Saturday, December 08, 2012
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About Me
- Kirby Olson
- Upstate, NY
- PLEASE READ THE INTRO AND ANNE WALDMAN'S EXAMPLE BEFORE CONTRIBUTING! Send to Kirbyolson2@gmail.com.
181 comments:
Maybe.
But folks got to have a reason to read it and if it's actually unprecedented then there's no antecedent, dig?
I dig.
Poetry has all the problems of any other form of commerce plus some more.
My wife and I saw Elton John in concert last night at the Araneta on the occasion of John's first visit to the Philippines and the 40th anniversary of Rocket Man. It was our Christmas present to ourselves. Never would have guessed that nearly all of John's lyrics were written by someone else.
http://www.berniejtaupin.com/templates/default/images/top_banner.gif
Oops. Bad link. I'll try it again.
http://www.berniejtaupin.com/
Click on the bio page. He's from the Cambridge school of surrealism.
I always wonder about the problem of "studying" poetry. You can find out all the poetry of the past but poetry is moving forward.
In a sense, it is a business. There are certain things that matter. Pound underlined a few of them: clear images, musicality, and an idea. Each of these has to be new, and yet there is a general trait, too.
The general trait can be considered and studied, as it is most effectively in Pound and in Aristotle. But the individual genius has to "make it new." This was the modernist dictum.
Where are we now?
I'm not telling.
I always wonder about the problem of "studying" poetry. You can find out all the poetry of the past but poetry is moving forward.
In a sense, it is a business. There are certain things that matter. Pound underlined a few of them: clear images, musicality, and an idea. Each of these has to be new, and yet there is a general trait, too.
The general trait can be considered and studied, as it is most effectively in Pound and in Aristotle. But the individual genius has to "make it new." This was the modernist dictum.
Where are we now?
I'm not telling.
"Make it new." --Ezra Pound
"We can change the past." --T.S. Eliot
"No ideas but in things." --William Carlos Williams
"No ideas but the in thing." --George Starbuck
"Plato
in his tree" Curtis Faville
you cannot step into the past even once
-heraclitus
(of course now that time travel is becoming popular the henny youngman of antiquity may be proven wrong)
life is very uncertain...heisenberg (of course i paraphrase)
jh:
Very nice.
i'm deeply indebted to the mississippi delta blues musicians of the early part of the 20th century hell i don't think i would've even thought poetry was important had i not hear mississippi john hurt's songs
i remember thinking as a youngster of twenty all full of vim and vinegar yee hah i remember thinking if i could write one song like mississippi john hurt wrote songs i'd be happy
the blues inform my worldview
jh
Stagolee was a bastard who killed chiildren and widows!
http://www.planetslade.com/stagger-lee.html
I've seen one account which suggests that Billy Lyon was Republican and Sheldon (Stagger) Lee a Democrat and that the murder shifted the balance of power in East St. Louis in favor of the Democrats. The two men seem to have represented competing houses of ill-repute.
MJH's singing is so sweet and delicate.
Ageless.
Riparian.
Blues in an autumn season.
Apparently East St. Louis was known as Cahokia from about 600 A.D. until about 1350 A.D., a period during which it was the largest city in the not yet New World north of the Gulf of Mexico. Cahokia's peak population of 40,000 was unmatched until 1780 when the Continental Congress made Philadelphia America's metropolis.
Fascinating!
There are at least two other popular murder ballads that came out of St. Louis. It's now a more interesting place.
c,mon kirby
have a little compassion
ole stagolee was desperate
nuthin e'er worked out for him
'cept stealin killin drinkin and whorin those things seemed to work till well of course the law caught up to him
it's a quintessential american story don't you think
i mean since poe the door is wide open
corrina corrina where you been so long
jh
i wonder if there were any europeans among the cahokians
Did I mention that my sister has a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology?
Craig: really?
I didn't realize that Stagolee had a historical reference or references within it. I used to listen to Mississippi John Hurt almost every day for years. I love the delicate guitar work, too.
There are very few Youtube videos of John Hurt playing the guitar. He was apparently a farmer in his 70s before he was discovered during the blues revival of the 1960s. His version references Louisiana and mines (I don't think there are mines in Louisiana, but I might be wrong).
I then found a book from Harvard UP by a novelist who traces the legend through its various permutations. It's called Stagolee Shot Billy. The author claims it became an archetype of black culture that has even permeated gang culture and rap music, and that this confrontation is something that continues to get a lot of young black men killed.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674016262/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
I never thought about all this. I ordered the book.
Amy Winehouse among others has also covered the song.
I don't think Amy Winehouse was such a profound singer. I like the Taj Mahal version. Some people claim Nick Cave did the best version. If poetry must be unprecedents it does seem that this song on the other hand recycles quite a bit and yet remains a profound moment for many people, perhaps a whole subculture.
I always thought this was the worst of Hurt's songs. I never liked the imagery in it, but it did hold my attention.
I found the Nick Cave version. There are several versions online but this one was the most over the top and to my mind quite embarrassing. Cave is an Australian Goth singer who once wrote an introduction to the Gospel According to Mark. I don't know what to make of this except that I thought it was stupid, but entrancing in some way.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xui3b_stagger-lee-nick-cave_music#.UMYnQMr4JBs
Just because something is unprecedented doesn't make it poetry.
"Unprecedented" is a necessary but not sufficient condition for poetry, as the logicians would say.
I have no idea what poetry is. It's one of those things that can't be defined in advance I guess.
Is this poetry? Not to me. I prefer the John Hurt version because the music is toned down and has a sort of ragtime shuffle in it, while the violence goes over the top. There is sympathy and compassion in the John Hurt version.
This version more or less revels in the darkness without any relief. It turns murder into an artistic statement. I found it gauche.
I admit I laughed at the smoke and the dancing.
You don't like Hurt's version?
after i watched the nick cave version
a commercial came up for some christmas add
this holiday
share everything
on ipod or soemthing
nick cave may be the only guy telling the truth in the pop world
he and perhaps bjork
jh
I like Hurt's version. There are two online versions. One is longer and has some factual seeming discussions of the matter before he launches into the song. He does not seem to be aware of the St. Louis scenario that Craig sketched out.
poetry precedes itself
If there were no precedent for poetry how would we know what it was?
Kirby,
If there were no precedent for poetry how would we know what it was?
Because it's not like the other stuff we've seen. Duh.
But this makes it pretty clear that the Soupault definition is too trite to be useful, as it presupposes the rejection of poetic conventions, poetic fashions, etc. Aristotle would not be pleased.
I think it is more realistic to say that attempts at poetry assume the context of all of the poetry that came before it. When they add to the canon, then they're poetry. When they don't, they're nothing. This definition honors both the past (that which is added to), as well as the imperative for newness (that it adds, and does not merely reiterate).
In the eaars of a child "roses are read violets are blue" is unprecedented and therefore delirium producing. Each old poem delights each new generation but the new poems of each generation often delight only that generation. They are not perennially new. Poetry must remain new. Shock has a certain novelty but it gets old. A poem that doesn't get old is a true poem. Is this true? Is this new? Is it the same old? It's possible to define new and old but not potry or true so we have to use that which can be defined to define that which cannot be. We can run our minds over and over a good poem and each time find something new. It becomes familiar but not old.
does the essence of a poem precede it's existence...(i learned recently that the word pome which is used by joyce and other litdudes is also a berryburgeoning forth on its stem bluishly budding into the air as in blueberry pome) that's all i'm asking...i mean i'm not trying to make a big friggin poetix ordeal out of this like it matters...it behooves me to think...the satisfaction one gets both from making and reading poems is inherent...children have word fascination...i recall the days when i had to actually get used to the level of profanity in the language of montanans montana people swore as a matter of course and it was everywhere apparent
is swearing a form of poetry
as terrible as it is swearing never seems to get any older and people use the same old words to the same effect almost always
i'll be go to hell
is a montana expression
my first experiments in poetry were nonsense....surprise!
had i not read frost
i would not know that snow actually
twinkles in the sun
poetry is word fun
it is always difficult the making i mean it's going to take soemthing the making you make and you make and you shake and you shake i smoked my last cigarette can't call a taxi can't get through the night can't use the pay phone can't find the toilet can't seem to find my wallett out of booze guitar is busted girlfriend left me where's the tears when i need em only the dust laden rays of one sole twittering lightbulb seem to know anything
i dig poems
poetix is a kind of flower
stopping by woods on snowy evening
is about as memorable as you're going to get
fractions amount and preference is and taste is fickle as the wind
i recall wishing that someday i would get a wise saying on the inside of the flipcap on ranier beer bottle
i set my goals pretty high
i' d' be doing better but ranier beer is no longer in business sad to say
will a college senior argue the merits of poetry
jh
"a"
http://www.jokelibrary.net/yyDrawings/bottle_caps.html
I always drank Lucky Lager when I needed a rebus fix.
It's why I still substitute b for p when I pronounce dociousaliexpiisticfragilcalirepus. The beer was free, but you couldn't get your next one until you'd solved the puzzle and said the magic word.
I signed a check today dated 12-12-12.
Snow melts, even on mountaintops, in the twinkle oven eye.
The appeal of the poetic tradition
Is that it's not religion.
from beginning to end
the orthodox liturgy
and the developed and reformed forms of liturgy
are pure poetry
daily poems daily thoughts
repeated year after year
day after day
there's the inherent issue of trust a person has to trust that poets of old were at least attempting to tell the truth
but poetry per se
as it exists in the writings of solitary dreamers and negligible schemers overread screamers and drunken regalers that sort of poetry does exist outside of religious intent...no one is going to make a cult out of robert frost and yet the poems are always vital
the same appeal as the opera tradition - it is not poetry perse
but acted narratives
and warbling exercises
i gotta go
jh
How many times did Worthworth revise his Prelude?
How many times did Whitman revise his Leaves of Grass?
Frost will last. Pound and Moore and many others of the modernist generation are now mostly odd. A poet has to speak to normal people not just to hypereducated eccentrics. Shakespeare speaks to normal people. Poetry ought to be popular as well as erudite, odd as well as general. It's a very hard thing to accomplish.
Frost did accomplish this.
Pound failed, Moore failed. T.S. Eliot failed. Some like his cats sequence, but it's too daffy.
Frost hit something quite remarkable.
There was the instant shock of EE Cummings but he's now almost unreadable.
WCW got something going, but he's never had a popular audience.
Ginsberg is growing increasingly rancid with age.
Corso's poem Marriage is more likely to survive than anything that Ginsberg wrote.
A poem has to speak to normal persons' experience.
And yet be odd and delightful.
I get sick of most things. I am already tired of Lady Gaga and of this new nut, Psy, and his Gangnam Style.
Fat, fat Democrat
Thin, thin Republican
Frost will last. Pound and Moore and many others of the modernist generation are now mostly odd. A poet has to speak to normal people not just to hypereducated eccentrics. Shakespeare speaks to normal people. Poetry ought to be popular as well as erudite, odd as well as general. It's a very hard thing to accomplish.
Frost did accomplish this.
Pound failed, Moore failed. T.S. Eliot failed. Some like his cats sequence, but it's too daffy.
Frost hit something quite remarkable.
There was the instant shock of EE Cummings but he's now almost unreadable.
WCW got something going, but he's never had a popular audience.
Ginsberg is growing increasingly rancid with age.
Corso's poem Marriage is more likely to survive than anything that Ginsberg wrote.
A poem has to speak to normal persons' experience.
And yet be odd and delightful.
I get sick of most things. I am already tired of Lady Gaga and of this new nut, Psy, and his Gangnam Style.
Fat, fat Democrat
Thin, thin Republican
jh:
"A" is the title of Louis Zukofsky's long epic poem.
Is this what you were referring to?
Roethke shaped my life long before I first encountered poetry. Frost? Used by schoolmarms to scare crows away from the farmer's corn.
Craig:
It's interesting to compare different versions of poems which a poet revises over a lifetime.
Robert Graves revised endlessly, weeding out and changing and then going back and including previously rejected poems (and versions of poems).
There's no single authoritative text, unless you insist on the "last" one.
People used not to live so long. If Shakespeare had lived to, say, 80, would he have gone back and revised certain of his plays?
Only death closes the book.
i missed an "a" in a previous comment
Kirby:
What a load of poppycock!
"Frost will last. Pound and Moore and many others of the modernist generation are now mostly odd."
"Odd"? Meaning what? Is this your new critical yardstick? Frost is not odd so his work lives? Seriously?
"A poet has to speak to normal people not just to hypereducated eccentrics."
There is no fixed audience for any kind of art. Popularity is how you define it. You're a hypereducated eccentric yourself. Does that make your taste irrelevant? Or have you carved out a special niche just for yourself? What are your principles?
"Shakespeare speaks to normal people."
There's no such thing as "normal people." Normal isn't a critical touchstone for anything, unless you mean mediocrity.
"Poetry ought to be popular as well as erudite, odd as well as general. It's a very hard thing to accomplish."
There's no reason any art should be popular. And popularity--whatever that means--could by no means be employed as a criterion for quality.
"Frost did accomplish this."
Frost's popularity is based on the most naive and shallow appreciation of his work. It functions on several levels, but the few poems that made him famous, were appreciated mostly for the wrong reasons and on a sophomoric level. His best work is beyond the comprehension of most "normal" readers.
"Pound failed, Moore failed. T.S. Eliot failed. Some like his cats sequence, but it's too daffy."
Incredibly condescending and naive. Art doesn't "fail." It's not a popularity contest, and it can't be "measured" with abstract yardsticks, either. Moore and Eliot both wrote juvi titles, but their serious work is intended for adults. It's by that work that they will be judged.
"Frost hit something quite remarkable."
I doubt you have the ability to tell us what that "something" was.
There was the instant shock of EE Cummings but he's now almost unreadable."
Cummings was a thoroughly tradition poet who employed a few mostly trite special effects and affected "stances" in his work. His reputation isn't high, but he remains "popular" despite your judgment. "Most people" "appreciate" Cummings for the "wrong reasons." How do you digest that?
"WCW got something going, but he's never had a popular audience. "
Again, what what was the "something"? Actually, Williams is one of the most famous and popular American poets in our history. Certainly among the top 20 in terms of notoriety. If you don't like his work, that's just fine.
"Ginsberg is growing increasingly rancid with age."
Again, it would be nice to be told what you mean. Is "rancid" a new critical standard?
"Corso's poem Marriage is more likely to survive than anything that Ginsberg wrote."
Corso's work is almost entirely unknown to the American public.
"A poem has to speak to normal persons' experience."
This is what used to be called "universality." I doubt that any critics, or any "normal" people, would tend to agree with your assessment.
"And yet be odd and delightful."
These are pretty limp principles by which to judge great art and literature. Certainly Shakespeare is delightful, and at times, very odd. But that by no means explains his importance or his gifts.
"I get sick of most things."
Yes, and you get weary of trying to explain things to people whose taste you're not interested in. You're just being lazy here. Is there any defense for it?
"Fat, fat Democrat
Thin, thin Republican"
Duhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
Let's just begin with this line which celebrates private property and the admiration that the speaker holds for private property. In aaddition there's the iambic jog trot that matches the pull of the horse as it takes the weary traveller who hasn't much wherewithal as Curtistmas approaches.
in a dark time the mind begins to see
The next line reads
His house is in the village though
We get the same jog trot. But here he's stealing a peek and nearly breaking the commandment against envying another's property. In the next stanza it turns out that his horse is finding him QUEER for gazing at the back woods property. Why do you suppose the horse to make this cognitive mistake? Or is the horse rigjt to think Frost queer for stopping there? Is this in fact queer? Who is the horse to judge? Let the horse without sin store the first throne.
The woods are dark and deep but he has promises to keep. Now many think he may be out there getting fresh w the horse while this is in fact Santa and instead of drinking a Fanta he should be delivering toys on schedule. This cannot be the correct reading becausse Santa uses reindeer and his reindeer are not generic animals but have lively and particular personalities as everyone knows. So promises belong to many in the dark woods but this is not Saanta and he is not drinking a Fanta. Tjis is Frost and he is not lost.
to reindeer carry ticks
Well, the horse thinks it's weird that he's stopping in a place where people usually don't stop.
In the middle of the woods, without a farmhouse anywhere nearby.
WTF dude? Why are you stopping here, man? Let's f'in get home.
This is the real world, dawg. Nature ain't all peace and mighty and shit. It's either dangerous and violent, or withdrawn and difficult and deadly in its empty sorrow.
Keep a move on, dude. I'm a horse. I want a farmhouse, with some hay, and some apples and shit.
It's snowing man! Get a move on, hopalong Cassidy. I mean, shiat. Ain't nothin' here but the trees and the snow.
And that shit's boring, and cold, and we ain't got the supplies we need to survive and whatnot.
The next poetry contest should be updated Frost poems to fit our technological time --
'Stopping by rest-stops on a rainy evening.'
Oh.
I get it.
Frost is a Christmas poet.
Get a decent graphic artist and a copyright use contract, and we can turn out a few hundred thousand greeting cards.
Since "Mowing" is my favorite, I vote we pair that with a picture of Father Time swinging his scythe like a pendulum of mortality, slicing off the heads of who's been bad.
Better watch out, better be good. Kirby's surveying his flock. Who to slaughter, who to sheer.
It's lonely in heaven.
he will not mind me stopping here
has a ring to it
there's a sense of polite self consciousness someone knowing that perhaps he is trespassing and good thing it's dark or else here in free american you might get your ass shot polite or not
from an indigenouos point of view there is something preposterous about saying HIS WOODS
to watch his woods fill up with snow
HIS WOODS who the hell does that anonymous guy think he is
there's an unspoken sign PRIVATE PROPERTY on the fence
all of life all of the dark prospect of existence looms forth
jh
We should all have respect for private property. THIS IS AMERICA. It was founded on Locke who guaranteed the RIGHT to private property.
All Americans reading Frost recognize we are not supposed to look very long at another's property. That would be covetous.
That would be icky.
Goodness.
Gracious.
The horse doesn't have an aesthetic dimension.
It doesn't share in the poetry. We are not animals.
There are lots of hidden distinctions in this poem.
Curtis is having another flip-out, which will almost certainly lead to another bake sale.
It's almost very important to make the hoi polloi QUIVER.
Shakespeare does this.
Jonson did not.
Frost does this.
Pound does not.
Having the common touch is a very important part of aesthetics. All of America knows and reverses Frost's poem.
His poem helps to define America.
Nothing that WCW or Moore or Pound wrote really matters to real Americans.
They were all too European.
Frost was an American like EA Robinson.
It's only through the local that you can touch the universal.
Many of the modernists went whoring after European regard.
Frost did not. Frost therefore will survive.
He will be carried forward by the NATION itself.
The NATION rejects most of modernism.
Frost IS America.
reveres
The ONE HOLY CATHOLIC and apostolic CHURCH has stood back aghast at the whole prospect of modernism
-it's the only genuine critique going
the nation this little second rate nation has sold out to modernism indeed....maybe we've been sold down the frozen river ice chunnks and all
frost will survive
all winter long
i especially like
hoarfrost
jh
"To A Steamroller"...
turning against Moore????? wow
That should have been "To A Steam Roller"--2 words not one--
(a splendid Moore poem available online
I personally like Moore better than the others. But I know better than to try to introduce her to students.
Kirby,
We should all have respect for private property. THIS IS AMERICA. It was founded on Locke who guaranteed the RIGHT to private property.
I disagree, and without respect, because you deserve none for presenting such an egregious lie as truth. I don't doubt that the oligarchs who founded this nation had a healthy respect for private property, this was not the substance of their complaint. Indeed, you have to get 2/3rds through the bill of particulars in the Declaraction of Independance against the King before you find the only colorably economic rationales in the entire document, to whit,
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
Our country is founded on very different principles: liberty, justice, and indeed, mutual responsibility. The colonist's complain was not merely that their means of self-determination were superceded, but that the superceding authorithy was negligent, capricious. Read the damn declaration, and stop being an ignorant tool.
So I'm calling bullshit, Kirby. Your version of history is intended to serve today's arguments, and is utterly without respect for or grounding in the issues that mattered then, and still matter now.
I'm glad to have this on the table. This is a huge difference between the Lockeans and the Marxists both of whom trace their lineage through scripture. I see private property as an inalienable right. Locke does too. Stu here wants to change this right and ises abusive language calling me a tool and usong another bad word which means this is a sticking place for him. It is clear to me that Frost came out of a different compact than many today. He had promises which he was going to keep in spite of the allure of another's woods. He had his own to nurture and grow.
In France Hollande has raised taxes on incite me over a million euros to 75%. Gerard Depardieu moved to Belgium. France's richest man also moved to Belgium. We have a sstrange legacy left over from the fall of kings and royalty. The radical cry for equality has ushered in economic totalitarianism all over the world. Against this is the cry for personal liberty from the majority.
Part of what we like in Frost is the loneliness of the driver. We are alone and we like it. We don't like our neighbors and their endless problems nosing down our necks. The nanny state of BO says that we have to take care of people who refuse to take care of themselves and would rather pop heroin and watch the Three Stooges.
Pound also wanted to live off of others and to reinstitute an icky elite that would demand tribute.
The modernist poets wanted socialism. WCW did and even Stevens did. Moore and Frost were holdouts.
I am a holdout against the holdup in which Obama wants to be the new sherifff who robs the stagecoach and plays Robin Hood in exchange for votes.
It's lawless. The precedent is the USSR.
Incite above should read income. The Kindle again.
Let's get stoned and rob the stagecoach! (Obamanomics.)
http://www.mediumdevice.com/images/obama_inhaled.jpg
Respect for private property beginning with the person and their body, including the bodies of babies and the elderly, is the beginning of a respect for law.
Otherwise we might as well be Bluebeard blockading Charleston harbor.
Kirby:
There are at least five kinds of condescension in your posts above, two insults, and a handful of misconceptions which aren't presented clearly enough even to discuss.
First, the people you attract here aren't literary thinkers for the most part, and don't know or care enough about Frost even to know whether what you're claiming about him has any truth in it. Even if they did, you'd bully them.
Using politics to judge literature or art is a bad recipe. You took the opposite tack over on Silliman's blog, way back when, when we were both trying to foster discussion based on a self-referential aesthetics, instead of a socialist program. But it turns out that you're just like Silliman, in wanting to promulgate a political program, deliberately misreading and misinterpreting the work of important writers in a simplistic, cynical way, to further a dumb argument.
You don't care one whit about Frost, or any other literary figures. They're just fodder for your anxieties. Frost's poem has nothing whatever to do with considerations of "private property" or other economic ideas. Your appropriation of the poem to try to make such a point is entirely expedient, and weak.
As usual, you attack me for engaging you on your earlier post about ranking poets. Rather than try to defend your dumb assertions, you just wave your hand "Curtis is having another flip-out" and move on.
Speaking of Frost's supposed "American-ness" you make the claim that he's more nativist than Williams. It shows how entirely uneducated you are in your own field.
Frost went to England to live, as a young man, because he felt a particular kinship with its history and literature, which he didn't feel in America. Frost's style and approach to poetry are entirely European (specifically British). Much of his early (and late) work is composed in strict rhyme, and the poetic forms of English poetry. Compared to his contemporaries, such as Williams, Pound, Stevens, H.D., Moore, Zukofsky, Lindsay, Masters, Eliot, Stein, Cummings, Hughes, Rakosi, etc., he is clearly the most "old-fashioned" and UN-modern of his era.
An argument might be made for Frost's crusty New England character as an aspect of his nativism, but formally he's quite cleary UN-American.
Frost's poem has nothing whatever in it about privacy, or private property; it is not anti-socialist. To try to say otherwise is an impossible stretch.
You're free to impute any motive you may think up to inject into your experience of the poem, but any critic seeking to impose political doctrine onto literature from the top down is doomed to irrelevance. Socialist and Marxist critics tried to make sense of literature from their point of view in the 1930's, to no avail.
Kirby, if you want a literature of selfishness and greed and hedonistic fervor, try Frederick Seidel. You'd learn something. Also, it might influence you to abandon some of your skittish puritanical aversions, and turn you into a rounded human being, instead of the cardboard figure you project here.
I had my students read Once By The Pacific and lectured about how a sonnet works.
Kirby,
This is a huge difference between the Lockeans and the Marxists both of whom trace their lineage through scripture.
As near as I can tell, you use "Marxist" to label those who disagree with you, with out reference to their actual beliefs.
I see private property as an inalienable right. Locke does too.
I see private (and corporate) property as means for ordering society. It is a tool, and a useful one, but not a virtue in and of itself. To raise property of to the level of a virtue as you do is to make a false god of it. Scripture is very clear on this point, and moreover on the consequences of chasing after false gods.
Stu here wants to change this right and ises abusive language calling me a tool and usong another bad word which means this is a sticking place for him.
There are two distinct issues here.
First, I did not argue against private property, I argued against your framing of private property as one of the founding principles of our country. And so I referred to the foundational document, the Declaration of Independence, and its particulars as to the reasons the thirteen united States resolved to "dissolve the political bands" between them and the King of Great Britain. As usual, you willfully misconstrue your opponents arguments, trying to weaken them to the point where your arguments have a chance.
Second, if "damn" has your shorts in a knot, let me recommend that you invest in a better grade of starch. Polite argument goes far, but sustained willful ignorance is eventually going to draw an exasperated response.
i'm a steam roller baby
a churnin' urn of burnin' funk
i'll contend let me contend shall i contend is it wise to contend or am i heading into a maelmstrom who knows who knows anything anymore
kirby i think where we are is at a breaking point with this whole locke thing the locke is to be broken that's the nature of lockes there are ship lockes channel lockes lockes and bagels and goldilockes and well it simply comes down to the point where you can't have the lockes on everything
private personal property is one thing your clothes your books your necessities for life but huge amounts of land is another and the question who gets to have those huge amounts of land that is another question and who gets to decide who gets those huge amounts of land that is yet another question and who taxes these huge tracts of land and who soaks these huge tracts of land taking every last drop of frakking oil from them who cares
take the metis for instance this morning
go ahead take them it won't hurt try the MEtis on for size what the hell happened there in 1870-1885 figure that one out
for a good 150 yrs the metis had traded trapped farmed and cultivated life in the red river of the north country between le grand forches and what is now winnepeg and points west adn north as far as the hunters could hunt they were well into montana by 1740 they understood land to mean that area that ettienne or guillaume took care of and it was understood interms of geography and eyesight...from those woods down to the river and over to the ravine that's your land but anyone can walk on your land anyone can shoot a moose on your land if they can and well it is right and good then that you share your kill with your neighbor then the phuqqing british came on the scene in the early 1800s the selkirk and wolsely bunch and they started surveying without asking permission and they started saying well this our land locke said so we have a locke on this land it belongs to the queen now can you filthy metis understand there is a queen involved here between 1815 and 1865 the metis withstood the onslaught and they won the skirmishes and they insisted that theire understanding of land was the right one but the british kept insisting with bigger and bigger guns that the land belonged to them they inheritied it from the hudson bay company and who are you petty filty halfbrreedds to say otherwise so they hung louis riel and that was that or was it...stay tuned...the shadows are whispering
the british notion of private property has something to do with kicking the shit out of people...i can't quite figure this out...i mean really...you have to kick the shit out of people and let them know it's your land....o o o on exchange we can put you on this chunk of land and you can learn to hoe the soil like good british farmers and hoe hoe hoe look who's comin' to town the people with private property the people who say they own the land the people who say not only do we own your land but we will tax you and give you the impression that you own it but in fact you don't so private property is a myth created by the prostestant world to keep the masses believing they'r'e really a part of this fine dream of limitless expansion and democratic unity that one nation under god is the dream you've been waiting for and if you simply get practical and get a job and pay for everything inclding your survival when you're sick then it will all work out to the common good ignore those fat rich bastards who own you don't pay them no heed just geta credit card and buy buy buy your private property
we are poor stewards
not to put too fine a point on anything
time to give all of western south dakotah back to the lakotah everything west of the missouri and all of northeast wyoming too the powder river drainage
metis justice will haunt everyone
private property my ass
treaties you could wipe with
jh
Frost believed in private property but had some disturbing notions in which for instance he argued that walls should come down into a kind of anarchism.
In Mending Wall for instance the neighbor repeats the 17th century proverb, "good fences make good neighbors."
Mending Wall
by Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
This is intelligent, that is, the neighbor is intelligent. I think Frost is noting that his neighbor has better sense than he himself has got.
The neighbor has private property uppermost in his mind. Clear distinctions.
The metis are backwoods creatures.
But the more organized spirit of New England has to do with clear boundaries. Even children work this out with one of the first words that they learn, "Mine."
Obama never learned this. Or rather, he believes that everything is his because he was an only child, so he never learned how to compromise or dialogue.
One of the ironies of my WCW bit was that he THOUGHT he was a nativist, but wasn't.
How could WCW have been a nativist when his mother spoke three languages? When his middle name was Carlos?
WCW was a rootless cosmopolitan like Pound.
Pound dug Frost.
Each of them has their own names on their own books. They are of course all about private property.
This is MINE, they say. These are MY poems. My NAME is on them.
Frost was just a lazy farmer. The one next door had twice the brains.
America was founded on the notion that the nation would not accept arbitrary taxation. This is the essence of the Tea Party.
And Roberts DID verify that Obamacare WAS A TAX.
Kirby,
You should think it a bad sign when your sources contract the points you're trying to make. A modest suggestion might be to find other sources, or perhaps other points.
It seems to me that what Frost is trying to communicate is far more complex than you credit him with. Certainly, he is not arguing for the superior vision of his neighbor, who serves as a conventional, unimaginative foil.
Let approach this poem through a somewhat circuitous route. Property rights are never absolute. As an extreme but illustrative example, murder is still murder if you commit it on your own land. Another example, possibly coming soon to a village near you, is that ownership of land does not usually convey ownership of the minerals below it. Just consider yourself fortunate that fracking is usually less problematic for the ordinary land-holder than strip mining.
Different cultures have had very different notions as to what rights are conveyed by property ownership, and what rights are not. For example, in England, the rights of public passage via a traditional trail across private property are guaranteed. This raises the question of the setting of "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." If it is England rather than New England, the passage thorough private woods is not necessarily trespass, and your analysis is mistaken. JH's description of the Metis follows line too: they had a notion of ownership of land, but the rights conveyed by such ownership did not include excluding other people from passage, or even from hunting. It seems that the dividing line here might be between what nature provides and what man provides. Thus, it's one thing to hunt deer on your neighbor's land, but another to trample his wheat, or harvest his apple trees. Perhaps Brother John will clarify.
Returning now to Frost, it seems to me that he's looking at the wall to be mended, and asking very legitimate questions, beginning with the processes whereby the wall is overthrown. Is it innocent frost heaving? Is it the passage of hunters, which might be licit (cf. English Fox hunts) or not. He raises the notion that walls ought to serve a purpose other than boundary marking. And even that what we view as our natural rights might not be so viewed by others (cf., Elves). Yet his neighbor blunders on, an unimproved savage in his thinking. The darkness that Frost refers to is not the absence of photons, but the absence of mental illumination in his neighbor.
Curtis writes, "Frost's poem has nothing whatever to do with considerations of "private property" or other economic ideas. "
However, Stu realizes that there ARE economic ideas in Frost's poems.
People thought it was just Pound that had an economics in his poems.
Frost does, too. Stu realizes this. Curtis doesn't.
Economics has been a very serious area of contention since at least the first world war when reparations were imposed on Germany that Keynes argued would lead to a second world war (he was right). Against the Keynesian bailouts we still have Hayek. Glenn Beck drew attention to Hayek a few years back.
Most of you back Keynes because you've never read Hayek and are only familiar with ideas that have trickled down from loopy dope-smokers who animated the 60s with their discussions of communes and love-ins.
Frost at least understood that there was another position and that his neighbor exemplified it in the quote he chose to reiterate.
