WCW's empirical poetry and just the facts m'am style left on the cutting room floor all discussion of values. This is in a sense exactly what the American Medical Association was accused of doing -- neglecting the meta-physical dimension of health and illness.
29 comments:
Kirby:
Could you amplify your post a bit? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
I can't explain it, because there is no language you would accept for me to explain it into. Basically, WCW doesn't believe in or discuss God or angels or values or feelings in his poetry.
There are no ideas but in things.
In medicine, it has been a widespread complaint that doctors pay too much attention to physical findings and not enough to the spiritual/emotional/psychological aspect of the patient's disease.
Do you see how there is a similarity between his poetics, and what has widely been regarded as a problem within the AMA?
If not, I don't see why not.
I guess it seems like a sophomoric take on his poetry.
When WCW began, there was way too much attention paid to religion. Victorian poets could hardly write a single sonnet without bringing in God. It was like a bad infection that no one could shake.
The 20th Century was the opportunity to break free of those restrictions, to focus on the way things actually looked and felt and sounded and tasted. What a liberation!
Williams--at his best--describes the most mysterious things in terms that anyone can understand, but the mystery is just as mysterious, the problems are just as difficult, except we're not distracted by all the religious bric-a-brac. We can focus on real problems, real things, instead of shadows and chimeras and symbols.
How does that old Tom Clark poem go? "The Myths are finally lifted from our backs. Peace be with them, they were heavy!"
How does that old Tom Clark poem go? "The Myths are finally lifted from our backs. Peace be with them, they were heavy!"
God, this is so deeply ignorant.
Myth is how we understand the world.
We can only understand anything by comparing it with something we think we already understand.
That is--we understand by metaphor.
The metaphors we start from are our myths--the pillar and the ground of our truth.
We cannot escape these myths--we can only exchange them for new ones.
What mythos, tell me, did Mr. Clark replace his with? Scientific materialism?
The value of the Christian Mythos (which you say "infected" the Victorians--which would be debatable if not so tiring) is that of all the available modern Mythos it brings God into as close contact with humans as possible (it is the most sophisticated occurrence of panentheism) and includes a God that suffers with our condition--that is, the Christian Mythos gives us a supreme Other that is inherently knowable AND reminds us that the general Others we encounter on a daily basis are knowable-by-extension.
There's not another mythos that does this. All Scientific Materialism tells us is that we are little more than robots--something that anyone who is seeing (instead of thinking about what they want to see) will reject out of hand as childish, inexperienced, arrogant--ignorant.
Tom Clark was raised as a Catholic in Chicago.
He now lives in the Bay Area.
Most of his work is interrogative, and seeks to destroy that upper layer of fragile mythology built up over the centuries.
He's empirical, just the facts, rather like WCW.
He worked with Ed Dorn and others. Dorn returned to his Protestant roots quite late.
I don't think Clark has ever gone back to his Catholic roots, but Corso did say once, Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.
True?
Clark's poem where he says we finally got those heavy gods off our face -- should be matched by a later poem where he realized that Satan is the true god of the empiricists/materialists.
God, this is so deeply ignorant.
Myth is how we understand the world.
I'm fully with GM on this one. My untutored assessment of WCW's mandate is that if you're trying to get out of an artistic straightjacket, it's best to make a clean break. But now, his dictate is just as much a straightjacket as what came before. Let me suggest the following as the apotheosis of the WCW poetic straightjacket:
I dumped,
then humped.
And with that, suggest that it is time to move on. Modern man does not lack for the ability to address the physiology of elimination or sexuality directly. He does often lack an emotional/value/spiritual framework within which to comprehend his life, and a language for expressing/revealing/understanding that which he lacks. it seems to me that the real purpose of poetry is to find ways to say what have not yet figured out (or have forgotten) how to say in plain speech.
Kirby,
Just a passing thought.
WCW's day job was as a pediatrician and GP. I wonder if you have causality reversed—that William's objective/empirical/fact-based poetry was in fact based in the culture of medicine.
That theory fits the facts to a degree, Stu (that WCW's poetry is based on the empiricism of the AMA tradition) but there are other facts that mitigate the finding -- the objectivists in general used a kind of empirically based factual writing (most of them were secularists) these in turn were not terribly different from the so-called imagists.
