A poem about love?
I believe that’s already been done.
How about, instead of a poem about human romance, a prose passage of surpassing beauty about love of the world?
It’s by John Malcolm Brinnin, a writer who lived in Key West for many years, and died there a decade ago.
Brinnin described Key West as “a town at the end of the line that reveled in squalor, cultivated waywardness, and, calling itself Conch Republic, regarded Florida as an enemy country, somewhere toward the north.”
Here he recalls a high point from his life of travel on board ships. The passage starts with the September date. He’s on the Queen Elizabeth.
Sheepish, in the thrall of sentiment, the sentimentalist joins other sentimentalists on board to stand and stare with reverence at a sudden brilliant break in the seamless immensity of the ocean… You see I’m using his phrases, his beautiful words… How does he make his little narrative so beautiful?
First, concision. Each perfect-length paragraph contains only the moments and images and sentiments necessary to convey his exultation, his adoration of a world of stillness and a world of sublime interruptions of stillness.
[UPDATE: Here’s a little something I’m adding a day after I posted this.
Note one important reason Brinnin’s able to keep things tight and brief: His feelings don’t predominate. Nowhere will you find I felt; my heart went pitapat; I was reminded of my Aunt Tillie, my first sexual encounter, the Titanic, the souls who’d died in the construction of those ships; the majesty of God … Like all great writers, Brinnin knows that it’s mainly about the world outside yourself. You can certainly earn narcissism points. UD ain’t saying you can’t talk about yourself at all. But you’ve got to earn those points. And best of all is not having to do narcissism at all, but somehow letting the way you describe the world outside of yourself convey your history and consciousness. That‘s the ticket. Few people are naturals at this. That – aside from the intrinsic pleasure of the activity, of course – is why a serious writer will want to read someone like Brinnin.]
Next, close and sensitive observation of human emotions. I know so well that sheepishness, that sly glancing at other people gathered, like you, at a transcendent event. You know you and the others will stand there for hours if you need to, into the very late night if you need to, because you’re passionate about this experience. You want it very badly. Your passion somewhat embarrasses you, since it feels extreme, and intimate — private to you and your aesthetic and even spiritual obsessions. Yet here are these other strange folk who seem to share your strangeness… In few words, Brinnin captures the combination of determination to see, and awareness of how odd you are for the fierceness of the determination.
And then, you know — the prose.
They stand apart from one another and do not speak, their eyes fixed on the visible horizon to the west as the vibration of the ship gives a slightly stroboscopic blur to everything they see.
After the strobe goes off, and moving objects are suddenly stationary, they make a weird blur against a white screen… And this idea of pausing things, of the greatest experiences actually being those not of dynamism, but of the earth stopping for us, so we can really look, so we can for a privileged moment take in the truth of reality — this will be the central idea of the passage, and of Brinnin’s essay altogether about the wonder of travel.
The paradox of travel, as he would have it, is that by incessant motion we press toward immobility, toward Wordsworth’s spots of time in which things become clear.
But in terms of style: Notice the repeated use of the letter B: visible, vibration, stroboscopic, blur. Subtle, but it creates a soothing rhythm.
The mid-Atlantic sky is windless, a dome of hard stars; the ocean glows, an immense conjunction of inseparable water and air.
See the poetic glory of this prose: mid/is/wind… The internal sounds that gently repeat, creating a floaty trance-like effect in us, as we stand alongside the writer on the floaty trance-like ship. And then five one-syllable words: a dome of hard stars, their monolithic feel spectacularly right for the simple uncrackable hardness of that upper dome. The sound of the O‘s in the ocean glows… And then the idea of conjunction, natural conjunction between water and air, but also the conjunction the writer is about to witness, between the two enormous ships.
These ten or twelve of the faithful in their shadowy stances might be postulants on a Vermont hillside, waiting in their gowns for the end of the world.
Still the self-ribbing about the deep sentiment of the occasion. For clearly this is a religious moment, though the writer seems a secular person. He deals with his inner dissonance, if you will, by mild humor at his own expense.
Notice also, in terms of the greatness of the prose, the oddity of certain choices: Vermont, gowns.
Almost as if she were climbing the watery slopes of the world, the oncoming Queen shows one wink at her topmost mast, then two.
Well, so, this is brilliant, if you ask me. He’s already given us Vermont, so the slopes, even in the flatness of his surroundings, seem weirdly okay. And then we get this amazing fanciful image: climbing the watery slopes of the world. The watery slopes of the world! Climbing water. So strange, and so beautiful. I’ve never seen that image, that thought, before.
The huge funnels glow in their Cunard red, the basso-profundo horns belt out a sound that has the quality less of a salute than of one long mortal cry.
The ocean glows, the funnels glow — the world as an immense conjunction of inseparables aglow. Seeing the whole thing. The thing whole. Huge, Cunard, profundo, salute — playing out the long cry of the letter U as he then turns to the cry of the horns. A human cry as well as a non-human — a world in which all is conjoined.
As the darkness closes over and the long wakes are joined, the sentimentalists stand for a while watching the ocean recover its seamless immensity. Then one by one, like people dispersing downhill after a burial, they find their ways to their cabins and close their doors.
The Vermont hillside again, and people walking down the hill at the end of their vision. Yet still conjunction, as the long wakes are joined. And the word wake joined with the idea of burial makes us think of the two meanings of the word… This is an experience which has jolted sleepy people late at night on a soothing ship awake; but they have also just witnessed the end of something. They are standing at the wake of the final meeting of the two ships; they have just marked that burial. The flat ocean again covers all in its seamless immensity — a seamlessness that seems to shut us out. But the watchers have for a moment felt the earth and the ocean embracing them, taking them into a heart-stopping brilliance.
When you turn your university into a dumping ground for political hacks, not to mention a source of money for your kid, you can expect things to get ugly eventually.
Especially when your BFF, Rod Blagojevich, can no longer watch your back.
Southern Illinois University President Glenn Poshard said Thursday anyone with evidence of “pay-to-play politics” involved in appointments to the school’s Board of Trustees should contact the proper authorities.
Questions have arisen in public surrounding financial contributions to legally embattled former Gov. Rod Blagojevich by board members including Chairman Roger Tedrick, a Mount Vernon insurance agent; John Simmons, an attorney from Alton; and F. William Bonan II, regional president of Peoples National Bank in Mount Vernon.
… [One speaker] raised the claim of a $4 million state contribution for the construction of Rent One Park in Marion, the home stadium of the Southern Illinois Miners, a professional baseball team owned by Simmons.
Poshard, who worked with Simmons and his son, Dennis Poshard, to bring the team to the region, said the money was given to the city of Marion for infrastructure developments, not specifically the ball club.
Dennis Poshard was involved in other of Wright’s allegations, including that the Arthur Agency, of which Dennis Poshard is president, received contracts for work from the university.
Poshard acknowledged the work his son’s company has done for the university, but said it was all handled properly. For companies affiliated with university administrators and board members, policies and procedures for bidding are stricter than for general bid awards, Poshard said.
Documents from the March 2007 board meeting show a $100,000 payment to the Arthur Agency for marketing services for CONNECT SI….
Background on Poshard, who plagiarized his dissertation, here.
From Louisiana State University’s newspaper.
University professor William Rowe was like any other student in his 375-person class when, a few years ago, he invited a guest speaker to one of his freshman-level geography classes. He found an open seat in back of the classroom and sat down to listen to the 30-minute presentation.
While taking in the lecture, Rowe saw most of his students paying attention. Some were even taking notes on their laptop computers. But one student’s activity on a laptop immediately caught his eye.
“One guy was perusing pornography, which was causing a bit of a disturbance around him,” Rowe said.
… Tracy Rizzuto, assistant psychology professor, recently instituted a “laptops in first row” rule. She’s been teaching at the University for four years.
“I don’t have an attendance policy — I don’t require people to come. But if they’re one of those people who are surfing the Internet or doing distracting things while taking notes, I want to be able to keep an eye on that behavior,” she said. “It’s easier to monitor what people are doing on their laptops if they’re sitting in the front row.”…
I know what you’re wondering: What if the student perusing pornography who you’ve put in the front row ejaculates on you while you’re teaching?
Here’s what UD recommends. In her day, guys used to go to seedy porno cinemas where they’d be given empty, bottomless popcorn containers along with their ticket. When a professor sees a student masturbating, she should issue him one of these, along with suggestions on how to direct his flow.
——————————
UPDATE: Some context. Feinberg’s famous A Ride on the Bus.
‘WHERE MERKIN LOST HIS WAY’ headlines a Wall Street Journal blogger who invites us to regard Bernard Madoff’s middleman (as the blogger points out, Ezra Merkin did things like “put about $15 million of [Yeshiva’s] endowment into [his] Ascot [fund]. He thus captured a 1.5% annual fee for himself, even though Yeshiva could have given its money directly to Bernie Madoff — who was later treasurer of the university’s board — for nothing.”) as a lost sheep.
Now, sadly, Mr. Merkin seems to have become the latest testament [The writer means testimony.] to the emotional struggle even the greatest investors must undertake to resist temptation. Of all the seductions that can lead a value investor to stray from the true path, perhaps the worst is simply making too much money.
Reader comments are … harsh. (There are twelve comments. The link only opens two of them, so to see them all you need to click on previous.)
Happens all the time. This one happened in Canada. As long as decent people exist, these programs will die on the vine. But eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Calling it “incompatible with the atmosphere required for free speech,” Queen’s University in Kingston yesterday scrapped its controversial “dialogue facilitator” program.
It caused a scandal last year when it was revealed the six student “facilitators” were mandated to intervene in private conversations to encourage discussion of social justice issues and discourage offensive language.
In a report to the administration, a panel of experts expressed “strong reservations about unsolicited interventions into the lives of students” because of the risk of “making students feel unsafe or under surveillance because of their opinions.”
… The panel faulted Dean of Student Affairs Jason Laker for importing an American model of diversity promotion. [Hey, don’t blame us for your fuckup.]
… The review was launched in response to “a tempest of negative, sometimes searing, comment in the national press.” [Duh.]
… putting photographs of, say, the governor, in every public university classroom would be a bad idea.
But putting, say, crucifixes in every Catholic university classroom doesn’t seem strange. Private schools, founded on and still devoted to a certain creed … Why not?
Yet Boston College, the Jesuit school which produced Harry Markopolos, has run into a bit of trouble along these lines lately.
… [S]uddenly, in all 151 classrooms, there is a Catholic icon, in most cases, a crucifix above the lintel.
Students and faculty returned to campus after winter break to find that Boston College had quietly completed, without announcement or fanfare, an eight-year project to dramatically increase the presence of Roman Catholic religious symbols on campus. The additions are subtle but significant, as the university joins other Catholic institutions around the nation in visibly reclaiming its Catholic identity.
… A meeting last month of arts and sciences department chairs turned into a heated argument over the classroom icons; a handful of faculty have written to the administration to protest, and some unsuccessfully circulated a petition asking to have crucifixes removed.
“I believe that the display of religious signs and symbols, such as the crucifix, in the classroom is contrary to the letter and spirt of open intellectual discourse that makes education worthwhile and distinguishes first-rate universities from mediocre and provincial ones,” Maxim D. Shrayer, chairman of the department of Slavic and Eastern languages and literatures, said in an interview.
“Christian iconography and symbols permeate this place and always have,” said the Rev. John Paris, a Jesuit priest who teaches bioethics at BC. Paris said he finds “offensive” the notion that a crucifix impedes the ability of students or faculty to think critically in a classroom and called the criticism “the narrow and bizarre musings of a few disgruntled folks.”
“This is a small problem for those with small minds,” Paris added. “This is not a serious controversy.”
Paris is wrong. It’s not a small problem. Big minds can profitably think about the extent to which a religious university visually presents itself as such. Is there, for instance, a kind of tipping point, in which reasonable people, religious or not, might find too many icons on campus?
How many icons is too much? UD would suggest that you’re in an over-rich iconic environment when your mind is directed too insistently, too often, to a particular doctrine…. When, as you enter a particular university’s gates, and as you walk through its interior and exterior spaces, you feel a bit mentally constrained in terms of thought that has to do with something other than a particular religious tradition.
If it feels, that is, as though the campus is designed to enforce, rather than prompt, spiritual reflection, there’s a problem.
I’d also say there’s an aesthetic issue here. Jam-packing your setting with anything is simply ugly, and it probably has an effect quite different from the one you want: It turns people off because it makes them feel manipulated.
These are subtle matters – theologically, aesthetically, institutionally.
… little essay in today’s George Washington University newspaper quotes your UD.
There are a few errors of writing in this piece, which I will hereby diplomatically correct.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm keeps her trap shut when UD‘s getting any form of media attention. Rule Number One of this blog.
Some excerpts.
The excerpts that quote me.
As a new generation of writers, we cannot help but … internalize [the recent] deaths [of significant American novelists], some more deeply, or strangely, than others. This is because these artists […] matter greatly, because we make them matter. We internalized their sense of story structure, if only to reinvent, criticize or recreate what they meant.
“It does have an impact on you [as a generation] that these people are gone,” said GW English professor Margaret Soltan, known for her widely read blog, University Diaries. “They produced a version of the great American novel, but at the same time, it seems to me that you’re from a different world.”
We are from a different world, and our literature – with its adeptness [at] switching scenery and [its] emphasis on the self-reflexive, reflects this, perhaps best embodied in the work of David Foster Wallace …
“I would argue that the basic theme of human existence – everyone trying to organize their life so it’s not painful – that theme has been with us since Shakespeare. The basic dilemma of being is not changing,” Soltan said.
Whether we like it or not – personal preferences aside – these writers are important to us, because we have either read them, been influenced by them, or because we were told that they were important. For this reason, we exist in their shadow. To be relevant artists, we are … either [going to] be influenced by their work or make an informed move away from it.
“The whole question of influence and how powerful[ly] you’re going to be influenced is in play here,” said Soltan … Even the notion of artistic trauma is at play, she said.
“Why does an artist’s life seem more difficult, and does that have to continue to be the model?” she asked.
Must future work depend on the trope of the suffering artist? Perhaps not…
… said Mr UD this morning, irritably. “Key West is obviously one of those places where excellent tea is easy to find.”
“Well, but they probably won’t have Marco Polo,” whimpered UD.
“You like black fruit teas, right? This will be a chance to explore new ones.”
Fine. UD won’t devote an entire suitcase to tea canisters.
And it’s true that she’s looking forward to sitting in internet cafes and exploring new teas.
She leaves in a few days.
… comes the sort of information about politics and the university you should worry about (as opposed to what Stanley Fish thinks you should worry about).
Les Gara’s a New York Jew with a Harvard degree who somehow got dropped down into Alaska, where he’s a Democrat in the Alaska House. He reports on a recent hearing:
The University of Alaska is this state’s greatest potential economic engine in the short term – for producing research, jobs, workers and opportunity. Well, last Tuesday University President Mark Hamilton came to the House Finance Committee to present his case for legislative funds. For 15 minutes he took questions from three of my GOP colleagues about why the students at the University were so, uh, politically misguided…
Some of the discussion by legislators went as follows:
“If I ask university staff, the people who are educating our future leaders, if they support the Chukchi Sea development, the Red Dog Mine or the Pebble Mine or any type of industry along those lines, a stereotypical response is they are in opposition . . .”
And
“I found it amazing there was a large disconnect in where the dollars for the state of Alaska come from on a regular basis as far as production of oil on the North Slope goes, and how it is turned into revenue for the state of Alaska and in turn is invested in the university system,” she said.
And
“How should I advocate more funding for an entire group that doesn’t want to see development going forward.”
The tenor of this hearing was troubling for many reasons.
First, there is no “right” or “wrong” view on the Pebble Mine, or offshore development, and lumping students with divergent views in one camp is easier than it is accurate. I don’t find students to be of one mind on these issues, and I find them more than able to justify their divergent views.
Second, universities are for teaching students to learn and explore policy solutions. It isn’t my business whether a student agrees or disagrees with me on these points – I only care that they are interested enough to form their opinions and do some thinking about them. Thinking students can come to conclusions on these issues across the spectrum and I’m glad when they do.
And, finally, if the point is that students should stand up for policies that bring the state money, so we can fund the university – then maybe the students weren’t misguided at all. The “liberal” students stereotyped at the Finance Committee hearing would presumably have voted for the oil tax reform bill we passed last year – which will likely bring in over $30 billion in additional revenue while including oil production incentives to promote development. So, if we’re going to rate these students on how much money they’d bring into the state with their “views”, they, I believe, did a better job for the state than those who voted against the November, 2007 oil reform law we passed. And since offshore oil development on federal lands and mining bring in relatively little state money, it’s not clear how a student’s views on those projects has much bearing on bringing in state revenue to fund the University…
Yes, Gara needs to cool it on the quotation marks.
But he’s on to the real tenured radicals scandal: In states like Alaska, some legislators are politicizing the academy.
