Archive for July, 2013

I’ve written about poet Dana Gioia recently, but I couldn’t resist this opportunity to do so again. I don’t know Mary Tabor, except on Facebook, which is how I found her interesting interview with Dana over at Facts and Arts (the interview is here).  A good deal of the talk is about his latest collection, Pity the Beautiful  (I got a private early reading of some of the poems – I wrote about that here). Says Dana, “Everything in this new book is in a sense a subtle, complicated protest against the gross, short-term materialism of contemporary life in the United States. In protesting, I think that we move with compassion, not with anger.”

An excerpt:

Tabor: At this point in your career that has been so sterling, you have 11 honorary degrees—

Gioia: None of which I deserved.

Tabor: Aren’t you modest? On psychologist Maslow’s Pyramid, at the bottom are food and shelter, safety, then love, esteem and at the top is self-actualization. Are you there?

Interviewer…

Gioia: I’ve always had kind of an inverted pyramid. My life seems terribly practical from the outside. I’ve had to construct a practical life because everything inside is totally idealistic and self-actualizing. So how could I lead the life I wanted to lead when essentially I’m a working-class kid? I always had a job and I’ve turned down practical offers. I only wrote what I believed I should write. My pyramid is all mixed up. It’s like Maslow’s Rubik Cube.

Tabor: What did your parents do?

Gioia: My Dad was Sicilian and when I was born he was a cab driver, then a chauffeur. My mother worked at the phone company. She was Mexican-American. They were good working people but poor as could be. At the end of their lives, they were totally broke. My brother and I felt we had to be practical with two more kids younger than we were. But at this point I do think I’ve earned the right to just do what I want: to write and to energize culture. American literary culture right now is in the doldrums.

…and interviewee

Tabor: You’ve said, “I don’t think Americans are dumber than they were 25 years ago, but our culture is.” Tell me how our culture is dumber.

Gioia: Our culture is vastly dumber. I’ll give you an example. If you’ve got a copy of The New Yorker from 30 years ago, it would have about six times as many words as it does now. The same thing for The Atlantic. With most of our newspapers, if somebody wrote a review of a book, it was thousands of words long. People would actually think through things in print in a serious way. Even if you didn’t like The New Yorker, you had to take it seriously. Nowadays we have the USA Today version of culture. People have been trained by TV and the Internet to want an image and a headline. The notion of careful sequential thought contextualized historically, ideologically is a vanishing skill. When we collectively lose our ability to have sustained linear attention, whole types of thought are impossible. I see this in my students who are bright kids but have read very little.

Read the whole shebang here.

Postscript on 8/1:  And the incomparable Jeff Sypeck over at Quid Plura agrees!  He wrote to us:

I agree with Gioia, but you don’t have to look to The New Yorker or The Atlantic for examples. In 1952, Time magazine published a piece about postwar efforts to preserve and publish Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; the article treats the subject seriously and assumes the curiosity of the middlebrow reader.

By contrast, when Heaney’s Beowulf came out in 2000, Time covered its publication with a cliché from Woody Allen and a crack about Harry Potter, characterized it as the epic every English major only pretended to read, said it was “filled with odd names and a lot of gory hewing and hacking,” and called Heaney’s translation “boffo.” A reader from 1952 transported to the year 2000 might well have concluded that Time had become a magazine for children.

The book that brought him to the West.

Zbigniew Herbert died on a stormy night in Warsaw, this day, in 1998. We can do no better than link to Artur Sebastian Rosman‘s post, “Zbigniew Herbert Tempers the Rational Fury” in his brand-new blog, Cosmos the in Lost. In particular, Artur explores Herbert’s interesting connection with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

From Herbert’s poem, “Mr. Cogito Tells of the Temptation of Spinoza”:

Baruch Spinoza of Amsterdam
was seized by a desire to reach God

in the attic
cutting lenses
he suddenly pierced a curtain
and stood face to face

he spoke for a long time
(and as he so spoke
his mind enlarged
and his soul)
he posed questions
about the nature of man …

Well, read the rest here.

I never met Zbigniew Herbert, but I did stroke his cat.  I snapped this photo of the occasion in 2008.  Szu-szu is on the right.  On the left is Mouszka, an important acquisition by Madame Herbert sometime after the death of her husband.  I wonder if Szu-szu is still alive…

Meanwhile, among my own posts on Herbert are: “The Worst Dinner Party Ever, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and the Lady Who Watched the Fight” here; and “When Zbyszek Met Kasia” here; and “Notting Hill Editions: Irish Saints, Dutch Executioners, and “a Crumb of Helpless Goodness”  here.

Light a candle in his memory.  And meanwhile, I must find a larger photo of these cats somewhere.  (Postscript: Found a bigger copy of the photo. The Herbert pussycats deserve no less.)

Watch your tongue, sir.

Thou bawdy, motley-minded rudesby!

Thou brazen, raw-boned canker-blossom!

Thou art a sottish, clay-brained nut-hook!

Thou prating, paper-faced pantaloon!

Thou art a waggish, horn-mad dogfish!

Thou art a hideous, eye-offending, hedge-pig!

Thou vacant, lean-witted manikin!

Who knew this was William Shakespeare at his rudest?  According to the high school English teacher who runs the blog Marginalia, “I gave my students a list of his oaths and insults, garnered from the body of his plays, [which] shows a predilection for double entendres, sexual flaws, and short jokes. … Upon examining this list, my students were immediately struck by the lack of anything explicit. I had told them that Shakespeare could be quite foul, when he chose, and there was a collective disappointment when the list failed to provide them with anything particularly R-rated. It wasn’t until I began to help them weed through the euphemisms and sift through the language that they began to get a picture of the breadth and scope of Shakespeare’s curses. The average tenth-grader will probably not be aware that to call someone ‘raw-boned’ is to imply that the person in question has been having so much sex that they feel literally raw. They will not know that in Shakespeare’s day, the word ‘nothing’ also meant ‘no thing,’ ‘thing’ meaning penis, making nothing sort of a euphemism for the female genitalia. Thus, when Hamlet tells Ophelia that nothing is a fair thought between a maid’s legs, he’s obliquely referencing her vulva. And what, then, do you suppose is the real meaning of the title Much Ado About Nothing?”

If you’re into antique obscenity, you might also want to check out Melissa Mohr‘s Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing – or at least John McMurtrie‘s review of it in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.  She studies the evolution of swearing from the Romans to today.  “Swearing is like the climate — it goes through cycles,” she claims.

“Ordinary people didn’t know Latin; women didn’t know Latin (with few exceptions, including Queen Elizabeth I); children didn’t know Latin. This made the language particularly suitable for talking about things you didn’t want the majority of people to understand — dangerous things such as sex.”

“In the Middle Ages, the equivalent of modern obscenity was not ‘foul words,’ but oaths. … Vain swearing [such as ‘by God’s bones’] was medieval obscenity, carrying all the power of the public utterance of taboo topics that defines obscene words.”

I take issue with her claim about the rarity of Latin – all the children in the Tudor household learned it, including Queen Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary and her cousin Lady Jane Grey, in addition to the males (Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII‘s well-educated first wife, certainly spoke it too, and his last, Catherine Parr).  Thomas More‘s household learned it.  I expect most children in the aristocratic households learned enough to fake it.  Presumably Petrarch didn’t write most of his work in Latin because he thought it would be kind of an inside joke.  And that’s just off the top of my head. Certainly it was the language of church and law, which already includes a lot of churchmen (and churchwomen, such as nuns) and lawyers, and I bet the people sitting in the pews had picked up a little along the way, though what they picked up on Sundays was not likely to include useful curses.

But “vain swearing” accounts for a lot of obscure curses, such as Shakespeare’s oft-repeated  “Zounds!”

Between the playpen and the frozen vegetables? Not.

We missed June 27, the official day Shirley Jackson‘s “The Lottery” takes place.  It’s a counterpart to Bloomsday earlier in the month, on June 16.  You know the story:  In a small-time American town, citizens gather every year to implore an unnamed force to grant a good corn harvest. The citizens draw slips of paper from a wooden box to select a victim for human sacrifice. A young mother draws the losing card, and is stoned to death by the community.  The end.

Hundreds of letters poured into the New Yorker when it was first published in 1948.  What did the story mean?  According to her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, “she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years.”

That’s not quite true.  She told the San Francisco Chronicle a month after the story was published:  “Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And how was the story written?  According to Jackson, speaking at a lecture, “I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator and, writing the story, I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause. As a matter of fact, when I read it over later I decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft.”

The single change was a request from the  New Yorker editor who reviewed the first draft, who asked “that the date mentioned in the story be changed to coincide with the date of the issue of the magazine in which the story would appear, and I said of course.”

That’s not quite true, either.  William Brennan‘s article in Slate, which came out last month in time for Lottery Day, corrects the record, after he made a trip to the Library of Congress, which holds Jackson’s records.  You can read the list of his discoveries in “How Shirley Jackson Wrote ‘The Lottery'” here.

Here’s something I didn’t know.  Jackson wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which was adapted in the Robert Wise film The Haunting, with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom.  Scared the bejeebers out of me when I was an imaginative little kid. I’ve refused to go to horror movies ever since.

Where would we be without both of them?

Met and buried here.

Happy birthday, Francesco Petrarca (a.k.a. Petrarch), born this day in 1304. What better way to celebrate the Tuscan poet’s birthday today than with this Venetian painting, circa 1510, which portrays him with the lady who rejected him in life, Laura de Noves? She rebuffed him for good reason; she was married with children at the time of their first meeting.  As Samuel Maio writes in his foreword to A.M. Juster‘s translations, published by Birch Brook Press (2001), it was “a longing intensified by the cultural, religious, and moral fates that have deemed her unreachable. Perhaps this is the reason for our age’s attraction to Petrarch, that his deepest torments are shockingly foreign and mysteriously antiquated compared to our culture’s insistence on immediate (if not satisfactory) gratification of our every whim and concupiscent impulse.”

But I have become intrigued with both figures for other reasons, for I am in love with Avignon.

That small Provençal city is where the poet first encountered Laura.  She was born in Avignon during the Babylonian Captivity, when the city was the hub of Western Christendom.  Petrarch summed their relationship this way:

“Laura, illustrated by her virtues and well-celebrated in my verse, appeared to me for the first time during my youth in 1327, on April 6, in the Church of Saint Claire in Avignon, in the first hour of the day; and in the same city, in the same month, on the same sixth day at the same first hour in the year of 1348, withdrew from life, while I was at Verona, unconscious of my loss…. Her chaste and lovely body was interred on the evening of the same day in the church of the Minorites: her soul, as I believe, returned to heaven, whence it came.

Or, as he expressed it in his Canzioniere, in Juster’s translations:

Love, just when hope,
the yield from all my faith, had bloomed,
I lost the one whose mercy I assumed.

She died at the age of 38 in the year 1348, on April 6th, another Good Friday, and 21 years to the hour that Petrarch first saw her.  One biographer wrote that we know little about her except that she possessed great beauty. I rather doubt we know even that. I’ve known too many men to see extraordinary charm in ordinary faces, and enough of a Jungian to know that we project much of ourselves into the beloved. I suspect he saw in her, as his father’s chum Dante saw in another woman: grace and dignity and proportion and (let’s hope) a profound spiritual dimension that made her worthy of attention, though not inclined to be silly if she was ever aware of the rapture she had inspired. 

Recalling, perhaps, the Paschal associations with their meeting and her death, Petrarch wrote:

He did not grace Rome when he came to Earth,
but chose Judea, for above all traits
it pleased Him to exalt humanity.

And so to show that He appreciates
both nature and my Lady’s place of birth,
a village sun becomes his legacy.

So let us celebrate both today, in the remaining hours of the day.  Were it not for her, we would not have Petrarch’s Canzoniere – and without the Canzoniere, I doubt we would be remembering this day with quite so much veneration.