From an interview with the poet laureate, W.S. Merwin:
Q: You write, in the poem “First Sight,” about “late blessings.” What are some that you appreciate?
Merwin: I love my wife, and I love my life here. I’m happy to be alive. I feel very lucky to be able to write sometimes and to work in the garden. That’s quite enough.
… Q: You seem continually astonished by nature, love, and words. What else astonishes you?
Merwin: What else is there?
… at 91.
Indomitable is one of those words, like poignant, that always seems to end up in a cliché; yet Spender was that sort of person, able always to rise up again from downfall.
Natasha Spender’s courage was never more severely tested than when, two months after her … book [in praise of the Spenders’ restored house and garden in France] came out, [the house, Mas St Jerome,] was completely destroyed in a forest fire. Luckily [friends] were staying with her at the time and woke up in time to rescue her and raise the alarm, or she would almost certainly have been killed. The fire not only destroyed the house and the garden but also Spender’s library, a loss his widow felt particularly keenly. But she remained philosophical and typically down-to earth. “I lived through the Blitz and this is remarkably similar,” she told an interviewer. “I must buy some secateurs … and start work cutting back in the garden.”
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I don’t know if this poem of Spender’s (my parents loved Spender, so I grew up reading his poems) was written for Natasha, but since they had a long and happy marriage, I wouldn’t be surprised:
The Trance
Sometimes, apart in sleep, by chance,
You fall out of my arms, alone,
Into the chaos of your separate trance.
My eyes gaze through your forehead, through the bone,
And see where in your sleep distress has torn
Its path, which on your lips is shown
And on your hands and in your dream forlorn.
Restless, you turn to me and press
Those timid words against my ear
Which thunder at my heart like stones.
‘Mercy,’ you plead, Then ‘Who can bless?’
You ask. ‘I am pursued by Time,’ you moan.
I watch that precipice of fear
You tread, naked in naked distress.
[Pause here, at the midpoint of the poem, and consider its peculiarly uxorious tableau … Long-married people share the intimacy and vulnerability of the marriage bed, in which sometimes one of them, awake while the other sleeps, can witness an anguished muttering bad dream state of the other… Spender calls this the separate trance, the starkly personal grappling with specific demons, memories, fears: I am pursued by Time…]
To that deep care we are committed
Beneath the wildness of our flesh
And shuddering horror of our dream,
Where unmasked agony is permitted.
Our bodies, stripped of clothes that seem,
And our souls, stripped of beauty’s mesh,
Meet their true selves, their charms outwitted.
This pure trance is the oracle
That speaks no language but the heart
Our angel with our devil meets
In the atrocious dark nor do they part
But each forgives and greets,
And their mutual terrors heal
Within our married miracle.
[The separate trance somehow transfigures into a mutual terror, a true meeting place of selves stripped of disguise, their mortal agony unmasked. The eye of love sees even into this atrocious dark (note the origin of the word atrocious). Indeed love brings angelic light to it; and, in a specifically married miracle, frees, wakens, the loved one from nightmare.]
U PRESIDENT VOWS PUSH FOR STADIUM LIQUOR SALES
(Headline, Pioneer Press, Minnesota.)
Look at this article about MSU’s budget problems and its fierce defense of an unpopular, financially killing sports program. Read the comments top administrators there make about keeping football going. Textbook provincialism… or why Missouri State will always be Missouri State.
Board of Governors Chair Elizabeth Bradbury said athletics help to make the school a destination-place locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.
“When you look at being that kind of a university, typically you are looking at schools that have good, strong athletic programs,” Bradbury said.
“Student-athletes are some of our best ambassadors,” Bradbury added.
MSU ain’t any sort of destination place.
A commenter on the article lists a bunch of schools that have dropped football, and notes that most of them are better schools than MSU. Another commenter makes the obvious point that athletes – especially football players – tend to be the worst ambassadors.
The vp for student affairs makes the pro-football case yet more astutely:
“If we didn’t have football, what would happen to our band program? If band isn’t as vibrant … those musicians also are involved in orchestra, ensembles and all that goes with that.”
A commenter responds:
Those football players are just a support group for the band! I will send this statement to the National Academy of Sciences to prove that football is very important to the academic pursuit of musicianship.
Then there’s the university’s president:
Asked if athletics teams could be on the chopping block in the future, Cofer said, “I don’t answer hypothetical questions.”
You can see why Cofer’s skittish about answering future-oriented questions. MSU’s last president was way bullish on the money the new basketball stadium would make.
The [recent state] audit … pointed out that JQH Arena operated at a loss in its first two years and, according to the current budget, is projected to operate at a loss for 2010-11, as well.
As a result, operating transfers from the athletic fund were needed to cover losses.
Cofer said he’s working on a plan for improving finances for JQH.
Yessiree Bob we’ve got that plan in the works fer sure.
… in swimming, has died in a World Cup race. He lost consciousness during the last leg of the open water event.
People are stunned, and it’s too soon for any official theories. But the water was very warm, and “several swimmers were treated for heat exhaustion at a nearby hospital after the event.” Maybe he had a heart attack.
Crippen’s sister is a senior at Virginia, and also a swimmer.
Two (three?) freshmen at Washington’s Jesuit university make meth in their dorm room.
Police discovered a methamphetamine lab inside a freshman residence hall on the Georgetown University campus early Saturday.
Everyone evacuated. (Meth labs have a tendency to explode.) Police are interviewing the meth makers.
You’ll recall that UD featured the same story not long ago, this time at the University of Central Florida.
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Some cross-town rivalry in the comments section of Vox Populi:
A meth lab? Who’s trashy now?
Love,
GWU
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God never closes a door without opening a window: Because of this story, UD has discovered the GW Ratchet.
