Paisley and Plaid

Margaret Atwood’s poetry and fiction are among the best.  My first encounter was The Robber Bride,  followed by The Handmaid’ Tale, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crate in that order, I think. Most of these were published in the ‘9o’s. Atwood’s worldview sometimes conflicts with mine, but she is insightful and tells her captivating stories with masterful style. 

She’s often satirical as in the terse “You fit into me:”

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
A fish hook
An open eye

I like her penchant for the unexpected, the unconventional, the twist. Her ear for speech is superb. And in this dialogue poem — “There was once” —  she’s at her best. She employs the humble fairy tale to satirize political correctness and more. It’s not public domain, but I’ve linked to the Mississippi Review’s online copy, right after the “Bad News” short. Read it in the characters’ voice, and I promise it will be worth the extra click.

(I’ve posted on her “Siren Song.”)

. . . when you’re dead. Of course we will. Rest assured.

A. E. Housman’s poem “Is my team ploughing?” presents a dialogue between two friends, young males, one living, one dead. The recently deceased has questions about how it’s going now that he’s gone. His friend answers every question but one. Stanzas are structured as Q & A. The poem reprinted from the Project Gutenberg edition of the collection, A Shropshire Lad, which has never been out of print, is included below.

A. E. Housman is one of our most loved English poets probably because of his accessibility (he isn’t obscure,) his conventionality (his verse is traditional.) and his subject treatment (life.) These characteristics distinguish him from other soon-to-come modernist poets like Pound and Eliot. Something by Housman always makes the anthologies. 

His best qualities are his tone, which is often wry, and his sophisticated insight masked in a common-man humility.  At times he is melancholy, but it doesn’t turn to despair. Most often he’ll sigh. Charming.

From A Shropshire Lad, 1896

XXVII
“Is my team ploughing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?”

Ay, the horses trample,
The harness jingles now;
No change though you lie under
The land you used to plough.

“Is football playing
Along the river shore,
With lads to chase the leather,
Now I stand up no more?”

Ay, the ball is flying,
The lads play heart and soul;
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.

“Is my girl happy,
That I thought hard to leave,
And has she tired of weeping
As she lies down at eve?”

Ay, she lies down lightly,
She lies not down to weep:
Your girl is well contented.
Be still, my lad, and sleep.

“Is my friend hearty,
Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
A better bed than mine?”

Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.

Slate Magazine contributor Tom Vanderbilt has an article  ”Lawn Pox” which made several amenable points. First Vanderbilt decries the sprawl of huge, plastic, primary-colored “play sets” that clutter suburban lawns.  They’re ugly and usually vacant and therefore are a needless eyesore. Beyond that he suggests that the “toys” are indicative of significant sociological trends.

You should read about some of the companies that make these deluxe implements of “kiddie clutter” and what they get for a “6-in-1 Town Center!” Lucky kid!

Vanderbilt blames fear for the plastic jungle and disappearance of the community playground– fear of injury and predators. One parent boasted that there were no “splinters” in her kid’s smooth, plastic set. And then there’s parental guilt: get them a big, impressive toy to substitute for  . . .  you know.

One reader offered a feeble defense of the toys if you’re interested.

I’m not really pro-lawn, but I am anti-toy — not all toys, just the drossy kind. Giant toys for little children is just sad. The monoliths are as ugly as those green, plastic mail boxes and dog houses molded in the same vein. All of it’s headed for the yard sale.

My fondest memories are from gramdparents’ homes and the home of a second cousin. At the grandparents’ we ran through woods and built pine straw forts with sticks and sometimes broke garbage bottles on giant rocks (Milk of Magnesia was bright blue!) and pretended the shards were jewelry. Yea, it was dangerous if you were stupid.

At the cousin’s we had no “lawn,” so we played under a railroad track bridge with a creek running under it. There were probably snakes where we waded barefoot in murky water waiting for a train and the noise and terrific shaking. Good times.

And those woods? Leprechauns everywhere! We saw them! Promise.

My date tonight, my husband, read comic books as a kid, so we’ve seen all the super hero movies. Most have been so-so — except for Batman and I think that was because of the actors: Keaton, Clooney, Bale — about what I expected from a comic book-based production.

But Iron Man tops them all with quippy, clever dialogue and a smart hero. We like this man, played by Robert Downey Jr., because he has everything James Bond has: looks, elegance, wit, mechanical dexterity, and a general irreverence but is also equipped with a billionaire’s bank account. He has inherited his father’s weapons business. And business has been good. So good that Tony Stark is kidnapped, nearly killed, and almost forced to manufacture a devasting “Jericho” missile system for the enemy.

He escapes, of course, using his own resourcefulness and inadvertently creates the Iron Man suit — a powerful weapon that does anything one would need in battle; it even flies. Another result of being a captive of militant Middle Easterners is Stark’s development of a conscience over how Dad made all that money in the arms biz, though this might not be noticed by young viewers. I got worried that we were headed for a p.c. round of anti-war propaganda, but it was subtle and well-executed. Stark sees the boxes of weapons bearing his name being used for subjugating innocent people, and this epiphany gives him pause.

Stark, a technical genius with amazing gadgets and gear, revamps the company intending to create something to stop evil. It is ironic that the something ends up being another powerful weapon — himself in the Iron Man suit– and its creation and final product are fun and impressive, even for non-techies.

Downey is just the right blend of playboy with a conscience and bright, gifted can-do hero. His relationship with Pepper Potts, Gweneth Paltrow, is subtle but based on mutual respect and care. She is brainy, but vulnerable. He treats her as a favored employee with an only hinted at attraction. 

Background music from the counter melody of “Iron Man”  plays when Stark does something heroic. The familiar score comes in only after a final news conference where Slater announces that he is, in fact , the Iron Man that has been causing disaster, this after being instructed by the military to “follow the script” that denies all knowledge of anything. At the Monaco more than a few clapped and cheered.

The film is too violent in the first hour for viewers under twelve or so though our theater had many children younger than that present.

Dear Paisley and Plaid (are you one or two?),

I majored in English, and by your erudite commentary and precise, exquisite style (and lots of time to blog) I suspect that you, too, may be an English major. I recently resigned my position teaching eighth-grade speech and rhetoric because of, well, it was the principal of the thing!

What do I do now?

Well, English Major,

Here are some jobs with real possiblilites for people like us — lovers of literature and all things written or verbal. Starting pay may not be up to scale with what you are used to as a teacher and therefore the greatest influence on the nation’s future, but as they told us in Intro. to Education I,, II, and III,  ”Money isn’t everything!”

Many of these TOP TEN jobs can be done concurrently.  Good Luck!

Bohemian artiste — with a perpetual scarf — make commentary on the bourgeois masses
Novelist writing from personal experience — make that a novella-ist – you only taught eighth grade
Ghost writer for people with experiences
Elopement planner — It’s much more than just load up and go!
Student at  Online Law School — Go OLS!
Guru — field TBD
Consultant  — all trades (How hard can it be? You’ve read Dostoevsky.)
Amish clothing designer
Torch singer - You enter, late of course, 9:20, sing, sleep till noon
Academic advisor –pass out free t-shirt s–  ”For Heaven’s Sake Major in Computer Science”
Mansion sitter — 15,000 sq. ft. and up

Out of the question list. You should stay away from this field:
Anything medical including dental work — the sounds, the smells, the sick people, mouth insides, nurses

And be sure to check out this link to 25 very odd jobs that you might pursue as well –
http://blog.sixwise.com/blogs/vaszily-brian/archive/2007/03/08/the-world-s-25-oddest-jobs.aspx

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Sad, isn’t it? T.S. Eliot has J. Alfred Prufrock say this as he contemplates his ineffectual attempts at living. Prufrock symbolizes modern man. From the first image of the poem man is anesthetized, spread on a table ready for life to be done to him, around him. He can’t connect with others including women though he admires them and woud approach them if he dared.

He is a city man: no rural farm boy or man of the soil here. The unfeeling concrete and murkiness of the foggy air, the dim lights through haze, city living rooms are his territory. People he sees at parties are as vain as he, “talking of Michelangelo.” He isn’t effeminate, but he lacks qualities that we admire in a man: courage, forthrightness, resolve. He is timid and lacks the nerve to break out of himself, his comfort zine, and relate to those around him. His world is sterile and superficial — a world of “coffee spoons.” Starbuck’s fans might recognize (and maybe take offense) at the image of one’s life being hanging out in coffee shops with strangers or “friends” coming in through wifi.

