Archive for May, 2022

Some good news in a sad year: Princeton University Press has just published the two-volume set of the complete poems of W.H. Auden, one of the foremost poets of the twentieth century. The volumes, edited, annotated and introduced by leading Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, include unpublished poems, songs, juvenilia, original texts and revisions. Together, the two volumes total nearly 2,000 pages.

There’s significance in the publication date: 2022 marks the hundredth anniversary of the year Auden began writing poetry. Had Princeton waited another eleven years, it would have marked the centenary of another remarkable event in his life, which Mendelson describes in his introduction:

“At the same time, when he was looking publicly toward social revolution, he was quietly approaching an inner one. In May 1933 he wrote a sestina, ‘Hearing of harvests rotting in the valley’, one of his bravura historical summaries of many centuries in a few rapid stanzas. After describing earlier centuries’ fantasies of escape from ‘the sorrow’ of unhappy cities to the happiness of utopias somewhere else, the poem ends by imagining a different kind of transformation, not an escape from sorrow, but the sorrow itself melting into a revitalizing flood, after which ‘we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.'”

“A few weeks later, in June 1933, he experienced what he later called, in a lightly-disguised autobiographical essay, a ‘Vision of Agape.’ This occurred when, sitting with three fellow teachers at the Downs School, he knew for the first time, because he was experiencing it, ‘what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself.'”

An excerpt from the essay:

“One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough but we were certainly not intimate friends, nor had any one of us a sexual interest in another.

Incidentally, we had not drunk any alcohol. We were talking casually about everyday matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because, thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself…. My personal feelings towards them were unchanged—they were still colleagues, not intimate friends—but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it.”

We don’t always get to choose our gigs, so jazz scholar Ted Gioia recently accepted an unlikely invitation to talk to med school students about the humanities. (More news: the Jazz Journalists Association had chosen Ted’s lively and informed The Honest Broker as blog of the year, and also awarded him the Robert Palmer-Helen Oakley Dance Award for Excellence in Writing.)

Back to the med school visit:

So I agreed to give this talk, but with trepidation. When you’re involved in arts or culture and stand up in front of an audience of science or tech people, they expect you to justify the humanities. 

Why should we waste time with you? They don’t actually say that, but it’s hanging thick in the air like a bad odor.

A “casual talk” about the humanities turns into a plea to the jury for acquittal. There’s simply more skepticism about the humanities now than ever before, and you can’t avoid that cynical attitude, especially when talking to a whole room of future doctors.

Frankly, I don’t like defending the humanities. Don’t get me wrong—studying the humanities was life-changing for me. I grew up in a neighborhood where nobody’s parents, including my own, had gone to college. So when I got the chance, I found it liberating to study Dante, Plato, Shakespeare, Mozart, Sappho, Goethe, and all those other dead people from across the big pond.

But these individuals, so important to my development, aren’t as beloved nowadays. I don’t know how anyone can grapple with ideas or the world at a deep level without paying close attention to the leading lights of the past, but I don’t believe anyone should be forced to read Shakespeare, for example. Let those who are curious and willing, go down that path. If that’s just a tiny number of people, so be it. And if others think they have found a better way to wisdom that doesn’t involve learning from the past, I wish them well and send them off to their favorite TikTok influencers.

So how did it go? Read here, on Ted’s award-winning blog.

Peter Pomerantsev is a Kyiv-born author, journalist, and TV producer who grew up in London. His family was exiled in 1978, when he was nine months old, after his father, poet and author Igor Pomerantsev was arrested by the KGB for distributing banned books, including Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. (His mother is film producer Liana Pomerantsev.)

Even so, he wrote, watching the atrocities “fills an émigré Ukrainian like myself with cold hate. I can feel my heart hardening. But it’s much stronger for those who live in Ukraine permanently.” And it affects the rest of us, too – as far away as California.

The Ukrainian-British author wrote a poignant article, “I can feel my heart hardening as the war goes on,” during Passover. An excerpt from The Spectator:

Recalling Ukraine during Passover Many Ukrainians I speak to worry that the war will brutalise them, that they risk becoming so full of hate it will eat them up inside. As I rode down to Rome airport I was reading WhatsApp messages from my friend and colleague Denys Kobzin, who is in Kharkiv. Before the war, just seven weeks ago, he was a famous sociologist. Now he’s joined a territorial defence unit and sends me selfies with a machine-gun slung across his shoulders. I asked him about how his unit copes with hate. He explained that the soldiers he is with see themselves as fighting to join the civilised world – which can help check the most brutal instincts.

The puzzle of how to keep your humanity while killing a genocidal enemy is also the most troubling part of Passover. This year it falls on Good Friday and overlaps with Ramadan. I’ve always found the Passover Seder a brutal affair, with its celebration of dead Egyptian firstborns, and rejoicing at the destruction of Pharoah’s army under the Red Sea. As my car passed from Umbria into Lazio I called my rabbi, Jeremy Gordon at New London Synagogue, to ask if there’s anything in the tradition that deals with this moral fallout. During the Seder there’s a line about asking God to ‘pour out Your wrath on the people who know You not’. One mollifying custom, Rabbi Jeremy told me, is to add another verse: ‘Pour out Your love on the nations that know You.’ Meanwhile in the Talmud there’s a passage describing how when the angels wanted to celebrate the drowning of the Egyptian army, God stopped them. How could they sing when His creations were dying? Even a genocidal enemy has some humanity. But if I’m honest, I celebrate every incinerated Russian tank. I tried to think about the soldiers inside them at the start of the war but I lost that moral battle by week two.

… At breakfast in the hotel I suddenly find myself weeping over the boiled eggs and coffee. That’s how you recognise Ukrainians these days – they’re the ones crying in public for no apparent reason. Like Zelensky, I may be angry at God, but religion helps: the ever-returning catalogue of mass murder imprinted in Judaism puts this current evil into a context of pain and ultimate resilience. Passover seems more special this year. Should I spend it at New London? With my parents in Prague? My new home in DC? No – there’s only one place which captures the puzzles, paradoxes and victories of Passover. I’m filing this as I head down to Warsaw station, then it’s a long, rumbling ride to the town of my birth. Next year, perhaps, in Jerusalem. But this week I can only be in Kyiv.

Read the whole thing HERE:

Here’s something cheery and inspirational to add a little oomph to your day: Kurt Vonnegut‘s 2006 letter to Xavier High School students in New York City. The English teacher, Ms. Lockwood, had given the students the assignment of writing to prominent authors and inviting them to the school. None visited, and only one responded – Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five. Here’s what he had to say: