we were both undergraduates, I was sitting on a corner of the library steps when Les ran up the steps to me, talking fast—telling me what happened and his poem about it:

                              Paranoia

               The doorknob came off in my hand!

The doorknob came off in my hand!

He repeated it, he told me how it felt when he’d just now gone to open a door but the doorknob had come out of the door when he pulled on it, and he left both of us laughing and scared—because behind the laughing and the poem-making was the realization of how something we feared or didn’t expect, death maybe, could just suddenly be there. I don’t think he published it.

7/ 23/ 24

by Bruce Kawin

 for David Lehman

Born today, JFK (May 29, 1917 - November 22, 1963), a Gemini Gem

Anthem for Doomed Youth [by Wilfred Owen 1893 – 1918]

Anthem for Doomed Youth [by Wilfred Owen 1893 – 1918]

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds

"The Totally Incorrect Politician" [by Walter Carey]

As everyone from Yogi Berra to Niels Bohr has said, "it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future." 

When you make predictions about the past, it seems retroactively inevitable.  Nonsense.

That being said, as the creep says after paying lip service to the truth, here goes: 

TTThey, who know who they are, will go after an Ivy League institution or equivalent (Stanford, Harvard, MIT) and rattle the bones of the administration with the result that

(1) The Dreyfus Case will serve as a cause celebre for the second time
(2) There will be massive layoffs in higher education
(3) Five-year contracts will replace tenure
(4) The tax-exempt status of universities with giant endowments will come under threat
(5) The world is on fire.

Doris Day & Gordon MacRae sing the great WWI morale-booster

 

"If You Were The Only Girl In The World" from By The Light Of The Silvery Moon (1953)

The Cover of "Time" (January 31, 1969)

On January 31, 1969, Time magazine broke the story.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Pantheon [by Jim Cummins]

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert thumb a ride in the 1934 rom-com "It Happened One Night"

A while back I posted a piece about how “immortality” had nothing to do with the future, but was rather a necessary requirement for the daily production of a writer. Now I think I’ve come up with an idea that will satisfy all those among us who daydream about being immortalized for the ages like Shakespeare or Chidioch Tichborne. I call it “the hitchhiker’s guide to the pantheon,” and it goes like this.

We start where all humanity started, with the opposable thumb. The thumb is a remarkable appendage. Think about all the practical wisdom evolution has poured into the thumb: prodding it to meet the index finger so as to reassure tribal colleagues all is okay; providing it to infants (and select adults) as a replacement for the maternal teat; establishing it as a weapon to stick in an enemy’s eye (only for home defense, of course); and as a means for stealing away with something after you’ve grasped it (no judgment). 

A thumb’s usages are almost endless. You can tell a bub to “take a hike.” You can have someone executed in an amphitheater. You can indicate a loner over by the window to a detective. And I believe my generation of Boomers has contributed greatly to the evolution of the thumb by spending the greater part of the ‘60s and early ‘70s hitchhiking all over the U.S. and Europe. It was magical. We’d just hang a thumb out on the freeway, and away we’d go. Since we often, or usually, had little sense of where we were going, our evolutionary thumbs began to take on the problem of “destination” for us. It was kind of like “dowsing”--or better, like the wand stuff in Harry Potter. Something like “the destination chooses the thumb.”

Unfortunately, the proliferation of serial killers in the ‘80s and ‘90s pretty much destroyed the Golden Age of Hitchhiking for the rest of us. (I’ve always suspected Greyhound and Trailways of bankrolling those bastards, but I have no proof. We didn’t have “talk radio” back then.) Anyway, let’s cut to the chase, so to speak. Here’s how we all end up immortal.

First of all, when I die I leave one of my thumbs to a cryogenic firm. The rest of me gets cremated (it’s more responsible ecologically); then when science refines the ability to reconstruct me from my frozen thumb cells, a la Jurassic Park, I’ll return—as a critic! I’ll “rediscover” my own work of years past, and proclaim myself the new Chaucer or, what the heck, Shakespeare! Having established myself in the pantheon, I can expand the business: David Ignatow, Amy Clampett, any number of British poets named “Peter”-- anonymous poets with heirs who can pay. 

I know what you’re thinking: why not let the usual literary processes prevail and get rediscovered “naturally” in a hundred years? But have you thought this through? Can you imagine how many hundreds of thousands of MFA graduates will be hoping to be rediscovered in a hundred years? No critical apparatus can possibly cope with those numbers. But my program can get you in on the ground floor.  What’s that worth to you? (Besides your thumb, of course; I’ll need your thumb.) 