So, you have Zukofsky, who was a high school teacher in NJ (same town as where WCW worked as a doctor). You have Charles Reznikoff, a lawyer who never practiced law (his writing is quite empirical). Reznikoff and Zukofsky have at most one foot in their Judaic religion.
The imagists such as Ezra Pound (in his early phase) was no doctor, at all, really -- but close to Williams, and like Williams, quite involved in humping, as you've put it.
The next generation (the one that Curtis cites, including Tom Clark, a very good poet who was a kind of minimalist of sorts who later tried to evolve toward NY School hilarity, as well as toward Charles Olson historiography) took the just the facts m'am notion to new levels, even practicing journalism, and seeing in journalism an analogy for what they were doing. Ed Sanders wrote a book about Manson based on empirical research including interviews and visiting the actual places that the Manson family crept and slept and left families who wept.
So this represents a whole movement of a sort. WCW may have seen the poem as a description of the symptoms and this may have been aided by his medical practice, but there is a lot of poets who did this without a medical practice.
There are probably other important poets who were also doctors, but I can't think of any offhand.
Kirby,
Thanks. But this leaves me all the more perplexed.
I get that poetry needs to speak to the situations of our lives. Of course, one can argue that it has always done so, and that pre-objectivist poetry used myth to engage its present metaphorically. E.g., if you've been following the Disunion series (a day-by-day history of the Civil War in the NYT, focussing on the events of exactly 150 years ago), you may have encountered Paul Revere’s Ride Against Slavery, which illustrates the point nicely through Longfellow's creation of a new mythic story within the shared myth of the American Revolutionary War, but one intended to awaken the North to the looming American Civil War.
I suspect that for WCW, the myths of the 19th century had no intrinsic value, and with that no utility as a metaphoric anchor. In effect, the shared language of mythic metaphor that poets relied upon had lost universality, even within the relatively small community of the culturally aware. What is really striking about objectivist movement was a refusal to create a new mythic framework to replace the dying old framework.
And so let me return to my perplexity.
At the risk of a great oversimplification, WCW was scientifically-trained, a secularist and secularizing, a fornicator, and moreover someone whose best poetry was written more than 60 years ago, and who died almost 50 years ago. His rejection of the role of myth in poetry (let's all gather up our copies of "The White Goddess," to burn them) also involved a rejection of faith and with it a rejection of emotion, morality, judgement, and in short, anything that can't be seen, touch, smelled or measured. I can see why this might appeal to Ginsberg. But why should it appeal to Olson?
God is dead,
or so they said,
and we shall take his place.
But Jesus lives,
and faith he gives,
by his redeeming grace.
Maybe you should consider a new requirement -- all comments should include a bit of original verse :-).
Well, I studied with Ginsberg. A lot of my writing and thinking is in response to that teaching, and to some extent, to overthrowing it.
But there are parts of it I like such as the focus on the daily and the real, which doesn't preclude the mythical, but I don't think we should be writing about Ariadne or about Dionysos, at least not directly.
I drove out of the Price Chopper lot
The snow fluttering
Like through a paper weight
If the weather were any worse
It would clean the streets as it fell
Shouting Hosannah in the highest!
How about for this thread at least you have to close with at least a couplet of poetry:
A sour Belgian beer
Christmas' potential in bread.
I liked reading this about the Paul Revere poem, and what it meant to Longfellow.
I have often wondered if poetry can change people's minds.
If someone in the deep south who was pro-slavery read the poem, and then released all their slaves. Does that kind of thing happen?
In this blog, I don't think anyone has changed their mind about anything as a result of our conversations. That could be because we are inadequate in argumentation.
But somehow the south did change. Their slaves were forcibly taken from them. Slaves were forcibly given rights. But by now in the south there is probably almost no one who would want slavery back.
I'm not sure if there's anything like an argument anywhere in WCW's writing. At least not an argument that could change another person's mind. It feels more like documentation. Charles Olson's writing about Gloucester also has no real argument. It does have a bit of a moral sense (that they should leave the Portuguese alone).
