Ajemmajem

 Poetry  36 Responses »
Nov 182003
 

Jacques Barzun writes:

When an undergraduate at a great university in the nineties, my fatherly friend had taken a course on the English lyric. The readings were from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and the lectures, by a well-known scholar, consisted of a careful account of the lives of the poets. The schools they went to, the patrons and wives they had, the journeys they made, the books they read and published were minutely chronicled, with thoughtful discussions of moot points and rival theories. Then, after two or three hours thus spent, the lecturer would come to the assigned lyric: “And now, gentlemen, what shall we say of this exquisite work? There is only one thing to say — a gem, a gem!”

…that last ritual phrase had become a family catchword that had to be explained to every newcomer. When something was approved of in a general way, but not really known or warmly liked, it was “ajemmajem.” The girls themselves, when asked about a new young man who had proved pleasant but not entrancing, would reply casually, “Ajemmajem.”

Michaela Cooper, writing about Ozymandias, acquits herself more creditably. She steers clear of Shelley’s life, which has long been a magnet for fatuous utterance. She summarizes its themes accurately; ars longa vita brevis and sic semper tyrannis and all that. She discourses on Chinese boxes and Russian dolls — the traveller tells the story to the narrator, quoting the epigraph on the statue, which itself quotes Ozymandias! According to Michaela this represents “three different aesthetic modes,” though I fear that is more her idea than Shelley’s, who was reliably simple-minded. She even throws in a reference to Edward Said. Michaela has a promising future in literary scholarship, and I wish her all the best.

Still, when evaluation time rolls around, she treats us to “intensity,” “dramatic contrast,” and “mind-exploding effect”: ajemmajem, in short. Now I, too, once thought as Michaela and spake as Michaela. Ozymandias was the first sonnet I ever memorized and I still have it off by heart. So it is with regret that I report, from my dotage, that Ozymandias is a bad poem, trite, stereotyped, and imprecise at every turn.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Poets are supposed to take special pains with language; let’s look at the language. “Antique,” with its orientalizing flavor, was mildly embarrassing in 1817; it is more embarrassing now. Edward Said would certainly object were he alive to do so. Nothing could be worse than “lone and level,” unless it is “boundless and bare.” Both pairs are applied to the sands; one would have more than sufficed. The vast and trunkless legs of stone present a striking image. Torsi missing their appendages are common enough, but Shelley’s trunkless legs and head are unique, to my knowledge, in the history of statuary.

The visage raises further difficulties. It’s no easy trick to frown and sneer at once; try it sometime. And to discern a frown, a wrinkled lip, and a sneer of cold command in a shattered visage one would have to be a remarkably perceptive traveller. “Fragmented” perhaps, “faded” possibly; but “shattered”? This was one of Shelley’s favorite adjectives, and he employed it here because he liked the sound.

In line 8 we have the heart that fed. What did it feed? If we generously allow “them” to serve as the object of “fed” along with “mocked,” then the heart fed “those passions” in line 6. The heart must belong to Ozymandias; so the passage means, “the sculptor well understood the passions that fed Ozymandias’s heart, and that the sculptor mocked, and that survive both the sculptor and Ozymandias.” But this is too convoluted to be impressive.

I can sympathize with the sentiment of Ozymandias, as I can with most of Shelley. But its theme is banal, and banally expressed. Michaela describes Ozymandias as “viscerally political and democratic,” emphasizing the political and democratic. Spare a thought for “viscerally” too.

(Update: George Wallace improves on the original. Michaela Cooper replies, in detail. I think she’s right about “antique,” and I like, though am not convinced by, the links to the frowning and sneering statues. Mike Snider comments. Rick Coencas comments. Chris Lott comments.)

Your Criminal Mind, and Mine

 Culture  30 Responses »
Nov 132003
 

It’s not I’m anti-social, I’m only anti-woik,
Glo-ri-os-ki, that’s why I’m a joik!

What causes crime? The classical environmental “root cause” theories suffer from two crippling defects. First, whatever root cause you choose — poverty, unemployment, peer pressure, parental abuse, parental indulgence — the vast majority of people who are exposed to it do not become criminals. Give us your poor, your jobless, your inadequately-brought-up yearning to breathe free to their therapists, and you will find that the vast majority, in all cases, are law-abiding. Whoever thinks that prisons breed criminals might ask himself who winds up in prison in the first place. Prisons incarcerate criminals. Not a great deal of breeding goes on in jail.

The criminals who have never faced your pet root cause, who grow up well-fixed, with loving parents, in law-abiding neighborhoods, also remain to be accounted for. People save most of their hand-wringing for crimes committed by these types, not because the crimes are especially brutal, but because none of the conventional explanations seem to fit. He was only a lad, he had everything, why would he do a thing like that? The shock comes from ideas smacking into reality.

If crime, metaphorically, is a disease, and its “root cause” is a virus, you can be exposed to the virus without catching the disease, and you can catch the disease without being exposed to the virus. This violates both tenets of Koch’s First Postulate straightaway. Aristotle wouldn’t be too happy either.