Did Freud Die? And if so, when? [by David Lehman]

I) Yes, he died

(1) At Freiberg (then part of Moravia) of a gunshot wound said to be self-inflicted on 6 May 1856

(2) In London of throat cancer on 23 September 1939

(3) Brokenhearted in North London of bronchitis on March 14, 1883

(4) In Paris, executed by guillotine, 28 July 1794

(5) In Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945.

(6) When his boat went down in a sudden storm off the coast of the Gulf of Spezia. on July 8, 1822.

(7) Drinking a goblet of hemlock 399 years BC

II). No, he did not die. He changed his name. He outlived Hitler. Beethoven's Ninth was the symphonic apotheosis of an ode to him. Freud means joy. Freud sounds like freedom. Freud is too close to fraud for comfort. 

Extra credit:

What were Freud's last words? And who said the others?
(1) Mehr licht! Mehr licht!
(2) More beer!
(3) Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.
(3) Friends, applaud! The comedy is finished.
(4) Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
(5) Am I dying, or is it my birthday?
(6) Nothing is easy for a dying man.
(7) "Good dog.” (Technically: vot sobaka.)

Thank you to our sponsors, including Beethoven, Nancy Cunard,  Benjamin Franklin, Freud, Goethe,  Lenin, Marx,, Gertrude Stein, Pancho Villa, Oscar Wilde, Nero Wolfe.

Name the object. It's in Vienna. 

I) Yes, he died

(1) At Freiberg (then part of Moravia) of a gunshot wound said to be self-inflicted on 6 May 1856

(2) In London of throat cancer on 23 September 1939

(3) Brokenhearted in North London of bronchitis on March 14, 1883

(4) In Paris, executed by guillotine, 28 July 1794

(5) In Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945.

(6) When his boat went down in a sudden storm off the coast of the Gulf of Spezia. on July 8, 1822.

(7) Drinking a goblet of hemlock 399 years BC

II). No, he did not die. He changed his name. He outlived Hitler. Beethoven's Ninth was the symphonic apotheosis of an ode to him. Freud means joy. Freud sounds like freedom. Freud is too close to fraud for comfort. 

Extra credit:

What were Freud's last words? And who said the others?
(1) Mehr licht! Mehr licht!
(2) More beer!
(3) Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.
(3) Friends, applaud! The comedy is finished.
(4) Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
(5) Am I dying, or is it my birthday?
(6) Nothing is easy for a dying man.
(7) "Good dog.” (Technically: vot sobaka.)

Thank you to our sponsors, including Beethoven, Nancy Cunard,  Benjamin Franklin, Freud, Goethe,  Lenin, Marx,, Gertrude Stein, Pancho Villa, Oscar Wilde, Nero Wolfe.

Name the object. It's in Vienna. 

I) Yes, he died

(1) At Freiberg (then part of Moravia) of a gunshot wound said to be self-inflicted on 6 May 1856

(2) In London of throat cancer on 23 September 1939

(3) Brokenhearted in North London of bronchitis on March 14, 1883

(4) In Paris, executed by guillotine, 28 July 1794

(5) In Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945.

(6) When his boat went down in a sudden storm off the coast of the Gulf of Spezia. on July 8, 1822.

(7) Drinking a goblet of hemlock 399 years BC

II). No, he did not die. He changed his name. He outlived Hitler. Beethoven's Ninth was the symphonic apotheosis of an ode to him. Freud means joy. Freud sounds like freedom. Freud is too close to fraud for comfort. 

Extra credit:

What were Freud's last words? And who said the others?
(1) Mehr licht! Mehr licht!
(2) More beer!
(3) Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.
(3) Friends, applaud! The comedy is finished.
(4) Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
(5) Am I dying, or is it my birthday?
(6) Nothing is easy for a dying man.
(7) "Good dog.” (Technically: vot sobaka.)

Thank you to our sponsors, including Beethoven, Nancy Cunard,  Benjamin Franklin, Freud, Goethe,  Lenin, Marx,, Gertrude Stein, Pancho Villa, Oscar Wilde, Nero Wolfe.

Name the object. It's in Vienna. 

The Day that Kennedy was Killed [by David Lehman]

The day that Kennedy was killed
    Was the day before the Stuyvesant-Clinton football game.
    There was a rally in the auditorium
    And our coach who was from Texas or Oklahoma said slowly, carefully,
    “There isn’t a horse that can’t be bucked.”

    Meanwhile half the school was marching along
            Fifteenth Street to Union Square and then up to
            Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue and some got up to
            Fifty Ninth, and they were parading,
            Yelling, “De Witt eats shit” until they were stopped by policemen.
                  I didn’t go.  I stayed in school.
                  That day I almost got into a fight
                  With a fellow twice my size on the stairway
                  And he laughed at me.  A friend of mine broke it up.

