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Absolutely fantastic pun.
I’m not sure the writer intended it.
Sample comment:
“I swear to god I would do everything possible to graduate on time if this would happen.” – Samuel Roth, member of the class of 2012
He’s still writing poetry. We’ve already considered a couple of his poems on this blog, but let’s go ahead and do yet another to mark the big day.
JUNE LIGHT
Your voice, with clear location of June days,
Called me outside the window. You were there,
Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.
Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,
Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.
And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.
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Your voice, with clear location of June days,
[Like James Merrill, Wilbur’s good at finding words that hint at other words, words that don’t so much radiate out with meaning, as generate an inner, meaning-mingled heat. So take location. He’s setting the poem’s place in time – afternoon, June – so location has that straightforward meaning. But he begins with a reference to his lover’s voice, so part of our mind may well be registering, say, locution – especially with that word “clear” in front of it.
The setting is about clarity, with objects bright and clear in the summer light; but it’s also about the clear locution of the lover’s voice as she calls the poet, who’s inside, to come outside to be with her.]
Called me outside the window. You were there,
[You were there. The poem’s already beginning to build the idea of the brilliant, enthralling, absolute thereness of the loved one, her glorious radiant presence, her intense and delighting being in the world. This is a love poem — to the loved one, and to the loved world, and to the way the loved one’s charismatic and adored way of being, her intensified self-ness, her sheer miraculous outrageously exceptional placement on the earth, astounds and delights the poet, lifting him to positively religious heights of ecstasy.]
Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.
[The poem’s called June Light, so on one level this reference to light intends to describe the peculiarly intense and at the same time tranquil nature of early summer light. This isn’t oppressive light that bleaches out the visible world; on the contrary, it’s light that’s composed – calm, but also ordered, yielding a beautifully clear and fitting world whose objects – like the lover – burst out of the dull background world with hyper-dramatic being.
The lover too has this combination of brilliance and calm, radiance and soundness. She’s both exciting and pacifying.
The soft stare of summer is “just” – right, appropriate, undeniable (uncontested) – which is to say that – let’s put it the way Gertrude Stein might – there’s a there there. The world obviously and incontrovertibly exists.
Does this seem trite? The world exists. My lover exists. Big deal. These things are obvious.
But they’re so not obvious. The narrator of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein is sitting in Paris, on a gorgeous June day, on the balcony of a grand hotel, with a view of the most stunning part of the city, and he thinks:
The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair. I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.
I mean here he is, having el major peak experience, and he despairs! He despairs because he doesn’t have whatever inside of himself to be adequate to it — yet the world is trying so hard to give him his Wordsworthian spot of time, his Sartreian perfect moment! What is the matter with him?
But everyone knows what the narrator means. “Slowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of color and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards, the philhellenes, laboring uphill, vastly unhappy,” writes the narrator of Don DeLillo’s The Names. Vastly? Unhappy? It’s a brilliant Athens day, and they’re going to see the effing Acropolis! The American narrator refuses to visit the Acropolis at all, even though he lives in Athens. Something about how the place is “daunting.”
Okay so Wilbur is simply saying that the life force of the loved one represents a brilliance he can approach, a world-intensifying, clarifying force that doesn’t daunt. As a result, instead of joining the depressives in Bellow and DeLillo, for whom the sheer force of the physical and metaphysical world in its most beautiful, meaningful, and intense realizations is just too much, the poet revels in his access to that force. It is all thanks to the lover.
Seeming and seamless are nice too, eh? The quality of the light transforms the seeming, difficult to grasp world we live in most of the time, to a seamless, composed, real world.]
Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,
[She wanted him to come outside because she wanted to toss him a pear she just picked. It’s beautiful, ripe, she wants him to see it and feel it. At this amazing moment of earthly and human clarity, when the world under its June light, and the lover under the influence of the June light, suddenly both take on absolute irrefutable acute being, what shines out most clearly is the fact of the lover’s love for the poet. The well-wrought, perfect ripeness and particularity of the pearfruit is the lover, in her fully manifest (legible) being, a higher being, if you will, brought into existence by virtue of her love for the poet.
In short, she’s happy to see him.
He can read who she is, what she’s feeling, from the lines of joy on her face, just as we can trace natural images on pearskin.
