MAGIC | Misdirection

If you think you can't be fooled by misdirection, watch this TED Talk (link below).

It's also a good introduction to Multi-Tasking.

https://www.ted.com/talks/apollo_robbins_the_art_of_misdirection#t-571236

ELIZABETH BISHOP | Reading

Elizabeth Bishop

Richard Wilbur, 1993 

Reposted here in abbreviated form from original posted on 03/04/2009, updated on 12/26/2016 by Arlo Haskell 

The 1993 Key West Literary Seminar was devoted entirely to Elizabeth Bishop. A series of readings-in-tribute offered her fellow poets the opportunity to discuss Bishop and her influence.

In the 18-minute KWLS recording from the event, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur reads Bishop’s “Little Exercise.” Originally published in her debut 1946 collection North and South, the poem ostensibly describes a thunderstorm “roaming the sky” over the mangrove islands, palm-lined boulevard, herons, and sleeping indigents characteristic of Key West, a place each poet called home. ...

Comments

John Tepper Marlin says:
01/14/2012 at 12:21 pm

I was sorry to see the Elizabeth Bishop house in Key West in such run-down condition.

Reply

◦ Arlo Haskell says:
01/16/2012 at 11:47 am

Something tells me Elizabeth would have liked it this way, tucked away and anonymous, as simple as the day she left it…

Reply

▪ John Tepper Marlin says:
08/06/2017 at 5:08 pm

Is it important to us whether or not the sandpiper is indifferent to becoming extinct?

Notable article in The New Yorker about Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil

                    https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/elizabeth-bishops-misunderstood-brazil

Previous posts on this site about Elizabeth Bishop:

Time Travel: ELIZ BISHOP | Key West 1938-46

nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2012/01/elizabeth-bishop-in-key-west.html

Jan 14, 2012

Time Travel: POETS | Eliz Bishop Homes Neglected in Key West, Brazil

nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2013/01/elizabeth-bishop-homes-neglected-in-key.html

Jan 18, 2013

Time Travel: POETS | Elizabeth Bishop in Ouro Preto

nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2014/02/on-elizabeth-bishops-trail-ouro-preto.html

Feb 16, 2014

ART BIZ | Gaia Celebrates Canada's 150th Birthday

L to R: Mother Nature, Gaia (rear), Alice, John. Ottawa,
Canada. Photo by a friendly fellow tourist.

We were in Ottawa for the wedding of my niece Marguerite (Margie) Marlin to Myles Dunn.

Canada is celebrating its 150th birthday and one of the biggest attractions is in the Jacques-Cartier Park in Gatineau, on the Quebec side of the national capital region, across the bridge from Ottawa.

The centerpiece of the botanical show is a sculpture of majestic Mother Nature (the mythical goddess Gaia) emerges from the earth, hand held skyward, streaming water down upon the land below.

On her right side (dexter, see photo), an eagle rests in her hand. On her left side (sinister), deer graze on her palm and horses gallop along.

This celebration of Canada's 150th anniversary extends to October 15. Its name is MosaïCanada 150-Gatineau 2017.

The exhibit has been curated by Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal, and features more than 40 sculptures, on a half-mile-long path.

POET BORN | July 28 – John Ashbery

Ashbery Receives National Humanities
Medal from President Barack Obama in 2011.

This day in Rochester, NY in 1927 was born John Ashbery. He is a time traveler in the way people thought of it before Einstein's followers started to think of it in scientific terms.

Ashbery grew up on his family's fruit farm near Lake Ontario. He went to a small, rural school, where they read some poetry, all of it classical.

Then he won, as a prize in a contest, Louis Untermeyer's anthology, Modern American and British Poetry. He said he didn't understand many of these contemporary poems, but he was fascinated by them – poems by Auden and Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

Ashbery attended Deerfield for his last two years of high school, from which he went to Harvard. He started writing poetry seriously and published his first book, Some Trees, in 1956, when he was 29.

I first met John Ashbery in the early 1970s, when I became a neighbor in Chelsea, NYC. His newest book was Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Subsequently he published A Wave (1984), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Planisphere (2009).

Garrison Keillor describes Ashbery as having been helped by a generous neighbor. As neighbors in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, John Ashbery and David Kerman  have themselves been generous.

An article in the NY Observer says that when Ashbery grew up on a farm, he didn't like it. He preferred living with his grandparents in the city to attend school. His grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester. When he was 12, Ashbery's younger brother died of leukemia. Ashbery spent most of his time by himself until a wealthy friend of his mother (the "generous neighbor") put up the money for him to finish high school at Deerfield. Ashbery explains:

By that time I had already discovered modern poetry. High schools used to have current events contests sponsored by Time, if the class subscribed to the magazine. They were quite easy. I won the prize of a book. Of the four that they offered, the only one I was vaguely interested in was an anthology of modern American and British poetry by Louis Untermeyer.

