“ A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
“Of Eros and of Dust”
Nov 30
Nov 28
“ ASQ: In 1990 I was under interrogation in [former Israeli prison near Nablus] al-Fara’a prison. After [the interrogator] finished, I said, “What do you want? We finished the interrogation.” He said, “Yes, I want something from you.” I said, “What?” He said, “What about making you a Palestinian leader? Which is better for you? To get out of jail — nobody is waiting for you except your wife. Or having 20 TV cameras waiting for you?” I said, “Well, 20 TV cameras would be much better.” He said, “Okay, we will arrange that for you when you get out of prison.” I said, “What’s after that?” He said, “After that we will concentrate on you in our mass media. Professor Qassim went, to Professor Qassim ate, to Professor Qassim met with some people, made a speech here and there and so on and in a couple of weeks you will be a Palestinian leader.” I said, “What do you want in return?” He said, “I don’t want anything. We have so many spies around. All I want from you is to give hot speeches. Talk about the liberation of Haifa and Jaffa, but go back home and sleep. Don’t do anything.” I said, “Okay, I will think about it and I will send you my answer.” I never thought about it and I never sent an answer. But that’s how they make leaders. So many of our leaders — they speak too much, they give hot speeches and people believe that these are nationalists! They are collaborators.
Nov 20
“ Irmgard Heydorn (93), former resistance fighter, talks about her dream of a bright future in 1945: “My biggest illusion was to believe that it would be possible to build a new society, without acknowledging that there was nobody with whom to do so.
Nov 15
“ It was a soulless place, poorly planned, with no playgrounds for children or community buildings. Verney described it as “a social desert” and gathered a small congregation together for Sunday worship in a builders’ canteen, where rats ate the heart out of a harmonium.
Nov 08
“ I did a reading at Milton Keynes the other week,” he tells me. “I had to get ready in the gents. There was no one in there, so I went into the disabled cubicle because there’s more room. And there was something about it that was almost…” Cooper Clarke, who is sensitive to the effect of every syllable, even in routine conversation, pauses for thought. “…residential. When I come out, the attendant is waiting. He says: ‘You don’t look disabled. What were you doing in there?’ And I said – I don’t know why, it came to me without thinking – ‘Just keeping the dream alive.’ That bought me just enough time to flee.
Nov 02
“ It is a principle universally acknowledged that those in search of examples of civil courage waste their time if they look for them among university faculty members and administrators.
Oct 29
“ Imagine the shock then at the appearance of a book, Come What May, by the great Cork hurler Dónal Óg Cusack which announces that he is gay. This has been a rumour for some time, a rumour helped along by a fan of an opposing team who carried a megaphone to a match in which Dónal Óg was playing and waited for a lull when there was silence and then roared into his megaphone: ‘He’s queer. He’s bent. His arse is up for rent. Dónal Óg. Dónal Óg.’
“ If we understand this under the rubric of ‘globalization,’ we see that the tentacles of that wondrous animal reach down into things that were once unambiguously our own: the amount of oil in a man’s crankcase.
Oct 23
“ The Prague newspaper Lidove Noviny has laid its hands on a previously unknown document which serves as further evidence that the writer Milan Kundera informed on the anti-communist agent Miroslav Dvoracek in Stalinst Prague of 1950. It is the manuscript of a speech given in 1952 by the former deputy minister for National Security, Jaroslav Jerman. Jerman praises Dvoracek’s arrest as a shining example “of how our citizens can expose our enemies”. Then Jerman cites the police document which was published last year in Respekt magazine, and which first cast suspicion on Kundera. Now, says the historian Petr Koura in the Lidove Noviny, “it seems practically impossible that the police document that emerged last year could be a fake.” Although the historian does add, that even the new document does not prove Kundera’s guilt unequivocally. Another commentator in the paper calls upon Kundera “for the umpteenth time” to speak up.