All this is not to disparage the sociologists, who presumably are doing their best. Multifactorial phenomena like crime defeat hard scientists as well; witness the struggles of medicine with cancer or physics with the Three-Body Problem. Humans seem not to be very well-wired to analyze more than one cause at a time; in fact the very concept of “cause” implies singularity.

According to Stanton Samenow, criminals cause crime. More precisely, criminal thinking causes crime. By trade Samenow is a clinical psychologist who specializes in criminals, and he came to his views, he writes in Inside the Criminal Mind, with some reluctance. Under his mentor, Samuel Yochelson, with whom he authored a three-volume study of the criminal personality, Samenow began to come around. He found Yochelson’s methods especially convincing:

Dr. Yochelson first had contact with these men… when things were going badly for them. They were about to be sentenced by the court, were already locked up, or had been faced with the loss of something valuable to them such as a family or career. In his initial interview, Yochelson asked few questions of the criminal but instead presented him with so accurate a picture of himself that the criminal could do nothing but agree.

Hey, with a shrink like that I might go myself! Yochelson could do this, Samenow says, because all criminals think alike. It starts early: most criminals have developed their habits of thought long before adolescence. Samenow begins with what most of us could figure out if we thought about it. Criminals all fancy themselves special, more intelligent than straight people. They treat everyone, including their family and closest friends, as pawns to be moved around for the chessboard for their personal gratification. They lie, not just like most of us when they’re in a tough spot, but all the time. They hate work because it’s, well, work. They are impatient and seek quick rewards.

He proceeds to become disquietingly shrewd and well-informed. On the sudden flashes of interest the delinquent shows in school:

The criminal child appears to have a short attention span for most classroom assignments. However, to his teacher’s astonishment, his lethargy is transformed into a burst of concentrated activity once he finds an interest… One teenager recalled that whatever academic interests he had disappeared as soon as someone provided direction, tested his knowledge, or imposed a deadline. He said, “The interest would turn into a conflict when something had to be produced like a paper or a test.” His “conflict” was that he objected to others’ telling him what to do, whether at school or anywhere else… He reflected, “Grading systems always bothered me, because I just disagree with them totally. If there’s anything I’m interested in, I can do it.” … The parts of the curriculum that interest [criminal children] are those appealing to their sense of adventure and thirst for excitement, such as a detailed account of a bloody battle or a dramatic science experiment.

On pleading insanity and getting over in the nuthouse:

To the criminal, the hospital is a permissive prison. Because he is considered sick, his crimes of the past and violations of the present are treated therapeutically, not punitively. He figures, often correctly, that he can do as he pleases as long as he shows remorse and psychological insight later. If he uses illicit drugs, he can explain it as his seeking relief from overwhelming anxiety. If he tries to escape, he can relate it to intense depression. Sometimes he gets away with such psychological rationalizations and may even be praised for them.

Memo to Judith Rich Harris, who has made quite a name for herself by arguing that peers have more influence over children than their parents do: which peers would those be, exactly?

Every secondary school has groups with different names — preppies, jocks, sweathogs [I guess: the book was published in 1984], freaks, and so forth. Snarled one 14 year old, “Preppies, I hate ’em. They think they’re so neat with their alligator shirts.” He chose to associate with the “freaks,” who skipped school, used drugs, and went on shoplifting binges. One father said of his son, “If Guy saw a group of neatly dressed students holding their books and talking about girls, cars, and sports, and he saw a scraggly bunch of boys swaggering around, drinking, and cursing, he would always choose the second group.”

One might argue that Samenow has only pushed the question back. Sure, criminals think a certain way, but why? Nature? Nurture?

Neither. Asking why someone commits a crime is like asking why Caesar crossed the Rubicon. It is the individual, irreducible act of will, what Ludwig von Mises calls “ultimate data.” In the absence of Laplace’s mathematical demon, choice is as low as we can go.

My copy of Inside the Criminal Mind, borrowed from a friend (like Anatole France, I never return a book or get one back, and my library consists entirely of other people’s books), is heavily annotated, mostly with proper names. I recommend my friend’s approach, so long as you don’t write your own name too often. Next to a passage about criminals who cry discrimination to shift attention from their own wrongdoing he writes “Clinton” in the margin. Another about criminal sentimentality and sensitivity to art and music has “Mom” (Mom?) written next to it. Many pages bear the names of our mutual friends, and yes, it’s true, and no, you don’t want to know them.

(Update: Mark Wickens comments, briefly but trenchantly.)

(Further: Michaela Cooper takes me to task, first, quite properly, for my bad manners, for which I hope she accepts my apology, and then for my content. Essentially she makes two points. One is that with criminality we are dealing with “risk factors,” not causation. The jobless commit crimes at a higher rate than the employed; therefore if the government finds everyone a job crime will decline. Not so fast. When sociologists say that X is a risk factor for Y, they mean that X and Y occur together more often than one would expect by chance. Since it is effectively impossible to control for variables in these studies, causal inferences are just-so stories. Joblessness might be a risk factor for crime; but one could also say, with equal logic and considerably more anecdotal evidence, that crime is a risk factor for joblessness.

