Boston

I went to Boston this weekend to visit one of my oldest friends (we've known each other for most of our lives). It was wonderful to experience a different city with someone who knows the lay of the land. Here are some highlights of the weekend...

My trip apparently coincided with a major sporting event, so there were people wearing Boston gear all over the city. Someone decided to clothe the Public Garden's decorative brass ducks:

And this is what looks like a ballroom in the main branch of the Boston Public Library:

It's a stunning space, with wood panelling and frescoes running the entire length of the walls. I could imagine a medieval ball being held here.

This library could give the New York Public Library at Bryant Park a run for its money. It has an interior courtyard that looks like it was airlifted from Renaissance Europe:

I'm reminded of the courtyard of the Frick Museum. I could imagine Juliet leaning on the rail of the balcony on the left, beckoning to Romeo in the garden below. I've never been to Verona, but in my mind, it looks something like this.

Boston is also home to the world's only Curious George store! I didn't know this a few days ago.

This was taken on a bridge over a particularly scenic stretch of the Charles River:

I believe it was the Longfellow Bridge, which was named for the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was one of the preeminent poets of his day; one of his most famous works, "Paul Revere's Ride," is a classic in the American canon. There is a plaque in his honor, and the poem is engraved on a stretch of the footpath on the bridge. I didn't think to get a photo of it at the time; I was too busy walking backwards reading the poem!

And that was Boston. It's such a quaint place (cobblestone streets! trolleys!) with so much history tucked into the fabric of the city.

R.I.P Seamus Heaney

A literary luminary died today:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13930435

I've owned a copy of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf for as long as I can remember, and I've read it cover-to-cover at least three times. It's beautiful, and not just because the parallel text (with annotations!) indicates just how faithfully Heaney translated from the original Anglo-Saxon. Rather, given the cadence and word choice of his modern English, it becomes immediately evident that the translator is himself a poet.

Few poets have been as universally revered in their lifetimes as Heaney was. It has been said, even before today, that he was Yeats's successor as Ireland's foremost poet -- and one would be hard-pressed to find a competitor for the accolade. His original poetry was not only sublime, but also widely accessible -- he was a true poet of the people. His laurels are too many to count (including the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Struga Golden Wreath, and the Irish PEN), but in my mind, one of his most significant accomplishments was that he brought poetry to those who might not otherwise consume poetry, who might consider the art too academic, too arcane. He brought beauty and wonder to generations of readers who saw something of themselves set on paper in his words.

He was, by all accounts, a compassionate and upstanding man who was profoundly aware of his position as a voice of the people in a land often rent by civil and religious strife. He tried to balance a sense of cultural heritage and pride of place with a concern for individuals that was evident in everything he wrote. One of my favorite of his poems, "Digging," describes his work as a natural continuation of the life's work of his forefathers, telling the story of several generations in just a few verses. (You can hear Heaney's own rendition of it here.)

A star has fallen.

Edit: I just discovered that Seamus Heaney's last words, delivered via text message, were "Noli timere" (Latin for "Be not afraid"). How fitting -- he was a poet to the last.

New York in Pictures

The past two weekends, I had two of my friends from college stay with me for a few days each. We explored the city, of course. It's always refreshing to experience one's hometown from a non-New Yorker's perspective. Much like how one gains a different understanding of one's native tongue in teaching it to a student of the language, there are certain aspects of place that are easily overlooked if one is immersed in it every day, that

Julie and I went for a bit of a hike in Central Park. We happened upon this interestingly-shaped copse of trees, and I couldn't resist a photograph:

Naturally (no pun intended), I was reminded of one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, "The Road Not Taken." (A pity it's not autumn; it would have been a beautiful picture with the thicket melting red and yellow around her.)

I also took her to see Alice, one of my favourite statues in the Park:

One of these days, I will sit by (on?) the Alice statue and reread Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. (It's somewhat fitting, methinks, that there's a little girl (wearing purple, Julie's favorite color) climbing on the sculpture in the background.)

