… comes out in favor of a university-wide laptop in the classroom ban. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all, you know that UD has confidently awaited such a day, and that she trusts something similar will happen at other self-respecting campuses (Def. of self-respecting campuses: Places whose football stadium isn’t named after a prison). That is, UD has anticipated that the real energy in favor of serious bans will come not from professors, many of whom do ban them, but from students.
This is for obvious I’m all right, Jack, pull up the ladder reasons: What careth I, Professor X, if Professor Y’s students have a shitty classroom experience? I’ve worked out something good for my group.
But – as UD has told you repeatedly – this is a treacherously short-sighted POV. As the Duke editorial writers ask:
Why convene class if students are half-present, constantly disturbed by text messages, games and Facebook? … What is the point of holding class if people are not paying attention? This is not just about respect; it is also about the necessity of a physical college campus. The more time we spend on computers, the less important the on-campus college experience — which universities tout as a major benefit of an elite education — becomes.
If it helps you to think about this in terms of sports: Note current plummeting attendance at many university and professional stadiums. Why, why, why? Well, lots of traditional reasons (obscene drunks, long runs of losing games, outrageous ticket prices, passels of bad boys on the teams) PLUS a new one: The addition to many stadiums of vast Adzillatrons — screens that show you the game as it’s happening, and add constant massive shrieking advertisements. Fun! You’ve spent hundreds of dollars to be treated to a computer-generated as-it’s-happening rendition of the game while being held captive to wall to wall commercials. Where do I sign up for my $2,000 season tickets?… But it’s so much less fun with every game, ’cause I notice all the other people who used to sit with me and make it exciting to cheer are gone. They’re watching on their big screen in the respectable privacy of their own home…
And see it’s the same thing at universities. Why go there? It’s nicer to lie in bed and stare at your very own screen. And you get to that place, mentally, as a result of staring at screens in classrooms, just the way people get themselves home from the football game by staring at screens in the stadium.
Really dum-dum states, like Nevada, our very dumbest state, are planning more and bigger Adzillatrons at stadiums. A proposed $800 million new facility for UNLV features an Adzillatron that spans the entire stadium. Imagine sitting in your seat and being forced to watch the world’s biggest moving image of a three-tier McDonald’s burger oozing white sauce! Slurp!
It’s just part of our times, something in the postmodern air, that we produce so many people like Jonah Lehrer, charming, inveterate, high-level liars. Publishers have been pulping his books left and right, as plagiarism and made-up interviews are discovered in them. The latest is How We Decide, which, among other things, includes what Lehrer describes as an interview he conducted with an airline pilot. Lehrer quotes him in the book:
“For most of my career, we kind of worked on the concept that the captain was the authority on the aircraft,” says Al Haynes, the captain of Flight 232. “And we lost a few airplanes because of that. Sometimes the captain isn’t as smart as we thought he was…We had 103 years of flying experience there in the cockpit [on Flight 232], trying to get that airplane on the ground. If I hadn’t used CRM, if we had not had everybody’s input, it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have made it.”
Twenty years earlier, at a lecture, the pilot said this:
“Up until 1980, we kind of worked on the concept that the captain was THE authority on the aircraft. What he said, goes. And we lost a few airplanes because of that. Sometimes the captain isn’t as smart as we thought he was … And we had 103 years of flying experience there in the cockpit, trying to get that airplane on the ground … So if I hadn’t used CLR, if we had not let everybody put their input in, it’s a cinch we wouldn’t have made it.”
… is UD‘s category for the terrific poetry of D.A. Powell. (Read earlier UD takes on Powell here and here.) UD and her friend D (also a poet) are excited that Powell has won this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award. Powell shares Charles Wright’s long sly metaphysical line, but Powell’s voice is broken down, debilitated, old before its time, and quite pissed off. Powell’s a little like Richard in that Joni Mitchell song – cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe – only he has somehow surgically removed the boredom from this cliched body. These dark cafe days, sings Mitchell, and that’s a lot of Powell’s poetry — dark, post-AIDS, cafe days… The rage of the young romantic suddenly dragged by disease into dying.
Here’s the title poem of the book for which he won the award.