Michaela also convicts me and Samenow of circularity:

What is a “criminal” anyway? It can’t be just someone who’s been convicted of a crime, since obviously zillions of people convicted of crimes (drug possession, involuntary manslaughter, isolated thefts of opportunity [Dreiser’s Hurstwood], not to mention those wrongfully convicted) don’t fit Samenow’s stereotype. Presumably, for Samenow, a “criminal” must have committed several crimes. How many? And what of those whose recidivism is driven by compulsion rather than sociopathic calculation — kleptomaniacs, flashers, peeping Toms? What about the ordinarily kind and loving alcoholic who assaults people when he’s really drunk? Must they all be crowbarred into Samenow’s singular criminal-mind box?

Surely many, many, many people incarcerated have few, if any, of the characteristics Samenow trots out! So, then, which prisoners do have them? Why the criminals!

I’ve never known a “kind and loving alcoholic who assaults people when he’s really drunk,” although I’ve known several violent alcoholics. I don’t believe in “compulsion,” and I don’t believe in Hurstwood either. Why can kleptomaniacs and flashers manage not to steal or expose themselves when the cop is watching?

Samenow claims that everyone who habitually commits crimes against people and property thinks this way. This is the vast majority of the prison population, including the ones who happen to be locked up for drug offenses, as any criminal lawyer will inform you. Now Samenow may be wrong, but his position, logically, is impregnable.)

Chicken Little

 Culture, Heuristic  12 Responses »
Nov 092003
 

How full of ourselves we bloggers grow:

Some might conclude from the above that, because I reject the solutions that [Steven] Den Beste and [Victor David] Hanson offer, that I’m implying that something more dire be done to “solve” this problem. I am not. Frankly, personally, I am increasingly resigned to the fact that these problems are without solution, to the point that I’m that close to simply giving up, mothballing this site, and accepting that yes, we’re watching Western Civilization self-destruct before our very eyes and there is nothing to be done about it… I’ll probably end my life in a Death Camp of Tolerance for expressing “divisive” views and making “insensitive” remarks.

Thank God for stalwart conservative bloggers! You might think that manning the barricades against the imminent fall of Western Civilization is a lonely job. You would be wrong; the barricades are crowded with Chicken Littles of all parties, although the smoke from all the shooting prevents them from seeing each other. For some of these brave soldiers Western Civ has already fallen and its revival is the consummation devoutly to be wished. The early Objectivists used to say of Atlas Shrugged, “if this book sells 50,000 copies, the culture is cooked.” Several million copies later, well, here we are.

The sky is always falling. The “new philosophy” was putting “all in doubt” in the 17th century (Donne); “Chaos and dread Night” were descending in the 18th (Pope); “the demons [of unreason] were let loose upon the land” in the 19th (Robert Bridges). Today’s featured blogger, one Porphyrogenitus, has found that it is impossible to persuade people with reason who deride reason itself. ‘Twas ever thus, dude. Derrida and Foucault are pretty small beer compared to Hume’s attack on induction, or Bishop Berkeley’s on the evidence of the senses.

Too many bloggers confuse civilization, or culture, with Zeitgeist, which is white noise. Culture does not consist, and never did, of what is taught in college, or what appears on television or in the newspapers. It is an underground stream, the product of a few dozen of the most intelligent people of each generation, and it always appears sounder retrospectively because time takes out the trash. It is opaque not only to statistical analysis but to all but the most acute critics of the time: there is too much to sort through, and it is too easy to read in the light of the pressing issues of the day. Edmund Wilson ventured in 1935 to guess which contemporary poets would survive, a fool’s errand, and came up with Edna St. Vincent Millay (OK, he was married to her) and several other people you haven’t heard of, for excellent reason. He found Frost dull and ignored Crane, Stevens, and Williams altogether. The point here isn’t that Wilson was a dummy — far from it — but that the state of the real culture, except from a very long vantage point, is extremely difficult to discern.

Is Western Civilization on the verge of destruction? I doubt it, but I don’t know, and neither do you. Ask me in a couple hundred years.

(Update: Marvin Long comments. Julie Neidlinger comments. l8r comments.)

Moore Better Blues

 Poetry  27 Responses »
Nov 032003
 

Letters aren’t usually to my taste, but I except an odd little book I’ve just finished, W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, Their Correspondence 1901-1937.

One of our correspondents needs no introduction. Yeats the Great The other, T. Sturge Moore (1870-1944), was the brother of the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica was still being assigned in freshman philosophy when I was in college. He made his living at the graphic arts, in which he showed considerable flair in an art nouveau vein; it is the sort of thing you will like if you like that sort of thing. Among other things he designed most of the covers for Yeats’ books. Moore the Obscure Moore was also an extremely distinguished poet and verse dramatist, and he wrote at least one poem and two verse plays (Medea and Daimonassa) that are far better than anything in Yeats.

Yeats plays the great man in his letters, as he does in his poetry, constantly prevailing on Moore for small and not-so-small favors. He borrows money — it is not always clear whether he pays it back — makes appointments and breaks them, pleading fatigue or “neuralgia,” and, once, egregiously, sends Moore to the copyright office on his behalf.

