The Word: Drying Up

If you believe the story of Babel, then at some point in the distant past all people spoke a single universal language. Genesis 11 is one of the really wonderful Biblical stories, and one that very likely predates the concept of monotheism altogether. In it, God (or, God and the host; or, for those more iconoclastic, the gods) sees the tower: ' "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel [a homonym in Hebrew for the word confused] — because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.'

I love this story. To me, it expresses a primal intuition of the possibility of human intelligence and effort, and the common strength that language provides. I thought of this when I came across Zak Bos' post at the Boston Translation blog, discussing the recent article by John McWhorter on the predominance of English and the extinction of languages. McWhorter writes, 'According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem.'

Zak Bos responds, 'On behalf of the editors of Pusteblume, with whom I've long discussed this issue, I can answer McWhorter's question affirmatively: the loss of languages is a problem. Whether this loss amounts to a problem depends upon the values of the person considering the loss. Some are untroubled by the destruction of texts, the attrition of cultural practices, and the homogenization that accompanies globalization. [. . . ] If we want to live in a world of diverse traditions and experiences, where human rights are respected, we have to accept the responsibility to support the exercise of those rights. With regard to language, our responsibility is to show value for and provide support to the living use of endangered languages. In other words — conversation, cultural engagement, classroom use and academic study, publication and translation. Every word in a language, and every grammatical tricks employed by that language to use that word, represents the solution to some problem of expression.'

I'm not sure — in fact, I probably disagree — that the right to a language is an inalienable right, one which necessitates enforcement. I'd argue instead that it's a freedom: a right to be free from purposeful eradication and oppression; free to speak and be allowed to thrive — or, as well, to fail. It isn't necessarily a malicious force or the fault of nations or people, this eradication, nor however is it an inevitable or natural progression.

My feelings on this are twinned. On one hand, as a writer and translator (of a near-dead language, no less, in Irish), I sympathize with Zak and those who he quotes in regards to the multiplicity of expression that is being lost: the particular inimitable way of expressing some nuance that exists in no other language; the unique music of its sounds. On the other hand, though, there is this enormous possibility of unprecedented unity in a 'cosmopolitan tongue', as McWhorter puts it; as in the Babel story.

To speak is the desire to be understood. To be universally understood is a feat of holy men and gods: it is an intuitive goal, and ancient one, and this seemingly unattainable quality has always been just out of reach, possible only for more perfect beings. Yet, the idea that we can attain a better world for a common language is just an ideal, an elaboration of this imagined desire — without prescience we simply can't be sure whether this drying up of languages is a famine or a cure.

Making a Scene

I'm totally overwhelmed by the number of events happening in greater Boston over the next couple of weeks. If you don't keep track of the Wooden Spoon events calendar, check it out:

On Subsidy & a National Literature

At his blog Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito has been reporting on the International Festival of Authors, in Toronto. In yesterday's post, he wonders what the benefits or dangers would be to increased government subsidies to writers, and he implicitly asks how that subsidy would work to form our national literature. He writes of a conversation about the way that 'Canada encourages a national literature (through things like the Giller Prize and Governor General's Award, the subsidization of authors, and the attempt to build a strong national publishing industry) to help build a national identity.'

Anyone who has taken masters courses in literature in the past decade has probably been confronted with the question of a national literature and identity — it was a central concern of such academic favorites as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Thomas Mann; and, the boutique area of studies for most of the 1990s was Postcolonialism, where they would happily deconstruct the words 'national', 'identity', and 'literature' for you. There are lots of insightful differing opinions, is what I mean to say.

What Scott is trying to get an idea about is not the theoretical underpinnings or the historical importance / factors, but the effect of practical governmental policies. The United States do have federal, state, and municipal government-funded organizations that provide grants to artists and writers; there are also many private organizations that do the same. What Scott perceives as the difference is in the degree: in Canada 'the money can be good enough to cobble a reasonable living from, between government money and book sales / touring,' where we can assume that he doesn't see that as being the case in the US. I suppose this to be true, although I'm not certain. Scott probably has a better idea of it than I do.

First things first, Canada has 1/10th the population of the United States, and in issues of economic policies proportion matters. Make no doubt, this is primarily a matter of economic policy. Dollars for writers come from taxes, and the mindset in this country is, 'Tax everyone — except me.' From that perspective, Scott's right in writing that 'a politician paying lip service to the arts in search of voters' is nearly unimaginable here. Indeed it is. The array of wealth needed to support that many artists is enormous, and there are enough funding problems as it stands. I cannot imagine increasing arts funding over police, medical, schools, etc.

However, there might be a different way to frame the issue. As a way of forming national literature, these public subsidies are also a matter of public education — at least to the degree that public schools were intended originally as a way of socializing citizens and preserving certain national qualities. We laud Mark Twain's sceptical, individualist wit; we indulge in the lively youthfulness of the beats: they, in turn, encourage those qualities in us. We fund them because they reinforce our national identity.

I've reached the point where policies and theories converge now, where practical social reinforcement meets altruistic urges. It's sort of an uncomfortable place. Funded fully enough to live off — as a sort of artists' dole — would the supported authors be judged in terms of the values they embody? Judged by whether they were American enough? I imagine that would open all sorts of Pandoran boxes. I wonder what the process is like now.

Stinehour Press Interview

Literary journalist Nigel Beale has interviewed Rocky Stinehour of the recently closed (but not forgotten, now or I imagine in the near future) Stinehour Press. For those unfamiliar with the press, take a look at this brief Publishers Weekly article. If you're interested in finding Stinehour books, you can get from your local library — at least, in New England I'm sure you can — David Farrell's The Stinehour Press: A Bibliographic Checklist of the First Thirty Years, (1988) which also includes an introduction by Roderick "Rocky" Stinehour.

Humbling Philip Roth

Also at The Guardian, William Skidelsky reviews Philip Roth's new novella, The Humbling: 'There are, of course, redeeming features: an interesting initial conceit, the usual beautifully controlled writing. And the novel asks interesting questions about ageing and what it does to you. But these things aren't nearly enough to make up for the absurdity at its core. [. . .] Roth's fiction has always relied on exaggeration – Portnoy masturbating into the liver, Sabbath jerking off over his dead lover's grave – but what redeemed even his wildest comic distortions was that they were never wholly removed from life. His characters, and the situations they find themselves in, have always been believable; this is what gives him licence to exaggerate.But nothing about Axler and Pegeen's relationship seems remotely true; it is pure, undiluted fantasy. And so the novel has nothing to ground it.'

The odds of Roth's books being very good look similar to a good Major League average, so to hear that The Humbling isn't brilliant is not surprising. I thought that Indignation was just OK. It seems odd, though, that a reviewer can so ferociously lambaste a book which contains both 'an interesting initial conceit' and 'beautifully controlled writing' — more than we can say for 90% of novels published each year. It seems as if perhaps the plot and tone left the reader behind in this case, or, as the reviewer implies here at the end, that a crucial tone were not well-enough struck by Roth. Or, it could be a case of cultural misunderstanding: Roth's literary sexual obsessions, after all, often only mirror America's own [see: pornography, internet].

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

At the Guardian UK, Carol Rumens writes, 'You might criticise the sometimes over-blown declamatory style, the archaic words, or the ghastly invocation of Christian belief at its most judgmental. Certainly, it's easy to agree wholeheartedly with Coleridge's own self-criticism, that there is altogether too much of a pious moral. But the poem exerts its potency every time. The scenery remains thrillingly hellish, while laced with photographically realistic meteorological effects, and the narrative drive is irresistible. Not least of its innovations is that filmic device of cutting, now and again, between the Mariner's urgent button-holing of the wedding-guest, and the tantalising merriment and minstrelsy of the wedding. Like the impatient guest, the reader may want to escape, but is held by the almost deranged insistency of the Mariner's tone.'

Letterpress, Beautifully Examined

Duino; or, Why I'll Never Get an MFA

I've recently bee reading and re-reading the new edition of Rilke, translated by Edward Snow. In the Introduction, Adam Zagjewski writes that Rilke is the modern model of a poet in our collective imaginations. Indeed, his solitude, his social ambition, and his relative leisure are all qualities that poets today seem to feel they absolutely must have in order to succeed. Many a poet bemoans the lack of grants, flexible jobs, and money from book sales, etc., that they 'need' in order to write. They dream of spending a year with Rodin and holing up in Duino Castle, or, as a substitute, in the Ivory Tower of a university post.

At the blog Pansy Poetics, Steve Fellner writes about poverty, class, and the MFA-holding poet: 'Not having is a different than not having as much as you want. If you can call someone to bail you out, you have nothing to worry about. You're doing OK. Some MFA students (and full-time employed poets) and their mock crisis of a fictional poverty refuses what Saeed is asking for: an analysis of the full range of class statuses. How can you talk about class when everyone is boasting unabashed financial ruin. [. . .] Financial problems occur after graduation. When the loans are due. And you may be only able to find work as a part-time adjunct, shelling out your hard earned cash on gas to shuttle you from gig to gig to gig.'

Now, I am a poet who finds it difficult to arrange blocks of time to write. It's frustrating. It's difficult to balance work and life. Sometimes, if I haven't been able to write for a while, I'm not a very nice person to be around. However, I don't drive an oil truck like my father did; my college degree gives me opportunities my mother never had — I don't have a bailout behind me but, as Steve writes, I'm doing just fine. Families are always rising and falling in America, Hawthorne [probably never] wrote.

Maybe part of the reason for my doing OK is that my model as a poet is . . . well, it's that I don't have a model. Rilke may have flitted about climbing the social ladder, living on allowances from family and patrons, but I never believed I wouldn't hold down a regular job. My goal was actually to only need to have one job — mom worked two or three, or four, for the sake of my education, and she was never too good for practical solutions to problems of dollars and cents.

As for poetry: the model exists on a page, not in some imagined lifestyle. One assumes, as a child, that everyone's life is like yours (you learn your place later). I encountered my first poets — Silverstein and Poe as a child, Whitman and Eliot in high school — in the vacuum of the folio. What existed were not these people with biographies and lifestyles, but words as if they'd formed ex nihilo. Of course, I learned, and read the biographies; but still, if being an insurance executive or a doctor or a clerk was good enough for the greatest men of letters America's ever produced, who am I to ask for more? Knowing what I do now, I suppose my model is Stevens: one can live in the mundane world and still be a great poet.

That being said, I can not imagine why anyone would want to be an adjunct in the exploitative system which Steve mentions. It's really a terrible situation. If that's the best job prospect that an MFA can offer me, well then, Thanks, but no thanks. There is nothing worthwhile in making little money and having little chance to get ahead, all for a bit of imagined leisure time. Leisure time which, I'd guess, remains largely imaginary.

I would much rather make my way in the world and make writing my private passion. There are other, better jobs for those with higher degrees, if you aren't too good for them (fewer now, of course, but things are improving). There are also plenty of resources for a poet struggling to become better. The library has all the books and journals I want; communities of writers abound in cities all over, and online: my being a poet does not depend on anything besides my own dedication and effort — not degrees held, or day jobs. I'm privileged by the opportunities granted me and by my education not to work every waking moment. My family's not going to falter now for the sake of Rainer Rilke.

Modern Music & the Mind

From Prospect Magazine, 'One difference between the avant-garde in classical music and in visual art, however, is that late 20th-century music was apt to defy these organising principles, while visual art did not. Although some viewers may fret that they cannot understand what is in front of them, it takes no more cognitive effort to “see” a painting by Mark Rothko than it does to look at wallpaper. The fact we can see the painting at all as a coherent object gives our interpretive mind something to work on, even if we come up with nothing more than a vague sense of beauty, serenity or absurdity. Music can defy even this basic sort of cognitive parsing: it can refute our efforts to find coherence, rather as if a video artist were to present us with unstructured static. Even Jackson Pollock’s chaos is contained — but sound is at once everywhere and constantly shifting.'

Music is organized by expectations in time, I'd say (with admittedly little background in music study) and many of those expectations are taken from nature — they mimic the rhythms and forms of experienced life. So, music that not only ignores but specifically counters those expectations is never going to normalize for people in the way that other musical innovations have. At least, not for the majority of people.

I wonder what limitations such as this there might be on literature. Obviously questions of sense and continuity are common in innovative writing. As well as context. Writing that relies too heavily on the reader's acknowledgment of some underlying ideological system tends to fail — at least, it tends to fail for me.

Get Yourself a Drink, Mr. President — You Earned It

The New Yorker reports, 'This day next week, the Commerce Department will announce that the U.S. economy expanded significantly in the three months from July 1 to September 30, with the consensus on Wall Street putting the annualized rate of growth at about four per cent. Unless something drastic and unexpected happens — another big Wall Street firm collapses, war breaks out, or something else of that magnitude — the upward momentum will carry over into the fourth quarter of the year, and it could well accelerate. Some forecasters are predicting annualized growth of more than five per cent during the October-December period.'

I'm just going to go ahead and say it worked. Here's to you, Obama administration.

Taking Heart

• At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carlin Romano reviews Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye. From what I can gather, Faye berates both the continued study of Heidegger and his very reputation as an accomplished and important, though morally-degraded, philosopher. It seems to be an attempt to convince academics and university publishers to stop: stop thinking about him, stop writing about him, stop printing books about him. Romano quotes the author, 'If [Heidegger's] writings continue to proliferate without our being able to stop this intrusion of Nazism into human education, how can we not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?'

What a depressingly complete lack of faith in the human condition, in our ability to grow and become better than we once were. Heidegger was an immoral human. His philosophy is largely derivative, but interesting in parts. Is he worth any sort of academic worship? Decidedly not. Neither is he worth the kind of hysterical fear that Faye exhibits. Just as the accessibility of Mein Kampf has not spread Nazism in America, Heidegger's writing will not either. The security of this faith is not due to there being no such threats in the world any longer, but because better people and better thinkers will no longer shy away from them — except perhaps poor, nervous Emmanuel Faye.

I agree, mostly, with Romano, who writes, 'It would seem that Heidegger, likewise, will continue to flourish until even "Continental" philosophers mock him to the hilt. His influence will end only when they, and the broader world of intellectuals, recognize that scholarly evidence fingers the scowling proprietor of Heidegger's hut as a buffoon produced by German philosophy's mystical tradition. He should be the butt of jokes, not the subject of dissertations.' Or, you know, both together would work too.

• At New America Media, Richard Rodriguez discusses the demise of the San Francisco Chronicle, 'I don't think the Chronicle is dying so much as I think that San Francisco is dying. When a metropolitan newspaper of that magnitude stops publication it indicates that there has been a death of the metropolitan ideal.' Eh.

• At Arcade, Marjorie Perloff writes about Futurism and . . . something: 'Whose Futurism? Whose Fascism? Everything Martin said was true enough if we label as Futurist, Marinetti's writings of the later twenties and thirties, up to his death in 1944. The speaker assumed that here was Futurism, largely because Marinetti continued to call himself a Futurist and he had a following of now largely unknown poets and artists. It was indeed an unsavory bunch, and Martin was right to pronounce on Marinetti's distrust of democracy. The only trouble is that, whatever self-designated label the artists in question adopted, theirs was no longer the Futurism that mattered at all. In point of fact, when Marinetti was composing the First Manifesto in 1908, Fascism had not yet been heard of; Marinetti was primarily a contrarian — he was a socialist-anarchist against the Papacy, the State, Parliamentary Democracy — and especially the loss of Italian territories to Austria — for example Trieste. He was certainly a Nationalist, but one can't quite equate nationalism with Fascism.'

• And the New York Times reports on the ongoing, increasingly meaningless price war on hardcover Christmas titles between Amazon, WalMart and Target, 'It’s a contest “that has no end in sight,” said Michael Norris, an analyst with Simba Information, which provides research and advice to publishers. Mr. Norris said the price war could be particularly damaging to booksellers because they could not afford to discount that heavily, while the retailers who were slashing prices “don’t need to sell books in order to stay in business” and therefore can sell the books at a loss.' It sure is great for those publishers though!

Privishing [as Opposed to Publishing]

Nigel Beale points out the little-known idea of 'privishing' — defined by Wikipedia: 'Privishing refers to the process of technically publishing a book without really publishing it. It’s printed in such small numbers or with such lack of marketing, advertising / sales support / enthusiasm that the book may as well never have been published in the first place. Said book is virtually impossible to obtain through normal channels, often can’t be special-ordered and is very seldom reprinted. In short, when a book is privished it’s "killed". Technical adherence to the terms of the publishing contract yes, but no more.'

It's not a well-known term outside of smaller presses. We hear it a lot at our angrier meetings, though, usually when being admonished for some poor marketing idea. As in, 'We aren't privishing the book. We're publishing it.' What he means is, 'We need to get the book into stores and into people's hands.' True. It's a hard process built on a lot of good faith and gut feelings: convince the stores to carry it, try to have them place it on a front table or face out so it isn't lost, then get good reviews so that people go buy it from the store (it's called 'selling through').

I had a chat over the weekend with a few friends of mine about just this vice. One was complaining — and rightly so — that her small press novel, though well reviewed and the winner of a small prize, wasn't carried by any of the major distributors (with whom the publisher would need to have a relationship). As a result, it wasn't getting carried by the majority of bookstores, and so no one ever saw it. The sales numbers were thus unreasonably low.

Her press' poor excuse was that there is 'nothing really to be done with first-time novelists', a cop-out which effective because it's true to a certain extent. Blockbuster was always improbable. First books are difficult, since authors tend to ride on the reputation of the previous work. But it is the publisher's obligation to try anyhow, to take advantage of reviews, and to put the book in a position to do well. It's the difference between publishing and privishing.

On Derision & the Book

When you have an unusual idea, people laugh and say that you're naïve, particularly when you're young and particularly in an industry as staid and nervous as publishing. When the big houses halted acquisitions after the crash, I recommended we expand our mid-list to pick up their slack; as we thought about advances for the next list, I pointed to HarperStudio as a royalty-only model; in my first few months, I suggested a content-oriented blog to add value to our website: in each case, I was derided for my naïveté. Pick up strong mid-list authors from flagging houses? It just isn't done. Offer a larger royalty with no advance? It just isn't done! A blog to add value? Our customers don't read blogs! [Note: on that last one, I've been vindicated. Still waiting on the rest.]

For all these reasons, I couldn't help but nod as I read Marion Maneker's article on 'The End of the Book World as We Know It', at The Big Money. Maneker suggests a new model for distribution and royalties (namely, cutting the advances) that is particularly applicable for the big-name authors who 'bring their own audience to the equation', but which might work for less-known authors as well. It's a model that might make sense, in some altered form, since one is sure adjustments would need to be made. Not the first to do it, not the last I'm sure, but one point struck me as just right.

'It’s been another bad year in the book business, and we’re likely to see another round of big cuts this Christmas. Do I think publishers will embrace this new business model? No. They’re too greedy. Like bankers, they would rather increase their risk-chasing margin than decrease their risks by reducing their costs. But the funny thing here is that the same supply-chain forces that have them posturing as the defenders of emerging writers have also provided a much better — and more cost-effective — way for them to develop new talent. And that would be those $9.99 e-books they were so worried about until last week.'

Not just greedy, though. Scared. Nobody wants to be the brazen Ahab who sinks the ship.

Maneker's suggestion probably overestimates the number of e-book readers and impact of e-books for new authors. It definitely underestimates the cost of production on a 'fat hardcover' book (although at 100k+ quantities, maybe not — I can't say). And it doesn't take into account the strictures that are placed on publishers by the big-box retailers, such as demanding certain retail distributors. But this type of sea-change in the business model is on the way, regardless. It's a business evolution: thrive or die.

P.Zukofsky & the Copyright Fever

At the official Louis Zukofsky website, the copyright holder to the poet's work, son Paul Zukofsky (a violinist), has forbidden any quotation of the poetry in any form, and has essentially denied the existence of 'fair use':

'Far too many people, especially perhaps-innocent grad. students, have been misled into thinking that, in terms of quoting LZ or CZ, they may do what they want, and do not have to worry about me. These people are then suddenly faced with the reality of an irascible, recalcitrant MOI, and are confronted with the very real prospect of years of work potentially down the tubes. I therefore wish to post an obvious "do not trespass" sign where LZ aficionados may see it.

'All Louis and Celia Zukofsky is still copyright, and will remain so for many many years. I own all of these copyrights, and they are my property, and I insist upon deriving income from that property. For those of you convinced that LZ would find my stance abhorrent, the truth is that he kept all copyrights (initially in his name) as he had the rather absurd idea that said copyrights would be sufficient to allow for the economic survival of my mother, and their son. My stance is congruent with that hope.

'Despite what you may have been told, you may not use LZ’s words as you see fit, as if you owned them, while you hide behind the rubric of “fair use”. “Fair use” is a very-broadly defined doctrine, of which I take a very narrow interpretation, and I expect my views to be respected. We can therefore either more or less amicably work out the fees that I demand; you can remove all quotation; or we can turn the matter over to lawyers, this last solution being the worst of the three, but one which I will use if I need to enforce my rights.'

It seems (so incredibly wrong-headed & crazy) like it must be a joke, or a publicity stunt to regain some general interest in LZ's work (outside of the dedicated circle, already committed). Maybe not. I have it on good word that it is very likely sincere, as paranoid and deluded as it may seem.

Odds, and Ends

• Robert Huddleston has a review at The Boston Review of two books on William Butler Yeats that sound, framing them as he does, like companion pieces and important addition to the critical body on Yeats. Huddleston writes, 'Paradoxically, this antiquarian stylist with a love of esoteric mysteries was the most contemporary of his peers, the one who still speaks most immediately to our present anxieties of flux and dislocation. [. . .] Vendler’s [book] Our Secret Discipline is a remarkable contribution. Its aim — a systematic exploration of Yeats’s poetics — is so essential to a complete understanding of the poet’s work that one can only wonder that it had not been undertaken earlier. [. . .] Bedient may better capture the energy and vibrancy of Yeats’s embodied thought in all of its exhilarating, perplexing, and at times infuriating multifariousness. He is at his best in illuminating poems that Vendler neglects or overlooks.'

• At Slate, Anthony Grafton reviews Donald Kagan's new study, Thucydides: The Reinvention of History. Grafton makes note of a particular passage from the ancient proto-scholar: 'In his account of the revolution in Corcyra, Thucydides tells his readers what happens to society, and even to language itself, in an age of civil war: "Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any." Almost two and a half millennia before Orwell, Thucydides diagnosed the diseases of language caused by war and faction.' Well, yes; where do we think that Orwell (and others) got the very idea in the first place?

• At The Los Angeles Times book blog, Carolyn Kelogg writes, 'The publishing industry may be going through tremendous upheavals involving technology — ebooks, the Kindle and its competitors, digital distribution, online marketing — but those changes may not make many ripples in the greater tech landscape.' One might be inclined to argue that this is exactly the problem with publishing as an industry. Those most invested in it (namely, publishers) refuse to take the lead: they follow, and follow trends mostly; they remain uninvolved in shaping print or digital technology, as if it were somehow beneath them. Ah, you masters of the folio, you leviathans of print! Innovation, as always, is the future.

Notes on 'Nobility of Spirit' by Rob Riemen

When I heard of Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit, I was immediately eager to get hold of it. Riemen is the head of the Nexus Institute, a humanist think tank based in the Netherlands. Humanism is as close to a political or religious system as I have, and I've been looking for some model that resembles my own somewhat unrefined instincts. To my mind, humanism celebrates learning and wisdom without denigrating the poorly educated, the less imaginative, or the less intellectual. It encompasses atheism as well as the life of faith, neither are turned away. Humanism celebrates virtue, but it engages with our faults and flaws equally, without denial or revision and with courage. It values the common humanity that all people share, the value of all individuals regardless of ephemeral characteristics, and is not limited by the scale of a single tradition or culture.

Riemen's book is not what I had hoped. It is, first of all, deeply personal. It is less a treatise on humanism than a reflection on certain humanistic issues, very much a product of his European background and his canonical interests. There is no claim here to define terms or set agendas (although Riemen does clearly implicate ethical judgments). As such, it would be unfair to hold his volume up to standards which it makes no claim of meeting. That being said, I'm sure that is exactly what I'm going to do. Because, while I agree with Mark Sarvas' assessment that 'nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever', I am not sure that this book is the answer.

Nobility of Spirit is split into three sections: the first reviews Thomas Mann's life as a model, tracing his emergence as an ethical leader as well as a cultural one; the second section imagines key conversations in Europe's ethical life, where Camus emerges as a sort of hero for accusing intellectuals of being 'responsible for the lack of values'; and the third section considers what it means to be brave, 'the courage to be wise, to continue making the distinction between good and evil, to be loyal to the quest for truth'.

Each section has its flaws. Riemen seems too blindly reverential of the flawed person that Mann was, and especially forgiving of the questionable opinions he held before the end of the First World War. His tone is too coy in re-imagining scenes from the canon, such as of The Republic and the tale of The Magic Mountain, in part two. Throughout, but especially in the third section, National Socialism is used as the personification of evil; it looms as a demonic force, and Riemen fails to recognize the far more difficult truth: that Nazism was itself a result of values and human decisions, the plans of human beings, and was as much a product of European culture as Mann. These flaws strike one as being oddly naive — particularly strange given the author's erudition and his role as the head of a humanist think-tank.

Still, the book's biggest problem lies in the easy hindsight with which Riemen views history. He recasts his chosen moments and works with an almost complete ethical clarity. There are heroes and there are villains. Nowhere does he engage the all-too-human uncertainty of holding one value over another when the consequences are still unclear, or of the conflict between mutually exclusive values. He does not question whether good men can be disastrously wrong. When ethical questions appear to be as clear as they do in this book, it means somehow that humanity has been removed from the equation.

It is very, very likely that I'm being unreasonably harsh. I haven't given enough credit to the careful choices Riemen made of scenes to highlight — I found the meeting of French intellectuals in section two and the story of Ginzburg's imprisonment in section three especially compelling. Riemen is admirably unafraid to use the 'big words' (truth, justice, virtue, good, bad), but some of his pronouncements — on the intrinsic value of 'truth' particularly — feel empty. He skirts some of the simplest questions that skeptics, modern philosophers, and extremists have used to successfully undermine humanism: what is truth? how to we decipher good from bad? what is culture? Sophomoric questions, to be sure, but ones that are powerful only when they are ignored or treated as unworthy. They seem to me, though, the very questions that are burning to be answered.

Review: 'Wild Tongue' by Rebecca Seiferle

The poems in Rebecca Seiferle’s Wild Tongue are emphatically modern. Yet, as I read it, I recalled Wordsworth’s The Prelude — specifically, a passage concerning poetic ambition in which the author wishes his work “might become / a power like one of Nature’s.” Seiferle’s obvious ambition is to create poetry with the force of a storm and to defy the prevailing wisdom of her culture, as Wordsworth did his. In the case of Wordsworth, it was the rationalism of the Enlightenment; in Seiferle’s case, it is the subjugation of the female identity and all that entails. This is immediately clear in the misogynist epigraph from the first letter of the Church father Paul to Timothy: “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection.” Seiferle might just as easily rephrase it to read, “Let the women learn subjugation all in silence.”

It is by this epigraph that we see what binds the collection thematically — and it is against this that Seiferle’s title, Wild Tongue, becomes meaningful. It is, so to speak, the symbol of female identity unleashed. The collection can be read as an argument against the hegemony and patriarchy of western civilization. It is deeply modern, and yet somehow not: the project itself implies a certain moral imperative that harkens back to a nineteenth century liberal tradition, the dream of a perfectible society. The poetry itself, however, could not be further removed from that age.

Seiferle’s aesthetic sensibility and range exhibit an amalgamation of influences, and a brief gloss of the authors reflected in her poetry — John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, John Donne — gives some idea of the remarkable breadth of verse forms in the collection, from brief lyrics such as “Those Greek Warriors” to sprawling project-poems like “On the Island of Bones.” But she is not only using these various aesthetic sensibilities and formal devices to exhibit her postmodern erudition: the poems of Wild Tongue are never pastiche. Lines such as, “I’m slightly disturbed when my friend writes / that guilt made her take my books to bed, not / because I’m unmindful of the erotic / life of the word,” from “Thieves of Fire,” recall any number of post-confessional lyricists such as Billy Collins; but “I just want her to be the snake in my bed,” from the same poem, is all Seiferle. She is able to identify and successfully exploit the strengths of whatever verse form she happens to employ, and there is a willful originality to her adaptations. This willfulness is likely the strongest aspect of the collection, but it is the same quality that, in excess, becomes its greatest vice.

Where other poets often leave moral and social issues open to interpretation (and, in doing so, leave open the conversation), Seiferle is blankly explicit. If a moral can be told, it is often put to verse in no uncertain terms. These poems are, as she writes, “like a pregnancy of meaning laboring to come forth.” They are bursting with revelations, with the constant reminder, in tone, word, or image, that the wisdom of her poetry is, to borrow again from Wordsworth, “something unseen before.” Seiferle assumes a prophetic voice throughout the collection, perhaps to appropriately counter the Western tradition that began with preacher Paul. This is rarely an effective approach to any artistic endeavor, though, since self-righteousness is a poor substitute for craft. It is even less effective when the insights are stale — not unimportant, per se, but the feminist and postmodern insights that Seiferle offers are hardly revolutionary. Our familiarity with her ideas weakens the power of her poems (the actual verse of which is of varying quality), since their dramatic and intellectual effectiveness hinges too often on a reader’s shocked reaction, one that is unlikely to be evoked today.

For all the many influences that are apparent in these pages, the poet who Seiferle most recalls is Denise Levertov; even more so than Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, or their heirs. Take, for example, Seiferle’s poem, “Ancestral Refrain,” which reflects on the way traditions are forged out of convenient half-truths, ignorance, and violence. It takes the form of a personal lyric, a meeting between two peers in the present-tense vein of that popular post-confessional style. The speaker reveals an obscured truth — the fact that General Custer played the bagpipe standard “Garryowen” before each battle with the Native Americans, thereby evoking not nostalgia but a memory of genocide — that illuminates the naiveté of her peer.

However, Seiferle lacks what might be called faith in her reader to “get” what it is she’s doing. The dramatic cues are woefully exaggerated: the speaker has to “choke out” the truth about “the damned song;” there are images of “bayonets flashing” and “cartridge pouches” fashioned from “the vaginas of women.” Both characters are “startled” by the speaker’s “vehemence” in the end, and the speaker recalls that Custer’s counts of “fighting men killed” are only a convenient version of events: “In truth, only 11 could be so classified . . . / the other 92 were women, children, and old men” [author’s italics]. A more controlled selection of details and use of language — one less enamored with shock — could have led this poem to a wonderful cumulative moment where the friend rejects, in willful ignorance, the brutal overtones that the song has now assumed. The dramatic movement of the poem’s plot, so to speak, is correct in that sense, and Seiferle has a fine ability to demonstrate these types of juxtaposition. Instead, though, the gesture of the poem is overwrought; the anger and graphic detail are comic instead of shocking; the essayistic dénouement that closes the poem — “it is the voice of our ancestors — all those war cries; in any language. . . . each not a song of slaughter” — is redundant. The connection has already been made clear, really too clear. The dramatic movement of the poem was completed with the friend’s denial of the ugly past; the reader is there with the poet already. The willful poet imposes her moral will too pedantically in this case, and “Ancestral Refrain” is exemplary of the flaw that undermines Seiferle’s ambitious collection.

It is in her deep flaws, despite Seiferle’s post-romantic tendencies, in which much of Wild Tongue is most reminiscent of Denise Levertov’s anti-war poetry. There is such a preoccupation with the righteousness of their messages that neither poet seems able to focus her technique. The poetic failures of both Levertov and Seiferle have admirable motives — the desire to effect substantively and to better the receptive culture — but the work of both also remains argumentative instead of engaging, due in large part to the myopia that is key to the vision of the poems. They lack something that could be called bravery in some counterintuitive way — each is afraid to be ambiguous, unable to perceive and empathize with anything not aligned with their moral message. They eliminate the moral ambiguity that allows the fullness of humanity to be encountered in verse. Lacking this human element, morality remains purely theoretical.

Without restraint in regards to her didactic tendencies and without the necessary trust that a reader will read through her literal and abstract images, Seiferle often turns to simplistic provocations: the overused word “cunt”; a reactionary anger towards female domestication; and a dictionary of neo-romantic words such as absences, soul, love, and depths, overused in mostly uninteresting ways. It is not that these approaches or techniques are necessarily failed, but in this collection they seem to be misused. They are the choices Seiferle makes when she is otherwise unable to reach some dramatic effect, a failure of her imagination that leads to these deus ex machinae methods.

The poet is at her best when she restrains these tendencies. “Ruined Pastoral” is a remarkable reappraisal of one of the English language’s oldest genres — a difficult undertaking in which Seiferle succeeds admirably. In her poem, the pastoral scene is ruined by the “hantavirus” that would be deadly to the eater of the “amber / seeping out.” This leads to death,

how ancient
the hive was
and how dangerous
in that desert
where lungs could fill
with the waters of
hantavirus —
the sound of nothing
filling the house,
invisible bees and
death in the sweetness —
your finger to
your tongue.

It suggests a tainted modern sexuality in the same way that early pastorals allegorized a perfect love, in which the pathetic fallacy of the natural world mirrors the human inner life. In the early tradition, bees represented the potency of nature; here Seiferle builds and undermines that: the honey-like substance is a harbinger of loss and death. The sweet-looking amber is the rot of an infected mouse. The fatal virus is transmitted from finger to mouth in an erotic image that suggests, subtly, that perhaps there is no pastoral possible in our modern era. This subtle connection between the tradition and the modern merits and encourages re-readings.

“The Fragments of Hölderlin” is a fascinating free-verse piece that seems to document the workings of the mind of Hölderlin as he descends into — or perhaps attempts to resist — madness. The lyric is caught in a circle of reference and mania, moving from snippets of Hölderlin’s verse, to egomaniacal contemplation such as “this room does not exist / except in the house of my / own being.” The poem’s circular logic oddly resembles that of Hölderlin’s teacher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose metaphysical system was denounced time and again by Immanuel Kant, and one wonders if this parallel is intentional. The visual construction of the poem — running across the whole margin of the page, aligned left and then aligned right, at times almost in prose blocks, scattered words and phrases — is a recognizably loose pattern, but that recurring pattern remains varied enough to give the impression of a mind at once obsessive and erratic. In this poem, more than in “Ruined Pastoral,” Seiferle’s didactic tendencies are naturally constrained by the historical nature of her subject.

Similarly, “After John Donne’s ‘The Dreame’” is Seiferle’s most successful post-romantic lyric — perhaps the best-crafted work of the collection. It is a remarkable poem, marked by a formal control — internal off-rhymes and a subtle sense of meter — that is otherwise rare (and, to be fair, would not often be appropriate); but, it is a welcome attention to language after so much flaunting of free verse forms. Her closing formulation of assurance — by a form of love more powerful than identity, which makes the speaker’s identity more real in return — is romantic to its core:

To dwell in some other paradisiacal o you
where, beyond all Feare, Shame, Honor,
one does not wonder if ‘Thou art not thou,’
but to bear the wonder of all being, where I
am I and you are you and love but is and is.

One can hardly help but hear not only Donne here, but, again, Wordsworth: “but in the very world which is the world / of all of us, the place in which, in the end, / we find our happiness, or not at all.” Seiferle’s poem converses with Donne’s original, drawing upon his terms and rhetorical structures but, in the best and most restrained example of her willful reworking, makes them entirely her own. The poem’s logical formulations stand at the edge where poetry only nearly defies understanding, and the poem stands admirably in the tradition of Wallace Stevens and the best work of John Ashbery.

In a case where Seiferle works well outside of a confining tradition, the opening lines of “We Should Have Turned Back” — another post-confessional lyric — are perhaps the most striking and memorable image in the collection:

We should have turned back
on our way to the Marine Fest, at the skeleton
of a child whale making a gate with its bones.

It is a disturbing but ordinary and entirely naturalistic image, like something out of Franz Kafka or Charles Simic. “We should have turned back” is dramatic but touches upon a perfect note of trepidation, and the image of the whale’s bones making a gate is one of an unsettlingly biblical kind. After this opening, however, the poem strays from this effective and evocative style of depiction into another moralistic, prosaic narrative, not entirely dissimilar from “Ancestral Refrain” — still, it remains one of the stronger pieces in the collection.

The reader is briefly shown an otherwise absent sense of humor in “after two years, you say only / the British have a cultural sense of tact which is necessary / to ‘true intimacy,’ and I am not British, so.” This mouthful of a title (which doubles as the poem’s first line as well) lends the rest of the piece a welcome sense of absurdity so that overly-poeticized lines, such as “a pain in you that made you breathless” and “like angels giving birth to laughter,” are funny and exaggerated instead of groan-inducing. If this type of hyperbole is intended to work in a similar way elsewhere in Wild Tongue, it was unapparent or unsuccessfully conveyed, and perhaps this poem should have appeared earlier in the collection to give the whole an edge of absurdist humor.

It is difficult to instill verse with moral sense. Most poets do not even try. Even Seiferle writes, “In absolute statements / poetry perishes,” but she seems not to have heeded her own truism. The outright successes are scarce in Wild Tongue, and more so for the length and ambitions of the collection. Seiferle has a clear vision of what she wants to achieve intellectually, but she is too enamored with it to see that many of her insights are too common to be provocative. She has enough imagination to construct evocative and, at times, effective images, but her sense of tone and control fail her consistently. The collection is notable mostly for its modern engagement with feminism, its variety of free-verse forms, and the continuation of the post-romantic tradition. When that tradition is applied most directly, it seems, Seiferle shines, perhaps because she is limited naturally by the other poet’s work; left to her own devices, willfulness and impatience are her persistent undoing.