There were a few highlights that I ended up visiting twice in as many weeks, but they were absolutely worth seeing more than once. The High Line is, for instance, one of my favorite places in New York. This is probably the cleverest billboard along the path:

And yes, it's situated above one of the few street-level car parks in Manhattan (which appears surprisingly empty).

Lucas and I also spotted this intriguing bit of text writ large on a dark wall across from the High Line:

It's ironically (or perhaps intentionally) located next to a tavern/restaurant called The Half King (its sign is partially visible in the lower left).

I also went to the Met twice in as many weeks, because if you have out-of-town visitors, they absolutely must see the Met. We ended up in the musical instruments section twice as well, and Lucas and I had the same thought about this sculpture:

Air guitar! Given the style of the statue and the position of the hands, there was probably a lyre or a harp at some point. A disappointment for all of the Guitar Hero players out there, I'm sure.

We spotted this on the subway, and my first thought was naturally, "it's a policy tub!" (A debate thing. I did LD, PF, and college parli, mind you -- not CX.):

Julie had a bit of a laugh at my expense. I don't mind at all. :-)

I love having friends in from out of town. Come visit me more often!

Faulkner on Literature, Humanity, and Immortality

On Sunday, I had dinner with my friend Brett after an afternoon visit to the Met. I was telling him about an amazing, inspiring book talk I'd recently attended: it was a conversation between Adam Johnson, a Stanford English professor and this year's Pulitzer winner in fiction, and Fredrik Logevall, a Cornell history professor and the Pulitzer winner in nonfiction, moderated by their editor, David Ebershoff, of Random House.

Brett was reminded of (and sent me) this particular speech delivered by William Faulkner on the acceptance of his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html

It's brilliant and quite worth reading (and not very long) -- so do actually read it! Faulkner's claim is, essentially, that literature -- the written word, storytelling, art -- is humanity's way of achieving some semblance of immortality. He writes not of the genetic "immortality" perpetuated by our biology, of course; I think one of the prerequisites of sentience is a consciousness of meaning greater than base instinct. Rather, Faulkner speaks to our legacy as a species -- the ideas, the intellectual and creative achievements by which humanity might define itself.

Literature is one such vehicle. I would hesitate to call it a record -- that term falls too much in the realm of historiography (which is itself an ambitious and meaningful endeavour, of course) -- but perhaps one might consider literature the pared-down essence of what it means to be human. In books, in art, we see reflected not only the best (and the worst) -- but also the deepest, truest, and most beautiful aspects of ourselves. In literature, we are immortal -- not only the writer, and sometimes not the writer at all (Homer is the example that comes to mind) -- but we, as a sentient species, are captured, burnished, chased in silver -- forever.

Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment centuries earlier:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(Sonnet 18, lines 13-14)

io9: Galileo's Ship Was One of the Oldest Relativity Though Experiments

It has always irked me, a little, when people claim that Einstein "invented" relativity. The man was a genius, to be sure, and contributed greatly to our understanding of general and special relativity in modern physics -- but the idea of relativity existed well before him. The term itself is quite broad, encompassing everything from temporal and spatial relativity to more nebulous perspective- and human interaction-based concepts; it hardly seems possible that despite hundreds of years of innovation in math and physics, relativity only arose within the past century. Certainly, there have been a number of similar (if more rudimentary) observations throughout history, such as Zeno's paradox(es). One of the oldest examples dates from the Renaissance:

http://io9.com/galileos-ship-was-one-of-the-oldest-relativity-thought-486468038

It sounds like a very low-tech version of Einstein's lasers-on-a-train thought experiment, doesn't it?

This brings to mind a blog post from about a year ago... Straying away from the sciences for a moment, relativity as an abstract concept -- even models of relative perspective uncannily like the sort of thought experiments Einstein proposed -- seems to have existed in the literary and cultural milieu for quite a while. It's reasonable to conjecture that there was some cross-pollination. (Eliot, for example, even drops an allusion or two to relativity in "The Waste Land.") The idea of relativity is marvelously intuitive (albeit in a slightly mind-bendy way) and quite useful in describing life alongside other sentient beings.