    In English the head of the Physics Department walked
    Into the room.  He said, “I think you are old enough
    To understand this.  The President was shot today in Texas.”
            I stand up.  I do not understand.  I say, “What”
            And I think, the President was shocked today in Texas.
            He leaves the room.  I am sorry.

    I leave early. The Clinton game is called off,
            And the series has since been discontinued.
    My French teacher is waiting for me.  Smiling shuffling his legs
            Touching his teeth with his tongue looking at me
            He says, “There is a rumor that Kennedy was shot.
            Do you know anything about that?”

    A week later I go to my cousin’s bar mitzvah
            Out in Long Island, and I bring a catalog with me
            From the Bernard Baruch School of City College.
                        I want to be a stockbroker.
    It is windy outside and we walk a mile or more
            To get to the bar mitzvah
    And as I walk I talk to my mother
    And I think carefully of what I am to say
    And I narrow my eyes.
    It is a cold and windy three days after Thanksgiving
    And I point my thumb to my stomach and chest
    And I brush my scarf against my face
    And I say, “I too want to become President.”

-- David Lehman, March 1967

What is "Cancel Culture" (and "Coward Culture")? [by Bret Stephens in "Sapir"]

Bret Stephens in Sapir (Autumn 2022):
<<<
What exactly do we mean by “cancel culture”? It’s obviously not a matter of being fired for cause. Harvey Weinstein wasn’t a victim of cancel culture: He’s someone whose serial abuses were moral, professional, legal, and criminal. Nor is it cancel culture simply when private companies, universities, or other institutions discipline employees or students for violating long-established and widely agreed standards of professional and personal conduct. When actress Roseanne Barr tweeted in 2018 that Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama-administration aide, was the baby of the “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes,” ABC had a legitimate reputational interest in giving her the boot.

A better way to understand cancel culture is to break it down into five component parts: an action, a method, a capitulation, a mentality, and a culture.

The action is cancellation. But cancellation doesn’t simply mean losing a job, a book contract, a TV show, a speaking gig, and so on. It’s more like erasure. A canceled person will lose not only his job but also his career. He will lose not only his career but also his reputation. He will lose not only his reputation but also many of the people he once considered friends. He will lose not only his friends but also, in some cases, his will to live. David Bucci was a 50-year-old professor at Dartmouth and a married father of three when he became entangled in allegations that, as a department head, he had looked the other way at a campus culture of sexual harassment. Though he was never accused of personal misconduct, the school’s failure to declare his innocence sent him into a spiral. He committed suicide in October 2019.

The method is usually the social-pressure campaign — with the aim to not only destroy the intended target but advertise the destruction far and wide as a means of intimidation. Person X is deemed a malefactor for a statement or action that an exceptionally vocal minority of people consider immoral or that causes “harm” and makes people “feel unsafe.” Sometimes these campaigns begin with an accusation that turns into a workplace whisper campaign; at other times with a social-media post that quickly gains wide attention and descends on the designated target like a Himalayan avalanche. Employers, allergic to public controversy, seek to make the problem go away as quickly as possible, usually by extracting an apology from the targeted employee. That apology, often given under acute emotional distress, is seen as an admission of guilt. Termination swiftly follows.

Capitulation is an underappreciated but integral aspect of cancel culture. After David Sabatini, a renowned cancer biologist, was pushed out of his job at MIT on account of a non-disclosed consensual relationship with a younger colleague that went sour, friends of his who thought the charges against him were nonsense sought to bring him to New York University. When word got out of his potential hire, it led to public protests, to which the NYU administration, including university president Andrew Hamilton, promptly caved. Sabatini, once touted as a future Nobel laureate, is now unhirable in American academia. Cancel culture flourishes because coward culture allows it.

Then there is mentality. The best term I know of for practitioners of cancel culture is “cry-bullies.” It captures the combination of self-pity and vindictiveness (the former providing limitless justification for the latter) that explains so much of the way cancel culture operates: the disdain for due process; the unlimited deference shown to the accuser; the indifference to the possibility of innocence or, at least, mitigating factors; the reputation-smearing; the foreclosure of any possibility of second chances or redemption; the demand for complete professional and personal excommunication. There’s a reason, as Lionel Shriver notes, why today’s cancel culture reminds people of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or Robespierre’s Terror (minus, for now, the bloodshed). Only those fully convinced of their utter righteousness can be so completely pitiless.

So this is cancel culture: a highly effective social-pressure mechanism through which the ideological fixations of the aggrieved and truculent few are imposed on the fearful or compliant many by means of the social annihilation of a handful of unfortunate individuals.