Kirby,
Curtis writes, "Frost's poem has nothing whatever to do with considerations of "private property" or other economic ideas. "
However, Stu realizes that there ARE economic ideas in Frost's poems.
Hoo, boy. Curtis was talking about Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," I was talking about "Mending Wall." Different poems, different content.
Most of you back Keynes because you've never read Hayek and are only familiar with ideas that have trickled down from loopy dope-smokers who animated the 60s with their discussions of communes and love-ins.
Actually, I think that most of us reject Hayek because it's clear that Keynes's ideas have survived the test of real world trials, whereas Hayek's have not.
The metaphysical implications of Frost's meditations do not hinge on civil dispute, or the rights of property owners, Stu's fascinating speculations notwithstanding.
What is obvious is that Frost is a nature poet. He's most interested in the relationship between man and nature, and much less so in the societal issues that preoccupy Kirby.
Mending Wall is principally about the demarcation between friendship and privacy, and the barriers we build to mark that division. We cooperate to keep such barriers secure, in good repair. Frost speculates about the motivation to keep such barriers in place, but his projection of his neighbor's "ancient" presumption is entirely opportunistic; we know nothing of the unnamed neighbor, and that's moot. He's just a symbol as Frost uses him.
There's a feigned innocent air about Frost's speech which many people find tiresome, but he toys with it because it allows him to construct ironies out of country language. Frost's ideas are rooted inside New England tradition, but he's omniscient over all its aspects, and teases complex meanings out of them. It is art, not social or political criticism. Frost was not a practical person; in New England, his vocation was subversive, but only in the sense of being an outsider, or a secret insider.
Frost may have worked with older forms, but his greatest innovation was what he called "the sound of sentences." By which he meant the way colloquial phrases could be arranged in such a way as to seem natural, but also structured toward a specific poetic end. The way you might think to make a statement, without sophistication, was bound to be more moving and original than how a scholar or intellectual would say it. He skirts the ginger edge of cliché in much of his work, trying to say difficult things with quotidian speech. It's an impressive performance.
Frost is a great poet, but not for any of the reasons Kirby thinks to cite. Kirby doesn't have a clue what makes a good poem good, or great.
"Frost at least understood that there was another position and that his neighbor exemplified it in the quote he chose to reiterate."
No, Kirby, Frost isn't advocating the neighbor's vision of "private property" and the barriers we construct to signify and preserve it.
Just the opposite. Frost is taking the "poetic" position of questioning the need for walls, and his personification of his neighbor's crudité is intended as a foil for his own lyrical animadversions.
You willfully misinterpret the poem for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the poem.
Any attempt to interpret Frost's work as economic criticism is completely beside the point. His work has a completely different focus and purpose.
the metis took to the back woods to avoid british bullets
they exemplify the highest in prairie cultivation of social virtue
something the lockedown british never understood
my economist of choice is john kenneth galbraith who said without flinching or batting and eye:::
the modern conservative--The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
now that guy had something to say-
he considered himself a reformed keynesian
looking over the legacy of my father's property i find things like very old metis moccasins and a real gold and silver mesh purse and old savings bonds and photos and his grandmothers' dresses and his grandfather's hats these could be considered private belongings passed down by family but the actual property he "owned " in his life the realestate was rented at best
i guess if there were no "firewalls" on the web we'd all be very uncomfortable with this technology
maybe we are already we just don't have the guts to say so
i mean
who's going to argue the merits of the WWW and i don't mean wrestling
private property creates a context for violence
british utilitarianism is the curse and the justification of modernism
did frost write any poems where an indigenous man appeared or a mixed-blood
how attuned to the land was he
did he have a sense of pre-european inhabitation in vermont...even frost had blinders
blinders bleepers bluesers bweepers
jh
My best Frost anecdote comes from my experience as a bookseller.
One day I got a call from a man in Mill Valley, in Marin County, just across the Bay from us.
He was looking for advice and opinion about an item he'd found in his neighbor's dumpster. (The neighbor was moving out, and throwing away household stuff he didn't want or need.)
Poking through the dumpster, the man had retrieved a copy of Frost's Collected Poems [1930]. It was only a fourth printing, without the dustwrapper, and wasn't signed. But it had an intriguing letter tipped into the front endpaper. The letter was by Frost, and was addressed to a woman who had been his childhood friend.
It is not much remarked, that Frost was not a native New Englander, but became one by adoption. He was born in San Francisco, and lived there until the age of 10.
The letter was addressed to a woman who had been a childhood playmate, while Frost's family lived in a hotel in San Francisco. He and this girl had played in the small courtyard of the hotel. This would have been in 1879-81.
The man calling me wanted to know what the book with the letter could be worth. I told him I would research it and get back to him. When I called him, however, he'd changed his mind about wanting to sell it, and refused to give his name or address.
I wondered whatever happened to it.
You guys are all nuts. The poem expresses a very typical set of problems. Frost doesn't like the wall because he has to keep it up, even though many people keep knocking it down. But these walls are all over New England and New York and go back centuries. Anyone who didn't like them wouldn't understand anything about boundaries. People without a decent set of boundaries are creeps.
How would you like it if a neighbor walked into your house and helped himself to your candy and then walked out leaving a trail of mud?
How are walls different from walls?
You guys just knock down any and every distinction.
This saying goes back centuries. A scholar named Wolfgang Meider traces some of the saying's lineage in an article in Folklore a few years ago. It's a fairly thorough article. You can see part of it here:
http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-106981965/good-fences-make-good-neighbours-history-and-significance
Meider like many scholars of the proverb sees them as building blocks of perception. We tend to reduce Christianity to a few of these proverbs, and to live by them. Marxists use a few phrases from Marx to guide their perceptions.
You can't finish the article without paying for it, I think. That's as it should be. This man put a lot of work into the article so we should pay him for his labor.
Only thieves think that everything should be free.
Pirates like Bluebeard feel entitled.
What Frost is saying is that he is himself bothered by the poor way in which the hunter and other tramples the wall. He thinks the line between the two properties should be a mental one since there aren't any cows involved. Most of the stone walls in New England down through PA (you see the stone walls even at Gettysburg for you westerners and midwesterners who may have trouble picturing these walls) were originally made when the farmers dug up the ground to make it economically viable so that the plows could turn the earth unhindered. The walls that were built are made of the stones that were unearthed. They were originally used to fence in cows.
It's irritating to have cows on your property that don't belong to you because they are eating your grass.
Plus they get lost.
Legal distinctions among property affording us property rights are part of what distinguishes English civilization from the crud that surrounds it, and allowed us to move forward. Everyone who came into contact with it liked it.
There are some backwards types who think anarchist collectives and matriarchal primitivism (hippies) would be a step forward. All those communities have collapsed outside of the one that has formed in the White House. That one hasn't collapsed but it has caused the American economy to collapse and stagger toward default.
No one' sure now who is responsible for what. The lightweight with the stone age mind has the belief that everyone should pay for everything, beginning with healthcare.
Without the clear sense of ownership businesses can't operate.
Frost has a little bit of that drunken person's regard for the hippies going on in his poem but he finally does bow to the neighbor. (It's an actual rather than a metaphorical fence, and you can look it up and see it if you like.)
You can't plan or budget without a clear sense of ownership.
Obama can't plan or budget so no one else can either.
I have no idea why people put a stoner into the White House twice.
Frost had a clear sense of boundaries and his work goes back into English history and unearths an ancient Puritan phrase.
Most of his neighbors regarded him as a goofball and a mess. He was. By their standards. But by the standards of the kinds of poets I was used to (Ginsberg, Corso), he was almost human.
The Beats had a farm near here up in Cherry Valley.
Good Lord.
Poetry of course comments on economic schemes. It doesn't always do this straight out. Nor is it the only way by which we should appreciate it.
I wouldn't judge a musical like Joseph by its historicity, or by its economic vision. But it still has both historicity and an economic vision.
Remember THAT Joseph was SOLD to the EGYPTIANS, and that he saved his brothers later on by letting them move over to Egypt.
Economics runs all through the Bible.
It may not be what it is ABOUT, but it is still THERE.
Good heavens.
Maybe Obama is not in the White House to try to get jobs, or try to make America into an economic powerhouse, but he still HAS an economic sense, feeble as it might be.
out in montana for years before there were fences ranchers used "brands" to secure the property of their cattle when the fences came they still branded them just in case they get through the fences of course rustlers who were some of the famous figures in charlie russell paintings stole cows and ate 'em or sold 'em to the whiskey traders...but most of the land was secured by gentlemen's agreement and people could go on land and ranchers didn't care until recently when idiots have cut fences and trashed property now the fences are supported with what with guns ranchers in montana will indeed take warning shots don't kid yourself
frost betrays his sense of civility but in other poems he ackowledges that human nature is not always conducive to the imperatives of civility forgetting and remembering so entwined as to be psychological problems for the conquerors -- won't those ghosts just go away
the land was ours before we were the land(')s...seems like nonesense verse from a very important point of view
neighbors are one thing
presumptions and deception about ownership are quite another
at any rate what we do know is that the vengeful ghosts live on in the land and tend to remember the old stupidities if you will...you get what you pay for even if you presume not to pay
jh
Now you're talking JH!
Well, at least we knocked Kirby off his soapbox about Frost.
Frost has nothing to do with Kirby's agenda.
I knew about these walls because we had them in the Napa Valley, where I grew up. They were built mostly out of red volcanic igneous rock, which hurt your hands if you handled it too much. But they were all over the valley. Farmers and ranchers put barbed wire on top fo them, because they didn't keep cows in. Herd animals are very persistent and canny--they can fine their way out of enclosures that aren't well made.
Rock walls are very picturesque. They're on the historic register in some places. Stone building are cool, but they're problematic. Where societies use up all the available wood, or can't find enough, they use stone.
New England isn't good for farming, because of all the boulders. Try plowing it. The American Midwest was the best farming until they discovered California. They brought in the water, and it became the nation's agricultural miracle. Now the water's disappearing because they've sucked the aquifers dry, and there are too many people who want it more than the farmers and ranchers do.
Kirby knows nothing about farming. Don't listen to him. He's a communist farmer.
All I know is the perimeter of my property abuts three others, and corners on two more. We all have fences. I built all four sides. I value my property and my privacy. But the neighbors can see through our second story window. Sometimes I wonder if they're peaking at my wife as she goes up and down the staircase in the morning.
Kirby is vain. He thinks everyone wants what he has, so he builds the highest fences allowed under law. Psychologically, he has a lot of mysterious secrets, the most precious and secret of which is: He has nothing worth finding out. What a tragedy it is not to have any precious secrets. To be an empty vessel, ready to accept god's wisdom.
Now you're talking JH!
A tremendous amount of work has already been done on Frost's poem. I took a course on Frost in college from a Lutheran pastor at East Stroudsburg University. The pastor is still pastoring in Pittsburgh.
I don't want to reinvent the wheel in talking about the poem. Some basic takes can be found here:
http://www.enotes.com/stopping-by-woods-snowy-evening-essays/stopping-by-woods-snowy-evening-robert-frost
But it's always fun to push the conversation back to our delightful skirmishes between Republican and Democratic policy matters.
Curtis wants a wall in Mexico.
New Hampshire is the only New England state that is likely to go Republican.
I don't know Frost's political bent. He read for the Kennedy inauguration I think. But Moore visited Lyndon Johnson in spite of their political differences.
The gap has widened since then as the Democrats have continued to go commie. Back then, Kennedy would not have thought of going commie.
He hated Cuba.
Obama sees nothing at all wrong with Cuba, and is trying to refashion our medical care system on theirs.
They claim it works. No one can check.
Obama would also like to fix it so that no one can check.
No one knows much about Benghazi and no one much cares. We can no more criticize the president of this country than can the people of Cuba criticize theirs. The only difference is that in this country we do it out of deference to a fear of racism.
In that country, one is sentenced to years in prison.
Here, it's shunning that does the trick.
The left is all Amish-communist now due to their having teamed up in the Civil Rights Marches and forming into a deadly one-two punch.
I alone continue to hold up a match in the dark, and say, "Who goes there?" As I keep my lonely vigil. If Hayek had really done his job years ago, there would be none of this need. Had Romney put Obama's picture with him smoking a doobie on every billboard in America, I wouldn't need to stand up for private property. But Republicans are too nice. Romney secretly liked Bam. And Hayek liked Keynes.
"Again, with Keynes clearly in his sights, Hayek could not bring himself to pull the trigger" (Keynes-Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, p. 121).
We see this among the modernists too. In spite of their differences they supported one another. Pound and Williams, Moore and Auden, Frost and Stevens, and on and on.
St. Paul at least knew how to lay down a clear fence. but then he was initially a Pharisee.
We need to draw back in all the old lines and defend them with wit and style against the nomads and barbarous pirates who see liberty and freedom as a means to attaining an equality of income without doing a dollop of work.
the ranches in montana are way too big...they need to be much smaller so the buffalo can run again
fences now have become desperate security protecting god knows what
we should be able to make room in this second rate country for nomadic people
all across northern spain there are rock fences and they sort of invite you to sit upon them and soak in the spanish sun
as long as we perpetuate the ridiculous notion of individual liberty there will be conflict and violence
communities must form people to be decent --- fences can help but if the formation is not there the fences are merely negligible impediments to personal freedom
im so glad the hayek didn't murder keynes that would've been such a terrible blow to wall street
jh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hadrian%27s_wall_at_Greenhead_Lough.jpg
http://www.studiolo.org/Goldsworthy/Wall/000827-1427-13.jpg
"The people must fight for the laws of the city as for its walls." -- Heraclitus
It's a time in which laws and walls are being torn down by communist airheads. Without property laws, no one can plan or budget.
Without walls, we have no idea who's living here.
The police cannot protect us with a nonsensical set of notions like this.
Nature is of course anti-wall but also anti-law. Laws are meant to be defend us against other people's bad and fallen nature. The laws begin with the ten commandments. Many today think these should be junked. They're being taken down in courthouses all over in favor of God knows what. Whatever some febrile activist judge thinks is ok from molesting children (where's the problem?) to feeling sorry for a junky because he has no mom, and therefore is entitled to shoot up the town.
I want all the walls and all the laws back.
Good laws make good neighbors. God gave us laws in the form of the ten commandments.
Today people just discard these laws, as they discard private property or any form of propriety. I even hear police officers casually tossing around the f word or saying "G- d-" or even college professors saying, "Bull-."
This is just disgraceful.
People also should not drink alcohol.
Where is Carrie Nations?
Frost drank and screwed around. I think he may have also sworn. He was not much of a church-goer.
But at least he had a decent neighbor with a brain, and had some sense of other people's property. He wasn't a completely pagan entity like that Pound fella, or that WCW.
He was more like TS Eliot, and more like Marianne Moore, from the viewpoint of propriety, perhaps.
Within poetry there ought to also be tradition as well as something unprecedented. The modernists thought they could junk the past. This meant that continuity with the past and with its traditions could be junked. I believe we need to reconnect with the entirety of the Christian tradition and remember it as we write poems. It doesn't mean we can't question it (Christianity is far from univocal, as the secularists largely believe). There are 1200 denominations and even within each denomination there are many maddening dialogues going on.
There are even Jungian Christians like that Bishop Spong who want universalism to include Satan.
Again, where are the laws and the walls?
The New Jerusalem will have walls. It will exclude dogs, fornicators, and sorcerers, to name but a few (22:15) as well as liars, murderers, and whoremongers.
This is as it should be.
We can't just have poets going all natural on us. Nature is what Christianity isn't.
Nature is bad. Christianity is good. In the same way, communism is bad. Capitalism is good.
But for capitalism to work, we need Christian laws, including thou shalt not steal (Obama should read this one and reflect on it while he's busy playing Bluebeard from the White House).
Obama is a legally elected pirate.
I suppose theft can be called a tax.
I respect all your attempts to illuminate me. I liked Stu's rather erudite meanderings through British and constitutional law.
I am slowly reading up on this stuff.
Today I might get a chance to see Lincoln. The first hour is an attempt to recapture the making of the 13th amendment which overturns the right to have slaves, from what I understand.