In Poiund's epic there is the sense that the Jews are evil, and perhaps the implication they should be slaughtered.
Or that at least usury shouldn't be allowed, and that it is a practice every bit as evil as slavery.
I think you can take people who have a moral sense but one that is somewhat warm, and make it fiery hot. The Battle Hymn of the Republic did accomplish that.
Maybe Paul Revere's ride helped in that line, too.
Did the south have anything similar?
Kirby,
I have often wondered if poetry can change people's minds.
I don't doubt that poetry can change minds. But I am doubtful that objectivist poetry can change minds, because the core tenant of objectivism seems to be, "we will not tell stories." And I think that it is only through stories that we can change people's minds.
This comes around again to GM's comment on myth. Myths are stories that we use to understand the world. The stories that make up our mythologies are not entirely static, but are always in competition with one another and with new stories. And objectivism seems to enter this arena of contending stories unarmed and uninterested.
Stories are part of what's interesting in poetry, and more and more scientists are realizing that they have to tell stories. Edmund O. Wilson published a novel recently. He for one realized that stories are how people learn.
But in the 20s and 30s there's another aesthetic in place -- the aesthetic of Cubism in France, and its American corollary which would be the Precisionists such as Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth.
Here's an image by Demuth.
http://www.artchive.com/viewer/z.html
They were painting grain elevators in reference to Cubism, but filtered through the industrial complex of American manufacturing (now largely but not entirely defunct).
Demuth lived in Lancaster, Pa, but made frequent trips to NYC.
The American avant-garde often lived in rural eastern Pennsylvania. Marianne Moore was from Carlisle. Demuth from Lancaster. John Updike was from Reading, PA. Williams and Pound and others went to U. of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Demuth's most famous painting No. 5 is based on a poem by WCW, about a firetruck named No. 5.
Demuth, not that it matters, was gay, in a time when even painters were under the Don't Ask Don't Tell gag order. He died from diabetes at about 50.
His paintings have a certain coldness to them, very rigid and geometric. Sheeler, who was also gay, painted likewise.
Arrayed against this school you do have a few Christian painters such as Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton (regionalists who took the grain belt and the rust belt cultures more seriously, and its religious faith more seriously, but are not collected as fervently by modernist collectors).
There is in turn a notion of the fragment, and the single image, in the aesthetics of Walter Benjamin (aesthetics writer -- Marxist, Jewish, apocalyptic to some degree who died in WWII), who created an aesthetic of the fragment, and said that art could be ahead of its time. Trotsky (Leon) also held to this notion, that art could be avant-garde or retrograde (timelessness as in Platonic theory was largely relegated to Christian art theory, which stopped about this time).
There IS a Protestant named Paul Tillich who kept on writing art criticism from within a Lutheran and Protestant context, but his work is not well-known even inside Lutheran circles, and is barely known in art historical contexts.
He was avant-garde, and had friends like Saul Steinberg, and was eclectic -- he liked Eastern art. He humped as much as the modernists, and his wife wasn't happy about it, and wrote a book after his death which dissed him.
WCW's wife was also very unhappy.
These men were all egocentrics to some degree, almost as bad as basketball players, or any other celebrity.
To create another whole aesthetic is part of the role of this blague, to try to coalesce a Lutheran or at least Christian avant-garde aesthetic, and to pull in conversants from many areas, is the whole idea here.
I'm not against the image in and of itself, or the notion of the thing, per se. I think it's valuable to focus on things, both from a geometric and from a commercial viewpoint. Things matter.
But the realm of the spirit also matters.
I would also like to think of sin and goodness, the Ten Commandments, and the importance of everyday reality as perceived through those eternal verities.
One of the things I got from Tillich is that he wasn't completely down with the notion of the freed libido that comes out of Freudian theory and that drives the avant-garde including the surrealists to such sexual frenzy, and to associate themselves with criminals such as the notion of serial killers as interesting people which you start to see as early as Philippe Soupault's novel Last Nights of Paris, and through to their celebration of prostitutes (already seen in Last Nights of Paris, the only novel that WCW ever translated).
This is a huge story in itself.
