Tag Archives: books

POETS Day! Apes in Hell

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Illustrated by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly done and you’re spending these last few hours doing what exactly? Trying to look busy? Surreptitiously scanning restaurant reviews? Checking game times? Texting your friends about restaurants and game times? Cut it out and cut out. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

I’ve mentioned before that I’m an introduction reader if the introduction is relatively short or obscenely long. My theory is that I might as well read a short one and that a long one indicates something in the book requiring the long introduction; something I might otherwise miss. My experience shows mid-length ones to be fumbling, fawning, and filled with ten dollar praise of the sort grad students fuss out over beloved former teachers. If I like the book, I’ll read those after. It’s a slapdash theory, but it’s served me and I’m fixed in my habits.

Christian Lorentzen wrote the Introduction to the NYRB Classic edition of Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis, and I’m a little ticked off at him. He’s funny and drops some whispered-about biographical info, though he’s writing about Amis and the info is about infidelity so it was loud whispering to begin with, but entertaining. I’m not going to work out the chronology, but Harper’s claims Lorentzen as a contributor, as do the London Review of Books and others. This intro is a small sample size, but I’m content to dub him one of the good guys and read what I come upon in the future. Still, he ticked me off. I’m pretty sure he gave away the ending of the book.

Not so terribly that I won’t read. I’m pretty, not totally, sure he spoiled it. Lorentzen gives a who’s who of the characters, outlines the conflict central to the plot, and then tells us the ending is “genuinely shocking.” But given the build up as explained there’s only one genuinely shocking ending. If he’s pulled a feint and one of the mains out of nowhere joins the priesthood, reveals himself as the Lindbergh baby, grows a trunk: fine. The ending isn’t spoiled. But given where the story, by his touching on it tells, is going… Dammit.

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POETS DAY! Keats Gets Snippy About Wordsworth

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

In the summer of 1818, John Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown went on a walking tour of Scotland. It looks like the pair covered somewhere between six hundred to six hundred and fifty miles over forty-four days, so about fifteen miles a day, give or take and accounting for weather.

Keats wrote a series of letters about the journey to his consumptive brother Thomas, unable to travel with what they didn’t know at the time was his last bout with tuberculosis. He brings his brother along in these letters. It’s endearing. He’s colloquial and considerate. Reading, you get the sense he really did “Wish you were here.” You also get the sense that he was entertaining a bedridden friend, and further, the sense that his audience enjoyed laughing at small frustrations.

There’s a great deal about lovely views, divine salt water baths, and all the joys that make for good travel brouchuring, but Keats peppers it with amusing observations; little asides he would give were Thomas along.

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POETS Day! George William Russell, Co-Host of the Irish Literary Revival

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Illustration by Rene Sears inspired by the Paintings of AE

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

For those who care about golf, this is your time. The Masters and its NPR whisper-excitement for four televised days is a duck out of work away. For those who don’t care about golf, it’s going to be a pain in the ass getting a table at the neighborhood joint. My local sods the dining room and patio, props azaleas in all the corners, pulls in an under-armor collared shirt Hootie type band for post-round, and makes it damn near impossible for a regular to eat a club sandwich in peace. People in green and white holding red solo cups spill out into the parking lot. They pack the place and good for them, I guess.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I hope your golf team wins.

First: verse.

***

In his younger years, George William Russell had a vision. Details of the vision are unclear to me, but “Aeon”, a Gnostic word meaning early being or ancient cosmic intelligence, popped from the fringe of understanding and held court, nipping at his synapses. He claims to have never heard the word before and to have been ignorant of its meaning until revelation fixed it front and conscious center. Obviously, he looked it up. Obviously it had meaning and implications. He decided Aeon would be his non de plume.

Something got confused. A printer was buffaloed by Russell’s use of the ash, or “Æ” character, to spell Æon. There doesn’t appear to be an academic reason for the ash. I can’t find support for using the symbol in aeon though there was a fashion for dressing up Latin and Greek terms with it as flourish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries whether called for or not. There were heavy metal album cover designers before there were heavy metal albums, so it’s possible Russell spelled for an esoteric aesthetic.

For whatever reason, he used it and the printer didn’t pick up on what he laid down. To the printer’s defense, Russell’s handwriting was notably atrocious. He’s lucky to have deciphered the hieroglyph as resembling A and E at all. The result was a work credited to an author named AE. Russell liked AE and kept it.

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POETS Day! Ford Madox Ford’s “In the Little Old Market-Place”

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Rene is out of town so there’s no illustration from her this week. The above is what happens when I’m left to my own devices.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

In the Little Old Market-Place
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939)

(To the Memory of A. V.)

It rains, it rains,
From gutters and drains
And gargoyles and gables:
It drips from the tables
That tell us the tolls upon grains,
Oxen, asses, sheep, turkeys and fowls
Set into the rain-soaked wall
Of the old Town Hall.

This is a longer poem, ninety-two lines, than I usually feature here, so I’m breaking it up with commentary as I see fit. I hope you’ll excuse my not prefacing each excerpt with “from In the Little…” An added apology: I have no idea who A.V. was. I did look around.

This work first appeared in his collection High Germany, dated 1911 but apparently not published until 1912, and reappeared in the debut anthology of Imagiste poets, back when the movement was helmed by Ezra Pound, Des Imagistes. Pound was awed by Ford and eager to get the established critic, novelist, editor, and poet on board. In part, Pound was thankful. Ford gave several notable poets a beginning in England, among them Pound, DH Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. When put on the pages of Ford’s English Review, they were elevated, sharing space with Yeats and Ford’s dear friend Conrad. It’s said here and about that he “discovered” these new voices, but that’s a messy term. I’m sure what it means in the pertinent sense, as all had published but not to scale, is that Ford lifted them up and made them salon worthy subjects.

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POETS Day: A Boy’s Life

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Officially, the work week’s gonna be over in a few hours. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and then. Cut it out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Boys play seriously. Words used metaphorically by noncommisioned adults, words like “scout” and “reconnoiter,” carry a punch in their youthful declarations implying duty or professionalism.

For a brief stretch of years, they patrol the neighborhood with pant legs tucked in galoshes on the lookout for good sticks, skipable rocks, animal tracks, and fossils. If they’re lucky enough to live near slate deposits or any shale that cleaves, “arrow heads” abound.

My wife and I walk roughly the same path everyday, weather permitting, along our creek. The city is making improvements no one wants. They cut ten foot paths through grass and laid asphalt pathways intermittently. Then they stopped. Debris containing construction fences have been in place for ten months now. The wiffle golf players don’t come out any more, nor do the Russian card players, though one of their chairs litters a fenced off section near the put in. The old foot worn paths remain. Neighbors ignore the city’s trails and keep on as habit and sense dictates, but the city paths wind. They snake in such a way that all the clearings that hosted croquet and touch football are intruded upon.

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POETS Day! Carl Sandburg

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week is gonna be over now, or it’s gonna be over in a few hours. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done. Cut it out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Carl Sandburg was posthumously honored with a postage stamp bearing a sketch of the poet done by his friend William A. Smith and the poet’s “distinctive autograph.” The “distinctive autograph” language comes from Wikipedia which appears to have gotten it from the world stamp authority, Scott Catalogue. Who doesn’t have a distinctive autograph? Signatures are supposed to be distinctive.

Before this week, I didn’t know much about Sandburg beyond a handful of poems I really liked and a handful I really didn’t. I knew he was a major figure in American letters, but didn’t realize the scope. In short, I was aware of his poetry and impact on that discipline, vaguely aware that he’d written Lincoln biographies, and think I’d heard somewhere that he helped preserve and widen the audience for American folk music. I didn’t realize how beloved he was in his time. Rather, I didn’t realize how large a figure he was in his time, because for all that he was beloved, he was scorned too.

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POETS Day! A Look at Narcissus

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

It’s POETS Day! Friday afternoons aren’t meant to be spent working. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Duck out and grab a beer, catch a game, or stroll through the park. You’ve done your part. Enjoy the rewards.

First, a little verse.

***

Narcissus gets a bad rap.

There is a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. You can read all the traits common to sufferers and a series of deficits and exuberances therapists are on the lookout for in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5th Edition. The problem is there’s no Latin. All the warning signs are kitchen table words so though it may well be true that “grandiosity” has a very specific meaning to mental health professionals, it has a more elastic meaning to the rest of us and we have an obnoxious aunt who won’t abide competing cobbler recipes, a co-worker who parks his precious convertible across two spots because he’s worried about dings, and a neighbor who thinks I like his grass clippings piled on my side of the line. By my reading of the DSM-5, they’re all a bunch of damn narcissists.

He died enthralled by his own reflection, starved because he couldn’t break gaze even to eat. Narcissus is the prime choice as patron of the self-obsessed, but there’s a hitch.

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POETS Day! Eliot’s 1st Part of the 2nd of Four Quartets

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

There’s a BarBQ place a mile and a half from our house that my children like to ride their bikes to, get an order of fries, and spend an afternoon downing soda and reading books. Monday, I hopped in the car for a quick trip to the store and came up on my youngest cycling, about halfway to the restaurant, and pulled over to ask if he wanted me to pick up anything while I was out. He told me I wasn’t the first person to pull over and talk to him that afternoon. Some persnickety woman rolled down her window a block or so from our house to “Make sure everything was all right.” She told him it wasn’t safe to be out biking.

The kid is thirteen. When did it become an oddity that one of his tribe might be outside by themselves? We hope she does it again. Next time my kid is going to point at her and start screaming “Stranger Danger!” at the top of his lungs.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Go outside and have some fun. Make it an honest to God POETS Day. Skip out of work and be as free and independent as a kid on a bike.

***

East Coker is a real place. Barely. It’s a tiny village in Summerset set as inland as can be, sandwiched between the Bristol and English Channels, on the north and south respectively; somewhere between Southampton and Plymouth on that southernmost extension of Great Britain the Pilgrims watched sink below the horizon. Wikipedia counts the population as 1667 souls as of the last edit and pictures tell me it’s the kind of quaint English village ripe for a festival-related trio of murders only a clergyman or spinster can solve, to the embarrassment of the local constabulary.

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POETS Day! Eliot’s Magi

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I hope you get a gift so awesome it makes you feel like that time when you were a kid and Santa brought the big red shiny bike/doll house/basball mitt you always wanted. And I hope you have such a good time with friends and family that you forget all about whatever gift made you feel like that time you got the big red shiny bike/doll house/baseball mitt. And then the next day you get lost in a Christmas book and eat leftovers before a football nap.

It’s the best time of year. Cheers, and God bless.

***

I am the oldest of twenty-one cousins just on my mother’s side, so I get my fair share of Christmas cards. Shutterfly, Zazzle, and Adobe, to pull a few from a very long list, make it extraordinarily easy to send family portraits, family travelogue pictorial collages, and a funny one with room for the pets on the back of a decently weighted card stock. My grandfather was a dentist, and there’s something of his preventative ethic still in his great-grandchildren, aligned by height or posed in a teardrop around my cousins and their spouses, pearly whites beaming. We’re old enough that some of the great-grand-level kids tower over cousins I still consider babies. Add the same from my wife’s side, and there are enough wide-shouldered teen giants in the mix to put together a formidable 3-4 defense.

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POETS Day! Charles Mackay of Extraordinary Popular Delusions Fame

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

My kid can type. I don’t mean he just knows how. He dropped into a conversation about something else that he started fiddling with a typing tutor website and “plays” the exercises between games or watching videos when he’s messing around on the computer. He’s been at it for three years. We think we keep an eye on what he does online but this was the first my wife or I heard about it, so we tested him on a random type training site, one he wasn’t familiar with.

He’s over one hundred words a minute at 99% accuracy. He’s thirteen. We’re a little terrified that he was able to spend as much time as he obviously has online without our knowing what he was up to, but damn. He won’t need a POETS Day plan. If he sticks to white collar employment, he’ll blaze throught as much by noon as his co-workers manage all day.

As for the rest of you, come up with something. Pretend a cough, remember a religious observance, whatever you have to do to get out of work and live it up on a Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, here’s a bit of verse.

***

One of the reasons I subscribe to The Free Press is for access to dueling articles on a subject. Here’s a guy who thinks war is bad. Here’s a guy who thinks war is good. And they’ll cross link if the two come out a few days apart.

I read the comments on both. Their paired articles seem less plagued by comment section trolls than the standard stuff, not that those are particularly afflicted when compared to the internet as a whole. I don’t think think I’ve ever been radically swayed by one of the exchanges—article or comment—but I get a few questions answered and pick up a few new questions in the process and emerge just as annoyingly opinionated but with a new array of plugged-in patina building bits of info to pester friends and family with. More than worth the $10 a month subscription price.

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