Slavery is mentioned in the ten commandments. God says it's ok to have them, but you shouldn't poke their eyes out just because they've been bad.
You're also not really supposed to have other Jews as slaves. This is Leviticus and Exodus. Of course they were themselves slaves for hundreds of years both in Egypt and in Babylon.
Not sure if Jesus ever weighs in on the slave issue. There are still many slaves in the Roman empire. Does he attempt to ban it at any point? Does He say it's wrong? Or does He leave that to Lincoln?
Lincoln kind of looks like God in the Memorial Building.
That's the same building that the whoremonger and plagiarist MLK raps from 100 years later.
It's also on the back of the penny. On the front of the penny is of course Lincoln's face.
It also still says on the front of the penny, "In God We Trust," and "Liberty."
It says in Revelation that Satan will burn forever in a lake of fire.
but we get activist Christians coming along and saying, "Oh no, he will be saved, too."
Doubt it.
But what if Jones Very really was the Second Coming?
Kirby,
"The people must fight for the laws of the city as for its walls." -- Heraclitus
Fair enough.
It's a time in which laws and walls are being torn down by communist airheads
Which laws do you have in mind? And what communists? The number of communists in this country is negligible and their political power is nil, your sustained attempts at pejorative mischaracterization of your fellows notwithstanding.
The laws begin with the ten commandments. Many today think these should be junked.
Who? And which commandments? All that I'm aware of here is that there is an objection to the display of the ten commandments as such by agents of the government like judges, which is a consequence of the founder's decision to form a secular as opposed to theocratic polity, cf., the first amendment. It really galls me how you conservatives ignore the constitution. But there is good news here to, and that is that the same legal principles that prevent the government from displaying the ten commandments in courtrooms also (in their wise neutrality) make the establishment of Sharia here equally impossible.
Anyway, that whole ten commandments in the courtroom thing is pretty much a made up controversy. The laws of this country derive their authority from the constitution, and not from anyone's scripture. People who put the ten commandments up in courthouses do it for the publicity, and to try to rally the ignorant around the notion that their religion is under attack, when in fact what is happening is that our intentionally secular society is defending itself against religious attack.
I even hear police officers casually tossing around the f word or saying "G- d-" or even college professors saying, "Bull-."
The ten commandments do not include prohibitions against coarse speech. There is a prohibition against taking the name of the Lord in vain, and this is usually interpreted in our society as prohibiting profanity (in the most limited sense of expletive uses of the persons of God). But calling your arguments bullshit does not contravene any of the ten commandments. Indeed, refraining from calling them bullshit would be to bear false witness.
People also should not drink alcohol.
Why? There's no commandment against it. Jesus himself came eating and drinking, cf., Luke 7:34. There are certainly good arguments to be made against excessive alcohol consumption, but that's an entirely separate issue.
Obama is a legally elected pirate.
You're bearing false witness here. Don't you fear God?
Slavery is mentioned in the ten commandments.
What is mentioned is that you shouldn't covet your neighbor's slaves. This should not be construed as a blessing of slavery. Would you like to see your children enslaved? I don't think so. Aren't we all God's children? So why should he want to see any of his children as slaves?
Not sure if Jesus ever weighs in on the slave issue.
Indirectly.
In the Roman world, slaves becames such via debt. If you couldn't pay your debts, you sold your children, your wife, and ultimately yourself into slavery. You hoped to be able to work your way out. Remember the Lord's Prayer, as recorded in Matthew: "forgive us our debts, as we have forgive our debtors." This is often taken metaphorically, as Luke did, taking debt as synonymous with sin. But there's good reason to believe that this is one of those cases where a literal reading is more faithful, and we are taught to call upon our own refusal to take others in debt slavery as we ask God to forgive us our debt to him.
this is it
i've just about just about just about had enough of this what shall we call it utter nonesense or udder nunscents o my
we can catch the cognityive culprit kirby right here in a mudhole of ridiculous statements i mean how could anyone how could you kirby how could you say nature is what christianity is not this is very very stupid even very jones would say it is stupid the whole transcendalist tradition would revolt against that for even jesus would say WTF dude i mean he said consider the lilies he said sparrows are blessed by god and the hair of your head he took mud and spit and put it in somebody's eye here's spit in your eye
kirby i'm calling for a complete doctrinal retraction on your part take it back or forever be banned for the the huge gilt doors the unbelievably ornamented baroque paintings and scupltures the huge murals the art for godz sake all this wonderful art that is the holy catholic church you will be banned for those artists believed in nature they believed in human nakedness they believed in fecundity but not for its own sake for godz sake so get it right
i mean i never hurrrumph!
of all the dastardly idiotic ignoramus oddball distortions i mean do you really want to say that when the roman catholic liturgy is replete with things of nature including very expensive and aromatic incense now don't get insensed about this just admit your mistake the world of nature is the gift god gave to us in order to work out our salvation in fear and loathing had we not nature we would have no context we would be ethereal dithering dingbats like that ditsy former parttime governer from alaska can't remember her name but she is a talking head with very little by way of brains she represents the best women the republicans have to give o come on
of course nature is christian
we bathe in nature
we embrace the natural we
love the sensual
but for godzsake not our own
that's the rubbadubbdubb
for did not god say
it is good
those were the literal written down words of god before copyrights even existed i mean he was giving it his all with his words
this is very good
god expressed pleasure and delight in nature
and the laws of nature which dictate our every impulse whether we choose to honor those laws or not
most people want to usurp with a cognitive burp all the laws god wrote down with his very own pencil
a #2 graphite if i recall correctly
we have to make some room for satan being able to say 'hey you know what i phuqqed up there i was drunk on my own madness and i made a wrong turn and it has been the sorrow of many a poor poor bastard and many a poet as well and many a selfconsumed idiot and many a wretchedly delinquent woman who thinks she knows so damn much and destroys nature in her very womb what an atrocity who can abide it
i cannot for it is nature and we violate nature at our own peril
get real kirydirbydoo
be a good dog
find some comfort in normalcy i' mean you are stretching way out there to the nether reaches of sanity with inanity you're like a blogspot hannity with some of the shite you write i can see why curtis gets so upset i mean it is balderdash most of it and it is full of sound and fury signifying nothing other than your desire to provoke insane responses and while i do not mean this to be an insane response i suppose the fact that i'm taking time to refute your complete idiocy on this matter it makes me an accomplice of sorts because i know i know i just know you're being silly you're not being real i mean what is real nature is real and jesus loved the perfume of mary magdalene and jesus ate tabooli with his mom and jesus delighted in tthe red poppies that grow all over israel and jesus even liked the mule he rode in on
christianity is a nature religion
and i'll fight o'reilly on that any day of the week
i'll give that asshole a fair and balanced kick in the proverbial intellectual ass
i've about had it up to here (i'm reaching to about 7 ft)
come back to the natural way
kirby
it's the only way to be saved
no salvation outside the holy roman do the natural thing church
obviously jesus liked wine
jh
i did not know that frost was profligate
I think he was but I don't know particulars. Wasbhe consrrvative in some ways and radical in others?
We're at a loss for witnesses now. Whittaker Chambers' book is old and he's been gone. The literary trradition has faded for conservatives since Solzhenitsyn.
Our one witness here JAdL is goje for reasons unknown. Picklesworth and I are left to hold the pass. Neither of us have truly suffered under the communist systems of today.
Individualism and liberty and private property define conservatism. It's there in Smith Locke Hayek and many more contrmporary but lesser lights such as Hannity but he hasn't got any literary merit. How do we knock out government the idol for the idle and of the idle?
Where are the Chinese Vietnamese and North Korean de toqueville's and Solzhenitsyn's. A massive dissident faction escaped the USSR but we need them now from China and N. Korea and Myanmar and Vietnam. Where are they to hold Obama's feet to the fire? Social democracy turns into communism turns into a depraved ogre once it owns all the means of production. First is erasing walls and laws toward communism. BO will never show how much he hates private property as Stu has recently done.
We who love our country and its past must fight for it in spite of those who hate the country and its traditions and want to scrap love of children and the nuclear family in favor of the mindless hordes of the 99%ers. We can't win against the hordes. We must still attempt the task of saving the country from the matriarchal hordes of desirous fools drenched in absolute evil who think of theselves as saints. Benghazi? Sorry I have a headache let's talk about sex.
Kirby,
BO will never show how much he hates private property as Stu has recently done.
I do not believe I said I hate personal property. I rather like mine.
Private property is part of this kingdom not the next. Render unto Caesar.
The Kingdom of God is near. This is the good news that Jesus preached. Render unto God the things that are God's.
So Kirby, you love children, yet two days have passed without any reflect on what happened in Connecticut. Does that National Assault Rifle Association have your tongue? Your balls? Do the lobbyists for the tools of murder hold you in thrall?
I can't handle it. I can't do anything about it and can't stand it. I am in denial. If all those kids had had guns they could have shot back.
Our school has a locked door a buzzer and an armed guard. Did Newtown have any thought for safety? Obviously there are sick people everywhere now wuo feel entitled to express their rage. More mental health protocols. We used to lock people up. Foucault argued that we need to more understanding about psychopaths. I wish we culd lock up dangerous people. And use asylums. Instead we now let everyone use psychoactive substances and drink. We need Carrie Nations. We need to teach kindness instead of rgc hatreds. I can't watch the coverage. I couldn't survive watching this ten days before Christmas.
When I was in eighth grade I got to be part of a special class that utilized team teaching and emphasized critical thinking skills with lots of neat exercises. We met once a week. One day about ten minutes before the end of the class period the door at the front of the room flew open and this ninth grader from the football ran into the room and he was shouting at somebody like he was being chased and he went to the back of the room and ducked down behind the students in the back row and then this other guy from the football team appeared in the doorway and he had a gun. And he started shooting at the first guy who ran out the door at the back of the room. We were really relieved when it turned out the gun was a starter's pistol from the track team. Our assignment was to describe what happened.
I think we should not talk about it. I tried to watch a few minutes of coverage. The prez can't talk about Benghazi. The secretary of state had a concussion. But the prez blathers on this and comes up w a few tears. None for Ambassador Stevens. Hillary cued tears over her problems in New England getting elected. Mental health problems all over. The idiot media will feed us dumb ideas. Even sportscasters will pretend to be serious. I'm really only interested in what people say off the record long after it matters. Even then only in books that took years to write. Only then might we get depth. Who cares what people say to push their agendas now and try to cash in or make their rivals look bad. The only serious people on Tv are the comedians. The newspapers aside from WSJ are numbing. I don't care what polls say or what poets say or what even philosophers say. I'd almost rather hear an ant speak. Thank God they can't.
Kirby,
If all those kids had had guns they could have shot back.
What an extraordinarily stupid thing to say. You do realize that bringing any sort of weapon to school is grounds for immediate suspension, and even expulsion? And for good cause.
Our school has a locked door a buzzer and an armed guard.
Your primary school has an armed guard?! I don't believe it. I can well believe your high school does, but that's a very different situation.
The locked door with a buzzer? Sure. That's SOP. According to published news reports, the gunman shot out the door on the way in, defeating a newly installed security system. That's not a threat that buzzer systems are designed to handle. In primary school, the preponderant threat is kidnapping by a non-custodial parent.
I can't watch the coverage. I couldn't survive watching this ten days before Christmas.
Well, it is Republicans who insisted on moving the responsibility for long-term psychiatric care from the Federal government to the states, a policy that resulted in the closure of the preponderance of psychiatric hospitals and the creation of the class of permanent homeless. It is Republicans who have insisted that an 18th century right to form militia and possess the arms necessary to support it necessarily grants individuals in the 20th and 21st century the right to own arms whose lethality is comparable to a light infantry company, What you're seeing is the unintended (but predictable) consequence of your own sin. It is no wonder that you turn away.
But as for the season, remember that Jesus Christ was born into a broken world, a world like ours.
I don't want to talk about this. With Benghazi we're dealing with adults but here we're dealing with children. I don't feel like scoring points over it. Of course I didn't mean that kids should have guns. I do think asylums need to be revived. It's all so sad. But I am tired of quick angry reactions. They don't solve anything or deepen our understanding. Let's not have any fun w this. I liked your last line. Jesus could get demons out of loonies. Could he cure Manson?
i couldn't watch the news about all this
i was physically sick to my stomach
who knows what home life was about
for the crazed soul
gaudete sunday
with some sorrow
it begs the question-
where might be we be without so many guns
even jesus weeps
jh
i suppose if all the kids had guns they could really play cops and robbers during recess
teachers would have to watch what they say
jh
Kirby"s confusion regarding the Modernists is astounding. It's as if he stopped his literature studies in the 12th grade. If he's teaching literature to undergraduates, he's immensely under-qualified, and I would think it would be incumbent on his colleagues to see that he's removed from his position, or assigned to other subjects.
The important Modernists were not an homogenous group. But something many of them did have in common, was a new interest in, and respect for, the distant past. The literary and artistic milieu of late 19th and early 20th century American culture was a creeping mediocrity and timidity, qualities reinforced by a "devout" religious influence, and a prevailing hypocritical "respectability" which tended to suppress creativity and speculative thinking. H.L. Mencken characterized it as "the mob."
Eliot and Pound and Moore were keenly interested in studying and knowing about the past. Unlike most of their contemporaries, they suspected that the arts had fallen into a mediocrity from which it needed to be awakened. Pound "resuscitated" our literature by reintroducing ancient and medieval and Renaissance literature models. Eliot went back to Renaissance and Italian dramatic models. Moore looked to 17th and 18th Century prose and poetry for ideas and formal inspiration. These were "revolutionary" ideas circa 1920. Harriet Monroe, Poetry (Chicago) magazine's founding editor, began that periodical in large part to represent the new work in America. Serious literature in the U.S. had fallen to such a low state that people were writing and reading what we now consider to be "greeting card" verse and calling it important. Eliot and Pound and Williams were voices in the wilderness. Reading the work of their contemporaries today, we're incredulous. Frost's work comes directly from the "polite" "careful" hidebound formalities of his time; incapable of innovations (and uninterested in them), he managed to write brilliantly within the strict limitations of late 19th century Victorian modes. By the end of his life, in the 1950's, he was still writing poems in a style of 50 years earlier; he never developed or explored new methodologies. His held on to his franchise like AT&T stock.
Literary historians across the spectrum today recognize and appreciate the convulsion which we call Modernism.
Kirby would repudiate all that in favor of the greeting card verse of Billy Collins and Gregory Corso.
What I was also struck by today, was that Kirby's ornery, largely incoherent ramblings, resemble nothing so much as Pound's letters and essays and middle period Cantos, the only difference being the political radicalism they separately represent. Pound, of course, was not a "liberal" in the terms of his own time. He was not even a parliamentary democrat. His politics more closely resembled that of, for instance, Kirby's own close ally, J. DeLater. Pound and Eliot were actually monarchists, who believed in a "benevolent" patrician class which would "guide" the "mob" and deliver us from the evils of representative democracy. As for Moore, any study of her biography makes plain her extraordinary eccentric social and psychological isolation, and the irrelevance of her wider political views. A brilliant poet of manners, of limited means, her most important poems are masterpieces of rhetorical flourish, dense, rich and original; but as an observer or thinker about current events, she's of no use or value whatsoever. You could say the same thing of Eliot and Pound and Stevens and Williams, and I do say.
I expect Kirby to come out shortly with a new defense of assault weapons, which we'd all expect from a card carrying Republican. Will the Congress act? I'm not holding my breath.
We need to reinstate the assault weapons ban.
Can our weaponrs industry really control a whole nation?
We know our soldiers need the most efficient and effective weapons we can give them.
Is there any argument to be made for the wide availability of such weaponry for the common citizens?
I doubt it.
I remember, working for the government in the early 1970's, when Reagan closed all the state mental facilities, these poor wandering, confused individuals who'd been released, coming in to the district offices looking for help. Reagan, of course, believed it wasn't the state's "duty" to help mentally retarded or deranged citizens. That was "social welfare," "big brother" or "big government" trying to control its citizens, and it was best that these people be sent back to the streets to become homeless, "criminals," inmates, or beneficiaries of the local social welfare systems.
