Juliet

Verona. The house of Capulet. Young Juliet is in love with Paris. Paris is in love with her. They are to be married - Paris has asked for and received her father's consent.

But Juliet has a secret - a dark, terrible secret. Ever since she was a child her cousin Tybalt has been sexually molesting her. She tries speaking of this to her mother but her mother loves Tybalt and will not hear a word against him. She tells her nurse about it and is advised to say nothing, for she will only bring shame upon herself. Yet Juliet cannot bear the idea of letting Tybalt go unpunished, cannot stand the thought of him leering at her across the family table for the rest of her life. She must have revenge.

But how is this to be accomplished? She considers confessing all to Paris, but what if he doesn't understand? What if he blames her? Besides everyone knows that Paris is no good with a sword and Tybalt is a master-duelist. Even if Paris did take her side she would only succeed in getting him killed. What is she to do?

She is still thinking about it at the ball when she sees young Romeo gawking at her. She has heard about this Romeo from her friend Rosalind. He is an awkward, immature boy, given to writing bad poetry and making obscene puns with his good for nothing companions. But they say he is a good swordsman. And besides, he is a Montague, and the Duke has decreed that any further fighting between the Montagues and the Capulets will be punished by death. All she has to do is lead this silly boy on a little, then sic him onto Tybalt. A fight between them will end in death for both. It means killing the boy as well as Tybalt, but he's a Montague and probably deserves it.

But can she make the boy fall in love with her? It can't be that hard. She's beautiful, she knows, and with a face like that the boy can't have much luck with women. Rosalind, she knows, won't give him the time of day. A little encouragement should do the trick.

So she smiles at him, looks repeatedly in his direction, pretends to be drawn to him. It works. He comes up to her, strikes up a conversation. Thinks he's being witty. Very well. She can keep up this kind of badinage easily enough. When Paris is not looking she allows him to kiss her. She can see Tybalt has spotted them. He's furious. Any moment now he and Romeo will come to blows. No, her father is stopping Tybalt, sending him away. Damn.

No matter. She'll just have to string this boy along a little more. He seems pretty far gone already. And to think that a few hours ago he was telling Rosalind how crazy he was about her. Men.

He turns up in her garden a little later, huffing and grunting like a pig. She pretends she hasn't seen him and proceeds to declare her love for him. He laps it up. He makes further protestations. What is she to do? She tries to lead him on a bit more, then realizes she mustn't overdo it - he mustn't think her too easily won, more than anything else he must respect her. She mentions marriage. He seems keen on the idea. Is she going too far? She retreats into her room, pretending that the nurse is calling her. But what's the harm? Why not marry the fool? It's not like she'll have to consummate the marriage. All she has to do is go through with the ceremony then tell him about Tybalt afterwards. If she's his wife he can't possibly refuse to fight for her. And then he'll either kill Tybalt and be executed or be killed by Tybalt and cause his execution. In either case, she'll be rid of them both. She goes back to the balcony, whispers a few more sweet nothings, tells him she'll send word to him the next day.

After that, it all goes swimmingly. He arranges the wedding. She goes through with it. Then tells him her secret. He swears vengeance, pulls on a sword, goes charging off to find Tybalt. It is done.

Only it doesn't quite work out the way she expects. Romeo realizes he can't just fight a duel with Tybalt - the Duke will have him executed if he does. So when Tybalt tries to pick a fight with him he backs off, thinking he'll arrange to meet with Tybalt in private later. Then Mercutio intervenes. Romeo sees his chance. If Tybalt kills Mercutio, who is the Duke's kinsman, surely then the Duke will not have Romeo punished for killing Tybalt? At a critical moment Romeo distracts Mercutio, blocks his arm. Mercutio is killed. Tybalt is wounded, frightened to have killed a kinsman of the Duke. Romeo fights with him, purportedly to avenge Mercutio's death, and slays him. The Duke, as expected, does not sentence Romeo to death for this, but, moved by Lady Capulet's tears, exiles him.

When Juliet hears of this she is distraught. Tybalt is dead at last, but Romeo is only banished, and banished is not good enough. How can she marry Paris with Romeo still alive? The friar is sure to object. To make things worse Romeo shows up in her chamber. He wants to consummate their marriage. She has no choice. She goes through with it, then considers keeping him there with her till he is discovered and put to death. Then she thinks the better of it. How will she explain what he was doing there? Her reputation will be ruined. Paris will never marry her then.

Meanwhile her father is trying to force her to marry Paris, little suspecting that it's what she wants most of all. But how to square the friar? She goes to him, feeds him some story about how she would rather kill herself than marry Paris. The friar's suspicions of her are allayed. He suggests a desperate stratagem. It sounds dangerous but she can see no other way. She figures if she can get Romeo to come to her in the crypt she can kill him there and afterwards convince the friar that now that he's dead there's no point in making their marriage public and that he should just keep it a secret and let her marry Paris.

Of course this doesn't work out either. She wakes from the friar's potion to find Romeo bragging to her of having killed Paris. She is enraged. This stupid boy has destroyed all her hopes. She still has some of the potion the friar gave her. She gives it to him, tells him it's a special love charm. The silly ass is just sentimental enough to believe it. He drinks it, then falls down in the semblance of death. She presses the cup into his hand.

It's only after she's put him to sleep that she considers her own position. What is she to do now? Her beloved Paris is dead. Any moment now the friar will arrive and then there will be all the tedious explanations to go through, at the end of which she will end up having to live with the hateful Montagues. If she's lucky. It hardly seems worth it. The friar arrives. He tells her he plans to have her put in a nunnery. No, no, that would be too terrible. She shoos him away. Why did Paris have to die? There is no future for her anymore. In despair, she takes up a dagger, kills herself. Her last thought is that by the time Romeo wakes from the potion she has given him, they will have buried him alive. It is a small satisfaction.

Artifice

Stefan Ruzowitzky's Die Falscher

[warning: Some Spoilers]

There is a scene in Imre Kertesz's Liquidation where a group of people at a party play a game of Lager poker - each person names which camp they were in and the chips are awarded based on how bad the camp was. B. the novel's central character, withdraws from the game, because he was at Auschwitz, and Auschwitz in untrumpable.

The ghost of Auschwitz, and the heirarchy of suffering it implies haunts Stefan Ruzowitzky's Academy Award Winning film - Die Falscher - about a group of Jewish counterfeiters who are given special treatment in exchange for their services in producing fake foreign currency to fund the German war effort. For the central characters of the film, the problem is not simply of how far to collaborate, or how to balance the exigencies of survival against the principle of resistance; the existential crisis of conscience they face is how to define themselves in a world where they are privileged non-entities. Forced by circumstances to play the double role of being both the victims and the elite, both the blessed and the damned, the counterfeiters struggle to cope with both the fear, suffering and helplessness that is an integral part of camp life, as well as the guilt of knowing, even as they suffer, that everyone else has it much worse. What they are trying to forge (in both senses of the word) is a currency of action that their conscience will accept, and the strain of doing so lies at the heart of the tension in the film - a tension that could come straight out of Sartre.

But the characters are not the only ones faced with a dilemma. Their director, Stefan Ruzowitzky has his own challenge - how to bring moral weight to characters who are not only, by the well-documented standards of concentration camp inmates, extremely fortunate, but also collaborators, however unwilling, in the Nazi enterprise? Had Ruzowitzky tried to downplay these aspects of his characters lives - the privileges, the uneasy relationship with the Nazis - this would have been an ordinary, even bathetic film. What makes Die Falscher work (despite an overplotted script, a deeply flawed ending, and a little too much melodrama for my taste) is that Ruzowitzky is clever enough to focus on the privileges rather than deny them.

Indeed, as the film opens, it almost seems as though Ruzowitzky is trying to emphasize the advantages his main character - a master forger called Salomon Sorowitsch ('Sally' for short) - enjoys. The film opens with a depiction of Sally after the war, living the high life in Monte Carlo, then switches back to show us Sally's devil may care ways in pre-war Berlin. When Sally is finally sent to a concentration camp, his stay there is hastily rushed through, and in hardly any time at all we find him being recruited into the counterfeiting ring, where he is allowed to wear civilian clothes, housed in a comfortable dormitory and given weekends off. If all this wasn't enough, Sally himself is depicted as being the consummate scoundrel - sly, self-centered, manipulative. It's almost as though Ruzowitzky was making every effort to make Sally (and by extension the rest of the counterfeiters) as unsympathetic as possible.