Abstruse Goose: In Cabin'd Ships at Sea

Whitman in the modern age (courtesy of Brett):

http://abstrusegoose.com/477
(You may have to click on the image to make the font a more legible size.)

It frustrates me to no end when people claim that poetry written long ago is irrelevant to life today. Part of the appeal of literature is its timelessness -- that while the specific time and place depicted might be past, human nature has not changed over the centuries. (I maintain that the Oedipus Cycle is one of the original family dramas. Would anything that messed up air on modern television? (Wait, A Game of Thrones is now on HBO. I take that back.))

Seriously, if you think poetry is outdated, quote your girlfriend some Yeats or Neruda or Shakespeare. Or, if you have a boyfriend, some Anne Bradstreet or Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The Oven Bird (by Robert Frost)

I'm taking a Poetry and Poetics course this quarter, and I just finished writing a paper on this particular Frost poem. I'd never read it before this class, but I've come to really like it. (That's the funny thing about papers/assignments; by the end, you come to either love or hate whatever it is you've been working on.) Anyhow, I thought I'd share:

The Oven Bird
by Robert Frost (1916)

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Frost, here, is lamenting the end of an era, which I thought was eminently appropriate to our impending graduation. (Does putting it in writing make it real?) Perhaps that's why the poem resonated with me so, more so than it might have at another point in my life. I know well that Frost is writing about being a middle-aged poet, thinking he's past his prime or being eclipsed by the younger generation of more experimental contemporary poets, but it's a similar sentiment. There's this sinking feeling that accompanies the idea of leaving the Stanford bubble, of being a continent away from the people I've come to know and love. It does feel like the best few years of my life might be slipping through my fingers -- though of course, I hope I'll do greater things with myself in future. I have regrets, I have anxieties, and I have the deep-seated, overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a passing age that Frost portrays so well in "The Oven Bird."

Fire and Ice (by Robert Frost)

I presented this very famous poem today in a history class about Einstein and his work. It's a beautiful little piece, and it's interesting to consider in the context of relativity and nuclear technology. 

Fire and Ice
by Robert Frost (1920)

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

I'm doing my paper on the cultural conversation between 20th century literature and Einsteinian physics. Relevant authors (of which I'll be discussing some subset in the paper) are people like Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Kurt Vonnegut, and of course, Robert Frost.

Beauty and Madness

 I've been reading some William Morris for a literature class on medievalism (both medieval literature and Victorian medievalism). This line, in particular, struck me:

 I was half mad with beauty on that day...

~ William Morris, "The Defence of Guenevere"

I've noticed that beautiful people, and people who create beautiful things, are often a little mad. (By "beautiful people," I mean people who have beautiful souls or minds, not attractive exteriors.) There's a sort of fragile beauty, the sort where you can hear the madness vibrating under the surface, like an impossibly light glass orb that might shatter if you touch it. It's the wildness of it, the thrill of unpredictability. It's the beauty of the endangered predator, the tiger that doesn't know it's one of the last of its kind, that can still kill you where you stand.

Madness itself can be beautiful, in its own way (hence the Gothic novel). There's a certain purity to madness, in that everything that affects a lunatic ultimately comes from within her own head (much of it is exhibited as response to stimuli, but the response is atypical -- i.e. not socially dictated). The greater part of the significance that literature assigns to madness is the uniqueness of its perspective.