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This one, back in ’05, was discovered via security camera. He was making meth in the San Diego State chem lab.
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Some background from Inside Higher Ed.
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In case you think there might be one in your dorm.
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Meth meet and greet. (Photo of evacuated Georgetown University students.)
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If you really can’t get enough of this.
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Update on the Georgetown University story: The drug lab seems not to have been making meth; instead, it manufactured DMT, a hallucinogen.
If UD‘s experience with these sorts of stories is anything to go by, however, police will find more than one drug being made or sold in the dorm room. The cookers (I learned this word from the Frontline documentary I just watched) usually offer a larger menu.
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Regaining a sense of perspective: From a Georgetown University comment thread:
At least DMT is a safe highbrow drug suitable for use by educated elites, unlike the crude trailer trash stimulants originally suggested.
… surfing in the morning before class is killed by a shark.
… as Nina Martyris nicely calls it, in an article about censorship at an Indian university, always identifies intellectuality as the enemy. Reflective people who value unemotional deliberation and an openness to the complexity of human life and thought are intellectual snobs – as Michael Gerson calls President Obama in a recent opinion piece – unable to appreciate the higher wisdom of plain-spoken people. Gerson joins Sarah Palin here, who in her speeches relentlessly uses the word professor to condemn Obama.
In his response to the scandal of the University of Mumbai having dropped a novel from its syllabus in response to political pressure, the author of The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay reminds us that “it’s one thing to be scandalous but quite another to be scandalously stupid.” Stupid is influential people in the world’s largest democracy choosing repressive parochialism over free thought.
In response to Sarah Palin and Michael Gerson and others, who insist that a president who openly values ambiguity, intellectual depth, and the free play of the mind — a president who voices his belief that there are stronger and weaker uses of reason in thinking about civic life — threatens the country, Michael Kinsley writes:
If an intellectual snob is someone who secretly thinks he’s smarter than the average Joe, we’ve probably never had a president — even Harry Truman — who wasn’t one. It’s true, I think, that Obama hides it worse than most. But having a president who thinks he’s smart, and shows it, is a small price to pay for having a president who really is smart. Or would people really rather have a stupid president?
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UD thanks Jack, a reader in Ontario.
12:01
Toward the White House end of the street, someone sings Hey Jude.
Wings flutter: The President’s helicopter flies over Washington Circle.
A car alarm.
White clouds float over a blue sky.
Wheels jangle at the university loading platform.
A FedEx truck in front of Rice Hall idles.
Flocks of swallows look black against the blue sky.
An ambulance wails.
A truck door rattles.
More music, from a car radio: You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.
High piping as a delivery vehicle goes into reverse.
Hammering at the construction site.
A cawing bird.
Police siren.
The clouds darken and move more swiftly.
A heavy jet engine roars.
The Hey Jude singer starts up again.
12:55
… Johns Hopkins conference on The Science of the Arts, the most intriguing came from a biologist who, when asked if he thought aesthetic creation and receptivity were hardwired in us for evolutionary reasons, said:
No, I don’t think so. Our brains are so powerful… art is an epiphenomenon of that power. Art has fallen out as a side-effect of our complexity and sophistication as creatures. Art is clearly about communication, which is a fairly low-level survival skill… We’re not hardwired to be appreciators of art at a Darwinian level; we’ve simply evolved an incredibly complex central nervous system out of which art appreciation has evolved. When you have levels of complexity that are extremely high, you get unexpected phenomena, like the art instinct.
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Speaking of evolution, UD notes that Leigh Van Valen, the University of Chicago scientist who originated the Red Queen hypothesis, has died.
Stephen Stearns, in a Yale course on evolution, said this about the Red Queen hypothesis:
[The hypothesis is that] all life on earth is in fact caught up in a coevolutionary web of interactions. And his evidence for that is that the long-term extinction rate is constant. If you look over the Phanerozoic, if you look over the last 550 million years, the probability that a species will go extinct, within a given period of time, has remained roughly constant.
There’s some slight evidence that maybe species have started to live a little bit longer. But, you know, broad brush, this claim is correct. Things have not gotten better at persisting, over the last 500 million years. So in some sense I think Leigh’s claim is probably true. Every time a species on earth tries to get a leg up, some other species compensates. So this is where that term comes from. This is an illustration from Through the Looking Glass by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). This–Alice is a pawn on a chessboard, and Alice is supposed to, in this mental game, march down the chessboard and get turned into a queen, when she reaches the end.
And the Red Queen, who is next to her, says, “Alice, this is a game in which you run as fast as you can and you can only stay in place.” So it’s like one of those nightmares that you have, where you’re running as fast as you possibly can, and you can’t get away. That’s Leigh Van Valen’s metaphor for evolution: everybody is running as hard as they can and they’re just staying in place; their fitness is not long-term improving.
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Further intriguing ideas from the conference, these from Pat Metheny:
It’s really all just ideas. Jazz improvisation is a narrative, linguistic experience… You’re dealing with a vocabulary and a language you work to refine in order to say what you mean, to express yourself honestly. Aesthetic success is when communicative flow happens, when a certain engagement happens.
Music is this wild thing – you can’t see it, taste it, smell it. It’s unreal. But it’s so effective as narrative, as basic communication…
What I’m getting at is elusive, and hard to quantify.
The idea exists before the instrument. If you ask me to play Funny Valentine on three different instruments, I’ll play it the same on all of them.
… FIRE.
This case seems tailored to that organization, which defends free speech rights in universities.
Louie Gohmert, a Texas pol with a hell of a temper, went and got the director of art galleries at Stephen F. Austin State University fired. The director mentioned in a conversation that he thought Gohmert was a fear-monger.
You’re not supposed to lose your job for stating your opinions.