What Ruzowitzky is really doing, I think, is setting up a study in implied contrast, inverting the normal rules of portraying suffering by showing us not the worst but the best, leaving us to imagine what the worst was like. As the film progresses we come to see how thin the shiny surface of privilege these counterfeiters skate on truly is, how easily it could shatter and plunge them into the dark depths that are always just inches under their feet, and how nimbly they must constantly maneuver to keep from meeting that end. The point is not simply that the life of the counterfeiters - for all its relative comfort - is fraught with peril and suffering; the point is precisely that the comfort is relative. Not to be shot or beaten on the passing whim of any passing soldier is a real privilege in this camp, but the fact that so basic a freedom as the right to life is a hard won reward speaks volumes for the horror of the concentration camps.

What Ruzowitzky achieves, then - and it is a considerable achievement - is a shifting of perspective that sets up a contrast between the absolute standards we are used to and the relative standards of the concentration camp, using that contrast to highlight how terrible the camps really were. In one powerful scene, for instance, Sally carries a dead coworker out of the area reserved for the counterfeiters and into the main camp and asks, "Where should I take him? He's dead." It seems like a perfectly reasonable question, until the camera draws back and shows you the emaciated bodies of the regular inmates who lie dead or dying by the dozens around him - a scene that makes Sally's concern for the death of his coworker seem ridiculous by comparison.

Sally's own transformation into a sympathetic, almost heroic character (which owes a great deal to a fascinating performance by Karl Markovics) is also part of this alchemy. The point is not that the experience of the concentration camp has somehow turned Sally into a saint or a humanitarian. The point is that even a selfish, hardened criminal like Sally has standards that are considerably higher than those of the genocidal murderers around him. Sally's code has not changed, it is just that in the hell he is consigned to his actions, driven by a notion of honor that is as unwavering as it is obscure, seem almost inspirational.

In the end, perhaps the finest and most insightful moment in Die Falscher comes towards the end, when the counterfeiters, coming face to face with the other inmates of the camp, are forced to confront their shame at having received special treatment, at not being able to match the suffering of the others. Desperately, the counterfeiters point to the one man among them who dared sabotage the counterfeiting operation, thus seriously hindering the German war effort. "He's a hero", they announce, but their voices as they say it lack conviction. And yet it is true that the man is a hero - he did take terrible risks, he did cause the Nazis a serious setback. Why then are those celebrating him so apologetic? Perhaps because they realize that in a world where devoid of all humanity even heroism is a privilege. To be a hero, to show courage in adversity, requires that one have some control over one's destiny; for the millions imprisoned in the Nazi death camps History offered no such control, provided no such choices. In the world of the concentration camp, even the ability to risk your life for your ideals is a privilege, and Die Falscher is a fitting testament to that terrible truth.

Spring

The sound of a woman crying in the next apartment tells him that the windows are open, that spring is here.

Poetry in the Machine

In case you've missed it, there's a fascinating conversation about poetry going on over at Space Bar's blog, building off an experiment by Vivek which you can read about on his blog.

You'd think that having left two llooonnnggg comments on that post I'd have exhausted all I had to say on the subject (well, at least you'd think that if you were new to this blog and knew absolutely nothing about me), but obviously that isn't true.

In particular, I want to focus on Vivek's claim that he's looking to humanize mechanical processes, in partial response to the work of poets like Christian Bok who are interested in a more 'machinic' view of poetry. While I think that's interesting, I think there's a middle ground of human-machine interaction that's being ignored. I too have issues with the idea of replacing the "lyric voice of a human agent" with the "actions of a machine" but I think there's an exciting set of intermediate possibilities, through which machines (or more correctly, mechanical processes) could be set up in dialog with human agency to accentuate the lyric voice. In particular, I think greater attention to mechanical processes opens up the possibility of a whole range of new 'formal' challenges, based on outsourcing parts of the poetic process to mechanical operation in order to focus on the rest (you can tell I used to be a consultant, can't you?).

The way I see it is this: the essence of formalism is constraint - the poet voluntarily relinquishes certain choices that should, by rights, be available to him or her, both so as to make writing the poem a greater challenge and in the hope that the adoption of these limiting parameters will help to sharpen what lies within them, making for a better poem, or at the very least, a better poet. Rather than make those choices himself / herself, the poet allows them to be predetermined by invoking some established rule or template, thus eliminating human agency from parts of the poetic process.

But what if, instead of invoking some preset rule or condition, we were to randomize some of the choices behind the poem by entrusting them to a machine? We could then imagine a whole set of 'new' constraints that we could attempt to write poems within.

Consider two examples, off the top of my head. Suppose you were told that you had to write a poem but would have no control over line order. That after you wrote the poem a computer (or some other randomizing device - technology is not important here) would rearrange your lines in a completely random way. The challenge would then become to come up with a poem (presumably a short one) that would work in every possible permutation. Of course, no computer would actually be needed to rearrange your lines once you were done - the point is that the idea of mechanizing part of the poetic process (line arrangement) introduces a new kind of constraint that makes the task of writing the poem more challenging.

Or, to take a second example - imagine that you took the database of lines that Vivek currently has (or any other set of lines) and used a random number generator to assign a number to each one of them. You then took the lines corresponding to numbers in the top 5 percentiles (say) and tried to write a poem using them. Let's say (to make things more challenging) you forced yourself to follow the rank order of the lines - i.e. you started with the line that corresponded to the highest number, then got to the second highest and so forth. You'd be free to insert lines in between, of course - the challenge would be to create a credible poem that incorporated a randomly generated sequence of lines (okay, okay, so I know it's a bit like the 'Whose Line' game on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, but then I've always maintained that Whose Line is a rich source of poetic ideas; it's also - to give it a more respectable lineage - very much like what Calvino does in Castle of Crossed Destinies with Tarot cards).

The point is not that these exercises are particularly brilliant (they're not - it's one in the morning and I'm exhausted) but that what the mechanization of parts of the poetic process makes possible is the creation of a virtually infinite set of constraint conditions that poets can use to challenge themselves if they're so inclined.

Personally, I remain unconvinced that all this desperate search for constraints is worth it. Oh, I think it's fun to do and entertaining to read, and I see how it helps to hone one's skills as a poet. I'm just not convinced that what comes out of it is particularly good poetry. But that's a whole other discussion. The point of this post is only to suggest that we may not want to dismiss machinic processes so easily, but may want to embrace them and subvert them to our own uses. And to propose that we try and think up new and interesting ways of doing that.

Her Demon Lover

[Space Bar points me to a Ramanujan essay about the different 'tellings' of the Ram story, which has become the latest excuse to rabble rouse - based, apparently, on Ramanujan's passing reference to a Santal version of the story where Sita is seduced by both Ravan and Lakshman [1]. I'm going to resist making the obvious jokes about Sita and the oral tradition, except to point out that if you're with a man who has ten heads it does seem a shame not to put them to use. Instead, I give you this.]

In the days that followed, she often found herself thinking of Ravan. Of the way he would come to her in those final weeks, wearing resignation like armor; coming to see her not because there was anything left to say between them, but as an act of propriety, a routine, content to sit unspeaking in a corner of her presence, as the sun sank and the world darkened around him. The walls of his city were on fire, his kinsmen were dying, his people were in revolt, and every day Death, like a jealous wife, drew him deeper into her clutches. Yet he never spoke to her of these things, asked her only if she was well, if there was anything she needed. If there was a question that lurked beneath these courtesies - and there was, they could both feel it - it was left unspoken. He was never rough with her, never demanding, even when the price he was paying was visible for all to see. Rather, it was as though the destruction of Lanka made words unnecessary, as though the carnage around them expressed the turmoil in his heart better than any speech he could make.

He never spoke to her of these things, and sometimes she wished he would. It would have eased her conscience to be accused, to be blamed. For she did feel guilt - it frightened her to see what she had done to him, what he had, for her sake, done to himself. It made her feel selfish by comparison. "You must hate me for what I'm doing to you" she said to him once, when it became clear that Lanka would not survive. He said nothing to that, only looked at her with the bewilderment of one who is asked a question in a language he does not speak. There was a dignity to his disappointment, and a sense, not of forgiveness, but of understanding. Like the feelings of a man who sees his starving dog turn to bite.

He never spoke to her of these things, and she wished now that he had. Thinking back, she can see how the catastrophe of those last days brought them closer than they had been before. She had denied him every intimacy, but she could not deny the bond that hopelessness forged between them; the constant distance that became, in time, a kind of connection; the ancient sympathy between victim and murderer, kidnapper and hostage.