Sometimes the world, and the people we love, shine forth with entire vivacity and truth. As in the moment that ends Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, a memory of his brother fishing that “remains in my mind as if fixed by some chemical bath.”
He never stopped to shake himself. He came charging up the bank, showering molecules of water and images of himself to show what was sticking out of his basket, and he dripped all over us … Large drops of water ran from under his hat onto his face and then into his lips when he smiled.
I can never get to the word lips in these lines without feeling the almost unbearable intensity of Maclean’s love for his brother.]
Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.
[I’m not sure what these lines mean. I think they mean something like this: The gorgeous flesh of the pear will become pear wine; or will be burned away in order for the pearfruit to become pear wine. The pear is even more vulnerable to the processes of time and transformation than we (more fatal fleshed); but although we have a longer earthly run (human grace), the pear certainly reminds us of our vulnerability toward death, the shutting down of all this being.]
And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.
[Yes, blessed, and the first great gift of all, and grace — You can read religion into this poem if you’d like, though frankly it seems more on the pagan side to me … Maybe that’s just me…
But anyway. 99.9% of poems these days are falling over themselves to capture these moments, and you can get knockoffs quick and cheap from a poet like Ted Kooser. But why not get the real thing?]
… Before this rash of arrests, Pitt had no procedure for screening football recruits for past trouble with the law. But after Knox’s arrest Pitt’s athletic department implemented a new policy requiring coaches to seek more detailed background information on potential recruits.
… Pittsburgh had more players in trouble with the law (22) than any other school among SI’s 2010 preseason Top 25.
… Pitt chancellor Mark Nordenberg and athletic director Steve Pederson declined requests for comment…
… [C]ollege coaches are willing to recruit players with questionable pasts to win. More surprising, however, is just how little digging college coaches do into players’ backgrounds before offering them a scholarship…
Argentina looks like an ass.
Intellectuals close to President Cristina Kirchner launched a campaign Tuesday to stop Mario Vargas Llosa from opening the Spanish-speaking world’s largest cultural fair because of his disparaging remarks about Argentine politics.
The article goes on to quote various parodies of the proud mustachio’d type, all drawing themselves up to the full height of indignation over the novelist’s insults to the dignity of Argentina. We don’t need no stinkin’ free speech!
In this article, it looks as though the President has had second thoughts. The relevant sentence is a bit knotty, but I think that’s what it says.
After such harsh words, [one of the mustachio’d] also recognized the request of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner made to National Library Director Horacio González to immediately withdraw his petition asking for the Nobel Prize winner not to be invited to inaugurate the fair in order to guarantee there is “freedom of expression” within the country, thus trying to ease up on the current political polarization that society is being dragged to as part of a we-they dichotomy.
Quite a life she’s had. And she’s still punching – hard – in her eighties.
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Final exchange from an interview she gave fourteen years ago.
CP: In closing, what kind of advice would you give to young people today?
AH: None. When I was young I hated it when old people gave me advice.
What is it about UD‘s imperial city that generates so many pharaonic university presidents? Presidents toppled from power by grandiosity and greed?
I suppose I’ve already answered the question… It’s the imperialistic feel of the place … There’s something about living, as the old Riggs Bank commercial had it, in “the most important city in the world” (Riggs was brought low by greed too) that takes starry-eyed ingenue university presidents and turns them into whores with eyes of steel. They’ll do anything, risk anything, to get a big seat at the front of the plane.
The most notorious name here is of course American University’s Benjamin Ladner, whose indifference to the running of his institution tracked his sense of himself as Xerxes. Eventually, to get rid of Ladner, AU students had to rent a UHaul on which they’d written something like Put your stuff in here and get out, Ladner. Something about daily news stories featuring the UHaul driving up and down the main street of the campus all day (I think a bullhorn was involved) convinced trustees Ladner had become a liability.
Unlike AU, the University of the District of Columbia is a public university, which means the already insanely put-upon taxpayers of the District are paying for the flight into Egypt described by an outraged UDC student in this post’s headline. Always a substandard school, UDC is slipping lower and lower as its latest president (in its short life it’s had many) runs off with its money.
If the UDC story plays out according to the AU script (it probably will), you’ll see Allen Sessoms regally disdain interviews. His courtiers will rush about making contradictory statements… Meanwhile, his crony-ridden, uncomprehending, fundamentally indifferent board of trustees will try to patch together a quorum to talk about the crisis… But the board’s own corruption will keep it from acting… At which point the students are going to have to rent a UHaul.
