Six lines from Auden

I came to W.H. Auden's poetry relatively late: when I was an undergraduate, Yeats and Eliot ruled from the world of the dead, and I'm not sure that many English Department people knew what to do with Auden's plain, colloquial words.

Here's a wonderful Auden passage: the first six lines of the very late poem "A Thanksgiving" (the next-to-last poem in Edward Mendelson's edition of the Selected Poems):

    When pre-pubescent I felt
that moorlands and woodlands were sacred:
    people seemed rather profane.

    Thus, when I started to verse,
I presently sat at the feet of
    Hardy and Thomas and Frost.

What's to like? A number of things:

The poet is quietly dazzling, writing syllabic verse with 7-, 9-, and 7-syllable lines. Note too the partial rhyme of verse and Frost and the way line six echoes "Tinker to Evans to Chance."

The poet characterizes his youth in a funny, self-deprecating way. It's impossible to imagine, say, Dylan Thomas in "Fern Hill" speaking of himself as "pre-pubescent." "Rather profane" is a nice swipe at the attitudes of youth too -- people, mucking up the landscape! A pre-pubescent of course would be untroubled by his own profane presence in these sacred territories.

There's more subtle comedy too: even when the poet, as a very young man, is writing poems without other people in them, he has to learn how to do so from other people -- from Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Robert Frost. So the solitary wanderer is not so solitary after all, and if he's sitting at the metaphorical feet of other poets, he's not wandering either.

One more point: Auden is taking up the centuries-old poetic practice of honoring by surname, as in Ben Jonson's Cary-Morison ode: "Nothing perfect done, / But as a CARY, or a MORISON." But he's having fun with this practice, sneaking in the American Frost and later acknowledging Brecht and Kierkegaard. Contrast the insular Philip Larkin, who once responded to an interviewer's question about another writer-librarian by asking "Who's Jorge Luis Borges?"

2007 is Auden's centenary -- one more good reason to take a look at his poems.

Other Auden posts

W.H. Auden centenary
Auden on handwriting and typing
Ian McEwan on Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" and the 2005 London subway bombings

Unnecessary repetition

I liked this example of unnecessary (and unneeded!) repetition in my local newspaper:

Police officers would be able to park all their squad cars next to the station and be able to drive through a 24-foot-wide parking lot aisle, instead of the existing 12-foot-wide alley.

"It is going to double the width of the access," [the city planner] said.

12 + 12 . . . yes, it checks out.

Related post
Unnecessary repetition

Primates and morality

Interesting reading in today's New York Times, on primatologist Frans de Waal's contention that the origins of human morality are to be found in the social behavior of monkeys and apes:

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.

Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.

Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape.

These four kinds of behavior -- empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking -- are the basis of sociality.

Read more:

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior (New York Times)

And now it's back to work at the Continental Paper Grading Company.

The toll of war

U.S. troop fatalities in Iraq (March 2003-February 28, 2007):

3,166

For Iraqi Security Force and civilian fatalities in Iraq, estimates range from

30,000 (March 2003-December 2005, Bush administration)

to

650,000 (March 2003-November 2006, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health)

An interactive timeline is available from National Public Radio:

The Toll of War

“Middle school is like Scotch”

On teaching at a middle school in Brooklyn:

JoAnn Rintel Abreu, 40, an English and social studies teacher at Seth Low, graduated with a masters' degree in English literature, the "bare minimum" teaching requirements and glorious visions of turning high school students on to Shakespeare and Chaucer. She was offered a middle school job first.

Now, after 16 years at Seth Low, Mrs. Abreu takes great satisfaction in trying to figure out how to reach adolescents. The rewards come with breakthrough moments, like when a sullen eighth grader who rarely does his homework handed in a bitterly descriptive, beautifully written memoir about his father's new girlfriend, "the witch."

"Middle school is like Scotch," she reflected in the teachers' lounge one afternoon. "At first you try to get it down. Then you get used to it. Then it's all you order."

For Teachers, Middle School Is Test of Wills (New York Times)

Me?

If I were paranoid, I would be certain that Roz Chast is drawing me. Again and again, this glasses-wearing, bearded guy appears in her work. Here he's a psychiatrist floating in an inner tube:

[Detail from "Emergency Session," New Yorker cover, August 7 and 14, 2006.]

And here he's passing as an academic:

[Detail from "How to Bail Out EuroDisney," New Yorker, December 28, 1992]

Wait a minute: she is drawing me.

By Roz Chast: Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006 (Amazon)

An Irish post

A passage from "Ithaca," the catechism episode of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922):

What considerations rendered departure desirable?

The attractive character of certain localities in Ireland and abroad, as represented in general geographical maps of polychrome design or in special ordnance survey charts by employment of scale numerals and hachures.

In Ireland?

The cliffs of Moher, the windy wilds of Connemara, lough Neagh with submerged petrified city, the Giant's Causeway, Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle, the Golden Vale of Tipperary, the islands of Aran, the pastures of royal Meath, Brigid's elm in Kildare, the Queen's Island shipyard in Belfast, the Salmon Leap, the lakes of Killarney.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day.

Font haiku

To mark the release of the film Helvetica ("a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture"), Extensis ("professional font management") is sponsoring a font-related haiku contest. My entry:

In ink, on paper,

words, letters, echo, quarrel:

"Sans serif!" "Serif!"

Bailey Fountain

From a way down Flatbush Avenue it suggests that cloven flame which spoke with Dante in hell but by a nearer view, it is a man and a nude woman in bronze, and their plump child, eager for the Park, and it represents the beauty and stability of Brooklyn, and of human, family life. The man and wife stand back to back, in the classical posture of domestic sleep. It is a thoroughly vulgar and sincere piece of work, and once one gets beyond the esthete's sometimes myopic scorn, is the infallibly appropriate creation of the whole heart of Brooklyn. Michelangelo would have done much less well.

A description of Bailey Fountain, which stands in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza, near the entrance to Prospect Park, from an essay by James Agee, "Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes," rejected by Fortune magazine in 1939 and published by Esquire in 1968. In 2005 the essay was published as a slender hardcover by Fordham University Press. I noticed and bought it in a bookstore a few days ago.

The photograph is by Paul Kostro and is used by permission:

Closeup of Bailey Fountain (Flickr)
More photographs by Paul Kostro (Flickr)

According to the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, the male and female figures represent Wisdom and Felicity. Not a bad way to imagine a human partnership. For more on the history of Bailey Fountain:

Bailey Fountain (NYC Department of Parks and Recreation)

The National Philharmonic of Russia

The National Philharmonic of Russia is on its first United States tour, with piano soloist Olga Kern. If you live in or near a city where the NPR and Kern are performing, try to get tickets. You won't be disappointed -- if, that is, you can get tickets.

My wife Elaine and I heard the NPR and Kern last night at the University of Illinois' Krannert Center in an all-Russian program: Shostakovich's Festive Overture, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in D minor. I went to be a good guy and pick up some Husband Points. But I soon figured out that I was listening to one of the most exciting, thrilling performances I'd ever heard.

Elaine's review of the concert (Musical Assumptions)

National Philharmornic of Russia Begins Debut U.S. Tour (Playbill)

Olga Kern plays Rachmaninoff (not with the NPR) (YouTube)