But which of them was the hostage? It was a question she could not bring herself to ask. She remembered the way he had looked at her, even there, right at the end, when even the idea of love making would have seemed a sacrilege against the sacrifice being made. A look of bottomless yearning, like the ache of embers in a fire that waits to be fed. No, even the ash of defeat had not destroyed his longing for her, even the insults she had raked him with, even the cold water of her husband's triumph thrown in his face. Was it that he understood what she did not: that release, when it came, would prove hollow; that in allowing her escape (for who protected her from him if not he himself?) he was becoming part of it, ensuring that she would take him with her? Or was it just that he loved her with a constancy that not even the certainty of defeat could erase?

For he did love her - more than Ram, perhaps; yes, certainly more than Ram. But then, had Ram really loved her at all? Oh, he had been proud of her, anxious to protect her, solicitous of her wishes in his prim, husbandly way. But there was always, with him, the sense of a life lived by the rules, of a concern with what was right that overwhelmed anything so irrelevantly human as appetite or desire. If he loved her at all, it was because that was the proper thing to do, what was expected of him, what he expected of himself. While Ravan had loved her (she sees this now) for who she really was, despite the impropriety of it, perhaps even because it was improper.

She dare not say this to anyone, of course. Not even to her own children. No, especially not to them. They would think her ungrateful, accuse her of cheapening their father's heroism, his bravery in coming to her rescue. Yet rescue from what? And for what? This hut in the woods? What had Ram really done - except fight a war with a stranger, defeat him in battle, win glory for himself? Wasn't that what the war was really about - not her, but the insult to him?

When they speak of his heroism she thinks of the day, early in the siege, when a mob of the townspeople had come to her quarters, demanding that she be killed or handed over to the enemy, so that Lanka could be saved. How Ravan had stood up to them then - his own people - some of them related to him by blood. How he had reminded them of the wars he had fought in their name, of the glory he had brought to their land, of the riches he had won for the state, keeping nothing back for himself, of his years of selfless and exacting service. Would they turn against him now? Would they not trust him to lead them into this final battle, the greatest and most glorious of them all, victory in which would make Lanka the mightiest land in all the world? What a fine figure of a man he made, standing before them, one man against a mob, one lighthouse against a snarling sea. And how the mob first soothed, then shamed, then inspired, had responded to his words, had dispersed back to their homes to prepare for the fight.

Had he really believed that he could win? Or had he simply known that her return would achieve nothing, that what Ram wanted back was not his wife but his honor, and that he would keep fighting until he had extracted his compensation in blood? Or was it simply that he could not bear to part with her, was willing to give up everything - his own people, his own life - for the sake of keeping her by him, aloof and distant as she was, for a few more weeks?

No, she cannot bring herself to believe that.

But why had she been so aloof, so distant? Why had she not given this man, who had loved her more purely and more desperately than any other, what he so clearly desired? It had seemed, at the time, a matter of principle, but she cannot remember, now, what the principle was, or why it had seemed important. Thinking back to that time, she realizes that what she regrets most is not the loss of Ayodhya, but those sunset visits, the two of them standing alone in the Lankan garden, saying nothing. Even now, long after the war that destroyed him and set her free, there is an absence in her evenings that she cannot fill, the weight of it growing inside her like a sorrow ten years in the making, waiting to be born.

When she thinks of him now - and increasingly she thinks only of him - it is with a sense of missed opportunity, of a chance offered but not taken. Like the fire she could have given herself to, that day of the test, if only she had been brave enough.


[1] The sentence reads: "The Santals, a tribe known for their extensive oral traditions, even conceive of Sita as unfaithful—to the shock and horror of any Hindu bred on Valmiki or Kampan, she is seduced both by Ravana and by Laksmana." Emphasis mine.

Invisible Ink

It's been two days since he realized the bottle of disappearing ink was empty. He must have spilled it and not noticed. It was probably at night, during one of his panic attacks, the ink spreading in the darkness, then disappearing with the dawn. He wonders where the stain is, waits for it to appear.

[55 words]

***

Over at the Philadelphia Orchestra this evening, de Burgos conducting Wagner: ah! the horns! ah! the trombones!

***

I know I've already linked to the Translation issue of Poetry a couple of days back, but as I read through it I discover new treasures. Including this glorious Bonnefoy sonnet and this translation of Olav Hauge (who, truth to tell, I've never heard of before) which is remarkable less for the poem itself and more for Robert Bly's lovely translator's note that provides so compelling a portrait of the man that I have the urge to go running to the library to try and find some of his work.

Forever Young

To take a (first) page out of Amit's book (would those be uncut pages?), it's hard to put down a poem that begins like this:

"I was having sex with a stranger
when I realized this was no stranger,
this was Eleanor Roosevelt,
wife of the 32nd president of the United States."

- Dean Young, 'Sex with a Stranger'

(you can read the full thing here - just scroll down a bit)

It isn't bad enough that this man makes it all look so easy, he has to go write a book a year (this poem's from his 2008 collection Primitive Mentor, not to be confused with his 2007 collection Embroyoyo) to make it look even easier. Aaargghh!

P.S. In other news, I just got my hands on the new Winterson. Gloating about which is, of course, the point of this post.

Design for life

As though a leaf, falling from a great height, circled its own descent, fluttered bravely into the air till it remembered it was no wing, then sank, coming to rest at last on the lake's surface, landing so gently not a ripple stirred.

When the wounds of your memory begin to heal

When the wounds of your memory begin to heal
I find some excuse to think of you.

No sooner do Love's proclamations blossom,
then tresses are arranged in every house.

Every stranger I pass seems like an ally
even now, going past your street.

Exiles speak to the wind of their lost country
and the eyes of the morning brim with tears.

Each time she stitches a voice to her lips
the air is scattered with another song.

Darkness seals the door of the prison
then the stars, Faiz, descend in the heart.

- Faiz Ahmed Faiz

The original:

Tumhari yaad ke jab zakhm bharne lagte hain
Kisi bahaane tumhe yaad karne lagte hain

Hadeese-yaar ke unvan nikharne lagte hain
To har hareem mein gesoo savarne lagte hain

Har ajnabi hume mehram dikhayi deta hai
Jo ab bhi teri gali se guzarne lagte hain

Saba se karte hain gurbat-naseeb zikr-e-vatan
To chashm-e-subah mein aansoon ubharne lagte hain

Voh jab bhi karte hain is nutko-lab ki bakhiyagiri
Fazaa mein aur bhi nagme bikharne lagte hain

Dare-kaphas pe andhere ki muhar lagti hai
To 'Faiz' dil mein sitare utarne lagte hain.

Translations, translations everywhere. Here's another attempt of mine at translating Faiz (I'm thinking of making a habit of this, btw). And there's the translation issue of Poetry, some of which is decidedly lacklustre, but also includes this gem from Rilke, and this translation of Vallejo by Don Paterson, to mention just two.

These are the solemn honors owed the dead

"But the chief mourners stayed in place, piled timber
and built a pyre a hundred feet in length and breadth
and aloft it laid the corpse with heavy, aching hearts.
And droves of fat sheep and shambling, crook-horned cattle
they led before the pyre, skinned and dressed them well.
And the great-hearted Achilles, flensing fat from all
wrapped the corpse with folds of it, head to foot,
then heaped the flayed carcasses round Patroclus.
He set two-handled jars of honey and oil beside him
leaned them against the bier - and then with wild zeal
slung the bodies of four massive stallions onto the pyre
and gave a wrenching groan. And the dead lord Patroclus
had fed nine dogs at table - he slit the throats of two,
threw them onto the pyre and then a dozen brave sons
of proud Trojans he hacked to pieces with his bronze....
Achilles' mighty heart was erupting now with slaughter -
he loosed the iron rage of fire to consume them all
and cried out, calling his dear friend by name"

RIP Robert Fagles

Notes

[1] Post Title - The Iliad Book 23 Line 10; translation by Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics 1990)

[2] Extract - ibid. Lines 187-204

Mirror Image

The mirror is not an image.

The image is not a mirror.

The mirror reflects, the image remembers.

The mirror observes, the image obscures.

The mirror demands, the image denies.

The mirror inverts, the image intends.

The image interprets, the mirror infers.

The image betrays, the mirror is faithful.

The image questions, the mirror answers.

The image generalizes, the mirror specifies.

The image mirrors more than mirror imagines.

Mirror image.

The age of Mirrorrim, prophet of opposites.



The image is always

the mirror is only.

The mirror is many

the image is one.

And people say I get obsessive about blog arguments

Okay, okay, so every now and then I get carried away in the comments section of this blog and end up having long, meaningless arguments with people who clearly aren't worth it. I know this. I even intend to get help. Just as soon as I manage to find the time away from all these arguments I'm busy having.