Garrison Keillor in a bio of Ashbery in 2014 gives us two quotes from Ashbery. One is about the fact that Ashbery's poetry is not easy. People say they don't understand it. Especially freshman students in college or high school who have to read it for their English courses. 

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience. [Italics added.]

Dorothy Parker once said: "Millay did a great deal of harm making poetry seem so easy that we could all do it but, of course, we couldn’t." Ashbery tries not to make poetry too easy because he believes it should stop you in your tracks – he wants his poems to stop you and make you spend some time. Keillor cites Ashbery's poem "At North Farm", which follows. It has a time-travel aspect. 

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you? 

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

The basic problem with the science of time travel is that in order to travel in time, we would need to travel "at incredible speed" – incredible because weight is a function of speed. We would need to be very light, preferably weightless. The only way that science knows how to time-travel so far is in the mind. But that gives us an important degree of freedom.

Physicists have been driven by unexplained phenomena to come up with a hypothetical fifth dimension that could unite the dimensions of space and time. Until they tie up the loose ends, we will have to rely on time-travel in the mind. We will have to rely on poetry.

NABOKOV | His One-Off Response to Criticism

Vladimir Nabokov famously refused to respond to criticism. Lolita was subjected to a flurry of critical comments, starting with his American publishers who refused to touch it in 1954.

He published it in Paris in 1955 and sailed on, as the book gained acceptance and broke all records for one-week sales when it finally appeared in the USA in 1958, despite being called "repulsive" by a reviewer for The New York Times.  It was made into movies in 1962 (and again in 1997), and Nabokov was seemingly oblivious to critiques.

In a January 1964 Playboy interview, Alvin Toffler asked Nabokov whether he regretted writing Lolita: "With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and fortune mushroomed...  to both acclaim and abuse."

Nabokov responded in the negative: "There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet."

Toffler then reminded Nabokov of two different kinds of critiques:

The Book that Smoked Out
Nabokov.

Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that her charm is tender, few would deny that it is queer—so much so that when director Stanley Kubrick proposed his plan to make a movie of Lolita, you were quoted as saying, “Of course they’ll have to change the plot. Perhaps they will make Lolita a dwarfess. Or they will make her 16 and Humbert 26.” Though you finally wrote the screenplay yourself, several reviewers took the film to task for watering down the central relationship.

Nabokov as a matter of principle brushed aside criticism, with the one exception of a screed he wrote in 1971.

What smoked Nabokov out of his non-responsive cave was a 193-page book published earlier that year by New York University Press and written by a Russian Literature Professor at George Washington University, Dr. William Woodin Rowe. The book was called Nabokov's Deceptive World.

Nabokov's commentary on Rowe's book appears in the October 7 issue of The New York Review of Books. He doesn't take issue with the first two parts of Rowe's book, but objects to the third, where Rowe identifies sexual allusions in Nabokov's work. Nabokov readily admits to such references:

One may wonder if it was worth Mr. Rowe’s time to exhibit erotic bits picked out of Lolita and Ada—a process rather like looking for allusions to aquatic mammals in Moby Dick.

But he strenuously objects when Rowe goes too far. Nabokov compares Rowe to a student (Wellesley? Cornell?) whom he failed in his course, he says,

for writing that Jane Austen describes leaves as “green” because Fanny is hopeful, and “green” is the color of hope.

It is not my place or interest to add to or settle the argument. My wish is to make a record of Rowe's responses and three judgments of independent commentators, since I delved into the  kerfuffle and discussed it with Professor Rowe as part of my research on his illustrious grandfather, FDR's first Treasury Secretary, William H. Woodin, after whom Woody Rowe (as he calls himself) is named.

Woody Rowe, 1934-.
Courtesy of Dr. Rowe.

Rowe responded swiftly to Nabokov's comments in a November letter to The New York Review of Books entitled "Arbors and Mists." He acknowledged that Nabokov's that his October 7 article was "entertaining." Rowe also wrote an article for a British journal, “W. W. Rowe on Nabokov,” published in Encounter, No. 234, March 1973. 

Three reviewers familiar with the dispute give more credit to Rowe’s book than Nabokov did:

• Eric Naiman, in Nabokov, Perversely (Cornell University Press), http://bit.ly/2vpSzpZ. 
• Andrew Field in “Review of William Woodin Rowe's critical study of Vladimir Nabokov's world, Nabokov’s Deceptive World.” Contemporary Literature Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter, 1973), 132-135 (University of Wisconsin Press, JSTOR preview at http://bit.ly/2umP1ba).
• Duncan White, in Nabokov and His Books, argues that Nabokov did himself a disservice by overreacting to Rowe's book.