Social Security and Medicare of course are also social welfare programs, which Kirby believes, as a dutiful Republican shill, should be eliminated.
Kirby thinks seniors should pull their weight, and stop cry-babying. Come on, you codgers and crones and lazy elders. Get off your asses and contribute! Start new businesses. 70 is young! You want hand-outs? You want a free ride?
Are you willing to sacrifice your FREEDOM to be wards of the welfare state???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Curtis wrong about everything he states uere but it's a waste of time to refute him. His ideas peaked and hardened in the 70s. He's returned after forty years in the bureaucracy to attempt to talk with us. He's not Piltdown man but it's a similar problem. Moore had a very strong constituency. Yes she reaches back into Puritan culture of the 16 to 1800's but this is because that culture is still alive for her as it still is in the Cumberland Valley from hence she came. The one existing biography is weak on this area but leave it to Curtis to take it for the final word. It was written bu an anti-religious academic. Eliot's work goes deep into religious territory too particularly of the English Reformation. Few in SF are capable of understaning the value of this period or are capable of umderstanding it and so see the modernists as a big deal or as the final deal. That was an attitude current in 1970 wwhem Curtis had his thinking formed for him by his contemptible contemporaries. time has moved on and is recirculating back toward a revival of the Reformation and of pilgrim and Puritan thought.
As for Reagan I think he made some mistakes. The cost of releasing the insane is still with us. But now the whole of the left belongs in an asylum or a museum of curiousity. It's the embrace of psychadelic culture and its epigones. Obama inhaled.
Isn't it Obama who sold assault weapons to the cartels? Ponage. We will never hear about that. It is our weapons that got Stevens killed too. We will never hear about that. Deer hunters must have their rifles taken. And their religion destroyed. Let's repeal the billof rights. Communists trade their lives for securiity. Why shouldn't we?
Corso and Collins are part of the revival of humor within contemporary and postmodern poetry. This trend really does interest me. The modernists were fascinated by high seriousness. Part of my claim has been to see the philosophy in humorists such as Corso Collins and Codrescu and even in Lear and Wodehouse. Communists can't handle humor. That fascinates me too. They tend to use high dudgeon. I'm more interested in The Onion than in the NYT or Anderson Cooper. I like Dennis Miller on Fox. I don't find Colbert or Stewart funny because they're too predictable. Humor is either wild or not at all. One flower power humorist I loved is Brautigan. But he was apparently a secret conservative according to his friend McClure. Curtis can't think outside of the narrow framework he was given even though none of the empirical facts fit (his trap ip to the Mexican border opened his eyes but not his brain).
E. Fuller Torrey's article came through my Facebook feed. Does it help? It's called How to Bring Sanity to the Mental Health problem. Bt ue works at Heritagenorg so minds will be closed. His description traces Federal care to Kennedy. He suggests that local governments need to deal w yhe problem. He says over 20% of inmates in the penitentiary are insane so that it has become the new asylum. I also notice many mental health problems even on our tiny streets here in Delhi.
There are no easy answers but we do need the convo. It seems that aesthetics always has to wait.
Pound and Eliot dropped the democratiic model. Moore never did. We do need discussion and voting. The 70s prescription for poetry was to deny transcendence and move toward WCWs ideas only in things. This doomed poetry to the irrelevance of Eigner and permanently disabled poetry as a positive and reduced it to a wrecking ball. Plato and all universalists were attacked. Clark celebrated the end of the gods. And in crept Marxism as the filler of the vacuum.
I think we need a variety of other groups and ideas in the discussion. The modernists thought they had all the answers. It turns out they were all bent nails and no one could build anything on the rubble. Frost's interlocutor in Mending Wall is sane but not Frost. Moore was sane ut is barely intelligible. She is however saying something very profound in each poem. Her taproot is deep and hidden.
I am tired of conservatives, and their activist judges, disrespecting the constitution.
Conservatives, and their activitist judges, decided that words in the bill of rights have no meaning: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" was apparently just a typo. (The bill of Rights is grand, but that second amendment has the worst grammar ever, and it's led to a lot of problems).
in a strange way both curtis and kirby are telling a truth and as long as we all recognize that nobody has a corner on the truth it's OK the corners are always being negotiated
it seems kirbyeez main point and i don't wish to overstate this the main point is accessibility
pound and eliot gertrude stein are great for the literati the people who like poems and think there's something always to mine there that is one thing but for someone who might just say hey i'd like to try to read some poetry frost is immediate he doesn't waste any time with mysteries of language as you read into him of course you find he's working out some very complicated inner and outer perceptions and he has this tendency to love sounds which cannot be ignored i think even pound came to recognize frosts penchant for good sound frosts' poems sound good
robert creeley's poems also sound very very good
tis tis tis true tis very true that pound was a a scholare of ancient writing east and west and eliot as well eliot even peering into ancient latin liturgical texts and seeing the richness of poetry in the liturgies of the cluniac monks and the sounds of the troubadours as well
frost did go to england and walked the country roads listening to the voices of english speakers from the english countryside and found in their voices the songs he wanted to write and so he did you can't blame a guy simply because he likes singsong sound iambic pentameter but also was charged by the free verse movement yet sought to have it no matter what intelligble i suppose that makes him quaint because you have to be a sort of expert at language to get much of pound and you have to be able to dig under the cloaks of history to play with the silk skirts of eliots verse though once you get the sense of it it is nothing if not engaging and that's what we want afterall with poems to be engaged to be quietly fascinated
now mnarrianne mmoorre was a baseball nut she went to games and kept score she was somehow fascinated with pirates and how little every one around her actually knew...i must admit much of her poetry stifles me i go WHAT and read it again then it's O OK i get it but wow why this way and then i wonder maybe i don't really get it at all and i need to read it again and thusly with that dame who i think i would ask out on a date were she still alive i think she'd find it cute to have a quiet dinner with a monk like me...raspberries for dessert
it's possible to speak the truth in only one direction in a multivalent discourse...few people ask the question...how wrong am i?
they can put perverts away but they can't seem to do anything about the guns...hmnh...quite a social conundrum
jh
Kirby,
As for Reagan I think he made some mistakes. The cost of releasing the insane is still with us.
Indeed. Something to agree on--punting on mental health is a bad idea.
Isn't it Obama who sold assault weapons to the cartels?
If this is a reference to the Fast and Furious, I can assure you this is quite confused. Take a look at the wiki article ATF gunwalking scandal. This was BATF "sting" that ran from 2006 to 2011. And the guns were not given to the cartels, but to licensed firearm dealers, and sold to "shadow buyers." These shadow buyers were (if I understand correctly) legal buyers who represented illegal buyers, i.e., they were gun runners. It was these gun-runners who illegal transferred weapons to the cartels.
So exactly what is the objection to the BATF sting? What they did was to inject traceable weapons into a much larger legal gun trade, and show that those weapons often "leaked" into the illegal trade. This made it possible to track the leaks, but the conservative objection is that the sting ultimately discredits the notion that our existing laws regulating the gun trade are strong enough.
It is our weapons that got Stevens killed too.
Whoa, there. It is certainly true that arms provided to Libyan revolutionaries have found their way into the hands of terrorists, just as arms we've provided for the Iraqis and Afghans have also found their way into the hands of terrorists. But I guess the four US citizens killed by US weapons in Libya do overshadow the thousands (if not tens of thousands) of US citizens (military and civilian) killed by US weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'll note, in passing, that the reason the US has not intervened in Syria is that the character of the Syrian opposition is not as well-formed as the Libyan (and that's a failure to clear a low bar), and the participation of terrorist groups in the Syrian opposition is greater, with a greaterly likelihood that weapons we provide will be used against us or our allies, e.g., Israel.
Deer hunters must have their rifles taken.
Deer hunters use deer rifles, not assault rifles. Deer rifles are intended for longer ranges, hence they have long barrels, fire much heavier bullets (160 vs. 69 grain), and are heavier weapons, which are a disadvantage if you're trying to murder kindergarteners a few feet away. The murder weapons have large, quick-change magazines (30 rounds is pretty typical). Simple arithmetic requires that the murderer went through at least 2 and probably 3 magazines. Deer rifles typically have a four round internal magazine, and have to be reloaded one bullet at a time. Murder weapons are semi-automatic, meaning that that it automatically reloads after each trigger pull. Deer rifles are almost always lever- or bolt-action, which means a much slower rate of fire.
This isn't to say that deer rifles couldn't be used in school shootings, just that it would be hard to kill more than five people. I think we need to be pragmatic here. Lowering the exchange rate on mass murders from 27-to-1 to 5-to-1 seems to me to justify an assault weapon ban. And finally, it's hard to commit suicide with a deer rifle. That means that the shooter has a long life in prison to look forward to, and I don't think that they're prepared for that.
Assault rifles seem bad. I thought they were banned. I haven't got a gun.
I prefer the Letters page if I have a beef.
I am sick and feel like a lump of lead.
I am surprised no one has connected the shooting to global warming or fracking or gay marriage or the need for rgc equality. Guns helped us beat the English and the Commanches. They were our friends. But people have such a short memory. The English were our friends when we fought the germ men. / have no problem with the English. All the modernists visited Europe. Some stayed.
Kirby,
Assault rifles seem bad. I thought they were banned.
They were. But the Clinton era law under which they were banned had a 2004 sunset provision, and was not renewed.
I haven't got a gun.
Neither do I, although my farm relatives do, mostly for deer hunting, but also for personal protection. The police department is about 4 blocks from my house. I don't worry about police response time. It is different if you live in a rural area.
I am sick and feel like a lump of lead.
Literally or figuratively? Our associate pastor preached a heck of a sermon today, and we needed it. We had an unexpected death in the congregation on Thursday -- a 57 year old man. Then came Friday. Did you know that God sings? It was in today's Old Testament reading.
I am surprised no one has connected the shooting to global warming or fracking or gay marriage or the need for rgc equality.
I see no plausible connection. That's not to say that these are not problems, but they're not everything.
Guns helped us beat the English and the Commanches.
Both sides had guns. If we didn't have guns, we'd have used swords, and if we didn't have swords, we'd have used clubs, and if not clubs, then rocks. No, guns didn't help us beat the British. We beat the British with sacrifice--because we had more at stake than they did. And because the French navy beat the British navy at the battle of the Chesapeake, leading to Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown.
God laughs quite a bit in the OT but I didn't know He sings. Citation?
I feel very sick and heavy but I can't sleep. So tired. I just want to hide away for a week. I'm reading 2 books on economics and a book on Love from the Seattle Love lab's Gottman.
On Tv is some kind @f syrupy story about an adopted kid nobody wants and I keep crying when I tune into it. Lifetime channel.
The killer is another autistic loner like the Unabomber and others. Everyone should be watching the Annoying Orange Christmas Special.
Kirby,
God laughs quite a bit in the OT but I didn't know He sings. Citation?
Like I said, today's 1st lesson: Zephaniah 3:17, "The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival."
The reference seems to be unique, although it can be argued that God is singing in the Song of Songs.
The killer is another autistic loner like the Unabomber and others.
AFAIK, there was some early speculation that the Sandy Hook killer was autistic, but I haven't heard it since Friday. Instead, what I've heard is that he was intelligent but a loner, someone who had no identifiable friends. This seems like a fairly common profile for school shooters, but not something that's specific enough to be useful a priori.
While I was in 4th, 5th and 6th grade I lived about a mile from a large state mental hospital where my dad was implementing a project that became the basis for a pilot program a few years later in a different community that established the state's first community mental health center. There wasn't any real security at the hospital as far as I could tell. It did have a gate, but I never saw it when it wasn't open. There may have been a security guard situated to keep an eye on who came and went through the main entrance, but so unobtrusive as to escape notice. Many of my friends had parents who lived on the grounds. You didn't need an I.D. to get in or out. I could get there on my bicycle in about ten minutes and often did as the setting was more like a state farm surrounded by a state park than a hospital. The buildings were yellow Spanish style stucco with red clay shingled roofs, promoting a peaceful, easy feeling. Some of the buildings contained farm machinery for the orchards and fields on the premises that largely sustained the estate. The superintendent's residence had a backyard swimming pool I visited as a guest on several occasions. One never had a sense that anyone was there involuntarily.
We lived down the hill from the hospital grounds across the main highway on about three acres in an old English style house surrounded by about twenty acres of cow pasture and farm field that were leased out to local farmers. Our living room had a twenty foot ceiling supported by hand hewn cedar beams and twisted wrought iron. The fireplace was immense, designed for cooking and the living room's primary source of heat. There were French doors that opened to a patio with a small square goldfish pond shaded by a substantial chestnut tree. A much larger goldfish pond across the driveway was covered by lily pads and surrounded by enormous pines and firs enclosed by rockeries to keep an assortment of ferns in place. The other side of the house had another patio with a large brick barbecue at one end with a fireplace in the center flanked by cast-iron stove tops. The driveway was large enough to park at least six or eight cars with a tool shop and a two car garage that we used as a barn to store hay for our horses. Behind the garage was a coal bin that we converted into stables. The back pasture had a disused two-story nuttery for drying and storing the hazel nuts from the half dozen or so trees that remained of what had once been a filbert orchard. The front corral was large enough to give the horses a good workout. We never had more than two at any one time. A creek, cold and fairly swift in the winter, bounded the property at one end. Footpaths along the banks meant you could hike all the way upstream to the hospital grounds or beyond, a mile in one direction, or through a complex of beaver dams in the other on approaching the river a mile downstream. Mr. Earl had his mink farm just across the gravel road from the path through the alders that led to our swimming hole. He kept horses, but only as food for his sable. The only spot in the creek deep enough for swimming was so rapid one had to swim to stay in one place, a sort of aquatic treadmill.
Rent was $125/month. The owner lived overseas, and had purchased it from my older sister's art instructor who was also her third grade teacher when we lived in a larger town nearby. She sold it after her husband died. They had designed the house, yards, patios, ponds and planted most of the trees. It eventually became a museum and crafts store long after we moved out. The foundation of the house wasn't up to code, limiting what could be charged for rent and rendering it difficult to sell.
Saw the first hour or so of The Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins should be tested for steroids.
There is an argument beginning to emerge.that mental health is the issue. The Norwegian killernplus other mass shootings in FINLAND England and Germany demonstrate that banning guns may not be the panacea the left reflexively believes. At New Life Church when the freak show appeared he was hit by a female member of the congregation and shot at ten times. Should teachers pack? Response times vary but if it took five minutes for the police to arrive at Stu's house and he was unarmed he and his wife would be dead. I llive on a small village with two squad cars on duty plus the sheruiff. Atop detective lives across from me and we're pals. But everyone suggests I should have a gun. Can I buy a rifle or a handgun? Do I need to take a course? Most of my students have them. There was a loner down the street who died last year. In his house they found thousands of guns. It was a collection estimated at a half million or more dollars. He never said a word to much of anyone although he did once say hello to me. He used to walk around half naked and had his windows covered with black cloth. He had a heart attack. He was about 6'3" and weighed 125 pounds. Seemed real normal to me.
maybe there's a level to the political argument that no one is talking about maybe the real division in american culture is between those who bear arms those who load guns those who use the gun as an extension of their alter-ego those who worship at the altar of gunpowder and there are a few around believe you me
and
those who don't
those who won't those who hate guns
those who want to be away awaya awaya from guns
those who don't want guns around at all those who don't want to have to think about guns
why guns? get the freakin guns out of here if you can't get through life without strokin your gun well something is amiss
if this is the divide well the gunless ones are at an extreme disadvantage...i mean then what do you resort to common sense? and believe that the virtue of humanistic rationality will prevail and no bullets will fly
there could be a third party i guess the party of people who carry but have no intention of shooting...this could make for interesting parties...the who is who isn't affair
our culture is getting so interesting now all this really very important stuff going on the things that make us who we are a demented aimless lockean idealised american dreamer cult who are on pharmeceutical drugs because they put them in the water systems with guns all these happy suburban streets in american just so peaceful
in montana the law is unconcealed weapons are OK you can have a gun rack but you have to show your gun
the cops have to know you're carrying they have to see it
how to wrench the gun theme out of the american collective consciousness....computer games...there's the answer why not computer games
we march a strange beat to progress
what's that popping noise
does santa carry a gun
oyvey
jh
Mental health is not the issue.