Nota Bene: New Aestheticism

'For all its implicit timelessness, New Aestheticism will no doubt one day be seen as a reaction to its age and therefore part of it, like the Chinese literati in dark times who turned away from a corrupt court to tend to their gardens. Whom has all our genocide testimony helped? Has deconstructing the bourgeois subject of linear narrative served any purpose but to construct an escapist ghetto for intellectuals who might otherwise have been among the best minds of their generation? And then of course there’s the Bush years.

But hear how shrill this all sounds. The New Aesthete would rather be beautiful than shrill. “I don’t know why literary people spend so much time apologizing for their perfectly harmless little books that no one will ever read. You don’t hear generals apologizing for killing people” (Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet).

If you write interesting sentences then people will want to read them if not then not, that is the truth.'

— from a manifesto by Damion Searls, at The Quarterly Conversation

Columbus Day

It's Columbus Day here in Massachusetts — a questionable holiday at best, but I'm still glad to have a long weekend — so here is a potpourri of links.

• At Blographia Literaria, Andrew Seal (of Critical Flame note) alerts us to an essay of appreciation by Terry Eagleton on the marvelous theorist / critic Fredric Jameson at the New Left Review. It is subscription-only, I'm afraid, but if anyone has access to such things please do take a look. Until then, Andrew has excerpts.

• At Slate, Juliet Lapidos reviews a newly translated collection of short stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, 'a virtual unknown here in the United States but a big deal in her native Russia'. Petrushevskaya writes 'Fantastic' fiction, 'texts that cause the reader to hesitate between natural and supernatural explanations for the events described (like Henry James' The Turn of the Screw)'.

Her fiction 'was banned in the Soviet era' and translators '[Keith] Gessen and [Anna] Summers suggest in their introduction that it was too dark and forbidding to gain official approval'. It seems to me, though, that any author writing fiction in which a supernatural element might be described as being 'real' would be banned by the concrete, economics-and-reality obsessed Soviet regime — not for its being 'too dark and forbidding' but because it suggests something more to life than raw, base, materialism; but, maybe I am missing something?

• At Conversational Reading, Scott directs us to a post at Shigekuni on the German reaction to Herta Mueller's Nobel Prize. 'For many, including many Germans, it was a complete surprise when Herta Müller was announced as the third writer in the German language to win the highest international literary award, the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has increasingly focused on European writers. Did she deserve the honor? Of course she did. Herta Müller is among the best and most important writers in German today, with a work that never shies away from trying new things, a writer who is smart yet not unreadably difficult. On the contrary: her writing, while complex, is frequently buoyed by a pleasurable language, which is warm and is driven by a kind of verbal plasticity that I have not encountered since Günter Grass. One of the defining characteristics of Grass’ style is the surreal quality of his words, his use of nouns is especially interesting and significant in this regard. But where Grass frequently drops off into a surreal plot, opting for a rich stew of a book instead of sharp criticism (which is why his shorter books frequently fall so short of the mark), Herta Müller is always on point, always engaged and worth engaging with.'

• At The Nation, Phoebe Connelly proclaims the merits of Jean Rhys via a review of the new biography, writing, 'Rhys depicted female characters who openly struggled with the binds of class and sexuality that ensnared women in the early part of the twentieth century — and arguably still do. Rhys was expert at dramatizing a double-bind: the moment when a woman acknowledges, much less gives into, her sexual desires was frequently the moment her social position becomes fixed'.

I love Rhys' writing. It is often (and I think at her best always) about women, but as with so many authors who write from within cultures or identities not my own — I think of Ellison, Tóibín, Tolstoy, Marquez — there is an explicitly humanizing element to work that draws one out of one's own limited self into the emotional life of another. That element is one effective through the artistic prowess, and Rhys is a marvelous writer. She is able to maintain the narrative tension of conflicts that are often irresolvable in a simultaneously fluid, energetic prose that is never staid or moribound. And Wide Sargasso Sea is simply brilliant.

• At The New Yorker, another new poem from John Ashberry.

"Little Magazines"

A great article by Stefan Collini at the Times Literary Supplement on The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, entitled 'Modernism and the Little Magazines'. Collini writes, 'One of the most fascinating themes to emerge is the repetitiveness of the terms in which the target readerships were imagined. There are constant invocations of a “serious reading public”, not defined by profession or level of education, whose needs are not being met by the shallow or coterie-led discussion of literature available in existing publications.'

I might be blushing a little bit. Collini seems to describe here not only those 20th century magazines that fostered Modernism, but aspects of my own mission statement of The Critical Flame. There I wrote, 'we at The Critical Flame seek to clear a space in this wilderness that is the internet for articulate discussion and learned debate. We will make our convictions vulnerable to scrutiny, put aside our petty egotism, and engage with literature honestly, openly.' I suppose that the implicit alternative to what I describe is a set of publications — in print and online — that do not meet these standards of discourse. (And I wonder, does The Critical Flame meet them either? We're trying.)

Are we seeing the same movement right now, online? I think so. There are a good number of exclusively online publications, such as The Quarterly Covnersation and the Contemporary Poetry Review, as well as others, fostering cultural discourse (critical and creative) as print publications falter. And they're good: as high-quality as anything available in print; and, as of now, they're mostly free.

That being said, these sorts of publications generally come and disappear in a fairly short time. They don't last because, I think, they're labors of love; people's lives get in the way, they get married, divorced, go poor or get rich, etc. I wonder, when all the current online journals are defunct, what kind of record will be left for future scholars.

President Obama Wins 2009 Nobel Peace Prize

CNN reports that President Barak Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his 'extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.' Amazing. I thought perhaps he was the first sitting President to win the award, but Obama 'is the fourth U.S. president to win the prestigious prize and the third sitting president to do so', according to the article.

update
Across the expanse of the internet, not a single person seems to feel good about this choice. At best, people are hesitantly optimistic and constructing apologist explanations for the Nobel's intentions; at worst, this is sure to be fodder for those who perceive secret international conspiracies, or who fear a dangerous cult of personality around the President. The backlash could, very conceivably, mortally injure the domestic reforms that the President is trying to pass in this country.

In keeping with what I wrote here yesterday, though, this seems very much aligned with the Eurocentric worldview of the Nobel Committee, a 'psychological bias'. From the fact of Obama's nomination in just February of this year, we can infer that the award is meant simply to turn the blade in American conservatism (which Europeans tend not to mistakenly equate with their own brand of conservatism), and is most certainly meant as a final blow against the departing President Bush. The former President disdained to involve them diplomatically — which I think hurt U.S. interests as well as those of the European nations. They, in turn, largely refused to support even the better of American policies during his two terms. President Obama has mended those damaged relationships, making Europe feel, at least, that they have a voice. He does intend, as can be observed by his speeches and still-nascent policies, to build just and peaceable relationships among all nations whenever possible. Only, he has not yet succeeded.

I am confident that President Obama will earn this honor, but it remains a poor and childish politicized choice by the Nobel Committee all the same. The Peace Prize is intended to recognize those whose actions have helped to build just relationships between nations and within the societies of nations; not, as it has been used here, as a political tool. It demeans recent and future laureates alike.

Further on the 2009 Nobel Prize

I am very happy for Herta Mueller. The Nobel Prize is quite an honor. Although, I am also one of those readers who is totally unfamiliar with her work, so my knowledge of her comes from various press coverage. It is the best part of these prizes that they introduce us to new authors, point toward something as worthwhile in the madness of marketing campaigns and mass-market publishing; and, as so many media outlets are fond of pointing out, American readers are very, very often being introduced to hitherto unknown foreign authors.

That being said, I think that the choice of Mueller — as well as some other recent Nobel choices — highlights a disconnect between the ethical questions at the forefront of European culture and those of the rest of the world. The issues of the Second World War and the struggles against post-war totalitarian regimes is a vivid memory and powerful ethical issue in Europe; whereas the remainder of the world is, to an extent, engaged with issues of fundamentalist religion and the ethical consequences of globalization. The two sets of issues are not unrelated by any means (one era sets in motion the next like a great Rube Goldberg machine), but they are indeed distinct sets of issues that require different types of witness by writers and artists.

To my mind, Pamuk and Le Clézio were more apt choices for the age — each write of the lasting consequences of culture wars, the effects of global economies, as well as certain fundamental human questions. Rushdie would have been an appropriate recipient in 2009 for his willingness to engage with and deconstruct Islam. (I'll make no claims about the 'best writers' winning this award.) The coverage of Mueller's work cites most often her witness of life under communist regimes, which is laudable; yet, what could be less similar to the problems of radical religion and terrorism than the extreme atheism of the communist state? No amount of evangelicalism in politics can truly affect a person in the same way as the belief in an eternal god, the soul, and a just reward in the afterlife can.

The nations of Europe are certainly embroiled in the same problems as the rest of the world: France's angst over the growing Muslim population; homegrown terrorism in the United Kingdom; the cartoons in the Netherlands; bombings in Spain and arrests in Italy. But the ethical perception of Europe's cultural leaders seems overwhelmed by the immediacy of 20th century conflicts. That time has passed though. New witnesses are needed. Find me authors who speak to this year, to this generation, and to the ethical issues of this century.

Herta Mueller Wins Nobel Prize

The Associated Press reports that 'Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller has the won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy, which has picked the winner annually since 1901, said Thursday that Mueller "who with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".' Learn more about Mueller at the Nobel Prize website and her Wikipedia page, and find a list of her titles in English at Amazon.

Many congratulations, but I had my heart set on William H. Gass. Next year, I suppose.

Nota Bene: William H. Gass

When the line is a good one, there is a musical movement to its meaning which binds the line together as if it were one word, yet at the same time articulating, weighing, and apportioning the lines' particular parts the way syllables and their sounds and stresses spell a noun or a verb, while throwing down a pattern of rhythm and meaning like a path to be pursued deeper into the stanza, and resonating with what has preceded it, if anything has. These are not naturally harmonious functions: looking forward, listening back, uniting and differentiating.
— William H. Gass, Reading Rilke

Tidbits

Picked up Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit at NEIBA this weekend, based solely on Mark Sarvas' glowing recommendation (which is also blurbed on the softcover). Uhm, notes to come. Not in love with it.

• The New York Times reports on [digital book] pirates! From the office of related anecdotes: In a meeting earlier this year with our Amazon Kindle 'Evangelist', as their publisher reps are called, we discussed digital content security. I said, 'Well, no one in the book industry wants to walk into this thing thing and get Napstered, you know?' To which the evangelist replied, 'Well, we really feel like people just aren't doing that.' Suffice it to say, my concerns were non squelched.

• Susan Barba, editor for Godine and Black Sparrow Books, is interviewed by Scott Esposito regarding her work with Georges Perec's Life a User's Manual: 'Without getting embroiled in a thorny argument about the question of fidelity, I’ll say this much: I think we rarely read successful literal translations of texts (apologies to Mr. Vladimir Nabokov). All translators make use of the principle of compensation to one degree or another; while Bellos might describe his use as more liberal than another’s (and he alludes to the arguments this liberal use has engendered in the same Note), I’m all for it in this case because it’s in the spirit of Perec’s work. The jokes, allusions, mathematical equations, and puzzles with which Perec peppered his work were an integral part of his texts and their reasons for being. If the translator has a choice between providing a literal translation which spoils the joke or elegance of the equation and substituting his own symbols in order to preserve meaning, then yes, let x equal y. I believe Georges Perec would agree.'

• Ladbrokes has placed 100/1 odds on William H. Gass winning the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, and Cormac McCarthy also at 100/1, while Joyce Carol Oates sits handily at 5/1 — yet another sign that there is no Justice on this desolate globe.

Alright true believers: Who's it going to be this year?

Relations not Transparent

The Boston Globe today relates some startling unemployment data, 'The unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent in September . . . [and] if laid-off workers who have settled for part-time work or have given up looking for new jobs are included, the unemployment rate rose to 17 percent.' We have ebbed; let's get some flow going now. (Although, I recall articles that posited a fiscal recovery without the concurrent job growth.) To the left of this article on the homepage, I noticed a headline related to our growing economic and social crises: 'Most babies born in rich countries this century will eventually make it to their 100th birthday, new research says.' One thinks of the masses of unemployed boomers whose lagging skill set has disqualified them from even basic office positions: the next phase of our economy has to be sustainable to a generation expected to live longer than any before it.

* Check out some poems at Jacket from Ben Mazer, and a few at Strong Verse from Nora Delaney. Also, I recommend the new issue of The Charles River Journal, in which I have a translation from the Irish of light, dirty verse. I'm off to NEIBA!

Tipping Pitches

I thought this was really interesting as a tutorial. All part of the great American passtime.