Finally, culture. Cancellation is awful, but it befalls relatively few. The broader impact is on a wider circle of people who fear that they, too, can be canceled at a moment’s notice for saying or doing the wrong thing. It’s what leads to increasingly widespread habits of self-censorship, speaking in euphemisms, professing views one doesn’t really hold, pulling intellectual punches, or restricting candid conversations to a close circle of like-minded and trusted friends. It is why more than 60 percent of Americans admitted in 2020 that they have views they are afraid to share in public, and another 32 percent fear that their job prospects could be harmed by speaking their mind. It’s also why young undergraduates such as Olivia Eve Gross, a third-year student at the University of Chicago who is publishing her debut essay in this issue, thinks twice before raising her hand in class.  
>>>

from https://sapirjournal.org/cancellation/2022/10/jews-and-cancel-culture/

Napoleon at St. Cloud in the Council of the 500 [by François Bouchot]

On Napoleon's birthday. . .

François Bouchot, General Bonaparte [born on August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, Corsica] in the Council of the Five Hundred, at Saint-Cloud, 10 November 1799, 1840, Oil on canvas, Musée National du château de Versailles.

Martin Peretz on Harvard

<<< Harvard had a kind of indifference to its Americanness then [postwar years]: Europe was still everything, Cambridge and Oxford were the colleges, Britain was the culture. American bounty was ignored. Four Mark Rothko murals hung until they were battered and faded in the dining room of Holyoke Center, a large and absurdly ugly brutalist building just off Harvard Square; now they’re in the Fogg Museum, which at the time had a great collection of 19th-century American painting—Winslow Homers, George Innesses, Frederic Edwin Churches—all rolled up in the attic. Harvard had an indifference to its wealth, too, which was substantial but somehow assumed. My friend Roger Rosenblatt studied literature at Harvard and got fellowship after fellowship. But eventually there was a fellowship he needed that wasn’t going to come through. One of Roger’s instructors said to him, apologetically, “Well, Rog, looks like you’ll have to dip into capital.” It was assumed a Harvard student would have capital to dip into.

The undergraduate houses in those days were class based, on the model of Oxford and Cambridge. Eliot House was for the upper class, the place for boys from Groton or St. Paul’s. If you’d been to Andover or Exeter, it was Lowell House. People from New York City public schools, the few there were, went to Adams House. Winthrop House was far away by the river and for the lower classes. It was like a map of the class structure, but it wasn’t axiomatic. For example, FDR had also lived in Adams House, though that was earlier, and so had John Reed, who is buried in Red Square. Alan Graubard, a very Jewish friend of mine, lived in Eliot House and was called “Mr. Israel” by his house master, John H. Finley Jr., a classicist descended from prominent Episcopalian ministers and public servants. Finley used the nickname not to be unkind—he was a friendly man—but probably in desperation at forgetting Alan’s name. >>>

<<< Harvard’s 300 years of Protestant inheritance was in its last, most overripe stages [circa 1960]. The old forms were increasingly minoritarian; most of the culture was actually decadent. A young man, part of a group that used to go down to New York to see Andy Warhol, died the first or second year I was there from a drug overdose. But it wasn’t the kind of thing you ever talked about. Eventually, though, the rumors of rampant marijuana use in the houses became so loud even the masters had to hear them.

A distinguished sociologist, George Homans, and I were appointed to investigate these rumors [o drug use] in Kirkland House. We knew that they were true before we even started and George said, “We’re going to have to tell Charles very gently.” He was referring to master of Kirkland, Charles Taylor, an undistinguished professor of history and man of a passing era we both liked. We went into the master’s office for tea, biscuits, and sherry, like they used to serve at Harvard, and before we could say anything he proclaimed: “If I find out that there is marijuana [he pronounced it with the j] in this house, I will cut my throat.” That brought us both up short, so George took over. He began, and began, and began again, and finally the master, who could see what was coming but needed a lifeline, said, “You’re not going to tell me, are you, that so and so does pot?” >>>

 

 

Peretz is the former publisher of The New Republic. 

from Tablet

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/christians-and-jews-at-harvard-marty-peretz

The Century Martini: Vive la republique de France a quatorze juillet

 

(art by Hilary Cooper, 2020; clip from Casablanca)

La Marseillaise

Allons, enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé.
Contre nous, de la tyrannie,
L’étendard sanglant est levé;
L’étendard sanglant est levé.
Entendez-vous, dans les campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes.
Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons!
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons.

"La Marseillaise" was written in one night, (April 24, 1792) by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle.