As you know (see this post), UD has begun a project – at the request of an entity which will for the moment remain anonymous – of writing about writing.

One initial point she’s already made, via George Orwell, about serious writing, is that it’s very difficult, its actual process often acutely unpleasant. Here’s more data along these lines, testimony from some very good writers:

Colm Toibin: “I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult.”

John Banville: “The struggle of writing is fraught with a specialised form of anguish, the anguish of knowing one will never get it right, that one will always fail, and that all one can hope to do is ‘fail better’, as Beckett recommends.”

Robert Greacen: Writing poetry is like “trying to catch a black cat in a dark room.”

Most university creative writing courses make it fun, because they make it about you. But Orwell, you recall, also said, “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.”

T.S. Eliot said something similar. “What happens is a continual surrender of [the writer] himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality… Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

James Joyce, in the character of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist, writes: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

Let’s put these two things together:

1.) Writing is hell.

2.) Writing extinguishes the personality.

and suggest the following. Writing is hell because in order to get at and express the truth of some aspect of existence you have to get over yourself — an excruciating task. You have to be riveted to the world outside yourself — both the physical world of objects and other people, and the metaphysical world of history and, in particular, the world that is the history of the literature preceding you.

If you remain riveted on yourself, you produce, at best, sincere feeling.

And “All bad poetry,” Oscar Wilde notes, “is sincere.”

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Update: Wow. These are really easy to find.

Joan Acocella in The New Yorker:

Writing is a nerve-flaying job. First of all, what the Symbolists said is true: clichés come to the mind much more readily than anything fresh or exact. To hack one’s way past them requires a huge, bleeding effort. (For anyone who wonders why seasoned writers tend to write for only about three or four hours a day, that’s the answer.) … Anthony Burgess [says] a writer can never be happy: “The anxiety involved is intolerable. And . . . the financial rewards just don’t make up for the expenditure of energy, the damage to health caused by stimulants and narcotics, the fear that one’s work isn’t good enough. I think, if I had enough money, I’d give up writing tomorrow.”

Acocella also quotes Elizabeth Hardwick: “I don’t think getting older is good for the creative process. Writing is so hard. It’s the only time in your life when you have to think.”

… wherever she lived growing up in Maryland, UD can recall her parents laughing at the state song, authored during the Civil War by a secessionist.

Sen. Jennie Forehand was attending a conference of Southern lawmakers some years ago when Maryland, My Maryland, the state song, began playing at a ceremony.

An impassioned Confederate-era poem set to the tune of O Tannenbaum, the song takes a particularly exclamatory turn at the end: “She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb – Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum! She breathes! She burns! She’ll come! She’ll come! Maryland! My Maryland!”

“People were laughing at it,” said Forehand, a Montgomery County Democrat, “They were asking, ‘What in the world is this all about?'”

Forehand told the story yesterday as she tried to persuade lawmakers to change their tune about the state song. The Senate hearing was packed with Confederate re-enactors, amateur historians, teachers and a seventh-grader who said she loves the state song, which taught her the meaning of “despot.”

For more than 50 years, lawmakers have periodically tried to dethrone Maryland, My Maryland, written in 1861 by James Ryder Randall and codified as the state song in 1939. Randall, 22 at the time, penned the lyrics after learning that his former college roommate had been killed in a Pratt Street riot between Confederate sympathizers and Union soldiers from Massachusetts, the history goes.

Many of those testifying yesterday said they were present seven years ago, the last time Forehand unsuccessfully tried to do away with Randall’s words. She wants to replace them with a more pacifist version written in 1894 by John T. White, an Allegany County teacher.

“I feel like a victim’s family who has to show up again and again for parole hearings,” Linda Atwell, a history buff who lives in Frederick County, told the committee.

Hyattsville resident William F. Fronck said Forehand’s motives were “an insidious spiritual virus called political correctness.”

Fronck and others argued that the song is a history lesson that should not be wiped away. Some called attempts to sanitize the lyrics a “Stalinist” revision of past events.

“This song is our history,” said self-described historian and author Daniel Toomey, who brought along an original copy of the Randall poem.

But opponents of the song said it misrepresents Maryland – “The Free State” – and unfairly portrays only one side of the Civil War.

“It’s a bitter and abusive diatribe written to incite revenge,” said William Moulden, a teacher who lives near Annapolis.

Respected state archivist Edward C. Papenfuse wants to see the song go. “While Randall deserves recognition as a Maryland poet, he was decidedly partisan and bitter, a strong advocate of slavery and secession,” he wrote in a letter to Forehand…

CURRENT FIRST STANZA:

The despot’s heel is on thy shore, Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door, Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!

[The despot is Abraham Lincoln.]

FIRST STANZA OF PROPOSED STATE SONG

We dedicate our song to thee,
Maryland, my Maryland,
The home of light and liberty,
Maryland, my Maryland.
We love thy streams and wooded hills,
Thy mountains with their gushing rills,
Thy scenes — our heart with rapture fills —
Maryland, my Maryland.

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Here’s something clever. How about instead of wooded hills you simply switch the first letters of gushing rills?

We love thy streams and rushing gills,
Thy mountains with their gushing rills…

Digestive CARE(TM), a medical group of 46 gastroenterologists in Broward and Palm Beach County, today launched the “Bottom Line Poetry Contest” in honor of National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month (March 2009).

Digestive CARE(TM) is offering a $500 cash prize (or the option of a free colonoscopy) to the poet who submits the best new original poem about colonoscopies.

… Original poems about colonoscopies should be submitted directly to [email protected]. Please write “COLON POEM” in the subject line. The deadline for submission is April 30, 2009, the last day of National Poetry Month.

… punishments in response to the university running a cheating ring for athletes.

A commentator writes:

[Coach] Bobby Bowden, one of the greatest ambassadors college football has ever known, should not be punished because some obscure academic counselor helped athletes cheat.

“So it’s a very bad situation. We feel like Harvard has plenty of money. When I came here 20 years ago they had $4.5 billion in their endowment. Now they have 29 billion. To me, that’s a staggering record of capital accumulation. And they made some risky investments that made the endowment skyrocket during the boom times – leveraged private equity, oil, timber, hedge funds, and of course these things, when the economy is doing great they do fantastic and the endowment doubled in just a few years. Predictably, in a downturn, those investments are going to take a hit. But they want us to pay for that. They want ordinary workers to pay for their investment strategies. They pay their top people – one guy got 6.4 million in a year for managing a Harvard endowment. There were several of them. It was reported in the Globe. He goes up from 3 million to 6 million. So why do they have to cut jobs?”

… Key West, though of course I won’t be here long enough to understand much.

But today, for instance, reading through The Secret of Salt while eating a spinach salad at Kelly’s, I discovered that in fact Richard Wilbur no longer lives here, having decided a couple of years ago that he and his wife were too old to manage two houses. His upstairs study in Key West, he recalls, was “full of airiness and swaying leaves.”

“It was marvelous to go every winter to a place where there’d be plenty of old and lively friends … It was quite a world of writers and artists with whom to enjoy oneself in the evenings. … I’m going to miss it a great deal, not just for its temperature… It’s a place that makes me feel youthful.”

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Tonight, UD‘s going to the Waterfront Playhouse to see BITCHSLAP.

… with my interruptions. To see it in its pristine state, go to the post directly below this one.

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH TEARS

[Title’s clever, and makes an English major think of How to Do Things With Words, the philosopher J.L Austin’s book about how language performs. So a sensibility here of someone literate, playful…]

In thy springs, O Zion, are the water wheels
Of my mind! The wheels beat the shining stream.
Whack. Dying. And then death. Whack. Learning. Learned.
Whack. Breathing. And breath. Whack. Gone with the wind.

[Hm. Already much to note! Tone’s all over the place. It’s madness. Starts all formal and religious, invoking Zion as some essential body of water – a spring from which spring certain operations of the poet’s mind — operations he compares to water wheels. Bit confusing. But fun. Difficult, but seductive. We want to figure this out.

But, you know, when I say sensibility I have in mind this rather weird, violent, disjunctive writing Grossman hits us up with right off. Now if it were just weird, it would be trifling; but in fact Grossman’s going to capture the complex truth of complex consciousness, as it moves from ancient pious formulations to Batman language and back…]

I am old. The direction of time is plain:
As the daylight, never without direction,
Rises in a direction, east to west,
And sets in a direction, west to east,

[Notice the control that the poem’s about to manifest. Having chosen an image – the water wheel – the poet will play that through to the end of the poem. But he has chosen another image for consciousness as well, that of a wandering traveler reckoning always with, fighting always against, the absolutely immutable movement of time toward the traveler’s death. And that image will also play itself out with careful thoroughness through the poem.]

Walking backwards all night long, underground;

[A wonderful image for morbid dreams or morbid night thoughts. Reviewing your life as you age toward death.]

So, this bright water is bent on its purpose—
To find the meadow path to the shore and then
The star (“Sleepless”) by which the helmsman winds

And turns.

[At some point those morbid thoughts become spiritual, and we’re searching for God.]

Zion of mind! This is the way:
Towards nightfall the winds shifts offshore, north by
Northwest, closing the harbor to sail
And it stiffens, raising the metal water

[The poet imagines his oncoming death, the shutting down of consciousness.]

In the roads. The low sun darkens and freezes.
The water shines. In the raking light is
Towed the great ship home, upwind, everything
Furled.

[That Old Ship of Zion. The reader may well at this point think of this great spiritual, in which the ship of God arrives at your death to take you home.]

And, behind the great ship, I am carried,

A castaway, in the body alone,
Under the gates of Erebus

[Here death’s imagined without spirituality, without transcendence, in the body alone. This is truly hell, the haunt of Erebus, where one is cast away rather than taken into the arms of God. Maybe this, the poet laments, is the truth of our end.]

—the meeting
Place of daylight underground and night wind
Shrieking in wires, the halliards knocking and

[The ships a mess. Everything’s come undone. Its loose ropes – halliards – are knocking against it. Great word, halliard. Probably had to look it up, no? Learning. Learned. We like that. Anyway, here the poet finds a brilliant figure for the failure of religious consolation, the mind unmoored.]

Ravelled banners streaming to the south-east
Like thought drawn out, wracked and torn, when the wind
Shifts and rises and the light fails in the long
School room of the setting sun.

[Light fails in the long school room of the setting sun. We learn a great deal as we age, but what we learn is that the light fails.]

What is left

To mind but remembrances of the world?

[All sorts of wonderful plays on “mind” here. What is left to take heed of. To beware. To take care of. To remember. And literally, what is left – as a sort of final gift – to the fading mind as it ages? Memories. As the old are notorious for being lost in memories. And yet again: We are earthly creatures. When we live and when we die we have only the earth. So when we begin to disappear, when, “on that green evening … our death begins,” it will be our love of the earth that we remember.]

The people of the road, in tears, sit down
At the road-side and tell stories of the world
Then they rise again in tears and go up.

[The poet imagines his funeral.]

The mill sits in the springs.

[Back to the mill. A formally clear and satisfying poem.]

Water wheels whack
Round: Alive, whack. Dying, whack. Dead whack. Nothing.

[After his lyrical journey round his morbid mind, the poet sinks again into the sardonic nihilism of that grinding mill: Old age as a painful assault by one meaningless moment after another, ending in nothingness.]

How, then, to do things with tears?

[Can I make something of my sorrow? My sadness for myself, for the world untranscended?]

— Deliver us,
Zion, from mist. Kill us in the light.

[Yes, I can do something. I can rage against death in life. I can rage against blindness…

You’re right. We’re landing somewhere in the vicinity of Dylan Thomas here. But Grossman’s better than Thomas, because he’s not a sentimentalist. His consciousness is more interesting, more challenging, more strange. Both poems want you to die, as you have tried to live, in full possession of your faculties. They want you to die in the truth. Never to lie to yourself in order to console yourself. But for me at least Grossman captures the battle as it rages far better than Thomas. Thomas merely exhorts his poor father to keep fighting as he lies on his deathbed; he rather mindlessly assumes the absolute value of life over death. Grossman ain’t so sure — that’s what the water wheel’s doing in the poem.]

The piece this comes from is a bit treacly, but the sentence itself deserves a closer look.

Mainly because of the word cerebral. Great poetry has to have an idea.

It also has to have a sensibility.

And it has to be written well.

I think the hardest of these three to accomplish, actually, is sensibility. The consciousness the poem expresses has somehow to be strikingly original. Strange, original, but also immediately recognizable as true — as like our own, as possibly our own, as a form of consciousness we, influenced by the reading of a certain poet’s body of work, might even in some sense make our own.

See, I think superficial readers of poetry (like the writer I talk about in a recent post titled Nothing’s More Reactionary than Mental Confusion) are getting excited about a sensibility. They pick up on the liberation in the loose lines of Ginsberg, and they like that feeling of freedom; but they don’t really get the cerebral part, let alone the intricacies of style. They don’t pick up on the study and suffering and seriousness that gets you to where Ginsberg’s consciousness has gotten. If readers like this aren’t careful, they end up fans of bad poets like Charles Bernstein, without ideas and without interesting language, but loose-limbed.

The most notorious recent bad poem, the Obama inaugural poem, lacked all sensibility; and though its language was also dull and its ideas shopworn, it might have succeeded had it been able to infuse its language and ideas with sensibility.

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The most recent winner of the Bollingen Prize, Allen Grossman, shows you how it’s done.

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH TEARS

In thy springs, O Zion, are the water wheels
Of my mind! The wheels beat the shining stream.
Whack. Dying. And then death. Whack. Learning. Learned.
Whack. Breathing. And breath. Whack. Gone with the wind.

I am old. The direction of time is plain:
As the daylight, never without direction,
Rises in a direction, east to west,
And sets in a direction, west to east,

Walking backwards all night long, underground;
So, this bright water is bent on its purpose—
To find the meadow path to the shore and then
The star (“Sleepless”) by which the helmsman winds

And turns. Zion of mind! This is the way:
Towards nightfall the winds shifts offshore, north by
Northwest, closing the harbor to sail
And it stiffens, raising the metal water

In the roads. The low sun darkens and freezes.
The water shines. In the raking light is
Towed the great ship home, upwind, everything
Furled. And, behind the great ship, I am carried,

A castaway, in the body alone,
Under the gates of Erebus—the meeting
Place of daylight underground and night wind
Shrieking in wires, the halliards knocking and

Ravelled banners streaming to the south-east
Like thought drawn out, wracked and torn, when the wind
Shifts and rises and the light fails in the long
School room of the setting sun. What is left

To mind but remembrances of the world?
The people of the road, in tears, sit down
At the road-side and tell stories of the world
Then they rise again in tears and go up.

The mill sits in the springs. Water wheels whack
Round: Alive, whack. Dying, whack. Dead whack. Nothing.
How, then, to do things with tears?—Deliver us,
Zion, from mist. Kill us in the light.

************************

… Hokay. I’m gonna tell you what the hell all that’s about, but I’m busy gchatting with my old ‘thesdan playmate, David. Hold on. Next post.

But you also know that they’re all pretty much alike. They feature Harvard law professors and overseers (Ogletree, Tribe, Dershowitz, Goodwin) using slave labor to write their books for them (a technique fraught with dangers, of which plagiarism is only one); or they’re about desperate illiterates (Glenn Poshard, president of Southern Illinois University) drawing upon their betters…

Very straightforward, these plagiarism tales. But here’s one that’s really twisted.

A loving, demented son decides to defend his father’s controversial research by assuming the identity of one of his father’s critics and making the critic out to be a plagiarist.

[Raphael] Golb is accused of using stolen identities of various people, including a New York University professor who disagreed with his father, to elevate his father’s theory and besmirch its critics, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said at a news conference.

Mr. Golb, 49, was arrested Thursday morning and charged in Manhattan Criminal Court with identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. He faces up to four years in prison if convicted.

Prosecutors said Mr. Golb opened an e-mail account in the name of Lawrence H. Schiffman, the New York University professor who disagreed with Mr. Golb’s father. He sent messages in Professor Schiffman’s name to various people at N.Y.U. and to others involved in the Dead Sea Scrolls debate, fabricating an admission by Professor Schiffman that he had plagiarized some of Professor Golb’s work, Mr. Morgenthau said. Raphael Golb also set up blogs under various names that accused Dr. Schiffman of plagiarism, Mr. Morgenthau said.

Raphael Golb, who lives in Manhattan and received his law degree from N.Y.U., also created e-mail addresses using the names of other Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, Mr. Morgenthau said.

“This exemplifies a growing trend in the area of identity theft,” Antonia Merzon, an assistant district attorney, said during the news conference. “It’s very easy to open an account using any name you want on the Internet. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But when you start using another person’s true identity for some purpose, you’re crossing the line into a possible identity theft crime or impersonation crime.”

The district attorney’s office began investigating the case after Professor Schiffman, who is chairman of the Hebrew and Judaic studies department at N.Y.U., came to them saying he believed that Mr. Golb was impersonating him on the Internet.

Golb’s father, an 81 year old University of Chicago professor who seems to share the paranoid tendencies of his son, thinks these charges are all part of the larger conspiracy against his work.

Which is why this little essay in the Washington Post, whose author prides himself on his radicalism and chides current college students for their quietism, fails.

He, a product of the sixties, still “care[s] about literature,” while today’s “narcotized” students read “inferior literature.”

The problem lies in the writer’s conflation of radical writing and superior literature. While some of the writers he admires – Ginsberg, Lessing – are indeed both artistically impressive and politically radical, others — Plath, Nin — are not political. Yet others – Mary Daly, Robert Pirsig, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, Germaine Greer – write broadsides and not literature; and while some of these people (Greer, for instance) are powerful prose stylists, others (Daly) are almost unreadably bad.

The category confusion in the essay, its facile generalities — “The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.” — and its willingness to overlook the importance of writers like David Foster Wallace and Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo to this generation of college readers, makes the piece more emotive than polemical, the expression of a certain contentment with one’s own cherished forms of radicality. Note that the writer doesn’t even have time for the wildly popular Chuck Palahniuk, whose work is without much literary merit, but has the exact same transgressive thing going (he’s best known for Fight Club) as many of the not-well-written works the author of the Post piece cites.

When Chris, our guide through the mangroves, said this to UD at the end of her kayak trip today, UD smiled very broadly. She’d been so nervous about going out solo that at the last minute she asked Chris if she could share his kayak.

“Can’t do that,” he replied. “I’ve got to have my own boat in case people need rescuing.”

So against a twenty mile an hour wind, UD joined four other kayakers as they paddled out to the mangroves. The wind settled down when they got to the islands.

It wasn’t the wind and the choppy water that made the outing a bit of a challenge; it was negotiating the narrow inlets through the trees — staying clear of voluminous roots, threading the boat through vegetation.

Once inside the long cathedral the sun-filtered canopies made, UD let her paddle rest. She drifted among the creeks and watched the waterbirds and the starfish. Chris dipped his little yellow net here and there and came up with prickly things and slimy things, all of which he insisted UD hold. Once in awhile he’d suddenly row like mad after a ray or a shark, and we’d follow him and watch large dark creatures ripple just below the waves.

Military jets broke the silence now and then, but it was mainly a quiet and meditative thing, being out there. Once UD calmed down about her ability to steer a kayak, she floated happily above the shallow grassy water. She recalled how her mother liked kayaking on the C & O Canal.

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UPDATE: For a terrific primer on all things kayaking, go here, to Chris Cole’s article at Nature Sport Central, “How to Kayak – A Beginner’s Guide.”

UD readers interested in thinking about

What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need? What should such citizens know, believe, and do? What institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship? How do individuals learn civic skills, habits, values, dispositions, and knowledge?

and/or interested in meeting the sort of person who would marry UD, might want to attend the tuition-free Summer Institute for Civic Studies at Tufts University, from July 13 – 24. Mr UD is one of the three organizers.

This page offers a framing statement.

… by these guys for some more kayaking of the out islands.

A couple of comments from a Volokh Conspiracy thread. Commenters are responding to Eugene Volokh’s laptop ban experiment.

This semester, all three of my professors banned laptops in class. One of the professors did this via a two week trial period, and then administered a survey. The results were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the ban in effect. Is it “paternalistic”? That definitely may be a fair charge to levy. However, as my one professor explained it (and I think that, 2 months into the semester, this is a very accurate explanation), the point isn’t to be protecting you and making sure you pay attention. Rather, it is to keep the class as a whole engaged, which is to everyone’s benefit.

Even if you’re on your laptop “properly”, you may still get distracted by other people’s screens, whether they are typing, checking e-mail, etc. People’s faces are also obscured by their laptop screens, and they create an artificial barrier in the classroom. Absent laptops, the class seems much more engaged in the discussion, making the classes much more interesting. Even if you turn off the internet, you will still have the second problem above. People staring into their computer screens blankly, pecking away at the keyboard for two hours, is hardly conducive to a good learning environment.

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If the arguments for laptops were true, the most efficient way to run a course would be to distribute full outlines at the beginning of the class, along with the course material and class transcripts, all in electronic form so the student could go through it all efficiently, and wouldn’t have to sit through classes over several weeks, taking notes and making outlines. But we don’t do that because students are not computers that you can just fill with information. To get things into your brain, you must engage with them. Brief the cases while you read them (info goes into eyes, through brain, out hands). Take notes by hand (into ears, through brain, out hands). Participate in class (in ears, through brain, out mouth). Make your outline from notes (into eyes, through brain, out fingers). The more your brain is involved when doing law school tasks, the better you will learn the material.

Not that UD‘s telling these schools anything they don’t know. Frank Tanzini used public funds to get a fake degree and then after the story broke (he was an Assistant Superintendent of Schools when it broke) Rowan and Ramapo gave him faculty appointments.

Here’s his listing at Rowan. Here he is at Ramapo.

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If you’re thinking of going to Ramapo or Rowan, don’t. Their professors are frauds.

If you already go to Ramapo or Rowan, transfer.

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UD thanks a reader for this story.