So Eliot gives us this picture of modern man  - monied, sophisticated, working, urban, informed — but feckless, paralyzed, and intimidated by real relationships. He has all the accoutrements of humanity needed for life, but lacking any spiritual force, the potential for real significance lies dormant. 

 ”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” isn’t a love song at all. There’s nothing about love in the poem. Eliot summarizes modern man here:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous–
Almost, at times, the Fool.

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/eliot.html  

Here’s a method for reading a poem that I use. It works pretty well though poetry is “slippery” sometimes by nature. My LINKS page has helpful sites for terms and examples. Here’s  a terms site. Check out the NYT RSS in the sidebar for more about a current poet and poetry in general.

1. Read the title then read the poem. Silently is good but aloud is better. Follow punctuation rather than line ends. Read sentences, thoughts.

2. Determine the speaker and his situation: Paraphrase.  ”The speaker is a man who . . .” This is akin to plot.

3. Examine the poet’s figures of speech (metaphor, apostrophe, allusion, etc.) Look for connotative language. — “fair” may be complimentary while “pale” usually isn’t. Also look at sound features such as alleration and assonance. Are they functional? Decorative?

4. What is the attitude or tone? Use an adjective or two. Here’s a list of “tone” words. Be exact. Is the poet being ambiguous? They like that.

5. Consider the structure and rhetorical mode: is it dialogue, argument, a lyric, a narrative, descriptive? How are the parts arranged? How does the form fit the message?

6. What is the theme? or “What’s your point? “we ask. Is it traditional, original?

7. What is the poet’s revealed bias or worldview? His theme should let us know. This is where many explications fall short.

8. Return to the title. It should now be significant and enlightening.

Remember that poetry isn’t a hobby for little old ladies’ sewing circles. Nor is it the domain for literary snobs. It is a time-honored means of self expression — art — and an important part of culture. Both men and women appreciate it. A Renaissance man would beat somebody in a sword fight, sail the Atlantic, and then write a poem.  Poetry is accessible for most people (nursery rhymes) if they use a good method and practice. 

What do Keats, Shakespeare, Frost, Millay, Plath, Browning, Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, Poe, Emerson, and Milton (I could go on) have in common?

They wrote sonnets.

Why the sonnet?

Originating in Italy in the 13th century, the subject of the fourteen-line poem was idealized love expressed in iambic pentameter. The Italian version rhymed in an abbaabba — cdcdcd scheme with an 8 - 6 division into problem - solution or situation  - comment structure.  Sir Thomas Wyatt having encountered the sonnet on his travels, transported the form to England and into an English version, and, of course, that was developed further by Shakespeare — 154 oif them. The English or Elizabethan sonnet developed into 3 quatrains and a couplet rather than the octave  — sestet Italian version.

So, for 700 years the form has thrived in periods Romantic, Victorian, modern, and postmodern. Why? Because the tradition is so rich with so many poetry canon contributors, most poets want to give it a go, add their stamp. Shakespeare added the friendship love theme. Romantics added politics. Modern poets alter the form and use most any subject. Some are just barely recognizable as sonnets. Then there’s the prescribed limits to work within. Or not. There’s even an anti-sonnet. Guess when that happened?

Ever tried to write a traditional sonnet? It’s a great exercise for appreciating what the masters did. Kind of like looking at The Night Watch and then trying your hand at oil painting.

A good, friendly site? http://www.sonnets.org/  sonnets grouped by chronology and by country, a reading room, submissions, and more

Ben Stein’s documentary now showing in theaters had a timely opening with election upon us. The first segment of the film is Stein’s interviews of several professors who lost their positions with distinguished universities. Incompetent? Immoral? No, they all made the fatal error of examining ID, Intelligent design, as a possible explanation for the origin of the universe. This on campuses where claims of academic freedom are made, often embossed in stone and heralded in mission statements.