Western culture idealizes individualism to an extent unmatched in other societies -- and that applies to Western intellectual culture as well. I think of it, sometimes, as the "genius in a box" phenomenon. People are attracted to the image of great ideas springing fully formed from the aether, like Athena from Zeus's head. They like thinking that geniuses are born, not made, and that they achieve their success purely through their own inscrutable methods. Of course, this construct doesn't quite reflect reality; as Newton once said, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (His expression of the sentiment is the most famous, but not the first; the earliest known attribution is to Bernard of Chartres.) I actually just read, for a history of science class, an interesting book by Peter Galison entitled Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, which argues (perhaps a tad overzealously) that Einstein, the quintessential representation of genius in modern Western culture, was inspired in the formation of his theories of relativity by the mathematician Henri Poincaré. One can't be a pioneer in one's field without having a good grasp of the work that preceded one's own. Genius is hardly ever as isolated as the romantic ideal would have it.

The thing is, genius is isolating only insofar as society renders it so. There were plenty of intellectuals throughout history who, in addition to being brilliant, were also scintillating conversationalists, consummate socialites and courtiers, and infamous Lotharios -- Renaissance men, as it were. It's terribly unfortunate that in the modern day, intelligence is seen as a social liability (that's probably a reflection on the state of American society, but we'll not go there tonight). But it's that isolation that makes it seem mysterious, unattainable -- and therefore beautiful.

A bit of a digression, I suppose. Perhaps not quite what Morris was going for, but that's how I read it.

Poetry vs. the Inquisition

A thought on the power of poetry, or perhaps just the abstruseness of some of the stuff:

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

~ Thomas Hardy

Of course, if Galileo had written the Dialogue in the style of Vergil, he might never have achieved the posthumous scientific success that he did. (Then again, there were Renaissance men in his day, scientist-poet-philosophers. I wish our modern education system allowed for that -- but that's for a different post all together.)

Hardy was himself a great poet, so he knows whereof he speaks.

If I Used Twitter

I would post, right now:

Writing a paper on Browning's "Childe Rolande" (quite creepy!), and G-chatting with my sister about secret elephants.

Because I could not stop for Death (by Emily Dickinson)

In addition to the book list, I found time over the summer for some poetry -- both revisiting old favorites and finding some new ones. I haven't posted any poetry in a long while, so I thought I'd share this one. It's pretty well known; I first read it in middle school, I think. One of the really geeky reasons I like it is that Dickinson's characterization of Death reminds me a lot of Terry Pratchett's Death, who is perhaps my favorite Discworld character. 

Because I could not stop for Death
by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Because I could not stop for Death – 
He kindly stopped for me –  
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –  
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility – 

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –  
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –  
We passed the Setting Sun – 

Or rather – He passed us – 
The Dews drew quivering and chill – 
For only Gossamer, my Gown – 
My Tippet – only Tulle – 

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground – 
The Roof was scarcely visible – 
The Cornice – in the Ground – 

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads 
Were toward Eternity – 

 The poem itself aside, there are a few small touches -- word choice, imagery, the like -- that I really enjoy in this piece. The "House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground" is great; it makes me think of hobbit holes. I like how she says that the grain is "gazing" -- not a verb one would normally associate with plants, but it recalls both the grazing of farm animals and the classic imagery of gazing at sunsets, as per the line following. And I love, love the formatting of the last line, which ends, rather than with a period (as is conventional), but with an em-dash, like the rest of the poem. The slightly unsettling, unfinished quality lends so much more power and meaning to the concept of eternity.

Dust to Dust

I'm writing a paper on T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" right now, and this is one of (in my opinion) the best and most evocative lines in the whole poem:

I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (line 30)

Simple, vivid, chilling.

It reminds me of "Ozymandias"; it strikes me as something a prophet might have said to that pharaoh, who desired to be great and enduring, and yet, like all other men, ended up fading and crumbling with time. Given that Ozymandias is actually a vague transliteration of what was Greek for "Ramses," that particular prophet would have been the Biblical Moses. Quite fitting, no?

Knitting a Poem

This is perhaps the coolest knitting project I've ever seen:
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/knit/

They're knitting a poem. (And not just any poem -- a Dylan Thomas poem.) My mind is blown.

I'm sorely tempted to try my hand at one of these quilts. New summer project? It would be a tremendously meaningful gift for a loved one, I think, given a particularly fitting poem (one that is, hopefully, not too long!).