Assault weapons are the issue.
I took the NRA safety course when I was 10 years old. I passed it.
I was given a 22 single shot rifle at age 9. We used it for target practice.
When I was 11 my dad took me out to a local dump where there were prairie dogs. He said he wanted to show me what killing was like. We shot a couple prairie dogs, and that was that. I never shot and killed anything again.
Deer and fowl hunters have their sport. With the rate at which we've been destroying habitat, the bird ritual will eventually be like shooting fish in a barrel, not very competitive, and kind of dumb.
Shooting game for food is from an earlier time, before we transported and preserved foods. Again, kind of dumb to think stalking harmless grazing animals with high powered scoped rifles is and kind of sport. Using a bow and arrow presents more of a challenge.
Assault weapons serve no purpose in a civilized society. We want our soldiers to have the best equipment, but ordinary citizens have no useful need for them, except as toys, or to kill people with.
Should we allow people to buy and own hand grenades? Same argument.
Kirby's a pussy about this. As a Republican, he has to defend assault weapons because the GOP is in bed with the NRA. But he's unlikely ever to want or need a gun himself. But he's still capable of it. At some point, one of his Tea Party friends will drag him into a gun store, and try to persuade him he needs "home protection" in the form of a .45 calibre.
He might just bite.
Kirby,
There is an argument beginning to emerge.that mental health is the issue. The Norwegian killernplus other mass shootings in FINLAND England and Germany demonstrate that banning guns may not be the panacea the left reflexively believes.
I don't think that banning assault rifles is a panacea. I do think it would materially both the rate of mass murders and per-incident body count, with few undesirable side effects.
As for the Norwegian killer, the guns he used were legally purchased. The Finnish killers (both at Jokela and Kauhajoki) had permits for the weapons they used.
I'm willing to consider other cases, but in all the cases I've looked at, the guns that were used were legally owned, and therefore cannot be used to make the case that outlawing assault rifles would be an ineffective strategy. Indeed, the experience of Australia, which enacted reasonable limits on gun possession after a 1996 mass murder, has shown that such limits are effective in reducing the rate of mass murders and the per-incident body counts.
At New Life Church when the freak show appeared he was hit by a female member of the congregation and shot at ten times.
Actually, a female security guard. This begs question of what kind of church feels a need for armed security guards, doesn't it? Anyway, that shooter used a Bushmaster (like the Connecticut shooter), which would be made illegal under an assault weapons ban, while the security guard used a concealed weapon, presumably a police revolver (she was a former police officer), which would not be. So what point do you think you're making?
Should teachers pack?
Hell no. The best way to ensure the safety of students and staff is to keep weapons out of the schools, with perhaps a limited exception for a relatively small security staff at high schools.
Response times vary but if it took five minutes for the police to arrive at Stu's house and he was unarmed he and his wife would be dead.
It wouldn't take five minutes, but statistics show that you're more likely to be killed if you're packing than not. But then, so too is the intruder. There's a tradeoff here. You might be less likely to be targeted if it's known that your packing, unless the guns themselves are an objective, as they often are.
I llive on a small village with two squad cars on duty plus the sheruiff. Atop detective lives across from me and we're pals. But everyone suggests I should have a gun. Can I buy a rifle or a handgun? Do I need to take a course?
It's not crazy, but... It's probably not helpful, either, and it's expensive.
Because you love your wife and kids, you'd need gun safe. If the guns not in the safe, the kids will find a way to kill themselves or someone else with it. And if it's in the safe, it's not much use in a home-invasion. Pesky tradeoff, that.
Anyway, a decent revolver is going to set you back $700+, and a suitable single-pistol safe is going to another $100. Remember to get a safe big enough to hold all your ammo.
If you live in a neighborhood, I wouldn't bother. If you far enough out in the country that other people won't hear it if you're shot, it's a more reasonable decision. Your call, though.
And yes, if you do decide to buy a rifle or handgun, get trained. It improves your odds, maybe even to the break-even point.
The thing is, I'm open to different possibilities. I think one of the problems is that like you said the gun has to be in a safe. What's the likelihood of my getting it out of the safe in time? That might take two minutes. Plus, loading it (you're not supposed to store a loaded gun). Then there's the frightful expense, and the weirdness of having it in the home.
I've only had one experience with a BB gun. It wasn't that pleasant. I shot a bird and cried for about a month.
I was so shocked by the reality that nothing could bring the bird back to life, and by the permanence of the damage I had done.
Most of the people I know who pack are law officers. They seem quite comfortable with guns. These are people who could also ride a motorcycle safely. They are people whose feet are on the ground instead of head in the clouds types like me.
I'm so grateful for that type of individual.
I watch TV shows in which law officers like Eastwood take out criminals... dirty Harry, for instance, or the Bronson films set in the Bronx.
I don't live in neighborhoods like that.
Part of the deterrent for me too is the loud sound. I can't stand loud sounds. The guy behind me is experimenting with souping up his engine, and it's loud.
Exactly where is the cut-off between a regular gun and an assault rifle? It seems to me that "assault" is the questionable term.
Of course this still leaves truck bombs such as at OKC, and other means of killing. Seems like if you wanted to kill children you could become a teacher and poison a whole class by putting something in the salad.
Children are terribly vulnerable.
At Beslan I think it was hundreds of children killed by terrorists.
If you want to hurt someone, it's the kids that are the most vulnerable. I remember that in Colombia when they wanted to get Escobar the extra-legal groups targeted his family and he came right out of the woodwork to defend them and got 800 bullets in his body as a result.
I still haven't heard why this most recent nut wanted to harm children. That seems to me to be the lowest of all lows: especially insofar as they weren't armed. At least he should have given them a sporting chance by arming them first and teaching them how to shoot.
There are a number of things that I don't understand about psychopaths.
With terrorists or political killers such as the Red Brigades they turn people into symbols.
That makes sense then why they can kill them.
They aren't people with histories of their own, or parents, or siblings. They are just symbols to be erased.
Even within the surrealist movement there was an element of this.
Breton wrote that firing into a crowd was the most revolutionary act of all.
I never understood this statement. It borders on recklessness.
While I enjoy mental recklessness, and while Breton never did anything like that, the surrealists often championed lawless criminals such as the Bonnot gang.
That sort of recklessness is what we find to an extent in Frost's undermining the wall between his and the neighbor's property. This is quite incoherent of him.
Marx's great rival Proudhon wrote that "Property is theft." But this was in a very early work. Proudhon was 28. In a later work written toward age 50 he wrote that property is the great engine of the middle classes, and the only stay against the totalitarian nature of the state.
That's in a book called Theorie de la Propriete, which perhaps I alone have read. There are only a few copies in French libraries.
But it's a far more mature argument. He was fiftyish as he wrote it.
Private property is the basis of individual freedom. If that can be taken away by the state, then so can our bodies, our lives, everything.
Poetry references these important problems and it's important for poets to get them right.
I'm not saying we shouldn't exchange gifts for Christmas. But it should be voluntary and individual, and not a mandated thing coming from the White House.
There's an element of anarchism in Frost.
I'm against this element.
I want law and order, based on private property.
The Dominicans and the Franciscans at various points are against private property. There was an element of communalism in Peter and James' commune in Jerusalem. You get glimpses of it in JC Superstar, too.
But they had expected the eschaton to arrive momentarily.
Over the long haul we need to think about how to make a community function... This seems to mean walls, boundaries, designations of mine and yours, and so on. Legal agreements are quite profound and important.
I guess there are some people too stupid to understand these distinctions, or who think that it's a form of theft, as the early Proudhon did.
It's actually the only kind of order that makes any sense. I assume even monks wouldn't like everyone using their toothbrush.
I assume all over Iowa there are fences.
I mean, what are surveyors for?
if a person can kill to protect his private property doesn't it follow that freedom is defined by fear of instant death
monks are stewards of their belongings
i do not own my guitars
i do not let anyone else use my toothbrush i don't let anyone into my cell....ever... i have many books and somehow i know they are all on loan...some of the stuff inside the books is in my possession i should hope...i never locke my door
barbed wire became the defining material for self absorbed violent and impotent clutching to the myth of private property...chief joseph of the nez perce had it right...own the land??!! you've got to be phuqqin kidding (or something to that effect)
things are good
but we should be willing to give them away like money we should be willing to give money away if more people just gave money away there'd be less anxiety and more people would be surprised to find $100 in an envelope some morning because it was their day to get some money
people should work at embracing poverty then private property begins to really mean something
young men in desperate straights
where are the good fathers
jh
If someone were to embrace poverty then no worries. For big government to beggar folks so that they are dependent on the largesse of the state then that's different since.it's the main way the left has found to get elected. The right is about everyone working and saving for themselves. If some choose to live in communes then that's fine. It's another version of the 1st amendment. But for Frost to buck his neighbors or run them down as they sought in vain to close out his bohemian nonsensicalness is not ok. He disses his neighbor and this isn't Christian. It's Satanic at best.
What do Manson Loughner Hinckley Chapman Squeaky Fromme and Lanzo have in common? Why do all the other people with guns not use them inappropriately?
does a gun or a gunshot ever appear in the poetry of robert frost
i know a chainsaw does
how many gun fatalities are there on any given day in the land of the brave and the home of the free
from a purely evolutionary perspective i suppose it is like lemmings
jh
jh,
how many gun fatalities are there on any given day in the land of the brave and the home of the free
According to the CDC, there were 31,347 firearms fatalities in the US during 2011, or about 86/day. This was comprised of accidental (554), suicide (18,735), homicide (11,493), undetermined (232), and legal intervention/war (333). Assuming that the later category included self-defense, it seems that a personal firearm is at least 60x more likely to be used to kill its owner than to kill a potential assailant.
how many people are killed by law enforcement each year in USAH
Oops. 31,347 was the final 2009 number, reported in 2012. There are only preliminary statistics for 2011. Accidents (851), Suicide (19,766), Homicide (11,101), Undetermined (222), Legal/War (9). So the preliminary total for 2011 was 31,949.
What is perhaps most interesting about this statistic is that the number of traffic fatalities per year in the US is currently falling, and was at 32,310. Almost the same.
There appear to be roughly as many cars as guns in the US (about 240 Million), and roughly as many deaths per year caused by each. But there's a big difference in ownership patterns. It's estimated that 95% of US households own a car, whereas the comparable rate for guns is about 35% (there's considerable controversy here -- this is taken as a rough consensus). A simple calculation shows that households that own gun and cars are about 4x more likely to kill someone (most likely themselves) than households that own just cars.
jh,
how many people are killed by law enforcement each year in USAH
The wiki article "List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States 2011" gives an estimate of 400 justifiable homicides/year. It gives a list (believed to be incomplete) of killings by law enforcement for 2011. By my count, this list contains 156 names.
This is somewhat more than my estimate of 300-ish for 2009 (then stated as 2011), which improves the ratios for gun owners, so it appears that (police included), a personal weapon is about 40x as likely to kill it's owner as it is to be used in a justifiable homicide (which might mean self defense, or the defense of someone else).
How many lightning strikes per year that are lethal?
ever since luther the lutherans have been oddly concerned about lightening strikes
gee...maybe it's time to call up an armed milita...we're running short on military
the constitution needs to take a walk
Kirby,
How many lightning strikes per year that are lethal?
There were 26 killed by lightning in 2011, down from a high of 432 in 1942. The difference is credited to public education -- but I think also to the ubiquity of timely forecasting.
This is what I posted to the ABAA chat-site this morning:
"Yesterday on NPR the Washington NRA representative stated, for the record, that their
position was that we need MORE GUNS in this country, that MORE GUNS could have
prevented Sandy Hook or mad it less catastrophic, had the teachers and/or administrators had guns
in their possession. They described the "cause" of these shootings as a failure of
our mental health system to identify and treat suspected shooters.
Assault weapons are only used by soldiers, and by a "lunatic fringe" of the "male war-games" crowd--
men who dress up in military fatigues and march through the outback carrying machine guns
and grenades and bazookas. The other thing, is that handguns are of little or no use as
hunting weapons, and are only used or useful in close range confrontations between people.
The main obstacle to sensible legislation is the very real fear that Senators and Representatives
feel that the NRA can defeat them at the ballot box, as has been proven on several occasions.
In the case of Sandy Hook, the shooter's mother legally owned an assault rifle. If she had
not possessed this weapon, her son would not have had easy access to such a weapon.
The argument that he "would have managed to obtain" such a weapon is a weak argument.
We have mentally ill people all the time, and that is not new. What is new is the easy
availability of the assault weapons (and hand-guns) in our society.
How is it that a relatively small industry--small in terms of the amount of money it represents
in the general economy--reportedly eleven billion gross annually--can wield such overwhelming
power over our government? It's well organized and highly motivated, and like so much of
our political life, does NOT represent the majority sentiment of the people. Its continued influence
is an outrage--another example of the power of money and lobbying in our state and
national political process.
If we tell our congressional representatives that we won't stand for any more malingering on
this issue, they will listen. No more "broad array" of solutions. No more grief counseling
in the public schools. Gun regulation NOW.
How about a grass roots national initiative campaign to gather signatures? I have no doubt
that tens of millions would get behind it. The lame duck legislators could lead the charge.
The only thing they have to fear is fear itself."
Kirby needs guns. There are communists and madmen and teenage bullies haunting the streets of his town. He needs to "pack." I can see Kirby with his side-holstered .45, striding into the local 7 Eleven at 6 AM demanding coffee.
It's a big world out there, Kirb, you need that edge.
Maybe the Tea Party could move for an armed revolution against the Obama Administration.
Assault weapons could be the spearhead of this new action.
I nominate Kirby as the organizer for Delhi. First order of business, start a gun fund at the local church, and start ordering them pronto.
The local militia needs to be formed. Kirby's captain. His home can be the command center.
Are the police friends or enemies? This will have to be determined.
Protective vests will be mandatory.
And so it starts.
In a little town in upstate New York, on a cold day in December, an obscure fanatical college instructor started the revolution that changed America.
Don't sample any Kool-Aid.
There's a direct correlation between the numbers of guns in the general population, and the incidents of injury or death as a result of accidental or deliberate shootings.
But Kirby knows otherwise. More guns will mean greater safety and fewer injuries and deaths. This is why we need more guns, why Kirby needs guns in his house. He's in imminent danger of home invasion, rape, kidnap, and terrorist attack.
Is there a gun shop in Delhi? Better yet, determine the nearest gun show venue, and mark your calendar.
These are times that try men's souls.
Stand up and be counted.
Get armed today.
The time is nigh.
The end of the world approaches.
It's amusing how every event makes the cicadas chant the same songs. But isn't this the problem w groupthink and the lack of intellectual diversity in the first place? In Switzerland every family has a gun. It's a given. And yet the murder rate is low. Your party keeps you folks in a cave and only lets you out to vote.
"In Switzerland every family has a gun. It's a given."
That's an interesting point, though I don't see that it has anything to do with "our party."
There are a lot of Democratic gun freaks in the South, and Democrat NRA shills to nurse them.
In very small countries with a history of paranoid delusion, like Switzerland, they have a national militia. It's considered a military necessity, since they're surrounded by outsiders and potential threats. Israel, on the other hand, has very real threats to deal with, and its national conscription is simple self-preservation.
But America is a very large nation. Though it once had a wide-open "frontier" (which fostered a frontier mentality and a lawlessness which is the stuff of legend--though a bit exaggerated for effect)--it has no immediate geographical threats. Prior to WWI, we were primarily isolationist in policy, believing that we had no immediate military vulnerability, which was true then, up until Russia got the bomb--but that changed. There has never been any point in our history that Americans needed to be concerned about a domestic land war, hence the lack of a need for general civilian conscription and universal military training. That lack of vulnerability was punctured by 9/11, which is what spawned the "homeland security" bureaucracy. Nevertheless, we've never needed a domestic militia as such, and hence the inappropriateness of Kirby's citation.