Tillich argued that it was possible to be a good father, and that it was therefore possible to make art that represented good father figures, including a decent God, and the notion of decency in general in which the superego was adequate to society's needs.
Most comedy since the 60s has been busy knocking down father figures and representing men as evil scum (see The Office, or The Sopranos, or Married with Children, or virtually any comedic show).
In the 50s in shows like Father Knows Best the father figure was still adequate.
But since the 60s there has been a veritable assault on authority figures, and especially against fathers, and perhaps especially against those who represent the superego such as police officers and judges and of course the clergy.
This is all bad.
WCW's work is a bit more gnomic than any of this, and doesn't take a direct line in the culture wars, but many of his descendents like Ginsberg do. Ginsberg disses the police, wants to celebrate the libido, and has no adequate father figures in it anywhere until you get to Tibetan guru Choygam Trungpa who was his guru, and who raped people right and left and even hit horses.
Ginsberg was deluded.
I alone can put all this right.
Actually, I need help, which is why I have attempted to marshall just a tad bit of energization through the blog.
Kirby,
Interesting. The Demuth link didn't work for me, but I had no trouble finding images through other means. I concur with your assessment: cold, rigid, and geometric. Part of this appears to be that despite having large monochromatic regions, he's intentionally under-saturated the colors and flattened the textures, so as to draw the geometry out.
There IS a Protestant named Paul Tillich who kept on writing art criticism from within a Lutheran and Protestant context, but his work is not well-known even inside Lutheran circles, and is barely known in art historical contexts.
Uhh... Paul Tillich was a major theologian/philosopher, and is very well known. I believe you're talking about the same person, albeit in what for him was a relatively minor field.
Ginsberg disses the police, wants to celebrate the libido, and has no adequate father figures in it anywhere...
As I see it, Ginsberg and his ilk were not only hedonistic, they revelled in it. They lived outrageous lives, and wrote outrageous poetry. They wanted to shock and offend, and in any case, to be attended to. His poems existed, not to help the reader/listener interpret their world, but to call attention to himself. Fair?
I suspect he beat you up pretty badly for having conventional values and a conventional life style, and he probably argued that your conventionality ran through your poems. Please understand, I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you, but instead to see if my impression of Ginsberg's character bears the test of someone who knew him.
I once started a poem that tried to stand up to such an assault:
Can a man a poet be,
who's only had one wife?
I certainly have a view of poetry that stands in sharp contrast to Ginsberg's, and I think you should too. I don't want to write poetry that calls attention to me. I want to write poetry that people enjoy for its own sake. I want to write poetry that inspires them to center their life on God. I want to write poetry that speaks to their human condition, and inspires them to be better.
I don't think anyone outside of theological circles reads Tillich, and within theological circles his art criticism is not read. I think Protestants have largely abandoned the arts though this is changing -- there are a few small journals, and even a few good Lutheran poets. IMAGE, out of Seattle, is one, and there is a Lutheran journal out of Valpo that publishes poetry -- can't recall the name of the vehicle. I don't hate their poems, and don't like them, either.
I think poetry has to have an element of scandal in it, just as stories about Jesus have that element, or even stories he told. They have to have a shocking quality, because the shock recalls us to our values, in a sense.
Your analysis of Demuth is really spot on --
"cold, rigid, and geometric. Part of this appears to be that despite having large monochromatic regions, he's intentionally under-saturated the colors and flattened the textures, so as to draw the geometry out."
I think he wanted to paint the blandness of industrial architecture, and there is somethng chilling but amazing about it.
I have always admired his paintings, their formal qualities, but never saw a whole exhibit of them. At SUNY-Purchase just north of Manhattan there is a collection of high modernist American paintings including Ashcan, and some Precisionist, and lots of pieces by American regionalists like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton.
It's a neat little collection of largely overlooked painting put together by an industrialist who collected that work. He also wrote a neat little book about collecting. I forget his name.
Re: Ginsberg: I was too young to fight him, and at the time I admired him. He admired me, too, but for the wrong reasons, which scared the daylights out of me.
I was quite open-minded about his viewpoint, and it took me decades to realize how wrong the whole mess was. There's still a lot I admire in him: the profound energy, the search for experience, the technique through the masters, his ability to create friendships and alliances, etc.
I just think his basic take was wrong: that sexuality can be unleashed ont he world without harming the person (the sexual revolution was a bacteriological and viral disaster). The drug abuse was really not smart (he continued to proselytize for LSD use for smart kids).
He barked up the wrong tree for wisdom (the far east) and found very lumpy apples which bonked a generation with Buddhist couch potato-dom, and worse. The gurus themselves unleashed themselves on American youth.
They were if anything worse than the Catholic priesthood of that generation.
It took me a long time to realize that the Protestant tradition of my childhood was better. I would never have been able to stand up to him on that matter. He was so articulate, and woiuld probably have been a good egg about it. He wasn't absolutely awful as a person. He was just misguided, mainly, but had a good heart.
All those guys stumbled toward happiness, misguided by the likes of Freud and Marx, and many others.
Ginsberg's mother was insane and tried to rape him as a kid. She was actually and literally insane.
Our families were far more intact.
Kirby,
I don't think anyone outside of theological circles reads Tillich, and within theological circles his art criticism is not read.
I tried reading systematic theology years ago, and so am a counterexample of a sort. I found it a thick slog, although not as thick as Pelikan at his densest. But both Tillich and Pelikan have stuck with me. A part that I remember of Tillich's theology was that only those within the circle of faith could properly do theology. I buy that, albeit with reservations. I'm better prepared now than I was then, perhaps it's worth another go.
I think poetry has to have an element of scandal in it, just as stories about Jesus have that element, or even stories he told.
Granted, but the scandal should be the spice, not the meat. And I'd argue that the scandals were of profoundly different natures. Scandal is a Greek work, a New Testament word... The primary gloss of σκανδαλίζω is "to cause to be brought to a downfall, cause to sin," and the secondary gloss is "to shock through word or action, give offense to, anger, shock," per BDAG. A prophetic distinction, Ginsberg vs. Christ, respectively.
He admired me, too, but for the wrong reasons, which scared the daylights out of me.
He found you physically attractive?
There's still a lot I admire in him: the profound energy, the search for experience, the technique through the masters, his ability to create friendships and alliances, etc.
There are few people who are purely good, or purely evil. Honor the good, and move past the evil. I'm interested to hear you cite "energy." It's a new piece to the puzzle for me. Contemplate the distinction between "energetic" and "driven," and get back to me. Seeking experience without discretion is foolishness, and he should have known this.
I just think his basic take was wrong: that sexuality can be unleashed ont he world without harming the person (the sexual revolution was a bacteriological and viral disaster).
The epidemiological aspects are the least of it. The violation of trust is by far the bigger issue. It is true that if you never experience multiple partners, you can't know what that means. But it is equally true that if you've not been faithful, you can't truly know what that means either. And which is more giving of eternal life?
All those guys stumbled toward happiness, misguided by the likes of Freud and Marx, and many others.
We are responsible for our own sins. Do you think Ginsberg ever read Marx, or Freud? I read chunks of das Kapital, part of a philosophy of Marx course I took as an undergraduate. Coincidentally, the only course I ever failed. A thick read, thicker than Tillich, thicker even than Pelikan. And less rewarding. Honestly, I can imagine no innoculation against communism that would be more effective than forcing people to read das Kapital, except perhaps that they also be required to write a paper on it, too.
I suspect Ginsberg had more of a folk-understanding of each, just enough to convince him that desire is good, and exists to be fulfilled. A false path, a death giving path.
Ginsberg was quite aggressive in pursuit. I hated that about him. Today there are laws against sexual harassment by professors. Back then, there wasn't.
I was only 19, and very timid.
I'm enjoying the conversation. Honestly, I find Marx very easy to read, and Tillich rather easy to read, too.
I had to read Lacan and Derrida and others in graduate school. Now those guys make no sense at all in English, and not very much in French. But it was the language of my graduate school days.
Marx was almost like Humpty Dumpty by comparison.
I still remember one sentence I loved in the Revolution of 1848. "In the wine tax the peasants tasted the bouquet of the government, its tendency."