But no discussion (read argument) I've ever had on this or any other blog can even begin to compare to the tortuous lengths that M/s. Shepherd, Robbins and Co. go to in response to a post about Intentional Fallacy. 15,700 something words (and counting) of heated debate, most of it, I suspect, unintelligible to anyone who doesn't have at least an undergraduate degree in English Lit.

Personally, I'm not entirely sure what the intention of any one of the parties involved was in having the discussion, but it makes for an entertaining, if slightly abstruse read.

Tops and Bottoms

Meanwhile, over at Language Log Melvyn Quince takes issue with Condoleeza Rice's claim that she will "stay on top of it and get to the bottom of it"

Of course, when it comes to tops and bottoms the final word will always belong to Cole Porter.

Mis-conduct / with conductors like these who needs an audience?

You know how I'm always complaining about people annoying me at concerts?

Well, I was at this concert today - a performance of Bach's Mass in B minor [1] by this ensemble called the Vox Ama Deus - and I thought for once things were going to turn out right. Two people who seemed to be from the UPenn music faculty on my right and a nice middle-aged lady with impeccable taste [2] on my left. A few kids in the audience, true, but far away and seemingly well behaved. No couples liable to start making out in the middle of a movement. No obvious snorers. All in all, the signs seemed propitious.

The concert started. Intermission came and went and still no one had annoyed me. Finally, we were in the home stretch - the Agnus Dei - I figured nothing bad could happen now.

And then, just as I was starting to relax, the conductor, the BLOODY CONDUCTOR breaks off the performance in BETWEEN MOVEMENTS to deliver some sanctimonious little homily about 'Our Lord Jesus Christ' who died on the cross so we could be saved, and 'Our Brave Soldiers in Iraq' and on and on and on - five minutes of pure blah which not only bored the ears off the entire audience but, more to the point, destroyed all the carefully created momentum of Bach's Mass, so that when he finally got around to playing the final movement it was pretty much impossible to step back into the music. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who would do that to Bach doesn't deserve to be an usher, let alone a conductor. If there is a God, Valentin Radu will be struck by lightning on his way home tonight (thus making him a conductor of an entirely different sort).

I don't know who this Valentin Radu guy is, but if he really feels so strong a need for a soapbox I suggest he join politics or becomes a school principal or something. Anything but a musician. Oh, and Mr. Radu, if you're reading this (which I very much doubt) the whole prima donna I-am-so-moved-by-the-music-I'm-going-to-stand-there-with-my-eyes-closed-for-five-minutes-after-the-end act? Not cool. If you want to go in for cheap histrionics like that, I suggest you get yourself a rock band.

Notes

[1] My fourth concert featuring Bach in a week. Life has been busy.

[2] By which I mean that she agreed with me that the violin soloist (Thomas DiSarlo) was atrocious, the soprano (Bonnie Hoke) mediocre, the flautist (Colin St. Martin) superb and the mezzo soprano (Jody Kidwell) sublime. I don't usually strike up conversations with people at concerts, but when the person sitting next to you claps for the same people you do and, more to the point, stops clapping for the same people you do, some conversation seems in order.

Prison Evening

Stars spiral into the evening -
a staircase the night descends -
and the wind comes near, then passes,
as though someone spoke of love.
In the courtyard, the trees are exiles
who keep themselves busy
embroidering the sky.

The roof shines; the moon
scatters light with generous hands;
the glory of the stars mingles with dust
and light polishes the blue sky silver.
In every corner shadows ebb and advance,
as though the heart were lifted
by a wave of separation.

This is the thought the heart returns to:
that life, in this moment, is sweet.
Let tyrants prepare their poisons,
they will never succeed.
They may snuff out the lamps
in the rooms of lovers,
but can they extinguish the moon?

- Faiz Ahmed Faiz

The original:

Zinda ki ek shaam

Shaam ke pecho-kham sitaron se
Zeena-zeena utar rahi hai raat
Yoon saba paas se guzarti hai
Jaise keh di kisi ne pyaar ki baat.
Sahne-zinda ke be-vatan ashjar
Sarnigun mahav hain banane mein
Damne-aasman pe nakshe-nigaar.

Shaane-baam par damakta hai
Meherban chandi ka dast-e-jameel
Khaak mein dhul gayi hai aabe-najoom
Noor mein dhul gaya hai ashr ka neel.
Sabz goshon mein neelgoon saaye
Lahlahate hain jis tarah dil mein
Mauj-e-dard-e-phirak-e-yaar aaye.

Dil se paiham khayal kahta hai
Itni shireen hai zindagi is pal
Zulm ka zahar gholnewale
Kamran ho sakenge aaj na kal
Jalvagahe-visaal ki shamayein
Vo bujha bhi chuke agar to kya
Chand ko gul karen, to hum jane.


For alternate translations and general context on where this post comes from, see here.

Fugue

1.

Silence:

a thing achieved,

or given.

A release

we extrapolate

into meaning.

The words

not to say.

2.

Not an emptiness, but

a fulcrum.

The circumstances

from which

absences

infer

they are meant.

3.

Silence:

not an emptiness, but

a thing achieved. A fulcrum,

or, given the circumstances,

a release, from which

we extrapolate absences

into meaning, infer

the words they are meant

not to say.

***

Blogging's been sporadic lately, I know, and is likely to continue that way for a couple of weeks. Combination of the Philadelphia Bach Festival (hence the post), a dissertation proposal that's due in two weeks and a couple of other projects I may tell you about someday, if you're foolish / sadistic enough to let me dandle your grandchildren on my knee.

Meanwhile, you can go watch / listen to M/s. Gould and Menuhin play Schoenberg, who I've been listening to a lot lately, and finding disturbingly easy to relate to.

Embryoyo

Okay, I know I've blogged about Dean Young before (and this is turning into a little bit of a poetry obsessed week on 2x3x7), but I've been reading his 2007 collection Embryoyo and laughing myself silly with sheer delight, so I felt I had to share.

You can find poems from the collection here, here, here , here, here and here.

And here's one that you can't find online:

Bunny Tract

Primarily by zigzags like a poem,
bunny moves. Out of base material,
grass is arranged. Certainly, bunny
has much figured out. Quickly, it converts
fear of death, starvation, boredom
into giddy-up, part Chinese checker,
part quantum which is here or there
but never in between. Cherished
by Plains Indians was bunny's power
to disappear by holding very still.
The ancient poet wakes, a bit hungover,
footprints of his friend in new snow
going down the hill, bunny dances
on the edge of the abyss. A cactus
has less in common with static
than a thistle with a kestrel. Baseball
is full of superstition because
it's surrounded by infinity, played
on a diamond formed by multiples of three.
Full of funny hops, bunny twitches,
procreates, kept alive by a curious,
somewhat gross digestive practice
and, perhaps in recompense, excessive
cuteness except for cousin jackrabbit
who looks like those late photos
of Artaud. To give a jackrabbit shock
therapy would be redundant though
Bunny glimpsed by headlight: sailor's
delight; bunny in the morning red:
might as well stay in bed. Bunny
munches its radish leaves without irony.
Without irony, bunny dashes down the hole.
A sense of incongruity, feigned ignorance,
or the doubleness of being one place
but feeling you are another is solely
a human blessing / curse, an aid perhaps
in traffic jams but much worse trying
to embrace a lover and feeling stuck again
in the third-grade cloakroom, whiffs of glue.
It is times like these it seems bunny
knows exactly what to do, flee then stop
and disappear but friend, our work is dark
in a darker world of not leaping in the sun
much. Nerves live in the wormwood.
Every canoe is a sad canoe. Bunny
hops in the vetch but whatever holds us
in its mouth hasn't decided yet to bite
or drop us in a fluffier nest.

- Dean Young

The Gift of Mediation / Poetry vs the Canon

From today's Poetry Daily:

The Gift of Mediation

Shadow warns shadow that you approach,
light warns light.
Frightened, a wild dove starts up. You are an obstacle,
not foreseen here between the loftiness of pines
and penal divisions of low grasses.

You are a foundling looking for a family,
a prodigal son who has fled
and returns to bear witness to the independence
of trees and thistles, quick butterflies and dying dragonflies.

It is through them this moment of peace comes to us,
they help grace descend on the wing
of an unknown bird
and it is their voices—an ermine's cry, moan of a dove,
complaint of an owl—that remind us
the hardship of solitude is measured out equally.

- Julia Hartwig (trans. from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)

Seriously, what is it with Poland?