I am going to send you a bundle of plays to get copyrighted. Mrs. Emery, who would have done this for me, is away and for certain reasons these plays have to be done at once… You will be able to do the whole thing in an afternoon…. Will you send the plays to the Censor, or, if not, will you send me his address? It might be as well for you to send them. I will of course send you a cheque for the cost.

“I will of course send you a cheque for the cost”: God forbid I should ask you to do me a huge favor and pay you for it in advance. Personally I would have told Yeats to get stuffed. But Moore accedes gracefully, as if he too were convinced of Yeats’s superiority.

At the heart of the letters is an argument about “Ruskin’s cat” that runs for several years. Yeats believed in ghosts and spirits, like many of his mystical Irish friends, and tries to justify their existence to Moore philosophically:

John Ruskin, while talking with Frank Harris, ran suddenly to the other end of the room, picked up, or seemed to pick up, some object which he threw out of the window. He then explained that it was a tempting demon in the form of a cat. Now if the house cat had come in both cats would have looked alike to Ruskin. (I know this for I once saw a phantom picture and a real picture side by side.) Neither your brother [G.E.Moore, who defended in his Refutation of Idealism the common-sense view that the external world exists independent of our senses] nor [Bertrand] Russell gives any criterion by which Ruskin could have told one cat from the other. No doubt if pressed they would have said that if Ruskin’s cat was real Harris would have seen it. But that argument amounts to nothing. Dr. Smyllie, a well-known Dublin doctor, made his class see the Indian rope trick by hypnotic suggestion a few years ago. All saw it: whether the suggestion was mental or merely visual makes no difference. Perhaps Russell would say ‘a real object’ persists, a phantom does not. Shelley pointed out that the same dream recurs again and again… not only things but ‘dreams themselves are a dream.’

Moore replies sensibly enough:

Do you deny that there are such things as illusions? Do you think that there are black snakes wriggling on the counterpane of a man who has D.T.? If so, we are only quarrelling about a fact, not a word. If you suppose there is a separate reality for each one of us that is not what we usually mean by reality it is putting a new meaning to the word… Do you deny that our sense can be deranged and make mistakes, just as our reasoning faculty may, as in Othello’s case, make a mistake? If you bang your head against a door you see stars that are not there but swim around as though they were. The blow has deranged your sense of sight, just as a disease may, or a hypnotic trance, or even a conviction may.

This reduces Yeats to incoherence.

Damn Russell — he is as fine a mathematician as you like, but when he philosophises a politician walking on his hands… Your brother is not a politician but a philosopher. Berkeley and practically all philosophers since have contended that ‘sensations’ are part of the human mind and that ‘we know nothing but spirits and their relations.’ Your brother and his school contend that ‘sensations’ are ‘behind,’ not in, the mind. They, like Berkeley, are concerned with immediate knowledge: what you write about hallucinations has nothing to do with it.

Yeats’s summary of philosophic thought on the mind-body problem leaves something to be desired. He makes a hash of Moore’s brother, who said that sensations were “before” the mind, not “behind” it. And “immediate knowledge” begs the question of whether a hallucination is “knowledge” at all. Yeats goes on in further letters to adduce the range of early 20th century spiritual phenomena — photographs of thoughts, Richet, Madame Blavatsky and the like — eventually exasperating Moore:

It is all moonshine and nonsense… When you say that seeing two pictures on the wall when only one is there is as good proof of the existence of two pictures as if both were on the wall you contradict yourself, because you admit there is only one on the wall. You make a distinction between what you know to exist and an illusion of sense and deny it at the same time. That is to make two contradictory propositions both of which cannot be true. It is not a question as to what happens to be fashionable among intellectuals, but as to whether there is a case that can be stated without involving a contradiction. Fools follow fashions in thought as in other things and then they think because they are very many they must needs be right as well as strong.

This is as close as he comes to calling Yeats a fool. Of course Yeats is a fool. Mrs. Yeats is reported to have said that Yeats simply never understood people; certainly he did not understand Moore.

Now it is possible, I suppose, to be a fool and also a great poet, although I can think of no such case. To take most of Yeats’s poetry seriously it is not necessary to believe in ghosts. It is, however, necessary to prefer aristocratic to democratic government, assertions to reasons, instinct to intellect, astrology to astronomy, and the mystical properties of sex to just about anything else. Even more than Blake, his poetry is preposterous because his ideas are preposterous.

Yeats is generally considered one of the master stylists of the 20th century. Yvor Winters explains his reputation:

In the first place, there is real talent scattered throughout his work; in the second place, our time does not recognize any relationship between motive and emotion, but is looking merely for emotion; in the third place, Yeats’s power of self-assertion, his bardic tone, has overwhelmed his readers thus far. The bardic tone is common in romantic poetry; it sometimes occurs in talented (but confused) poets such as Blake and Yeats; more often it appears in poets of little or no talent, such as Shelley, Whitman, and Robinson Jeffers. For most readers the bardic tone is synonymous with greatness, for through this tone the poet asserts that he is great, in the absence of any (or sufficient) supporting intelligence. If the poet asserts his own greatness long enough and in the same tone of voice, the effect is hypnotic; we have seen the same thing on the political platform in the persons of such speakers as Mussolini, Father Coughlin, and Adolf Hitler.

Winters omits one point: Yeats looks like a Great Poet, with his piercing gaze, roman nose, and snowy hair. He was exceptionally jealous of his hair. He refers in the letters to the equally fine-maned Bertrand Russell as “bald-pated,” and in his poetry frequently employs bald men, as in The Scholars, as a symbol for intellect, which he despised. The reputations of Shelley and Whitman also profit from their looks. Moore, by contrast, looks like the harmless village eccentric. And Yeats is a great man, and no one has heard of Moore.

(Update: Colby Cosh troubles to read the Moore poem I cited. He dislikes “carven,” which is a perfectly respectable English word, although it smacks of the 1890’s, from which Moore, and Yeats for that matter, never freed himself entirely. He objects on metrical grounds to line 5, which I scan as follows:

Though un / intend / ed, ir / revoc / able!

The inversion in the fourth foot is unusual, but not problematic. Neither is the elided article in line 6; Moore is writing not about a particular incident but a type. What I think raises this poem to greatness is its perception of the nature of speech; “self-bemusing ease” is a master stroke. Bloggers have talked a lot lately about how easy it is to hit the “Send” button or the “Print” button. This poem is about how easy it is to hit the “Talk” button. I will be very happy if everyone reads it as attentively as Colby does.)

(Further: Alan Sullivan doesn’t like the poem either. Craig Henry comments. Alex(ei) comments. Mike Snider promises to tell me, sometime, why I’m wrong, so I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.)

Give Me Twelve Shillings

 Literature  5 Responses »
Oct 272003
 

Literary criticism turns up in odd places. I’ve been waiting to have my say about Tolstoy, that youthful rake turned pious old fraud, only to find that the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, in his curious novel Mysteries, beat me to it by a century. His main character, Nagel, gets drunk and begins to rant:

To get back to Tolstoy, in my opinion his intellect is no greater than, say, General Booth’s. They are both preachers, not thinkers but preachers. They deal with the status quo, popularize already accepted ides, reduce them to the lowest common denominator, and then sit back and watch them take root. But if you’re going to sell, you must do so at a profit, and Tolstoy’s enterprises show a staggering loss. Once two friends made a wager; one bet the other twelve shillings that he could shoot a nut out of the other fellow’s hand without grazing it. Well, he fired, missed, and blew the whole hand to shreds, but he did it with style. As he was about to faint, his injured friend moaned, ‘You lost the bet — give me the twelve shillings. Give me twelve shillings,’ he said! God, how Tolstoy labors to eliminate humanity’s happy vices and make the world full of love and mankind! It just fills me with shame… It would be different if Tolstoy were a young man struggling against temptation or if he had a battle to fight and tried to win it by preaching virtue and clean living. But his sources have run dry; he has no more humanity left to struggle with. You may say: But this has nothing to do with his philosophy. But it has everything to do with it! Oh, just wait until old age has made you self-satisfied and callous! Then you go to the young man and say, ‘Renounce these superficial trappings.’ The young man ponders, sleeps on it, and comes to the conclusion that this indeed is what the Bible preaches. But he doesn’t ‘renounce’; he goes on sinning for the next forty years. And so it is. When his forty years are up and the young man has grown old, he saddles his snow-white mare and rides off with his crusader’s banner held high in his bony hand, calling out a pious message of renunciation to the youth of the world. It’s a comedy that endlessly repeats itself. I get a kick out of Tolstoy. I’m glad the old boy is capable of so much munificence.

Lord, make me chaste, forty years hence.

Dude, Where’s My Concordance?

 Code, Literature  5 Responses »
Oct 262003
 

Computers may or may not be changing the nature of art; I leave this question to the eminent Blowhards. But at the very least they could be the handmaidens of literary scholarship. Shouldn’t the Internet be full of concordances by now?

You remember concordances. Those thick books your English professors had on their shelves, where you could look up how many times Milton uses the word “swain,” or Dryden “wit,” or Dickinson “nature”? Now difficult as this may be for some of you juvenile readers to grasp, in antediluvian times scholars compiled these by hand. They are indispensable for serious literary scholarship, and excellent for settling arguments and jogging memories.

There are a few online concordances for the obvious choices, like Shakespeare and the Bible. There’s even pretty cheap software that will do it for you automatically, which these folks have used to make a desultory stab at a few of the British romantic poets. The University of Georgia English Department has managed to post a complete one for William Blake. It is defective (a search for “rose” yields hits for “prose” and “arose” with no way to ask for the whole word only, or to distinguish the noun from the verb) but far better than nothing. Bartleby offers search on its texts, but they are nearly always single works or selections. No remotely complete online concordance exists for, moving in reverse chronological order and considering only a few poets who interest me, Stevens, Robinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Dickinson, Pope, Dryden, Milton, Jonson, Donne, Greville, Ralegh, Gascoigne, Skelton, and Chaucer. Print concordances exist for every one of these authors.