Nabokov died in 1977. The coast was clear for Rowe to write two more critical studies of Nabokov, in 1979 (Nabokov and Others: Patterns in Russian Literature) and 1981 (Nabokov's Spectral Dimension). Forty years on, Woody Rowe is thriving in Arizona in his 80s, the youngest of three surviving grandchildren of Will Woodin (the other two are in their 90s).

REVOLUTION | July 14 – Bastille Day

Storming of the Bastille (Artist unknown)

This day in 1789 the French Revolution began in Paris with the storming by an angry crowd of the Bastille,  a 14th century medieval fortress long used as a prison, especially for opponents of the royal family.

The Parisian mob wanted to commandeer the ammunition that Bernard-René Jordan de Launay, the military governor of the Bastille, had just brought into the Bastille — 250 barrels of gunpowder.

The origin of France's problems was the financial stress from supporting the American colonies' war of independence (a fact that Americans sometimes forget when they remember American help to France during the two World Wars).

Higher taxes provoked questions from French citizens about their government and its finances. Rebellions occurred in different parts of France. Louis XVI relied on Jacques Necker, finance minister and effectively prime minister, for answers. Necker tried to negotiate his way to some solutions, organizing the return of the Estates-General, an assembly consisting of clergy, aristocrats, and commoners (the "Third Estate"), for the first time since 1614.

The Estates-General came to no agreement. Necker either did not fully appreciate that political reforms were required or decided that the King wouldn't agree to them. On July 11, Louis dismissed Necker, unleashing mob violence.

The fighting at the Bastille, three days later, lasted several hours, with nearly a hundred attackers killed and one guard. The mob broke in only to find just just seven prisoners to liberate. They killed the governor of the Bastille, de Launay, and paraded his head around the city on a pike.

When the King returned that evening from a day of hunting, a duke told him the story of the day's events at the Bastille. Louis asked, "So this is a revolt?" The duke replied: "No, Sire, this is a revolution!"

King Louis was executed in January 1793 as was his wife Marie-Antoinette ("Let them eat cake") and during the next few years tens of thousands of the nobility who had not fled. Shortly afterwards, The Third Estate was  reborn as the National Assembly.

While the day is celebrated as the birth of the French Republic, not all French people celebrate the day. They may remember ancestors who had their heads removed by a guillotine during the years following the taking of the Bastille, or they may have left France. The defeat of the French Navy at Trafalgar is attributed by some to the lack of experienced naval officers, who before the revolution had to be "four quarters" nobility (all four grandparents).

CALUMNY | What Are Its Antonyms?

The Junior House, Ampleforth College, York,
England, c. 1954. I am Second-Hand Rose—
 second row, second from the left.

July 11, 2017—J. K. Rowling earlier this month took President Trump to task for his CNN tweet with the wrestling video.

She quoted George Washington: "To persevere in one's duty, and keep silent, is the best answer to calumny."

That has spurred new interest in the obsolescing word calumny.

It brought back to me one of the very fine talks that Fr. Peter Utley (Richard Utley in his pre-monastic life) gave to his Junior House flock at Ampleforth College, which I attended in 1953-1955.

Fr. Peter devoted an entire talk to the subject of detraction and calumny. The somewhat obsolete word calumny (the preferred word for a civil complaint about slander today would be "defamation") is the subject of many a Catholic homily, because it describes the eighth commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness against Thy Neighbor." A sample of Biblical references to calumny may be found here.

Fr. Peter was an impressive monk, who played cricket for the RAF and exemplified the British Public School model of Muscular Christianity. What I found memorable about his talk on calumny was that it was so analytical about the word. Calumny is actually two offenses wrapped into one.

Fr. Peter did not just contrast calumny with speaking well of people, which is what you will find if you look up "calumny antonym" on the internet. He did not present calumny as a choice between speaking well of people vs. telling lies about them.

No, he presented two dualities:

• Speaking well of people vs. speaking ill of them. 
• Telling the truth vs. telling lies.

Calumny is two sins, he said. Detraction is saying negative things about someone for no reason. Calumny goes beyond that to add lying. Fr. Peter said that Christianity brought a higher standard than the eighth commandment. It was not enough to avoid lying about one's neighbor. We should also not engage in spreading negative truths about people.

One defense against libel (bearing false witness in writing) and slander (bearing false witness orally) is that the negative information is true. Fr. Peter would say that true negative statements are still wrong if they are made out of revenge, or envy or just maliciousness. Detractors seek lower someone else's reputation for no reason.

Fr. Peter made exceptions for people whose job it is to make comparisons, such as teachers grading their pupils. That includes all of us in the marketplace as we seek a service provider. The relative quality of the goods or services being provided is of importance and we can share our experience blamelessly because we are trying to help someone make a purchase. In the marketplace, comparing one's own product favorably to that of the competition is part of conducting business. But in one's personal life, we are expected to show restraint.

That's what I remember. It was a good lesson, for our understanding of our language and of our lives.