***

Meanwhile, over at the Guardian there's the Great Poets of the Twentieth Century thing. I know one should be grateful anytime the mass media pays serious attention to poetry, but I can't help finding the whole exercise terribly stick-in-the-mud. Do we really need to be told that Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Hughes and Plath are Great Poets? Again? [1]

Sean O'Brien, in a companion piece to the series in this week's Guardian Review makes an argument for 'bringing back' the canon, citing a friend's daughter who dislikes Eliot and arguing that to ignore the canon in the name of difficulty or as a political reaction to the hegemony of dead white men, is to deprive ourselves of some of mankind's most delightful and rewarding artistic achievements.

It's a good argument, and as someone who loves the work of almost all the poets featured I'm certainly not going to argue with the idea that more people should be encouraged to read them. But I can't help feeling that an overemphasis on the canon, especially the canon as defined by these choices, obscures what is, to me, one of the chief qualities of modern poetry - its sheer range. Poetry is large, it contains multitudes, and that multiplicity of voices is something we need to celebrate, not only because it allows poetry to speak to wide range of constituencies but because each one of those voices exists in the context of the other, so that the combination makes (to quote Keats) "pleasing music, and not wild uproar". To attempt to impose a canon on such diversity is to either fall into the trap of being 'representative' or to end up championing (consciously / unconsciously) one set of voices over the others. And neither of those approaches is particularly useful.

The trouble with the Canon, and the privileging it leads to, is that it limits the experience of poetry for potential readers, and therefore limits the readership for poetry. By making poets part of the Canon we make them gatekeepers into what is, for many, the mystical land of poetry, and in the process end up driving many of them away. Every time someone tells me that "they don't get poetry" or "don't much care for it" I always want to ask them - what have you read? It usually turns out to be something from the Canon. People sample these 'great' works, often in a classroom setting under the tutelage of uninspiring and poorly informed teachers, and end up coming to the conclusion that all poetry (or at any rate all modern poetry) is like this, and since this is the 'best' work and they don't like it, it's hardly worth pursuing it further. But, of course, those of us who do pursue it further know that there is much more to poetry than what goes into the Canon. I would go so far as to say that it's entirely conceivable that you could love poetry without being particularly fond of M/s. Eliot, Auden, Larkin and Hughes. I wonder how many people never realize that.

What we need if we want to make a wider audience engage with poetry (and that, I assume, is the Guardian's purpose - it hardly seems worthwhile to tell a group of people who already love poetry that Eliot was a great poet) is not a canon, but a new set of gatekeepers. One that will help people discover the variety of poetry. One that will help them to find, as a first step, a voice or a set of voices that they can delight in, and which can then become their entry point into this exciting new realm [2]. The question to ask is not who the great poets of the last century are, but who are the poets you would recommend to someone who was unfamiliar with poetry and regarded it with suspicion.

Don't get me wrong. This is not an argument for dumbing poetry down or for trying to write poetry that is more 'accessible'. It is simply a call for recognizing that a) different people will relate to different styles / voices and that b) some poets may be easier to relate to than others. My own list of poets to get people started on includes Amichai, Szymborska, Frost, Yeats and Billy Collins - each a perfectly respectable poet in his / her own right, but for most people, I would argue, an easier place to get started than Heaney or Ashbery.

Nor is this an argument for ignoring 'difficult' poetry. It is simply an argument for recognizing that difficult poetry may, for some people, need to be grown into. John Donne writes: "That which in him was fair and delicate / Was but the milk, which in love's childish state / Did nurse it: who now is grown strong enough / To feed on that, which to disused tastes seems tough." Making sure we provide that milk, rather than stubbornly insisting on the primacy of the canon, is what greater public engagement with poetry demands.

In the end, I keep coming back to the daughter of O'Brien's friend. Is seeing Eliot feted as on the 'Great Poets of the Twentieth Century' in the Guardian going to convince her to give him another try? Or is it just going to confirm her bias against him - making him even more of an authority figure and therefore someone more passionately to be rebelled against? The worst thing that could happen here is that this girl's prejudice against Eliot gets transferred to twentieth century poetry more generally, so that she ends up disliking not just Eliot [2] but poetry itself, and become one of those people who go around saying they "don't much care for poetry". What we need to do is not so much convince her that Eliot is worth the effort (if we can keep her reading poetry she'll figure that out eventually, and even if she doesn't, does it really matter?) as find her some other poet she can champion in Eliot's place. That after all, is how art progresses - by the intense championing of the new and exciting against the hegemony of the old and established [4].

Notes

[1] Though admittedly, Siegfried Sassoon being one of the century's great poets is news to me. I'm looking forward to hearing what William Boyd has to say about that one.

[2] I'm tempted to draw parallels to Virgil leading Dante all the way to Paradise, but never mind.

[3] I have my own theories on why people dislike Eliot, but that's a whole other post.

[4] You could argue, of course, that by putting up this list the Guardian has created a set of establishment figures to be opposed, sparking a broader discussion on poetry in the name of telling them why they're wrong (witness, for instance, this post) but somehow I doubt that's what they had in mind.

Mir-ly adequate

Okay, okay, so I know it's been two months since Szerelem asked me to do a Mir translation and I said I would, but these things take time, you know, especially when you forget all about them.

Anyway, here goes. I'm not entirely happy with the translation, but it'll have to do for now. You can read the original here and a slightly shortened version (with an alternate translation by K.C. Kanda) here. You can also see a video clip of Mehdi Hassan singing this ghazal on Youtube. I've skipped on couplet of the original because it didn't really make sense to me, and I haven't really stuck too closely to the literal meaning, so it's more a transcreation than a translation, but what the hell:

Look at the heart, see where it rises.
See how it comes upon us, like smoke.

Whose ashen grave is this? This sky
from which a flame daily rises.

These ruined chambers of my heart,
this house you must never leave.

When lamentation tugs at me,
a great roar rises, fills the air;

a dust of confusion rises
where your eyes engage my grief.

Where shall he find rest again?
The man who rises, leaves your door?

When I left your street it was as though
I chose to abandon the world.

Love, Mir, is a heavy stone.
Who can rise from under its weight?

- Mir Taqi Mir

Spritzer said to be weighing resignation

Am I the only one who sees this headline and has an immediate mental image of a man standing mournfully before a weighing scale, adding page after page to his letter until the pans balance?

What I find really outrageous about this whole thing is the $ 1,000 to $ 5,500 an hour the folks at Emperor Club charge. Do you know how many stupid undergraduate papers I would have to grade to make that kind of money?

City of Meh

Just got back from watching Paulo Morelli's Cidade dos Homens, which is basically a Ram Gopal Varma film, only in Portuguese and with hotter men. Actually, it's more like a combination of a RGV film and one of those corny Hindi films from the late 70's where child actors had a distressing habit of growing up to become Amitabh Bachchan. No, seriously. Story about two kids growing up fatherless in poverty, ending up being best friends, close as brothers? Check. Love interests? Check. Love interest who turns out to be daughter / sister of hero's most hated enemy? Check. One friend betrayed by other? Check. Betrayed friend falling into wrong company and taking to crime? Check. Startling revelations about hero's parents? Check. Friends break up, end up on opposite sides and come close to killing each other? Check. Hell, they even have a scene with the two friends driving about on a motorbike (though mercifully without a sidecar). I swear I sat in the theater humming "Yeh Dosti" under my breath, I was that bored. If you watched City of God and liked it (as I did) Don't watch this film. On the other hand, if you really enjoyed Knocked Up and / or are still nostalgic for the lost era of films starring Shatrugan Sinha, this is the film for you.

The most entertaining part of the whole experience was actually the couple sitting two rows away (who made up, incidentally, 40% of the film's audience). They get to the hall fifteen minutes early. They change seats three times before the finally decide where they want to sit. They sit there for one minute. Then they go out to get popcorn. They come back. They sit for thirty seconds. Then the guy goes to get water. He comes back. They sit for thirty seconds. Then the woman decides she wants to a Coke. So she goes and gets that. They sit for forty-five seconds. Guy goes to the restroom, returns. They sit for thirty-eight seconds. Woman goes to the restroom returns. They sit for two minutes, with the guy complaining that the movie hasn't started even though it's ten seconds pas the time, while the woman has a loud conversation on her cellphone about what she plans to cook for dinner. Show starts. Woman turns off cellphone, guy sits up. They settle in to watch. They watch the first trailer. They watch the second trailer. They find the third trailer inexplicably funny. Halfway through the fourth trailer they start whispering to each other. The movie starts. They watch it for fifty six seconds. Then they walk out, taking popcorn / water / coke with them. One minute later they return, bringing back popcorn / water / coke. They go to place where they were first sitting. They go to place where they sat next. They clearly have no clue where they were sitting but want to go back there. They pause, watch another two minutes of the film. Then they start searching again. A-ha! they have found woman's coat. Woman puts on coat while guy holds popcorn / water / coke / cellphone. Finally, seven minutes into the film, they leave, taking popcorn / water / coke with them.

Dissolve

"I'm trying to write a poem that will alert me to my real life,
a poem written in the natural speech of the breakfast table,
of a girl spooning yogurt, pausing, the spoon held aloft
while she gestures toward the exact turning of her thought.

It would have to be a poem dense with ordinary detail
the way the sun, spilling across walnut and balled-up napkins,
can pick out cups, plates, the letter from which someone has just read aloud,
with evenhanded curiosity, leaving behind a gloss of pleasure."

- Jane Cooper, 'Ordinary Detail'

"Hurry up or you'll be late", her mother says.

The child knows better.

Alert as an alchemist, the child measures out each teaspoon of sunlight, adds it to the glass. Stirs it vigorously till the water shines with a dissolved brilliance. Till the water becomes a co-conspirator, and the spoon winks back at her, trying not to laugh.

Now that's what I call a birdie

Sometimes the jokes just fall into your lap.

Needless to say, this blog strongly disapproves of cruelty to animals, especially endangered species. What do you think humans are for?

Meanwhile, the Yahoo News site continues to be a source of endless entertainment. Another article from the site informs me that scientists have discovered that the Grand Canyon is at least ten million years older than it's usually considered to be. That's about 2,628,000,000,000 missed photo ops. No word yet on how old John McCain actually is.

Nordbrandt

Have been reading an early selection of poems by Danish poet Henrik Nordbrandt (translated by the poet and Alexander Taylor), and was struck by how strongly Nordbrandt (or at least early Nordbrandt - he has a few poems in this month's American Poetry Review that seem very different; he also puts in an appearance in a recent issue of Agni) seems to be influenced by Cavafy.

Exhibit 1:

Athens

We have been travelling so long
we no longer know where we live.
But if we did know
we would go straight home...

We call this city Athens
but we really can't
have arrived in Athens yet
since this place corresponds neither with
our memories nor our imaginings.

And since it is not Athens
how can we leave again
as long as we do not know
what place it is we are leaving?

So let us stay here a while
take a look at the ruins and get to know the city
and if after a time
we begin to feel so much at ease
we are convinced that it is Athens

we can begin again
to wonder where we live
and at that time
hopefully go straight home....

Exhibit 2

On the way to Ithaca

On the way to Ithaca I see myself at last:
A shape more blurred with the crest of each wave
as the men who created
its cold blue contours by rowing the ship forward

gradually are left astern, perish in their dreams
or fall dead on the oars:
Their disappearance brings me, bit by bit,
to the arrival that has always pursued me:

Pink mountains, capped with snow, jutting
from a pink sea, dissolve my features in theirs.
I am the nobody Ithaca has made me.

The Ithaca mirrored in the sea I had abandoned.
The Ithaca I thought was my longing
when that longing still had a form and could be stilled.

See what I mean? Of course, not all of it is like this. You also have:

China observed through Greek rain in Turkish coffee

The drizzle
falls into my coffee
until it gets cold
and runs over
until it runs over
and clears
so the picture at the bottom
comes into sight.

The picture of a man
with a long beard
in China
in front of a Chinese pavillion
in rain, heavy rain
that has congealed
in stripes
over the windblown facade
and over the face of the man.

Under the coffee, the sugar and the milk
which is curdling,
under the worn glaze
the eyes seem burnt out
or turned inward
toward China, in the porcelain of the cup
slowly emptying of coffee
and running full of rain
clear rain. The spring rain

atomizes against the eaves of the tavern
the facades on the other side of the street
resemble a huge
worn wall of porcelain
whose glow penetrates the wine leaves
the wine leaves which are also worn
as if inside a cup. The Chinaman
sees the sun appear through a green leaf
which has fallen into the cup

the cup whose contents
are now completely clear.

and

Head of Clay

The storm has washed a head of clay up the shore.
It is a sea nymph
and from the relationship of the face to the neck
it seems she has something in her hand
she is fond of. She looks
most of all like a girl from the country on her way to the dance
but has something sad about her
which she can't explain.

Now you carefully scrape the chalk from her face
to try to find out
what it is that troubles her. She looks
as if she were sleeping, dreaming
in a meadow. But on her cheek
near the right corner of her mouth is
embedded in the clay a birthmark
which she is trying to hide under a tuft of hair.

It is shaped like the imprint of a finger
the little finger of the right hand
and put there long ago when you once
touched her, only once, to thank her
for something you no longer remember.
Maybe it was only that she yielded
to your wishes exactly the way you wanted, so beautiful
you couldn't bear to leave her alone.

and just by way of comparison, here's one of the poems from APR (translated by Thomas E. Kennedy)

The House in Sweden

I bought a house in Sweden. And never
have I done, felt or seen anything more absurd
or seen a more insane row of words on paper.
"I" to start with certainly does not belong here.
"I" could just as convincingly have been an apothecary
or a lynx made of asbestos
and "bought" sounds like the only word
that has unhappily survived
a long dead Siberian language.
And "house." I who never wanted to live on earth
and of all places in Sweden: Not on your life.
Therefore I bought the house
so the apothecary's crisp bells could be heard
in early spring far out in the darkening birch wood
and the asbestos lynx could have a lake to mirror itself in.
I looked it right
in the eyes tonight as I prepared my suicide.
There stands the house in these words
on the length of the lake, whose depth is clearly visible
through the black holes of the ice.
It is a house. And because it is me
it is as red as blood but running nowhere.

More Nordbrandt poems here.

Author admits boring memoir is fantasy

Hohum County, Nevada

In a tearful statement here today 62 year old Emanla E. Rymton, author of a critically and commercially unsuccessful memoir about the joys of growing up in 50's America, admitted that her memoir, All Things Nice, is a complete fabrication from beginning to end. Ms. Rymton said "she didn't know what possessed her to publish that ghastly thing as my life story" but said that while she herself had never experienced any of the events in the book, the stories in it were drawn from the reminiscences of fellow residents of her old-age home. "I guess I just got sick of listening to them talk about all the pretty dolls they had", Ms. Rymton said.

Published last year, All Things Nice tells the story of an idyllic childhood in the suburban mid-west, spent playing with dolls, giggling about boys, and dreaming of white weddings and washing machines. The book, which the only critic who read it described as a 'saccharine snore-fest', and which is currently being made into a movie starring Lindsay Lohan, was an instant flop across the country, selling a total of 14 copies in the first month, including the three copies someone stole from Ms. Rymton's room.

It seems however, that the childhood Ms. Rymton describes never happened. Ms. Rymton never lived in a suburb outside Chicago, never owned a complete set of Barbies and did not spend her days cutting pictures out of Woman and Home to stick in her tinsel-and-ribbon filled scrapbook. Nor was Ms. Rymton ever a cheer-leader, in fact, she never even attended high school.

The child of a Mr. and Mrs. Rymtonski, a Jewish couple forced to flee their native Poland after the Nazi occupation, Ms. Rymton was orphaned at the age of 6 months when her parents were both killed in a mining accident in South Dakota. The rest of her family having vanished in the Holocaust, Ms. Rymton spent her childhood in a series of foster homes, where she suffered physical and sexual abuse, before running away to the Alaskan wilderness at the age of 12, where she proceeded to establish a working rapport with the grizzly bears and survived by hunting elk. A career as a drug-runner followed, then a stint in the CIA during the Nixon administration, followed by twenty years running covert operations for the Canadians in Northern Mongolia (as part of the series of top secret espionage missions described in Warren P. Aren't's thrilling book The Cold Shoulder War: The Race to be the Less Insignificant Neighbor).

When asked why she had chosen to conceal these facts, Ms. Rymton said that she felt like she needed "a different voice, a voice people would listen to, would respect, would understand". She also says that she apologizes for any disappointment her readers may feel upon learning of her true past, but that it was never her intention to trivialize the sufferings of the survivors of American suburbia, whom she described as "the true heroines of my story".

The revelation of the book's fictional nature caused little consternation, since no one has actually read it, but Simple and Huckster, the publishers of the book, issued a statement immediately following Ms. Rymton's expressing "their disappointment at being made the victims of this hoax, as well as of being deprived of this woman's real story, which we might actually have made of a profit off".

Ms. Rymton's statement is the third in a series of such revelations that have shaken the publishing industry recently, the other two being Margaret B. Jones' Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca's Misha.

P.S. This just in: The reporter behind this news story just issued a statement saying that the entire report is a fantasy. In a tearful statement to his fellow journalists...

Reading Snow

"as I speak he is freezing
my words he will melt them

to listen and listen
to the water of my voice

when he is the last
speaker of his language"

- Agha Shahid Ali

He wakes to find it's snowing, and he's the only one who knows the code.

He pulls on his overcoat, steps out into the yard. Snowflakes drift past, tiny packets of information, each one unique.

Where others see forgetting he sees pattern, beauty; his practiced hands finding, always, the snowflakes he seeks, the lightness of them on his fingertips that he deciphers into words.

With his eyes closed, the air is a braille of impressions. He has only to touch these poems to feel them melt away.

Dear John McCain

I realize it's a bad year for the Republicans and you're probably not going to be able to afford advertising on your own. So I thought I'd put together an ad that you could use to make your pitch for President. I think it makes the perfect case for why we need someone like you in power. Best of luck!

Oh, by the way, the last five seconds or so have a picture of me - sorry about that but we couldn't find one of you. But you should be able to replace that easily.

Love,

Hillary

P.S. Seriously, what is the woman thinking?

UPDATE: The PhD version.

Those who do not learn from history...

...are doomed to make others repeat it.

Paul Kramer in last week's New Yorker (sorry, I'm running behind on my reading) about a raging controversy over the use of torture by occupying US forces trying to deal with subversives - over one hundred years ago. Go read.

It must be something I 8

Ok, it's official. I am not doing another tag for at least three months. Or 8. So there.

Meanwhile, I suppose I may as well get this one out of the way (who comes up with these things anyway?):

1. 8 things I am passionate about

a) Poetry (surprise!)
b) Beethoven, Mozart, Bach
c) Miles
d) Films with subtitles
e) Dark Chocolate
f) Procrastination
g) Being right
h) Air-piano

2. 8 things I want to do before I die

a) Finish my dissertation (it may take that long)
b) Read Proust
c) Conduct the Berlin Philharmonic (what? No one said I had to be realistic)
d) Win an argument on the Internet (see above)
e) Clean the fridge (I don't really want to do it, but figure I should, at least once)
f) Develop a new flavor of Ice-cream (How does Single Malt Dark Chocolate Espresso sound to you)
g) Stop putting off things I want to do
h) Commit suicide (this list is in no particular order)

3. 8 Things I say often

a) "Three things"
b) "And now for something completely different"
c) "Hello"
d) "Goodbye"
e) "What was it Eliot said?"
f) "My dissertation?...uh...well, you see, I haven't really decided yet..."
g) "Go ahead. Make my day" (I don't really say this often. But I'd like to)
h) "Not another tag!"

Bonus: Things I'd like to say often

4. 8 Books I've read recently

(You can actually see this from the Shelfari list on the side - but let's see which ones I remember)

a) Susan Sontag, At the Same Time (currently reading)
b) J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (currently reading)
c) Paul Celan, Selected Poems trans. by Michael Hamburger (currently reading)
d) William T. Vollmann, The Atlas
e) Nicanor Parra, Emergency Poems & Poems and Antipoems
f) Rae Armantrout, Veil: New and Selected Poems
g) Ursula K. Le Guin, Searoad
h) Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

5. 8 songs I could listen to over and over

a) Franz Schubert, Winterreise (okay, okay, so that's 24 songs right there, but you can't seriously expect me to pick between them)
b) J.S. Bach, Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott (from Matthaus Passion BWV 244)
c) Georges Bizet, Habanera (from Carmen; see also)
d) Joni Mitchell, River
e) Bob Dylan, Desolation Row
f) Ella Fitzgerald, How High The Moon / Mack the Knife
g) Begum Akhtar, Mere Humnafas mere humnawa
h) Tom Lehrer, Masochism Tango (talk about passionate)

6. 8 Things that attract me to my best friends

a) A well-stocked bar (also, apartments in Manhattan and / or a penchant for driving rental cars to distant National Parks)
b) A disdain for all things popular
c) Comic book collections
d) A complete absence of spouses, children and other such domestic inconveniences
e) A well-stocked bar
f) A taste for bad puns
g) Willingness to be seen with me in public
h) A well-stocked bar

7. 8 people I think should do this tag

a) Raul Castro: "8 things I want to do before I die. Hmmm. Fido, what do I want to do before I die?" ("Oh, never mind, too late.")

b) Barack Obama "8 things I'm passionate about: Change, change, change, change, change, change, change and...ummm...maybe change?" (Hillary: "Did you hear that sixth change? Didn't it sound exactly like the fifth one? He's plagiarizing himself again.")

c) Snow White "8 things I'm passionate about: The Prince, Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sneezy, Bashful, Sleepy and Dopey"("Yes, sometimes all in one night")

d) George W. Bush "8...errr...8...Uncle Dick, what's a b-o-o-k?" ("Uncle Dick, Uncle Dick, I got up to five. Can you tell me what comes next? I've got a book in my other hand.")

e) Quentin Tarantino "8 things I say often: ****, ****, ****, *******, ******, ******-******, ******-******, ******-******* *******" ("It's a tough job, you know, writing your own scripts")

f) The Spanish Inquisition "8 things that attract me to my best friends: Surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the pope, nice red uniforms, comfy chairs, soft cushions, diabolical laughter and The Rack! The 9 things that attract me..." (You weren't expecting that were you? well....)

g) Nipper: "I'll listen to anything! Any 8 songs, I tell you! Anything but that damn voice!" ("Oh, come on, not 'How Much is that Doggy in the Window'!!")

h) Elizabeth Barret Browning: "8 ways I love thee" ("a) The depth my soul can reach b) The breadth....")

Fairy Tale

In the beginning God created the Gingerbread House.

And the door of the house was of chocolate, and candy was on its face.

And God looked at the Gingerbread House and knew that it was good.

Then God created Hansel and Gretel that they may dwell in the House.

And She said to them: "Of all that thou seest before thee thou may freely eat.

But of the Oven of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thou shalt not eat of it, that alone I forbid thee, for it is surely death."

And the days of Hansel and Gretel in the Gingerbread House were many, and there had they much sport.

But a serpent more subtle than others came unto Gretel and said to her: "Beware! for thy life lieth in peril. Not the first art thou to live in the Gingerbread House. Go look in the Oven that God had forbidden thee and there shalt thou find the truth of what I have spoken."

So the children looked into the Oven, and lo! there were the bones of the children who had come before them, and little flesh was left on them.

Then were Hansel and Gretel frightened and they did hide from God.

But God was aware of their fear, and She walked through the house calling: "Wherefore dost thou hide from me, my little ones? Who has taught thee to be afraid of thy Maker? Hast thou peered into the Oven of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as I had forbid thee? Then for this sin shalt thou perish"

And God chased Hansel and Gretel all through the Gingerbread House, but the children were clever and they lured God into the Oven and locked Her inside.

Then were Hansel and Gretel sad for they knew that they must leave the Gingerbread House. And the Serpent came unto them and said "Fear not, my children, for I shall lay a trail of bread crumbs from this house to a place where thee may live safely, and if thou shalt follow this trail thou shalt be saved"

And so the Serpent laid a trail of bread crumbs, but the Arch-Sparrow Michael and the Arch-Sparrow Gabriel who were servants of the Lady did see the crumbs and swallow them, so that when Hansel and Gretel came to the edge of the forest they could not find the trail.

Thus did Hansel and Gretel come to leave the Gingerbread House, and were lost in the forest forever after.

Obligatory (Pre-) Oscar Post

It's Oscar night. What better time to clear up some confusion about the purpose of the Oscars. The Oscars are not, as only the feeble-minded could possibly believe, meant to celebrate outstanding achievement in the cinematic arts or anything like that. On the contrary, they are an important cultural touchstone precisely because they provide the bronze standard against which the rest of us can measure our own snobbishness. How could self-defined, self-important film critics like me showcase our superior intelligence and taste if we didn't have an establishment account to disagree with? How could we prove that we are serious film people, except by showing off our familiarity with all the contenders (unlike certain other people) and our opinion on their relative merits? Without the Oscars we would run the risk of actually finding ourselves in agreement with everyone else. This way we can play it safe.

Of course, just beating up on the Oscars afterwards is a tad unsporting. To keep things fair, one must have the decency to pick the nominees one thinks should win beforehand, rather than ascribe merit afterwards to those who lose. With that in mind, here's my list of films I'd like to see winning tonight - films I think should win are marked with a #, films I haven't seen are marked with a *.

Best motion picture of the year
"Atonement"*
"Juno"
"Michael Clayton"*
"No Country for Old Men" #
"There Will Be Blood"

I'm not really that fond of No Country, but of the three nominees I've seen, it's easily the best. Now if I'm Not There / Across the Universe had been nominated, this would have been a different story.

Performance by an actor in a leading role
George Clooney in "Michael Clayton"*
Daniel Day-Lewis in "There Will Be Blood" #
Johnny Depp in "Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street"
Tommy Lee Jones in "In the Valley of Elah"*
Viggo Mortensen in "Eastern Promises"*

Ya, ya, let's get it over with already. I'll be happy if that's the only Oscar There Will Be Blood wins.

Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Casey Affleck in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"*
Javier Bardem in "No Country for Old Men"
Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Charlie Wilson's War" #
Hal Holbrook in "Into the Wild"
Tom Wilkinson in "Michael Clayton"*

I have to say I was a little underwhelmed by Bardem's Chigurh. It's probably because my mental picture of the character from reading the book was so much scarier. Also, what was with that haircut?

Performance by an actress in a leading role
Cate Blanchett in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"*
Julie Christie in "Away from Her"*
Marion Cotillard in "La Vie en Rose"*
Laura Linney in "The Savages" #
Ellen Page in "Juno"

I'm going to plump for Linney on this one, partly because I haven't seen either Cotillard or Christie's performances, and partly because I think The Savages deserves to get something.

Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Cate Blanchett in "I'm Not There" #
Ruby Dee in "American Gangster"*
Saoirse Ronan in "Atonement"*
Amy Ryan in "Gone Baby Gone"*
Tilda Swinton in "Michael Clayton"*

Okay, so Blanchett's is the only performance I've seen, but it doesn't matter. She was the best thing about a very good film, and probably deserves to win anyway. Now if only we could convince her to come accept the award in character. That's one Thank You speech I'd love to hear.

Best animated feature film of the year
"Persepolis"#
"Ratatouille"
"Surf's Up"*

All I can say is, why did they even bother nominating Surf's Up?

Achievement in cinematography
"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"*
"Atonement"*
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" #
"No Country for Old Men"
"There Will Be Blood"

Watch the film. Really. Just watch the film.

Achievement in directing
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", Julian Schnabel
"Juno", Jason Reitman
"Michael Clayton", Tony Gilroy*
"No Country for Old Men", Joel Coen and Ethan Coen #
"There Will Be Blood" , Paul Thomas Anderson

I think it's about time the Coen brothers won a Best Director Oscar, don't you?

Best foreign language film of the year
"Beaufort" Israel*
"The Counterfeiters" Austria*
"Katyn" Poland* #
"Mongol" Kazakhstan*
"12" Russia*

For me, the best foreign language film of the year is Bela Tarr's Man from London (I haven't got around to watching Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days yet, though I plan to soon) Of the films nominated here (none of which I've seen), I'd pick Katyn, if only because it's Wajda. What the Academy should do is institute a Scorsese award - given every year to a director / performer the Academy has been too boneheaded to reward when it should have. At least that way they'd stop playing catch-up with the current year's awards.

Best animated short film
"I Met the Walrus"
"Madame Tutli-Putli"
"Même les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven)"
"My Love (Moya Lyubov)" #
"Peter & the Wolf"

Best live action short film
"At Night" #
"Il Supplente (The Substitute)"
"Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets)"
"Tanghi Argentini"
"The Tonto Woman"

(for both short film awards, see here)

Adapted screenplay
"Atonement"*
"Away from Her"*
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" #
"No Country for Old Men"
"There Will Be Blood"

I know the popular argument here is for No Country, but I can't help feeling that the Coen Bros. had it a little too easy. The person who really should be getting an award here is Cormac McCarthy (not like he needs anything as trivial as an Oscar). I can't say that the Coen Bros. script added much to the book, and I think there were several key elements that they took out of it, which weakened the story considerably. On the other hand, I thought The Diving Bell and The Butterfly did a fascinating job of taking the thoughts inside Bauby's head and finding a way to bring them alive on screen. I haven't actually read Bauby's book, so I don't know how much of it is coming straight from there, but the way the hospital staff / friends respond to Bauby's predicament is pitch-perfect. And someone should get an award for that.

Also, is there a reason Persepolis is not nominated here?

Original screenplay
"Juno" Written by Diablo Cody#
"Lars and the Real Girl" Written by Nancy Oliver*
"Michael Clayton" Written by Tony Gilroy*
"Ratatouille" , Screenplay by Brad Bird;
"The Savages", Written by Tamara Jenkins

I will say that I thought Tamara Jenkins' script for The Savages was interesting - if only because of the way it deployed Brecht, but I think Cody's script is just brilliant at so many levels - both in its quick-witted surface energy and in the way it challenges and subverts its audience's expectations. I would have liked to see a slightly less cheesy last twenty minutes, but I suppose that's asking for too much.

Hitch

In case you haven't seen it already, Vanity Fair has a special photo feature paying tribute to Hitchcock by the somewhat bizarre method of shooting imitations of famous scenes from his films with modern day actors in them. It's a fairly silly tribute, if you ask me, but it makes for fascinating discussion. You can see the full series here.

Personally, I can't say their choices are all bad. I happen to think Jodi Foster in Birds would be a distinct improvement, as would Naomi Watts in Marnie (it occurs to me, btw, just looking at that photo, that the perfect person to play Marnie may actually be Nicole Kidman - after all, you have only to look at Ms. Kidman to know that something traumatic happened to her as a child), but this may be because I think anything short of a block of wood [1] would be an improvement on the mannequin that is Tippi Hedren. And I can certainly see Keira Knightley in Rebecca. Admittedly Ms. Knightley can't really act, but then Joan Fontaine can't either, and Ms. Knightley is both more spirited and much better looking. I'm even willing to live with Charlize Theron taking on Grace Kelly's non-role in Dial M for Murder, though I draw the line at letting either Scarlett Johansson or Gwyneth Paltrow replace her in Rear Window and To Catch A Thief respectively. As for Rene Zellweger in Vertigo, the very idea of letting that woman onto the set of a Hitchcock film makes my blood run cold, let alone actually giving her a part in one [2].

On the men's side things are not so bad. I like the idea of Josh Brolin in Lifeboat and I can totally see Javier Bardem carrying off Jimmy Stewart's role in Rear Window (and that's a serious compliment, though it's hard to imagine a role Bardem couldn't carry off) except that I think the sight of him staring out of a window unable to move will bring back too many memories of The Sea Inside. You're likely to end up spending more time worrying about his death wish than what's happening in the apartment opposite. The role they should really use Bardem in is Olivier's role in Rebecca.

It is, of course, entirely impossible to imagine anyone, and I mean anyone, replacing Cary Grant in anything, but I can just about see how Robert Downey Jr. could pull of To Catch A Thief. The idea of trying to have Seth Rogen (who in case you're wondering is the guy from Knocked Up) substitute for Grant, on the other hand, is utterly ridiculous. It would be like replacing a bottle of champagne with mango Rasna.

[1] Actually, even a block of wood might be better, remember that Monty Python sketch?

[2] I'd say "act in one" but there's no risk of that, is there?

While his guitar gently taps

Just got back from an evening listening to this man do wild and wonderful things with a guitar - the kind of things it shouldn't be possible for mortals to do, including an adaptation of the slow movement to Mozart's Piano Concerto 21 (yes, that's Elvira Madigan) that brought tears of joy to my eyes and that old Amadeus himself would have been proud of. Adapting the Beatles and S&G and Led Zep and even Miles is one thing, but when you can pull of Mozart on a guitar you are truly God.

Now you'll excuse me while I go listen to the man play ragas Bihag, Shankara and Malkauns. Meanwhile you can check out more Jordan links courtesy TR.

Prayer for Image's Sake

Give us this day the photographs not taken. Handfuls of film poured away in the river. Memories misplaced between pages of light.

Spare us this day regret's exposures. The blankness of lives that we never used. Spare us the shutter of your wrath, your eye that bruises, and all the vulnerabilities with which our flesh burns clear.

Let no one leave who cannot be forgotten. Let no one stay except in our hearts.

The Binayak Sen Petition(s)

And while we're on the subject of Human Rights, csm points to an online petition for the release of Binayak Sen.

You can read more about Dr. Sen and his arrest by the Chattisgarh government here (I'll admit this is the first I've heard about it). The wikipedia article also has a link to a site that lists a number of other petitions (including this one, which seems more recent).

Happy signing.