I loved the idea of the wine tax in a snifter of sorts, with the rude nose of the peasant embodied as one being.
It was brilliantly funny. I loved his debates with Proudhon and others. I liked his letters to Engels. He was a madman.
Energy is eternal delight, Blake said.
But it isn't everything, as you note.
It's not clear to me what Ginsberg actually read of Marx or Freud. It's a good question.
I have some more Christmas wrapping to do. I'm enjoying the conversation here. I think as Venn diagrams go, this is an area where we can say a lot to one another, and mjove forward.
There is a Lutheran poet over in Connecticut at some college there. I have been in slight touch with him. He publishes in a lot of big journals, but isn't a jerk. He's really something.
He wrote a poem about how mothers and dads work in facotires night and day for the chance for their kids to do better. I'll post it at some point, and we can talk about whether that's a good poem, in all the senses of good.
He's not well-known. I can't even remember his name right now, I'm ashamed to see. Robert Corbett, perhaps. A very sharp and congenial man.
Ginsberg was quite aggressive in pursuit. I hated that about him. Today there are laws against sexual harassment by professors. Back then, there wasn't.
Yes, and no. Before and after tenure were night and day, even more so then than now. The guy that went after me was pre-tenure, and so was easy enough to evade. He was barking up the wrong tree in any event, but I can see how relatively modest perturbations in his conditions would have made my life a lot more uncomfortable.
I was only 19, and very timid.
Yeah. You might as well have had crosshairs painted on your shirt.
I'm enjoying the conversation. Honestly, I find Marx very easy to read, and Tillich rather easy to read, too.
And you'd probably find my math books to be impenetrable :-). I am curious at the difference. Pelikan's hard because he knows so much, and you need to know almost as much as he does to gain from reading him. That I get. Tillich, though, throws up a wall of words, long sentences, redundant and circuitous. It's not lack of knowledge that makes it him hard going for me. I wonder what it is.
Let me give you a bit of the set up. I was an honors college student at Michigan State, and so prerequisites were automatically waived. As a freshman, I waltzed into a 300-level (junior/senior) Chinese philosophy course, and had a blast. I had a friend from high school, a philosophy major, who was stuck in the 100-level intro courses, and who was positively green with envy. Anyway, I tried the philosophy of Marx class next. Big mistake. I repeated it to get the F off of my transcript, and ended up with a C. My second-worst grade as an undergrad, after the F. After that, I pretty much stuck to math.
I liked his letters to Engels.
Hmm. I always thought Engels was the clearer writer. Whether you agree with the manifesto or not, there's no beating around the bush there. And Engels knew the value of a sound bite. Marx often droned.
He wrote a poem about how mothers and dads work in facotires night and day for the chance for their kids to do better. I'll post it at some point, and we can talk about whether that's a good poem, in all the senses of good.
I look forward to it.
It's fun for me to try out IQ books now and then, including some from MENSA (a math teacher retired and left rafts of these on her shelf, and I grabbed a few of them).
The vocabulary tests present no problem, and I ace them and usually get them done in about two minutes even though the average MENSA person does them in 15.
But in math, I have no idea what's going on. There was this really cheap one that went like this:
Find the number the doesn't fit the sequence:
3689025681235689
The answer was 1 because it was the only one that didn't have any curves.
I laughed, and just thought: why did anybody bother to come up with that question?
The answer was completely irrelevant to any actual pattern-finding in the numerical progression. It just felt like a cheap shot.
Then there was this:
26426289
What's the next number?
You are supposed to see that every other number is a simple progression by twos. I did see this, but again wondered what it's really measuring if not dastardliness on the part of the test maker.
About the predators in the halls of academe, it's just a shame. I assume that this trend is not just in the Catholic church and academia, but is now going to become a full-on problem in the military as well.
I haven't read WCW's biography. There are apparently no really good ones. But there's lots of anecdotal evidence that he was after everyone he came in touch with if they were wearing a skirt. Even patients were not immune from his blandishments.
I think this sort of thing is too much. But that whole school is shot through with that kind of thing.
Kirby,
But there's lots of anecdotal evidence that he was after everyone he came in touch with if they were wearing a skirt. Even patients were not immune from his blandishments.
I think this sort of thing is too much. But that whole school is shot through with that kind of thing.
This seems like a predictable consequence of their philosophical commitments. If you don't have an external God, you'll recreate yourself as an internal God, and therefore reduce the people around you to objects, one way or another. In effect, this is another way to understand what they meant when they described themselves as "objectivists," not as open-eyed rationalists, but rather desecrators and reducers. Those who reduce people to objects.
About the predators in the halls of academe, it's just a shame. I assume that this trend is not just in the Catholic church and academia, but is now going to become a full-on problem in the military as well.
You're really at cross purposes here. First off, the problems with academe and the church (and it's not just the Catholics, although there are aspects of the Catholic system that have exacerbated the problem) have both heterosexual and homosexual aspects. We tend to hear more about the homosexual aspects, but that's because homosexual predators still have a greater ability to shock, and so are more newsworthy.
The real problem is abuse of authority. To get any sort of organization to act purposefully, there is a need for authority. The problem is that the authority that organizations must grant to individuals in order to meet organizational goals are often abused by those same individuals in order to meet their personal goals. Thus, the authority within the classroom to manage instruction, and assess student performance, can be twisted by the professor in order to seek sexual gratification from his students.
As for the military, these are not new issues. There have been problems of sexual misconduct within our armed forces for a long time. This is not a criticism of the armed forces, because I see such problems as inevitable given human nature. The question is how well does the organization respond, and I believe the armed forces has a decent (if imperfect) record there. Permitting homosexuals to serve openly will hardly change the underlying dynamics.
You seem to be right here all the way through to my eyes except for the last part: I'd think that not asking and not telling would have protected the troops from some kinds of behavior (people not asking and not telling). Whenever there are changes there are nw loopholes, and new calamities. It's just a question of what they will be, and when they will come.
It's not my worry, since I'm not in the military.
The French have had gay people in their military for some time (not sure since when).
Of course they haven't come close to winning a war since about 1812.
They may be a model of inclusiveness, but a military that generally loses is a bad military. A military that invariably loses is even worse.
WCW had some close links with many French writers. One of his most interesting links was with the major surrealist Philippe Soupault. Soupault's novel Last Nights of Paris is the only novel Williams ever translated. It's a hack job done while he was down with a cold on a ski trip. WCW's mother was trilingual (the Carlos indicates the Spanish, but he and she also knew French). It might be the worst translation into English that exists, and yet it exists, and continues to be republished.
At the high point of the novel, the narrator, a solipsistic night owl who prowls around Paris looking for kicks, finally beds a prostitute that he's been after for some time. His revelation is that nothing of any worth whatsoever passes between them, and he is left emotionally cold instead of finding pure love
It's ridiculous, I guess, but also, rather amazing in its own way.
Kirby,
You seem to be right here all the way through to my eyes except for the last part: I'd think that not asking and not telling would have protected the troops from some kinds of behavior (people not asking and not telling). Whenever there are changes there are nw loopholes, and new calamities. It's just a question of what they will be, and when they will come.
It opens some loopholes, and closes others. Time will tell regarding the balance between the two.
In any event, it is probably relevant to remember that the military requested that congress end DADT, on the (reasonable) theory that if congress didn't act, the courts would, and that by having congress act, the military would have more time and flexibility in their response. I think they were right.
We've come to expect judicial activism, and to act preemptively.
The Term Objectivism was originally used to describe the work of Charles Reznikoff, whose work had a very mixed reception. Ginsberg and Corso loved his poetry, but Marianne Moore saw nothing in it.
I rather love it.
He seems himself to have been a good egg. He had some tiffs with the other members of his crew, but he was not into drugs or making off with other people's wives or children.
some of his poems read like straightforward Jewish poems.
He was trained as a lawyer, but I don't think he practiced law. His money came from proofreading law texts, I think.
In his work there's a sense that he's focusing on images and thngs, but that's because all over him he can sense the absolute enormity of the real world of transcendance. I love this poet.
Here's a bit from Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Reznikoff
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