Everyone knows that important busy people who want to refer to themselves as Doctor have a tendency to plagiarize or just outright buy their theses. So what? Speeches and op-eds are ghostwritten; articles get penned by graduate assistants or subordinates in the lab or pharma-hired consultants. BFD. Everybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it…
But people are remarkably unforgiving about it. You’d think by this time, all of us postmodernized to within an inch of our lives, we’d find the revelation of yet another totally simulacral political leader a real shrug.
… in which technoid professors drive students away from class, here’s an opinion piece by a student at Harvard. You can tell he’s kind of shocked that even at Harvard this sort of thing goes on.
Excerpts:
… Too many teachers simply throw their bullet points onto a series of slides and read them aloud during lecture.
… The bullets also encourage the professor to read simply what is on the slide, rather than prepare a more fleshed-out speech, …leading students to wonder why they couldn’t just read the slides to themselves in the comfort of their dorm.
Using PowerPoint simply for bullet points is downright lazy, and may stem from a more general problem of professors not putting enough effort into preparing for class.
… If the slides simply consist of the lecturer’s notes, many students will opt to skip lecture and cram from the slides before an exam or paper. Not only will the professor drive students away from class by giving boring, redundant lectures, but the lecture slides act as a complete, downloadable study guide that can be a perfect substitute for going to class.
… [L]ectures are conducted in darkness to help students see the slides, when ideally the lecturer should be well lit, as it is his or her body language and gestures which should help connect the slides to the speech content of their words…
From The Telegraph:
Col Gaddafi was feted by senior staff at the [London School of Economics] during a meeting conducted via video link just two months ago.
In a video, understood to show a closed doors meeting, the Libyan leader is seen being applauded by members of the LSE staff as he launches into a rambling speech in which he spouts offensive views about Lockerbie.
He also uses the speech to attack former world leaders including Baroness Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The LSE student who leaked the video said she was disgusted at the way senior college figures had behaved towards Col Gaddafi and his son…
[Florida legislator and Brevard County Community College lecturer Mike] Haridopolos got paid $154,000 [by the college] to write a book titled Florida Legislative History and Processes.
[T]he book is light on content, has errors and – are you ready for this – there is exactly one copy.
One copy.
Really. $154,000 for one copy.
No, he didn’t teach during that time. Too busy on the book.
Excerpts from the book here.
A woman at the University of Doha in Qatar asked German President Christian Wulff why Germany bans burqas in school.
“The conscious decision to cover yourself up clashes with the duty of the state to educate its children,” he said. “Showing your face is part of a free society.”
A person wearing a burqa in Europe appeared to be calling into question the equality between men and women, Wulff said. “But we don’t want to question this equality.”
Bravo.
… if the laptops in college classrooms problem were solved not by professors, but by angry students! I can’t keep up with the editorials in university newspapers calling laptop use rude, outrageous, distracting to others in the room, an intolerable problem. Where are the professors willing to say this?
True, more and more of them, like UD, ban the machines; but the vast majority seems – cynically, lazily, indifferently – to be perfectly okay about mandatory attendance policies (Duh – The next step after being allowed to surf on a laptop all class is deciding not to attend the class at all. So the professor, to avoid speaking to an empty room, must force people to attend.), and about lecture halls and seminar rooms full of people resentfully, flagrantly, ignoring them.
So here’s the latest student protest – a woman at Indiana University. She notes increasing numbers of professors “making attendance an important part of the grade,” and shudders at the thought of all the online flunkies who would have stayed home now showing up and being in-class online flunkies. The problem as it stands is bad enough:
No matter how hard you’re trying to pay attention to the professor, if the person in front of you is on Facebook or Popeater or Tetris, your attention is going to be drawn to whatever he or she is doing.
Quite frankly, it’s rude. If you’re not interested in paying attention during class, don’t come. You’re a distraction for the rest of us, and you’re probably annoying the professor.
She argues for what they’ve done at the University of Chicago law school: Disabling the internet in classrooms. But she also notes that this won’t stop her fellow students from playing distracting off-line games… And I can tell you, from the professor’s point of view, that as long as there’s a vertical screen between you and the student’s face, the same problem of total non-interaction pertains.