Oct 22
Oct 21
"That Domineering Creature Called the 'I'"
Charles Simic
Frederick Seidel (Mark Mahaney)
No recent book of poetry has been reviewed as widely and as favorably as Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009. It seems as if every major newspaper and literary magazine on both sides of the Atlantic has already published an admiring piece on the poet and we can expect more accolades to come. “Thank God for Fred Seidel,” Michael Hofmann concludes a review of the book in September issue of Poetry. Adam Kirsch agrees, calling Seidel perhaps the best American poet alive. Even the critics who have expressed a few reservations about his poetry agree that he’s never boring. Like Lowell, Plath and Sexton—and even Ginsberg—Seidel specializes in saying things one is ordinarily reluctant to say aloud even to oneself. His hatreds, his lusts, his wealth and his vanity are all on display. The poems are shocking and often annoying, but that’s not the whole story. They can also be genuinely moving and compassionate.
BROADWAY MELODY
A naked woman my age is a total nightmare.
A woman my age naked is a nightmare.
It doesn’t matter. One doesn’t care.
One doesn’t say it out loud because it’s rare
For anyone to be willing to say it,
Because it’s the equivalent of buying billboard space to display it,
Display how horrible life after death is,
How horrible to draw your last breath is,
When you go on living.
I hate the old couples on their walkers giving
Off odors of love, and in City Diner eating a ray
Of hope, and paying and trembling back out on Broadway,
Drumming and dancing, chanting something nearly unbearable,
Spreading their wings in order to be more beautiful and more terrible.
This is an original and very powerful poem, as far as I’m concerned, but I find it impossible to persuade my friends that Seidel is worth reading. He is a showoff, they complain, endlessly bragging about the company of the rich and famous he keeps or his custom-made English suits and Italian motorcycles. They don’t like to spend time with someone who is convinced of his own exceptionality and who never ceases to remind them of that, though they admit that Seidel does have some striking images and metaphors in his poems.
I’ve encountered this problem before. Most of my students at the University of New Hampshire, where I taught for many years, never really got to like Lowell, Plath and Sexton, no matter how hard I tried to persuade them of the value of their poems. Coming from modest, hard-working small town New England families, they found the endless whining of these well-to-do Bostonians self-indulgent and insufferable. Although they would not admit it, a lot of their discomfort had to do with class. Who cares if some rich man or woman is unhappy, they were implying.
It surprised me. I had always believed that a good poem can stand on its own, that it made no difference if some creep you’d never want to meet in your life wrote it; but, obviously, that’s not how it is with many readers. For them, what Thomas Moore said in a prayer almost five centuries ago is still the definition of a good poem.
Grant me a soul to which dullness is naught,
knowing no complaint, grumble or sigh,
and do not permit me to give too much thought
to that domineering creature called the “I.”
Because it’s good; because people only ever quote the first line; because he is about class (and so, clearly, is Simic); because the New York Review is on Tumblr.
“If Larkin had won the pools…” is a better put-down.
Oct 20
“ You have to be incredibly cautious,” Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah, says. From 1994 to 1997, he advised Israeli commanders on targeted killings in the Gaza Strip. “Not everyone is at the level appropriate for targeted killing,” he says. “You want a leader, the hub with many spokes.” Guiora, who follows the Predator program closely, fears that national security officials here lack a clear policy and a firm definition of success. “Once you start targeted killing, you better make damn sure there’s a policy guiding it,” he says. “It can’t be just catch-as-catch-can.
Oct 18
“ The dialogue to which Marker invites us recalls, in many respects, that of Video Letter, of the rare and beautiful video letters that the poet Tanikawa and the filmmaker-poet Terayama sent to each other. But as in Immemory, the dialogue between sender and addressee remains virtual; and one still has very little understanding of what a CD-ROM may be, somewhere between the withdrawing film and the book of images. One thinks of the book conceived by Tanikawa, on the occasion of a retreat from writing. A screen-book in landscape format, nothing but signs, pages of images and words, alternating, mixing, edited together with an astonishing freedom: a staggering encyclopedia of everyday life and of life in general. A spectography of Time. The author entitled it Solo and the book was published by Daguerreo Press. These are his ‘Bedside Notes,’ like the book by Sei Shônigon which haunts Sans soleil and to which Marker returns in Immemory – since it is still a matter of making lists and of choosing “the list of ‘things that make the heart beat.’” [113-114]
Oct 15
Also, Keith Gessen?
Not a public intellectual! This is a dude who seriously entitled his novel “All the Sad Young Literary Men.”
No he didn’t.
Oct 11