Stein effectively draws an analogy between the supression of ideas such as ID and Nazi Germany, crematoriums, and goose-stepping. Several shots of the Berlin Wall, before and after, are included, also symbolic of the fear of competing ideas in the marketplace.  The grim reminders that we’ve all seen before — the emaciated POW’s, the bones piled high, the gas showers — inspired my blog title. Loss of a job can be bad. But dead because of ideas that one is willing to allow into the discussion, upheld or not, is worse.  Several interviewees clearly did not want to allow ID and the possiblilty of a God onto the “freedom” table. This is America last time I looked.

Stein and others make the connection from Darwinism to ideaologies like Hitler’s and Sanger’s. If natural selection is followed to its logical end, eugenics makes sense. Good breeding is good for humanity. Why protect the weak, the disabled, the sick, the elderly, or the unborn, who may all be drains on society’s resources?  In fairness, the argument is made that right after the quotation from Darwin on the weak and imbecile, he advocates the protection of such people, thus making Stein’s quotation out of context.

The film’s structure is somewhat choppy, but easy to follow. Interspersed throughout the first section are black and white clips of kids being bullied and such.  Images grow more distressing as they include the all-familiar death camps and patrol guards.  In the middle these images and dialogue are outlined in old filmstrip style, the main points concerning how a Darwinist would best secure his message. According to Stein he’d enlist education, the media, and the government. Examples are provided.

Finally, Stein meets with whom he calls the foremost Darwinist of our day, Dr. Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion.) Dawkins has reportedly been angered by the interview on film. It does make him look less than trustworthy when he says that life could not have been created by God, but another type of intelligence might have done it– perhaps an ALIEN being.

My own stand is with those who favor intelligent design: I believe in the Bibllical God. That said, I want the best inquiry that science offers. I want to know what Charles Darwin did and said that set the world on its ear. I will not dismiss nor deny the Holocaust. I want to know why there was a big gash of concrete running through Berlin. I may be misinformed at times, but within my scope I’ll search out the truth. Most importantly, I don’t look to science for proofs of what I believe through faith (and a certain amount of personal objective and subjective experience.) It won’t matter to me if science “proves” that there is no God. They’re too late.

  I picked up an old, yellowed copy of The Early Rand (Signet, ed. Leonard Peikoff, 1984) and have thoroughly enjoyed reading from her early unpublished fiction. Peikoff and Rand were friends. In fact, she was influential in his move from studying medicine to philosophy.  He was one of those invited into the salon circle of disciples where Rand discussed her views.

For one thing, what the unpublished writings offer is her early struggle with the English language. She had emigrated to America from Russia in 1926 at 21 and had to learn everything from scratch. But the stories show the maturing of a great writer. In “The Husband I Bought” the language usage is rough, and the diction is imprecise.  The plotting is immature with more telling than showing. But the men and women, her characters, are predictive of the giants of fiction that Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden are today — people of strength and integrity and self reliance.

Having read Buckley’s Getting it Right, an enjoyable and fairly accurate fictional account of the formation of the conservative movement, I know that Rand didn’t support Buckley or The National Review. She thought it “the most dangerous” publlication in America since she felt that Buckley wanted to merge conservatism with religion. He didn’t favor some of her views, which were conservative, but Godless. The novel is just plain good reading.

I reject Rand’s views of religion and some of her views on man. I thoroughly relish her postulations that show man as heroic, purposeful, determined, the ruler of the world, capable of anything for his own self interest and thereby the good of others. It’s a vision that lauds man’s creativity and ability to produce and to derive from his efforts a deeply abiding satisfaction, confidence, and love of life — capitalism. (Some of the works in this anthology are vehemently anti-Communist.)

In her fiction, the evil characters are the lazy, inferior men who resent and envy those who do produce and are successful. Her fictional situations show people who are despised for their want of vision and talent — characters who function best in at atmosphere of regulation and bureacracy enforcing status quo operations and considering anyone who is not content with that and cannot abide mediocrity a threat. The bad guy is a jealous, petty man.

Peikoff recommends reading the novels first and then trying the early work. I agree that this makes a fascinating study.

You might enjoy these articles:

From The Atlasphere, bio and some good articles on social and political topics, mostly conservative

On Rand  — http://txpayervoice.blogspot.com/2008/01/ayn-rands-birthday.html

Manybooks.net has only Anthem available free online and as an audiobook here.