Clearly there’s a shortage people with the necessary technical skills and literary interests to do the job. A sufficiently interested and modestly competent database programmer could rig this up in a jiffy. Do I know anyone like that? Oh. Right. Never mind then.

School of Poetry

 Poetry  18 Responses »
Oct 242003
 

Erin O’Connor favorably cites this piece from the poet Tom Henihan, slagging poetry workshops. Henihan writes:

The teaching of poetry has become epidemic. The question of having the “gift” never comes up; the assumption being that poetry can be acquired like everything else. I have to say that the poets who head up these little retreats are very sensitive, preferring to lie rather than give any genuine criticism that may offend the student. You see they must keep these aspiring poets coming back, year after year, stanza after stanza, by shamelessly lending credence to the most flat literal efforts. I have yet to meet anyone who has been told the truth about their work (good or bad) at one of these little soires in the woods.

The blame shouldnt go so much to the hapless souls that sign-up for these exercises but to the purveyors of snake oil that put them on. I am not suggesting that poets cannot teach one another a trick or two, but taking 10 to 15 aspirants to a nunnery in Sooke for a 3-day workshop is so sweet it could make one cry. It goes up against everything radical, wild and individual in poetry. These people would be better served and brought closer to poetry if they got drunk, got laid, or went dancing.

Erin glosses:

Henihan may come off as a snob at first glance. He may come off as one of those vaguely anti-intellectual artistes who hold critics and teachers–the people who try to analyze the why and the how of their art–in unapologetic contempt. But to read his essay that way would be to miss the point. There are some things that cannot be taught. Inspiration is one, creativity is another, having a “feel” for language a third. Skills can be taught, and those are certainly necessary if one wants to be a writer of any caliber. But too often creative writing courses are about far more than the teaching of skills–there is a dishonesty to them, as Henihan notes. Their premise is that everyone enrolled in the course can write; their guiding principle is that deep down, we all have a poet or a novelist in us just waiting to come out. We don’t.

Doing original mathematics requires inspiration, creativity, a “feel” for numbers, all the mysterious qualities that Erin posits for poets; yet no one would dream of saying that teaching calculus to a class of sub-Eulers and sub-Gausses is useless. Why, then, is there no point in teaching poetry to a class of sub-Jonsons and sub-Dickinsons? Poetry is every bit as technical as car repair, and poets, like car mechanics, need to know what they’re doing. The byways of literary history are crowded with talented poets who damaged themselves with technical misunderstandings and home-grown metrical theories. Gerard Manley Hopkins, with his theory of “sprung rhythm” and “outrides” and his belief that there can be five-syllable feet in English, is the most famous case. Hopkins’ problem was assuredly not that he didn’t get drunk, get laid, or go dancing, although by all accounts, being a Jesuit priest, he didn’t.

Good poets need good models, and most modern poets are bad because their models are bad. Trying to write like William Carlos Williams is hopeless unless you’re William Carlos Williams. Trying to write like Walt Whitman is hopeless even if you are Walt Whitman. Trying to write like John Milton, whose virtues are unique but whose vices are easily imitated, set English poetry back about a hundred years.

I’ve never attended a poetry “workshop,” and I stipulate that they are as ghastly as Henihan says. My poem’s OK, your poem’s OK. The fact that poetry is often taught badly, however, does not mean it cannot be taught at all. If I had a two-week poetry workshop to teach, I guarantee that I would improve the poetry of everyone in the class. Or your money back, no questions asked.

Here are my first three assignments, for those of you following at home.

1. No one who can’t read poetry has any business writing it, and you have not read a poem properly unless you can paraphrase it. Of course the meaning of a poem does not consist entirely of its paraphrasable content; if it did we wouldn’t need the poem. But the paraphrase remains the indispensable baseline. Paraphrase the following three poems: in order of increasing difficulty, Ben Jonson’s To Heaven, John Donne’s Valediction: Of My Name in the Window, and Fulke Greville’s Down in the depths. When you finish this assigment you will understand that poems can argue, with great complexity, and that great poetry is possible with a minimum of imagery, or none whatsoever. These three poems make Ezra Pound’s petals on a wet black bough seem like a pretty pallid affair.

2. Now it’s time to develop a little respect for traditional forms. Find two perfectly regular iambic pentameter lines — no substitutions, no elisions — that differ as far as possible from each other rhythmically. Meter is simply the background, the bass line, as it were, against which the movement of the line takes place. This assignment will turn your attention to syllable length, caesura placement, strength of accent, and all the other aspects of rhythm that make lines move the way they do. It will prove especially useful to people like Ron Silliman, who sneer at “tub-thumping iambic pentameter” as if all metrically identical lines sound alike, or K. Silem Mohammed, who is so bored by meter that he’s going to hold his breath until he turns blue. To get you started I’ll do this one myself. The first line is from the 16th century, Dowland’s Songbook; the second is from the 20th, Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning. They are both regular pentameter lines.

Fine knacks for ladies — cheap, choice, brave, and new!
The world is like wide water, without sound.

Mike Snider has also already completed it.

3. Write three poems in rigid forms. Begin with the easiest, an Elizabethan sonnet, next a rondeau, and finally a villanelle. This will be graded strictly on its adherence to the form in question. Don’t worry that the poems are bad: they will be bad. Attend instead to the way formal demands concentrate the mind. You can’t say exactly what you want because it won’t fit. You begin to revise it until it will fit. Then, if you work at it enough, you find that your revision is better — more precise, more compressed, more poetic — than what you thought you wanted to say in the first place. Poets who always compose in slack meters cannot grasp this process, which is how all great poetry is forged.

(Update: Mike Snider comments. George Wallace comments. Nate Bruinooge comments. Jim Henley reports from the belly of the beast. PF, who seems to know a great deal about Russian poetry, comments. Desbladet comments.)

(Further: Dr. Weevil notes that I misquoted the Dowland line. This has been corrected. Two lines of verse in the damn post, and I get one of them wrong.)

Lost School of Rock Translation

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Oct 192003
 

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

A group of American fourth-graders, led by perky Scarlett Johansson, travels to Tokyo to participate in an international karaoke contest. Jack Black turns in a feral performance as their coach, exhorting them to “stick it to Japan.” Bill Murray plays a wealthy ex-karaoke star who has lost all interest in karaoke and has been prevailed on, for an enormous fee, to serve as a judge. Murray, in a stunning departure from his last eighteen movies, is care-worn and worldly-wise. He encounters Black in the hotel bar and finds his infectious enthusiasm for karaoke grating at first. Eventually he completely fails to be won over.

The children, meanwhile, are left to explore Tokyo on their own. Johansson, in her schoool uniform, encounters a sarariman who proposes a little enjo-kosai, leading to a series of amusing misadventures and panty shots. Joey Gaydos, as gloomy but talented Zack, wanders down to the hotel bar and runs into Murray, who gets him drunk on sake and prevails on him to lead the patrons in a stirring rendition of “Devil With a Blue Dress On.” Other children are bowed to by the hotel’s staff, and bow back, giggling.

Black does his best with Murray, but the children still lose the contest to the reigning Japanese karaoke champions. They return to America sadder but wiser, having learned from Murray that there are more important things in life than winning, such as raking in huge appearance fees.

Jack Black and Bill Murray, despite the smoldering sexual tension between them, do not actually have sex.

50,000 Film Buffs Can’t Be Wrong

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Oct 162003
 

My old friend and frequent critic Michael Krantz, taking exception to my criticism of Quentin Tarantino, writes as follows:

Tarantino seems to inspire strong visceral reactions of both kinds, which to my mind is at least somewhat [sic] of a compliment (who bothers arguing about most movies?).

I don’t wish to pick on Michael particularly; one sees this in arts criticism every day, and his instance is brief and near to hand.

We already know that 50,000,000 Frenchmen can be wrong, and frequently are. Here Michael goes this ancient fallacy, argumentum ad populum, one better. The opinion, in his formulation, need not be popular, so long as some people hold it. (“Strongly and viscerally” to be sure. One might think that rational opinions would count for more than visceral ones, but no matter.) Strong and visceral opinions are like — well, everybody has one, and now everybody can publish his too. Controversy, perforce, results. “Controversial” has nonetheless become a term of praise, although a shame-faced one, resorted to by publicists faced with an absence of favorable reviews. Still more debased and narcissistic terms exist, like “talked about” and, at the bottom of this barrel, “widely anticipated.” Controversy, like celebrity, is circular. Why is it controversial? Because I’m talking about it! Why am I talking about it? Because it’s controversial!

Obviously there are a great many fervently held beliefs that have no merit whatsoever. Scientology is controversial. The healing power of crystals is controversial. Everything this side of Gigli is controversial. Tarantino, too, is controversial; ergo Tarantino has merit.

Or as the girlfriend more succinctly put it, “God, that is sooo NPR.”

Michael continues, less temperately:

The plagiarism dismissal was boring and specious ten years ago.

I blog, OK? I stopped worrying about boring people a long time ago. And to the accusation that my plagiarism charge is, um, unoriginal, I certainly plead guilty. By Michael’s own lights, the fact that some people have agreed with me that Tarantino is a plagiarist might give the argument some weight. A hundred accusations of plagiarism can’t be specious.

More seriously, this is a heads-I-win tails-you-lose proposition. If your argument is original, then the reply is that no one believes that. If your argument is old, then the reply is that it’s old. It’s like being put in the asylum, where whatever you do is classified as insanity, no matter how innocuous, and taking notes, say, becomes “compulsive note-taking behavior.”

To summarize: All strong opinions have merit, or at least reflect favorably on their subject. Unless they are old, in which case they are boring and tired and need not be discussed. My thanks to Michael for clearing this up.

The Video Clerk As Auteur

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Oct 122003
 

Quentin Tarantino watches a whole lot of movies, to considerable purpose, as most of the best bits in his own movies are lifted from other people’s. Pulp Fiction‘s “cleaner” sequence plagiarizes, down to the name, the one from La Femme Nikita. It even uses Harvey Keitel, who played the same part in Point of No Return, Nikita‘s word-for-word American remake for the subtitle-impaired. The colorfully named crooks of Reservoir Dogs first appear in The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, a little thriller so taut and well-made that it must make Tarantino weep with envy. To be fair, the original lacked a Mr. Pink, and Steve Buscemi’s plaint of “Why do I have to be Mr. Pink?” seems to be Tarantino’s invention.

Jackie Brown, which I could not bring myself to see, advertised itself as a “homage” to 70s blaxploitation films, starring Pam Grier for bonus verisimilitude. (This term, in Tarantino’s universe, refers to fidelity not to life but to other movies.) “Homage” is one of the many euphemisms for plagiarism that litter Tarantino reviews. Others include “nod,” “take,” “view,” “deconstruction,” and “twist.”

Tarantino’s new movie, Kill Bill, will be released in two parts; this is Volume 1. The “volume” has “chapters” too. This an ironic reference to the fact that it’s not a book, it’s a movie. The curiously stilted dialogue manages to be at once formal and ungrammatical, as if it had been translated from English to Japanese and back a few times. Now Tarantino, being a genius, knows that “vermin” sounds silly in the singular and the difference between who and whom. Tarantino could not possibly intend lines like “with your own beautiful blue eye” (said to the Daryl Hannah character, who wears an unexplained eyepatch) and “Silly rabbit, tricks are for kids” to pass for wit. So these must be ironic references to the badly translated subtitles of the chop-socky movies to which Kill Bill is a “homage.”

The plot involves a team of beautiful girl assassins, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DVAS, get it? huh? huh?), managed by an off-screen character named Bill (David Carradine), to whom they are utterly devoted. This is an ironic reference to Charlie’s Angels, or a nod to it, or a twist on it, or something. Bill turns against one of his Angels (Uma Thurman) for no specified reason, and on her wedding day sends his whole team to finish the party off.

The combined efforts of Bill and his lovelies result in killing everybody but Uma herself, who awakes from a coma four years later bent on revenge. Tarantino wisely does not overburden the viewer with motive. He sweeps aside bagatelles like whom she was marrying, why she was pregnant, why everyone at the wedding has to die along with the target, why she joined the Deadly Vipers in the first place, how the best female assassins in the world and their boss can botch such a simple job, why the other girls all hate her, and why everyone in the damn movie insists on using swords instead of guns anyway — which I recall seeing an ironic reference to someplace. Vol. 2 may clear these matters up, or perhaps Tarantino will leave them hanging, as ironic references to making sense. In any case, he brings us quickly to the swordfighting, which is really the point. If you don’t enjoy watching people lose their appendages then Kill Bill may not be the wisest choice for your entertainment dollar.

Tarantino is often criticized for drawing on television and other movies instead of his own experience. This is unjust. So far as I can tell, his experience, aside from an occasional bar brawl, consists entirely of watching movies and television. What else would you expect him to draw on?

If your local video parlor is anything like mine, it is staffed by film junkies who pride themselves on knowing the good bits of every movie. They can quote at length from more movies than you and I will ever see and are lost if you ask them what any of those movies is actually about. They are all writing screenplays. If a major studio ever greenlights one the result may resemble Kill Bill.

Tarantino was a video clerk in his youth. It is rare for anyone to find his calling early in life; one hopes that his unfortunate detour into Hollywood superstardom will be short. His movies are pastiche, all good bits because he does not understand what makes the good bits good. This explains his special fondness for blaxploitation and chop-socky, which even at their best have a few memorable lines and scenes with no context to support them. Listen to the great man himself, in his Newsweek interview:

Interviewer: Its like when youre a kid, you say, Oh, just give me the good parts.

Tarantino: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, God, you could almost make a case that thats my whole theory in filmmaking: take out all the shit that weve already seen a million times before, and that we never liked in the first place, and just get right to the good stuff.

For “the good stuff” read “grotesque violence.” At some point it may occur to Tarantino that the goodness of the good stuff depends on all that other shit that we never liked in the first place. Then again it may not.

The true geniuses behind Kill Bill are the brothers Weinstein, who decided to release it in two parts. A tetralogy couldn’t tie up the loose ends in Vol. 1, but what do Bob and Harvey care? They disguise the mess and get two admissions for the price of one production budget. By the time Volume 2 comes out, in February, Tarantino’s fans will have forgotten that the package is nonsense, if they cared in the first place.

About Tarantino there is only one interesting question: Is he firmly convinced of his own genius, or does he wake up in a sweat at 3 AM, wondering when the world will wise up? I don’t know. His best friends may not know. Only one man can say for sure, and he isn’t telling.

(Update: Rick Coencas comments. Alex(ei) also comes to Tarantino’s defense.)

(And: Gregg Easterbrook is even harsher than I am, which I didn’t think was possible. The whole Jewish movie executive business at the end of the piece is a bit loopy though. Nate Bruinooge has some especially interesting comments. Ian Hamet strikes a more mature attitude.)

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