Edit: Perhaps this poem? There isn't anyone for whom it would be appropriate, at this time.

Edit II: Alphabet knitting diagram: 
http://littlecottonrabbits.typepad.co.uk/photos/alphabet/

Edit III: possibly the ultimate collection of alphabet patterns:
http://www.chemknits.com/2009/08/assembly-of-alphabet-charts.html

Happy Earth Day! or, Nature (by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Today is Earth Day. Given my various posts on the subject in the past, it's self-evident that the earth, and therefore this holiday, is something I care a lot about.

In honor of the occasion, here is an appropriate poem I quite like:

Nature
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1900)

As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,
Leads by the hand her little child to bed,
Half willing, half reluctant to be led,
And leave his broken playthings on the floor,
Still gazing at them through the open door,
Nor wholly reassured and comforted
By promises of others in their stead,
Which though more splendid, may not please him more;
So Nature deals with us, and takes away
Our playthings one by one, and by the hand
Leads us to rest so gently, that we go
Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,
Being too full of sleep to understand
How far the unknown transcends the what we know.

A beautiful poetic interpretation of the expression "Mother Earth," which many of us take for granted. But not today.

One Art (by Elizabeth Bishop)

I haven't posted any poetry in much too long. Here's a villanelle (a famous and much admired one) for your consideration:

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop (1979)

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The beauty of this poem lies not only in its masterful use of a difficult form (the villanelle is really hard to do well; I've tried), but also the interplay of its text and subtext. I'll leave that for you to admire and figure out. ;-)

The New Adventures of Queen Victoria: Edgar Allan Poe's Attempts at Levity

Victorian literature joke (humour me, okay?):

http://www.gocomics.com/thenewadventuresofqueenvictoria/2010/10/04/

I thought it was funny...

Sonnet 130 (by William Shakespeare)

I haven't posted any poetry in a while, so here's some more Shakespeare. This is another one of my all-time favorite sonnets:

The 1609 Quarto Version

My Miſtres eyes are nothing like the Sunne,
Currall is farre more red, then her lips red,
If ſnow be white, why then her breſts are dun:
If haires be wiers, black wiers grow on her head:
I haue ſeene Roſes damaskt, red and white,
But no ſuch Roſes ſee I in her cheekes,
And in ſome perfumes is there more delight,
Then in the breath that from my Miſtres reekes.
I loue to heare her ſpeake,yet well I know,
That Muſicke hath a farre  more pleaſing found:
I graunt I neuer ſaw a goddeſſe goe,
My Miſtres when ſhee walkes treads on the ground.
    And yet by heauen I thinke my loue as rare,
    As any ſhe beli'd with falſe compare.

And a modernized version, with the typesetting and spelling "cleaned up" a bit:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
     As any she belied with false compare.

At first glance, it reads as though the Bard is complaining about his mistress's rather plain looks -- but upon closer inspection, the poem is really about love in spite of, or in acknowledgment of, one's beloved's flaws. It's about love as acceptance of all of another person, not just the appealing parts. Everyone has a dark side, however small or non-apparent. Love that embraces that dark side is love with eyes wide open, a truer love than the rose-tinted infatuation that poets are so inclined to extol. Such is a love I would wish for myself.

NYTimes: A Hundred Ways to Be a Frog

A very interesting slice-of-life article about herpetologists (I love that word!):

 http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/a-hundred-ways-to-be-a-frog/

I would wager that the title is a reference to the Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". Stevens is one of my favorite open-form poets; I don't generally like open-form, but he is proof that it can be done extremely well.

Thanksgiving

A short piece I wrote just now, in honor of the holiday:

On this day, out of all the year,
I think of all that I hold dear:
For songs I've sung and books I've read,
For those with whom I've broken bread,
For new friends made and old friends kept,
For times I laughed and times I wept,
For things I've learned and things I've found:
In life, in self, mundane, profound;
For beauty, love, and all good things,
I give my thanks for all life brings.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks!