Readerly smudges on the windowpanes of history

I know very little about the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and even less about his poetry.

But I liked this quotation from an article in the TLS about the centenary celebrations of the poet's life:

As Robert Hass put it, readers “press their noses longingly against the window of people who have had dramatic historical experiences”.

Nicely put.

It's not so much a policy, it's more like free verse

Prospective Republican candidate for president Herman Cain (who is apparently leading the party's polls), responding to a question at last night's debate about how he would respond in the face of a possible European financial meltdown:

"Just like a dollar must be a dollar when we wake up in the morning, just like 60 minutes is in an hour, a dollar must be a dollar."

That's very reassuring.

It's an accomplishment to take words and extract the meaning from them

Like many of the YouTube videos available of concerts, this one could have benefited from a steadier hand and from fewer people around the person filming who scream stuff.

It also ends rather prematurely and abruptly.

Still, it's a good performance of a great (ahem...) song by a great band.



The Mountain Goats, 'The Sign' (originally by Ace of Base), 9:30 Club, Washington, DC

And hey, it's filmed at the 9:30 Club in DC, where I used to spend a good amount of time.

That's reason enough, I think.

Mixed news

Félix Fénéon, bringing things to a fine point, around the turn of the last century: 

“There is no longer a God even for drunkards. Kersilie, of St.-Germain, who had mistaken the window for the door, is dead.” 

From Novels in Three Lines, described here.

(Via Blood & Treasure)

The metal concert at the end of the universe, and other poems

As is oft his wont, John Darnielle has been writing poetry about metal bands.

I've quite enjoyed a couple of his recent offerings: 'the temple at the end of the cosmos' (on Ride for Revenge) and 'sacred worlds' (on Blind Guardian).

Related: JD talks such topics with The Believer.

And explains here, that death metal rules.

In the bleak midwinter

There is something strikingly poetic, spare and lovely--but also gloomy and foreboding--in George Orwell's diary entry from 2 January 1940:

No thaw. Fallen ash-boughs all stripped & gnawed by rabbits. Pan of water left out all day is thickly frozen by evening.

6 eggs.

Winter. Can it end already?

Under the pale moon, where I see a lot of stars

It's been a while since I've posted a reminder of our continuing Mountain Goats obsessions, so it's about time.

And this one, although it's really more audio-based, features a striking image (from his wife's Flickr photostream) of singer-songwriter John Darnielle with a somewhat disgruntled-looking wombat. (It may be, though that 'disgruntled' is more or less the default expression of a wombat, how do I know?)

And you don't run across that sort of thing every day.

Moreover, I have now discovered yet another cosmic link between JD and yours truly: the Cubs have, apparently, broken his heart too.



The Mountain Goats, 'The Sign' (orig. Ace of Base), 2002.

Previous Mountain Goats clips and comments available here.

Other MG version of 'The Sign'.

Put off by Padel's poetry

I initially thought that the title of Ruth Padel's (aka The poet formerly known as Oxford Professor of Poetry) poem "Survival of the Fittest", from her collection Darwin: A Life in Poems, was somewhat ... suboptimal. After all, the phrase (coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin, even though the latter adopted it in later versions of On the Origin of Species) is not exactly the most appropriate metaphor to describe the principle of natural selection.

But now that I've watched a video of Padel reading from her work (and in a yurt, too) at the Hay festival I'm no longer so certain that this was merely a minor slip of the pen by a slightly ditsy lady sporting the medusaesque hair and dramatic eye make-up of expressionist movie stars. Sounds more like Padel, who is Darwin's great-great-granddaughter, has used her poetry for a wee spot of kin bitching. I don't know whether the other poems in the collection are in any way more ... astute than "Survival ..." (in one of them, apparently, she imagines Darwin's horny revery over a smutty painting), but somehow I can't be arsed asked to read them.

R.I.P. Nicholas Hughes

Of course I'm aware that - on this splendiferously sunny Easter Sunday, on which I succumbed (tut-tut) to the temptation to plant the tomatoes before the sacrosanct "Frost Saint" watershed (the cold snap that sometimes strikes in May, destroying the crop of all too optimistic gardeners) - you're all already slobbering to read a devastating deconstruction of the Easter message by clanger-dropping Mr. Godastic Walter Mixa (aka the Bishop of Augsburg) .

Well, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a day or so to get our take on "agressive atheistm" (though I can promise you that something substantial - involving hard historical data and quotes by Richard Evans and the likes - is brewing). These here avowed atheists are too busy having a peaceful and sunny spring holiday. I guess you could call that "practising atheism".

In the meantime, here's a belated tribute to Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, who committed suicide on 16 March this year. The New York Times has a particularly evocative article about what seems to have been a lovely man:

[Nicholas Hughes] was possessed with an utter distaste for academic politics and a special gift for finding simple solutions to complex scientific problems, which he then translated into clear, clean prose for the most important publications in his field.

Well, that's one thing we have in common (guess which of the three it is), and two that I'm aspiring to. Given these dislikes and passions, it is hardly surprising that Hughes found life in a world of empty verbiage, professional obsfuscation and territorial megalomania too difficult to bear. I hope he's found peace.

And just to round off my commemoration, here's the poem that Plath wrote about him:

Sylvia Plath, "Nick and the Candlestick"

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish -
Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs -

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.