Useless Landscape
A lone cloudburst hijacked the Doppler radar screen, a bandit
hung from the gallows, in rehearsal for the broke-necked man,
damn him, tucked under millet in the potter’s plot. Welcome
to disaster’s alkaline kiss, its little clearing edged with twigs,
and posted against trespass. Though finite, its fence is endless.
Lugs of prune plums already half-dehydrated. Lugged toward
shelf life and sorry reconstitution in somebody’s eggshell kitchen.
If you hear the crop-dust engine whining overhead, mind
the orange windsock’s direction, lest you huff its vapor trail.
Scurry if you prefer between the lime-sulphured rows, and cull
from the clods and sticks, the harvest shaker’s settling.
The impertinent squalls of one squeezebox vies against another
in ambling pick-ups. The rattle of dice and spoons. The one café
allows a patron to pour from his own bottle. Special: tripe today.
Goat’s head soup. Tortoise-shaped egg bread, sugared pink.
The darkness doesn’t descend, and then it descends so quickly
it seems to seize you in burly arms. I’ve been waiting all night
to have this dance. Stay, it says. Haven’t touched your drink.
Nothing grows in this alkaline potter’s field; the poet’s eye ranges, with acidic exactitude, over the useless landscape of himself. All diseased, the earth here ends by taking the shape of a tumorous tree burl which seizes the speaker in its arms and spins him into a death dance. But before that sudden final descent, the poem’s all been variations on the same thing – the earth dessicated, deformed, chemically fouled, death-bearing. The genius of Powell allows a sick particular self to infiltrate these earthy lines; the clearing, for instance —
its little clearing edged with twigs,
and posted against trespass. Though finite, its fence is endless.
This is the specific private space of the speaker’s own demise, his certain end (finite) infinitely closed off, as experience, from anything he could share. Dying, the best he can hope for now is a paltry
shelf life and sorry reconstitution
which is to say no life at all, closeted away, only half-mended.
There’s no escape, in this landscape, from death — If you’re lucky enough to flee the fumes of the crop-duster, you’ll find yourself
between the lime-sulphured rows
– that white graveyard generating only lifeless sticks and clods for harvest.
Dopplers and squeezeboxes remind us we’re in the very immediate present, though gallows and millets and clods and conversations with devilish (sulphurous) death offer a grotesque medievalism for counterpoint, and for a reminder that nothing in the way of suffering and treachery changes. Squeezebox – again the brilliance of Powell – at this point in the poem seems a medieval word for grave, no? Dark little buried thing just big enough for the shrunken body of the sick man. Rattle of bones, rattle of dice and spoons – no one does associational thinking as well as Powell, no one so well conveys with this sequential array the movement of the bitter and sorrowing mind.
… because we’ve lately been told that the Mediterranean diet is the only way to go, let us note that poets have long been swigging olives and their oil and the trees that hold the olives, and there must be a reason for this olive-love on the part of so many poets. The most recent of poetic olivephiles, A.E. Stallings (read UD‘s appreciation of a poem of hers here), has just been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle prize, and the name of the nominated book is … Olives.
A quick read of a bunch of poems featuring things olive confirms that poets like the olivesque because… Well, let’s go to the tape! Let’s do five olive poems! I bet we’ll discover that all poets – at least all the poets on our list — i.e., Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Karl Shapiro, Rachel Hadas, A.E. Stallings — like the same stuff about olives.
Pour la première, M. Wilbur, “Grasse: The Olive Trees.” (Go here for the complete poem.) So the poet’s in the south of France, marveling at the incredible lushness – almost to excess – of natural bounty there:
… the grass
Mashes under the foot, and all is full
Of heat and juice and a heavy jammed excess.
… The whole South swells
To a soft rigor, a rich and crowded calm.
But no – not everything around the poet is like that:
… olives lie
Like clouds of doubt against the earth’s array.
And why? Well, they look different, for one thing, all gray and gnarly and oldish and “anxious,” says the poet, in their thin arthritic presence.
What’s their problem? Their problem is that they’re at odds with their lush relaxed just let the rain drip all over me and the sun warm me up setting; they don’t trust the natural generosity of the cosmos; or, rather, they – like Kafka’s Hunger Artist – know that no matter how generous the universe, the lives it gives us are finite and difficult, and we will always be hungry and thirsty, wanting more joy, and more life. The olive is
a tree which grows
Unearthly pale, which ever dims and dries,
And whose great thirst, exceeding all excess,
Teaches the South it is not paradise.
So the olive is there to remind us that even in our most famous paradises – here, the south of France – the reality of life and death pertains: Our lives are treacherous, we’re barely getting by, and we grow unearthly pale, asking of existence compensations and fulfillments that will never occur. This is earth, not paradise, says the olive tree, and this is an important message, worth the poet’s notice…
Just so in James Merrill, the olive features in a poem about the frustration of being mortal, of having too little time to overcome one’s convoluted beginnings and break through to the elemental paradisal person one wishes to be (see Philip Larkin’s Aubade: “An only life can take so long to climb / Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never…”). In “After Greece,” Merrill describes coming back to the States, back to his personal history, back to the story that made him and that he’ll never – however many times he leaves for Greece – escape. It’s an earnest New Englandy sort of inheritance – Christian, or maybe if not Christian at least animated by “Art, Public Spirit…” But Merrill wants neither of these – neither the moral piety of the religious life, nor the moral piety of the post-religious public spirited life. He wants essentials:
how I want
Essentials: salt, wine, olive, the light…
The poet is – in Wilbur’s words about the olive tree – “rooted hunger wrung.” His hunger for essentials has him calling out to the olives, begging their sun-laden natural fulfillment for himself; but “I have scarcely named you” when instead of that idealized earthy plentitude, what materializes is the gradually killing radiance of the Greek sun, turning things “unearthly pale.”
Shapiro? Same old same old.
The fruit is hard,
Multitudinous, acid, tight on the stem;
The leaves ride boat-like in the brimming sun,
Going nowhere and scooping up the light.
It is the silver tree, the holy tree,
Tree of all attributes.
Now on the lawn
The olives fall by thousands, and I delight
To shed my tennis shoes and walk on them,
Pressing them coldly into the deep grass,
In love and reverence for the total loss.
All attributes, multitudinous, holding on to life tightly; and yet the olive is going to fall to the ground, pregnant with nothing, and the poet celebrates this reverent opportunity the fall gives him to press his feet into the “cold pastoral” grave of his own abundant nothingness.
Next up, Rachel Hadas, who just says it:
Ideas of the eternal,
once molten, harden; cool.
Oil, oil in the lock.
The door to her country house gets old and stiff and hard to open, so she softens it with olive oil to make it young again. But as she gets older ideas of infinitely available regeneration “harden; cool.”
oil in the lock; the key
dipped in lubricity
the boychild’s shining skin
me tired to the bone
And finally Stallings herself – perhaps the most evolved of the poets – finds in the olive a rich equivalent to her acceptance of limitation, her understanding that to be always hungry is not the ideal human outcome. Of the poets, she’s the only one who claims the olive:
These fruits are mine –
Small bitter drupes
Full of the golden past and cured in brine.
That is, Stallings seems to have arrived at the proper attitude to take toward the olive. Not morbid, like Shapiro, or somewhat puling like Merrill. Not somewhat hectoring or lecturing, like Wilbur, who concludes a bit too authoritatively with his reminder to us; and not meanderingly wistful like Hadas (I mean, they’re all fine poems; I just think Stallings is the best). But rather with a toughed-up wisdom, and even a joy based on that difficult knowledge.
Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet…
for the truth, the bitter truth, that is, and the olive contains it. Its gradually darkening skin “charts the slow chromatics of a bruise,” the gradual process, also chronicled in the Hadas poem, of one’s recognition of mortality. The olive is
Daylight packed in treasuries of oil
Paradigmatic summers that decline
Like singular archaic nouns, the troops
Of hours in retreat.
So learn to love that fact of decline and retreat, that singular fast-becoming-archaic thing which is you, packed tightly with your daylight memories into the skin of an indehiscent mind, a mind strong enough not to split when it arrives at maturity.