Not that he needs any excuse for irrelevant citations. He throws them out like peanut shells for the gallery.
Civilians don't need hand-guns and assault weapons and grenades and radioactive substances and deadly poisons. That's why they should be outlawed. Violence isn't a "price we must pay" for freedom.
Freedom isn't the right to bring harm to fellow citizens, as ultra-conservatives contend. Or the right to rip them off.
Kirby begs for rules. For boundaries. For laws.
Okay, let's stop this BS and pass a law to forbid hand-guns and assault weapons from being sold or possessed by citizens.
Wiki has a list of gun ownership per capita by country here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country
The problem with Switzerland being fourth is that it's a per capita listing however every family has to have a gun because every family is part of the militia. All the Scandinavian countries also have them and many of the Arabic countries.
But you don't hear of the mass shootings we have which are almost invariably by loner-kooks which the Democrats following Foucault have decided not to stigmatize, and which the Republicans don't want to care for, since it costs too much.
I am not sure if Obamacare has a side that will allow for the return of public sponsored incarceration of the mentally ill.
In NY State there used to be a gigantic asylum near Buffalo. It is immense. It still stands. It's about a half mile long brick building perhaps six stories high. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. Except for one very small wing, it's now empty.
Which means they're all out.
I have some inkling that Reagan let those folks out. This is partially because new drugs allowed them to better control their psychotic states.
America is crawling with psychotic and sociopathic denizens.
That might be the difference between Switzerland and America and Yemen. I wouldn't know.
But the problem with the left is that they have these immediate answers for everything. And you're not allowed to disagree.
Hillary gets a concussion a week before she's due to testify on Benghazi. No one says anything. The media simply reports it as factual, and moves on.
No hint of suspicion?
This place has gotten incredibly amusing.
I'm laughing almost from the minute I get up until the second I fall asleep at the absurdity of this nation.
The media has been zombified by the left, and the population has been zombified along with it.
I suppose on things that people have actual experience with: (Curtis actually was taken to the border by his cousin, and lives in SF so has had some eye-opening encounters with gay men) then there's a chance that someone will fall afoul of the consensus.
Otherwise, it's lock step to the cliff.
It's as if America is now one big asylum.
Even to try to define normal is now forbidden. how dare you?
Wiki has a list of gun ownership per capita by country here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country
The problem with Switzerland being fourth is that it's a per capita listing however every family has to have a gun because every family is part of the militia. All the Scandinavian countries also have them and many of the Arabic countries.
But you don't hear of the mass shootings we have which are almost invariably by loner-kooks which the Democrats following Foucault have decided not to stigmatize, and which the Republicans don't want to care for, since it costs too much.
I am not sure if Obamacare has a side that will allow for the return of public sponsored incarceration of the mentally ill.
In NY State there used to be a gigantic asylum near Buffalo. It is immense. It still stands. It's about a half mile long brick building perhaps six stories high. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. Except for one very small wing, it's now empty.
Which means they're all out.
I have some inkling that Reagan let those folks out. This is partially because new drugs allowed them to better control their psychotic states.
America is crawling with psychotic and sociopathic denizens.
That might be the difference between Switzerland and America and Yemen. I wouldn't know.
But the problem with the left is that they have these immediate answers for everything. And you're not allowed to disagree.
Hillary gets a concussion a week before she's due to testify on Benghazi. No one says anything. The media simply reports it as factual, and moves on.
No hint of suspicion?
This place has gotten incredibly amusing.
I'm laughing almost from the minute I get up until the second I fall asleep at the absurdity of this nation.
The media has been zombified by the left, and the population has been zombified along with it.
I suppose on things that people have actual experience with: (Curtis actually was taken to the border by his cousin, and lives in SF so has had some eye-opening encounters with gay men) then there's a chance that someone will fall afoul of the consensus.
Otherwise, it's lock step to the cliff.
It's as if America is now one big asylum.
Even to try to define normal is now forbidden. how dare you?
Kirby,
Switzerland is a very different society, with very different gun laws. There is universal male militia service, which means that most adult men own either fully-automatic SG SIG 550's (if they're in the militia), or semi-autos (if they've been discharged). Ammunition for these weapons is tightly controlled. Private citizens can purchase ammo for these weapons at licensed ranges, but they're obligated to shoot it there. A consequence of this is that while every family has an assault rifle at home, essentially none of the families has ammunition for it. This is an important caveat. Switzerland does permit the private ownership of traditional hunting weapons and their associated ammo.
Switzerland is also a country that has a high level of public expenditure. E.g., taxes constitute 34.5% of GDP in Switzerland, vs. 22% for the US. A consequence is that there is far less income dispersion: the bottom 10% of Swiss society earn 7.5% of the income, vs. 2% in the US, while the upper 10% earns only 19% of the income, vs. 30% in the US. That bottom figure is especially important -- the lower 10% makes 1/4 less than the average in Switzerland, vs. 4/5ths less in the US.
In many ways, Switzerland better fits a Democratic ideal of a well-ordered society than a Republican ideal: public service (via the militia) is ubiquitous, public expenditures are a larger part of the economy, the population is well educated, income dispersion and poverty are low. If you want to hold Switzerland up as an example to emulate, I'm all for it.
One of the strangest things that happened since Curtis Faville fell into his 40-year sleep that ended a few years ago when he awakened his literary interests after having put them to sleep in order to make a living within the bureaucracy is that the study of poetry fell out of fashion in the academy. Forty years ago it was still possible to find academics who read poetry and thought of it as important. The modernist poets were then the rage. Many people read Pound, Williams, Ginsberg, and others, and discussed their work. But when the feminists swept in during the eighties this phenomenon disappeared in favor of several other disciplines: cultural studies became a more important aspect of the humanities. Rediscovering women writers became important.
Because poetry has never had a large public, we now have scholars whose work consists of "reading" Broadway musicals. And Soap Operas. And Mad Magazine. I kid you not. This has been a very big trend.
I haven't seen more than five advertisements for a scholar interested in modernist poetry within the last twenty years. I look at the ads a lot, and am incredibly amused by them. When I do see a department advertising for someone interested in a modernist scholar of poetry, it's most often in a place such as Singapore, or Switzerland.
And these positions are amazingly rare.
There are still positions open for poets of course, and poet-scholars are still sought, but you'd have to have several volumes of verse and your main teaching load would be creative writing which could of course feature Pound's poems, or Williams' poems, too.
The only modernist at UW who taught was Charles Altieri (he's been at UC Berkeley for twenty years now).
It's somewhat amazing that Curtis still exists, which is one of the reasons I appreciate him, even though his viewpoints are bizarrely antiquated and undeniably violent (he wants to put me into an asylum, call me a Nazi, and get me fired all at once).
Even though his understanding of the modernists is forty years old, and needs serious updating, he at least has that interest. It's strange how intact it has been kept. It's as if he wrapped up his interests in fine cloth and has reopened them in retirement.
I still welcome him even though he's completely deranged, but then who isn't?
Stu:
Did you read my comment?
Countries like Switzerland and Israel have high military profiles for understandable reasons.
Those reasons don't apply in America.
We still have a silly "frontier" mentality, which is completely inappropriate in our urban and suburban areas. Hand-guns and assault weapons in the hands of civilians inevitably lead to violence and mayhem. This has nothing to do with "hunting."
Kirby wants to start a grass roots revolution in America to take it back from the "communists." Hence, "militia."
In Colonial America, the founding fathers felt that citizens needed to protect themselves from government--even their own government.
But we've seen how the gun culture has filtered into the religious sphere, and now we have cults armed to the teeth to "defend" themselves against the police, and the FBI, and presumably the homeland security folks.
Do you support this nonsense?
JH meanwhile asks us about Frost and guns. Frost did have a gun. He waved it around from time to time at his own family. Frost's whole family were in and out of institutions. Here's a bit:
"Frost had his own demons to battle, and he understood all too well the darkness that lurked on the periphery of life. Born to an alcoholic father and a depressed mother, Frost was plagued all his years by the effects of mental illness on himself and on those he loved. Frost had to commit his sister Jeanie to a Maine state mental hospital in 1920, and she died there in 1929 at the age of 53. His son Carol committed suicide in 1940, at the age of 38. Daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. And other tragedies rocked the family—his daughter Marjorie died in childbirth in 1934, when she was 29 years old, and wife Elinor died of heart failure in 1938, a few months after the couple's 42nd wedding anniversary.
Frost also suffered from depression, and often felt himself unhinged by his darker impulses. His daughter Lesley recalled waking up one night to find Frost pointing a gun at Elinor and threatening, "Take your choice. Before morning, one of us will be dead."18 His fears, angers, and jealousies could be alarmingly intense. When Frost learned that his publisher, Holt, was planning to put out a book of literary criticism that did not contain an essay of Frost's own work, the poet threatened and raged until the book's author was forced to find another publisher.19 For all of his weaknesses, poetry seemed to be the glue that held Frost together. It was his way of making sense of the world, of distilling the vast terrifying wild into controlled verse. Poetry was a way to engage with life—not a means of escaping it. "The weak think they are escaping," Frost once said. "The strong think they are pursuing."20
The modernists were not what we think they were. Nothing is what we think it is. Our thinking is framed by certain framing devices, and we have to constantly fight out of these devices. One of the salutary things about this blog is that it allows me to emerge from a relative isolation and have dialogue with people without actually having to actually meet anyone. It allows me to exchange ideas and have them challenged. One of the reasons I started watching Fox is that I was amazed that such a channel even exists. It televises viewpoints that I thought were illegal, since you never see them on campus, or hear them anywhere much. But that they still exist is somewhat wonderful.
I am so used to the PC left and its horrors that I didn't think anything existed outside of that mess of mentally ill norms.
Something there is that loves an asylum.
One of the strangest things that happened since Curtis Faville fell into his 40-year sleep that ended a few years ago when he awakened his literary interests after having put them to sleep in order to make a living within the bureaucracy is that the study of poetry fell out of fashion in the academy. Forty years ago it was still possible to find academics who read poetry and thought of it as important. The modernist poets were then the rage. Many people read Pound, Williams, Ginsberg, and others, and discussed their work. But when the feminists swept in during the eighties this phenomenon disappeared in favor of several other disciplines: cultural studies became a more important aspect of the humanities. Rediscovering women writers became important.
Because poetry has never had a large public, we now have scholars whose work consists of "reading" Broadway musicals. And Soap Operas. And Mad Magazine. I kid you not. This has been a very big trend.
I haven't seen more than five advertisements for a scholar interested in modernist poetry within the last twenty years. I look at the ads a lot, and am incredibly amused by them. When I do see a department advertising for someone interested in a modernist scholar of poetry, it's most often in a place such as Singapore, or Switzerland.
And these positions are amazingly rare.
There are still positions open for poets of course, and poet-scholars are still sought, but you'd have to have several volumes of verse and your main teaching load would be creative writing which could of course feature Pound's poems, or Williams' poems, too.
The only modernist at UW who taught was Charles Altieri (he's been at UC Berkeley for twenty years now).
It's somewhat amazing that Curtis still exists, which is one of the reasons I appreciate him, even though his viewpoints are bizarrely antiquated and undeniably violent (he wants to put me into an asylum, call me a Nazi, and get me fired all at once).
Even though his understanding of the modernists is forty years old, and needs serious updating, he at least has that interest. It's strange how intact it has been kept. It's as if he wrapped up his interests in fine cloth and has reopened them in retirement.
I still welcome him even though he's completely deranged, but then who isn't?
I'd like to follow up a bit on the ammo for the Swiss militia weapons. Until 2007, active militia members had 50 rounds of ammunition for their weapons in a sealed container, which had to be presented at their annual training with the seals unbroken. But in 2007, this policy was terminated, and even active militia members no longer have ammunition for their weapons at home.
Very likely, this was blowback from the 2001 Zug massacre, in which a psychologically deranged individual used a couple of semi-automatic weapons, together with a shotgun and a revolver, to kill fourteen members of the Zug canton parliament, and then himself.
This strikes me as a fairly thoughtful solution, although I doubt it is one that would satisfy the NRA types.
Kirby:
I think you're delusional, at the least.
You pose as a serious academic, but all your anxieties and suspicions come from ignorance and a lack of seriousness.
You think to squirm out of responsibility by being funny and cute.
But the cuteness doesn't work. It's still hate speech, and it is still appalling, that an academic is plainly incompetent in his own field.
I have no doubt that I'm more well-versed in cultural criticism than you are, but I don't wear it on my sleeve.
The discussions here about art and literature are limited by your own ignorance, not by any short-fall among the commenters. You attract few if any literary readers, because you don't rate them. You attract other kinds of people. Compared to them, your literary knowledge may seem impressive, but we both know it isn't.
You're not fooling anybody.
You have no literary aims with respect to this blog. Your taste is nonexistent, and your interest in culture is trivial and superficial. I should think you might have made a pretty good advertising man, thinking up jingles and absurd pitches. You probably missed your calling.
But as a serious academic with an interest in literature or art?
Please.
Curtis,
Did you read my comment?
Countries like Switzerland and Israel have high military profiles for understandable reasons.
I didn't read your 10:46:00 comment until after posting my 11:07:00 comment. Scholarship takes time :-). Anyway, yes, Switzerland and especially Israel have good reasons for ubiquitous military service. Israel even requires women to serve, IIRC.
Those reasons don't apply in America.
No, but there are other reasons that do. Social integration in the US is relatively low. There's good evidence that shared service helps foster social integration. Sometimes one solution can solve more than one problem. I think the problem here is that when you read the word "militia," what jumps into your mind are paramilitary groups in the US acting out juvenile fantasies, but that's not what I'm talking about. Indeed, the US Constitution does not speak of unrestricted militia, but instead of a well-regulated militia, and I think this captures the relevant distinction remarkably clearly.
But we've seen how the gun culture has filtered into the religious sphere, and now we have cults armed to the teeth to "defend" themselves against the police, and the FBI, and presumably the homeland security folks.
Do you support this nonsense?
I think you're talking a certain amount of nonsense, e.g., when you think of the religious communities of the US as though they're monolithic w.r.t. their attitude towards guns.
I'm OK with hunting weapons (i.e., non-semi-auto long arms with limited, non-removable magazines), especially in an ex-urban/rural context, with mandatory licensing which requires training and the absence of psychological disease. I think that pistols and assault rifles are intended only to kill people, and so should be restricted to deputized security forces and the military respectively. I think the Swiss approach (separating ammo from weapons) is a clever one, but I'm doubtful that it's workable in the US. Ammo is too easy to smuggle.
I also think that the transition from a gun-immersed culture to a more limited culture is going to be expensive, as the most effective strategy would involve a buy-back program. Doing the arithmetic, it looks as though such a program would cost about a quarter of a trillion dollars. Even if you spread it out over a few years, this is a significant perturbation of the federal budget, but IMO would be well worth it.
Kirby,
Something there is that loves an asylum.
You should move to South Carolina. You know the Petigru quote?
Kirby:
I think that spending time teaching undergraduates in the humanities carries a certain risk, especially in rural or out of the way places. I remember teaching undergraduates at Iowa. I could have said anything and these poor kids wouldn't have had much of a clue whether I was telling them the truth or a load of manure. Your scatterbrained style here may be a reflection of the teaching habit you've gotten into, of trying to get students' attention with outrageous, half-serious, half-humorous assertions. Ha ha ha. There'll be a test on Friday.
The odd thing is, you first lured me over the the LS site by taking sides (with me) over the infection of the humanities by politically correct multi-cultural inclusion and textual relativism. Those developments occurred in the very period that I was away from the academy. They frustrated you, and that was a concern we seemed to share. Now you've apparently jumped over the counter and you're accusing ME of being out of touch. But my knowledge of Left academic models is probably more developed than yours.
If you would have me be "old" I can have no defense. I turned 65 this year, and I did work in a government bureaucracy for 27 years, years when--between, say, 1979 and 2002, I didn't spend much time writing or reading literature. But I wasn't idle. I read deeply in the arts and architecture, taking a Master's in Landscape Architecture in 1986, and development my pursuit of large format photography. I found it difficult to stay focused on my writing when I was spending 6-9 hours a day on technical writing and study at work. I make no apology. At least I was earning an honest living--something I think you regard as worthy.
o great really great just great you guys are into your rhetorical coup d glazes and everything else just goes to hell i mean after awhile even the couch is uncomfortable after awhile the hum of the refridgerator is the only music there is after awhile even the political argument sounds like a scam there's nothing left to do but watch tv and eat bad food contained as they all are in cubicles with computers it's a mad house in there who is in charge kirby are you in charge maybe we need a general around here someone to give orders so the borders can keep in the horders and let the lorders play
you guys are playing a badmitton mad mitton match and it's making my neck lurch
time is of the essence who gets the last word stan getz i should hope not the cool went down with acid rock that was the end nobody listened to cool anymore the brazilian stuff has some historical merit but everything else is negligible save for the aficianado of that particular era...although one would have to say that miles davis struck a timeless chord in kinda blue
it sounds like people like dave letterman and bloomstein no bloombury no bloomberg yeah that guy and obamasan all want to do something but what are they going to do there are just too many guns to be regulated too much candy out there too many sugar slavering children wanting guns i'd say
turn off the TVs and computers completely one week a month no computers or TVs for seven whole days everyone just stops looking at television and computer screens no movies nothing for seven whole days a national day of abstinence or a week oK a week of no tv
what would this do for our beloved country
cry the beloved country
we are all imprisoned in the limitations of our minds
solace
most people are good
thank god for that
yet desperation reigns
like a brooding king
conversation here tends to narrrow to a quadralogue or a trialogue or when craig weighs in a quintalogue
lots of interesting thoughts however
wow
like wow man
time for a cigarette
jh
With respect to the personal attacks, there is an old saying in psychiatry, that people only have as much power over us as we're willing to grant them (or tolerate). The other part of that is that we can only be moved by the opinion of people we respect, or whose opinions we respect.
I suspect that the majority of people who visit your site are appalled at the things you say, especially in the comment box. But for the most part, I guess you behave the way you do as a way of generating interest, and keeping people's attention, by any means possible.
But political subjects demand more gravity, and I think that's where you really go wrong here. Talking about Breton wanting to shoot capitalists is one thing, but making light of racist remarks about the President is another. These are not interchangeable strategies.
IOW, since I have little respect for most of your opinions, there isn't much you could say about me or my thinking that would move me. Which is another way of saying, why bother to attack my person, unless you're thinking to set me up. The other folks here are familiar with your behavior, so doing it over and over is kind of doggedly pointless, no?
Anyone who thinks that everyone is a communist, or is out to get them, has real deep-seated psychological issues. Is this blog the place to work those issues out?
Altieri is quite partial to Stevens as I recall with an emphasis on abstraction.
This is in fact a different kind of setting and one that isn't in the framework of scholarship. I have sent some scholarship forward, but I don't think you have the patience to read it.
This is one of the problems now. Who has the patience to read?
The legislature pumps out bilge that gets passed and which no one has read. Who read the stimulus bill? Who has read the Obamacare package?
I have read the Constitution but do I really understand it? I have no idea what it means.
In graduate school I read probably five hundred books of contemporary French theory, in French, and talked for thousands of hours about it with French professors, in French. Now I have decided that all of that can be boiled down to: useless.
Since economics has invaded my field, I have also tried gamely to understand the economics issues. This is another enormous undertaking. I'm reading Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, by Sylvia Nasar (she wrote A Beautiful Mind). Her dismissal of Marxism is really something.
I'm also reading the Keynes-Hayek Debate, by Wapshott.
I have gone through Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom. Twice. I've also read several books on Hayek, and have read 3000 pages of Marx. I've even read his competition such as Proudhon and Stirner.
I've read hundreds of pages of Stalin's writing (he's coherent and wrote incredibly well). As well as Stalinist aesthetic thought (particularly Zhdanov and his competition such as the Hungarian and Romanian schools and the few who managed to work around it, such as Bakhtin -- Rabelais and his World).
Meanwhile, I have found that the field I wanted to work in -- contemporary poetry -- has simply disappeared as an area of scholarship.
That is, there are no jobs.
I am quite fascinated by humor study. It is a nascent field. There are no jobs there, either. In thirty years I have never seen one job advertised for a humor scholar.
So here I am working with freshman composition (I get students from areas such as plumbing and heating, golf course management, and so on, along with a few students who wish to be nurses or psychological counsellors and many students who have no idea whatsoever what they want to do). Most of these students have never read a complete book.
I kid you not.
I tried to introduce them to writing about places and some did extremely well. I got a terrific study of an old folks home where one student works. Another wrote a terrific paper about deer stands.
But I kid you not. I went through my paper on Marianne Moore's Camperdown elm and no one could understand the poem even after we went through it four times.
I tried to read the paper to them, and after a solid week we hadn't gotten through the first paragraph.
One of my better students asked me if it was a work of fiction that I was writing.
Almost none of the students know the difference between definitely and defiantly. Very few know when it's appropriate to use "it's" versus its.
I've taught at the U. of Washington and had the same experience. Here the students are actually better because they have their feet on the ground. Many have some sense of a trade.
Many care about their families.
And many go to church.
I also teach a Bible intro and a Philosophy intro and a Mythology intro.
I get students who are twenty years old who have not HEARD of Zeus. I kid you not.
And yet these young people can feed themselves. They can drive a car. They can vote. They can get married and have children, and are very sophisticated about clothing and how to build a table.
I also teach a creative writing class, and get some publishable papers. I have had students publish creative essays and stories and even get paid. I like the students here. In any class I also have some very gifted students along with students whose families have virtually disabled them from learning through all the fighting and drug use and what not. It's hard to reach anyone, and to do it you have to put up with a lot of grief from all the neuroses and sickness and blinders people have on.
There remain a few places where I can have conversations about modernism and about politics. This is one of them. At times I do get excited about some aspect of these areas. Like others I am caught up in the events of our time and how people interpret these events.
I don't have a gun, and have only fired a BB gun a few times.
So I generally never think about this. I don't go in the woods because I don't know when the hunting season is around here.
Although I am not myself a big gun, I still publish poems in big journals such as Poetry East, Potomac Review, south Dakota Review, Christianity and Literature and have had poems in Partisan Review among many hundreds of others.
But I am also interested in talking with all kinds of people here. I don't want to talk about just modernism or the surrealists or the Beats (which is bogus for most of us).
I bring it up in passing.
But almost no one in America can read French or knows anything about surrealism from inside. The few in France who still do are snobs, and I don't want to talk with them either about much of anything. They just want to jump down your throat over peccadilloes.
I do still publish on these topics but they are for very specialized audiences and you need at least a Ph.D. in that area to understand the jargon, even though I try to make it as clear as possible.
How do you have a conversation about Lutheran Surrealism when you are in fact the only one who goes to a Lutheran church and has a lifelong interest in French surrealism? How do you lead people into thinking about this area? I have actually managed to publish an article or two on this in Lutheran Forum. I was told by the deacon that he did try to read it but it made no sense at all to him. If I had a lifetime I couldn't explain it to him but he's a very smart man.
I think you put up the title and talk about everything else. Occasionally you put up an entire sentence. Even with Curtis he is probably not aware that the one novel that WCW translated was a novel by Soupault that is available and in print. It's called Last Nights of Paris. It's a terrible wooden translation that WCW threw together in a weekend while he had a bad head cold. His French was lousy, but he had help from his trilingual mom. even that one book is one no one will ever read.
This means that all the people who came here have now read one sentence of the eighty books that Soupault wrote in his life.
That's a lot more than they had read beforehand.
I'm giving you tips, Curtis.
Advertising is NO SMALL PART of a movement's success.
Even Erik Satie said that he never neglected this side of things.
I'm bad at it, but at least I'm trying! I keep trying. I keep trying with the students. I keep trying with the general population. I have a lot of affection for the people who come here.
Heck, what do I know about Stu's advanced mathematical world, or JH's incredible knowledge of Thomism, or JADL's understanding of the events of the Vietnam War, or GM's understanding of Anabaptism, or your interest in some of the byways of modernism? Brett has a lot of interest in odd little documentaries and movies that no one will ever see. He's barely thirty so in thirty years who knows how advanced that interest will be? He will be increasingly isolated in his interests.
No one knows anything about anyone else or their interests.
Nor can we be expected to. I have tried to read some books on math but I'm just so bad at it. I watch NUMB3RS and am thrilled to get SOME of it. I read A Beautiful Mind and about a dozen other books on math mostly in order to accommodate Stu.
But I think it's good we don't agree, nor do we coincide in many ways. It's not frustrating to me. Communication is impossible. But I believe in attempting the impossible. I love impossibility.
But how do you have a blog? I think you need a lingua franca. What is today's linggua franca? Party politics. Because few in the arts world will take the Republican side, I do it. It has to be a game like cops and robbers and there has to be a relatively low entry rate so everyone can join.
I don't take it too seriously.
I also am not taking the Republican side for no reason. I want to understand it so try to argue from that viewpoint.
I was happy to see Lincoln last night and hear the Democrats as the evil party. It occurred to me that it took Democrats a hundred years to get on the side of right and even now they've turned it into something evil and backward just as they turned the bible into something evil and backward during the Civil War.
Now they put forth rgc rgc rgc.
they finally got it just when the Republicans have moved toward universal human rights.
It's quite amusing to me. The Democrats are still the southerners, but they think they're not because they're northerners.
Everything changes but doesn't.
I suppose all we can do is keep arguing.
Meanwhile, I recommend the new Spielberg movie. The complicated process of passing the 13th amendment is worthy of consideration even in this annotated form.
And I am trying to get out of the rut of communism versus capitalism and trying to get into some of the nuances. Keynes thought Marx was an uninformed idiot. I will attempt to enlarge the boxes and maybe develop a third box.
It will take time though. Be patient. Maybe in a year I will have a third box.
Meanwhile, you guys should read some Hayek. He's really quite good, and he and Keynes WERE friends.
Altieri, Craig, is good on ALL the modernists. He's one of the last scholars who knew all their work intimately. I sent him my book on Corso but never heard back. I argued with him strenuously in local papers but my arguments weren't very good. I did my best, though.
I doubt if he read any of my book on Corso. Some people do.
I recently had a couple from France write to me that they had read it and loved it. They translated part of it into French for their journal called Black Herald. They also asked me for a new introduction to some Corso poems they were translating into French.
The book is in about 400 libraries worldwide. People do still visit libraries.
I've read all of Altieri's books and really love his very abstract mind.
i suppose this is one way to say that the precedent for reading soupault...soupault is enough if there is enough soupault...has been established for all of us here who had never before read soupault...this is the first i've heard of him....was he french...is this a sort of general assignment now we all have to read all eighty books of soupault....welll OKKay...if you insist...do i get extra knucklehead points...i mean this must be worth something there must be pragmatic ends by all means this is america and we're nothing if not pragmatic reason reigns supreme of course bouillabaissie is great soupault those french always going to extremes
we should have a contest wherein we're all challenged to write one piece of political commentary in the mood of soupault could be gruelling but you take your caldo any way you can get it la sopa de gallegos
this is all a bunch of tripe
soupault the soup bowl
sopped some sloppy soup
i'm outta heah
jh
http://www.google.com.ph/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=wallace%20stevens%20vs%20hemingway&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kwls.org%2Flittoral%2Fernest_hemingway_knocked_walla%2F&ei=o2LRULSoCMXprQfmuoCICg&usg=AFQjCNGStPwRoyC-IwtwXZDa7cHC4damRQ&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.bmk
Would claim I'd forgotten this, but Soupault only now brings it to my attention.
Craig,
Let me help:
Key West Literary Seminar: Hemingway Knocked Wallace Stevens into a Puddle and Bragged About It
I don't know to what extent Soupault should be in anyone's interest here. My own interest in surrealism is partially historical, and partially an interest in the strange and beautiful poems and paintings they put together. I like many of the poets and many of the painters and even some of the novels these people wrote. But they're certainly not salubrious in the Christian sense. But Christianity haunted many of them. Soupault continued to touch upon prayer and angels and other topics in his poems right up through the end. He was the only surrealist to have rated Jesus with a 20.
Here is a brief review of a recent biography that I published about a month ago in an online Christian arts journal:
http://www.curatormagazine.com/kirby-olson/desire-the-drive-death-of-surrealism/
I realize that my interests in these realms is fairly recondite. I might be the only American who has ever read Soupault's entire works. There is one book in English. It's called Last Nights of Paris, published in 1928, and translated by William Carlos Williams (they were friends). Roosevelt (FDR) knew some of Soupault's poems by heart and recited one or two when they met. Soupault was an enormous writer 70 years ago. His continent has now disappeared.
I suppose that I am interested in the arts and how to connect them to Christianity more firmly again. This connection was quite thorough for a long time.
Now the arts look to politics instead for balustrade. And in terms of politics they look often to economics. Since Marx that has been the case. WCW and Pound and even Moore thought about economics. The first two have many essays on this topic. Moore limited herself to quick shots on it in her letters.
None of them could be said to be economists (find me an economist who claims to be a poet and you'd have something even funnier).
"Soupault was an enormous writer 70 years ago. His continent has now disappeared."
Kirby: Very nice metaphor.
It's like a compliment to the artist that his work implied a multitude or a great mass, and the "disappearance" is like a cataclysmic event, except it's absent.
I once concluded a prose poem about a man dreaming of the coast, that a large section of coast has fallen into the sea, "like a vague memory, dissolving."
yes
i think there can be a box
for
informed idiots
like this box i'm writing in
hey has anyone ever stopped
to recognize that in fact
we write in boxes
boxes are a part of life i guess
ho hum
on to the funeral reception
i was thinking of starting a minor movement called catholic surrealism
but then i remembered
my aversion to redundancy
have a nice day
this stream will never reach 200
we should have more jews commenting here
yo
israel
wadduppP
jh
jh,
How about Catholic Partiality? I think it has at least as large a coefficient of oxymoronisity, but is also oddly workable.
stu
i think one of the reasons more christians can't do the catholic thing is the surreal aspects of the faith the sacred heart of jesus complete with crown of thorns the immaculate heart of mary the cult of the saints the garrisch arte of the 1800s the smoke o the smoke holy smoke the peculiar religious movements the processions bingo in the basement you name it we got surreal you want surreal we got surreal
the logic of your juxtaposition of terms betrays not only the potential for misconstrued predominance but the concomitant presupposition of displaced appropriations such as stolen art and thus...you want to find it workable this nonesense of possible hypocricy of which in the holy catholic church there is not a shread or is that shred i never know
universal particularism
i think that's the penchant of the protest
we don't hear much about the abortion craze anymore what is going on there
i've taken up floating as a form of exercise
i must depart for the pool
christians rubbing shoulders
in ways they've never done
here comes everybody
jh
OK, then. How about Catholic Eclecticism, which seems more to the point than surrealism. Every denomination has had it's odd moments. Catholics just seem more inclined into making them traditions.
talking of catholic eclecticism
when we gather the extremes of right and left into one worship space and everyone in between and the core of elderly faithful ladies and men who kneel and pray the rosary with zeal and the cookies and coffee on sunday after mass and homeschooled traditionalist and barely knowledgeable lapsed catholics (of which i know many) the whole catholic family with cultural character of geography of odd and typical ways of doing things of preferences and what will not make it in the door of liturgical dancers and bad music and beautiful gregorian chant and everything in between...phew ....it all begins to look surreal makes my head swurreal...the older traditions of formation and processions and pilgrimage are returning with the neocatechumenate and the women are standing up and flipping the pontiff the finger glorifying their vaginas and not taking no for an answer....matched with simple trad minded young priests who will not see beyond 1940...it's enough to make the world spin how it is all kept under one tent is a circus of consideration
with poor benedict XVI as the ringleadermaster here come the lions and the flaming hoops
everything gets molded into the one long tradition sooner of later everything eventually takes its place...new wineskins these days but the quality of leather is questionable
ah i long
for the good ole days
when life was perfect
drea-ea-ea-ea--eaM dream dream dream
jh
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