THE MANHATTAN REVIEW

THE MANHATTAN REVIEW
Excerpt:

John and Bogdana Carpenter

from Conversation on Writing Poetry: An Interview with Zbigniew Herbert

Mr. Herbert had consented to be interviewed in early July, 1984, when he was staying outside Warsaw and devoting his time to writing. He returned to his apartment in Warsaw on July 12th for the interview with Bogdana and John Carpenter. Mr. Herbert's wife, Kasia, was also present, and took part in the conversation.

Q: After five years abroad you returned to Poland in January, 1981. That was a dramatic decision; you returned at the height of the Solidarity era. Ten and a half months later the "State of War" was declared by General Jaruzelski. When you made your decision, did you have any premonition of the events to come? Would you have returned, knowing what would happen?

A: When the Gdansk Agreements were signed I said, We have to go back. I knew that it would end badly, because I know this system. A system that is incapable of being reformed. At most one can introduce certain "permissive" structures, like strip tease. Or a change—that there will be sausage in the markets. The system is to be overthrown, but not to be reformed.

Q: When did you lose your faith in the reformability of the system? In 1949 with the beginning of Stalinism in Poland, or before 1956? After 1956? After 1968, 1970? When?

A: I have known this since September 20, 1939. When I came into contact with the Soviets in Lwów, as a boy. I cannot stop wondering at certain intellectuals. I had my revelations ab oculos. And not through Marx or Lenin. The city was changed within a few days into a concentration camp. This system attacks a European through smells and tastes; while I am a partisan of goodness and beauty, I don't have a model for the happiness of humanity. My advice is: compare the smell, the state of the street, people's eyes, as I did in 1939.

................................Read on..................

Anecdotal Evidence: `Serenity, Dignity and Cool Radiance'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Serenity, Dignity and Cool Radiance'
Excerpt: [Magnificent.]
“The Little Soul,” an essay in The Labyrinth on the Sea, the posthumous prose collection published in Warsaw in 2000. An English translation is yet to appear though a volume of his collected prose is rumored to be in the works. This passage is welcome news to Herbert’s non-Polish-speaking readers:

“One of the deadly sins of contemporary culture is that it pettily avoids a frontal confrontation with the highest values. Also the arrogant conviction that we can do without models (both aesthetic and moral), because our place in the world is supposedly so exceptional and can’t be compared with anything. That’s why we reject the aid of tradition and stumble around in our solitude, digging around in the dark corners of the abandoned little soul.

“There exists a false view to the effect that tradition is like a fortune, a legacy, which you inherit mechanically, without effort, and that’s why those who object to inheritance and unearned privileges are against tradition. But in fact every contact with the past requires an effort, a labor, and a difficult and thankless labor to boot, for our little `I’ whines and balks at it.

“I have always wished that I would never lose the belief that great works of the spirit are more objective than we are. And they will judge us. Someone very rightly said that not only do we read Homer, look at frescoes of Giotto, listen to Mozart, but Homer, Giotto and Mozart steal looks at us, eavesdrop on us and ascertain our vanity and stupidity. Poor utopians, debutants of history, museum arsonists, liquidators of the past, are like those madmen who destroy works of art because they cannot forgive them their serenity, dignity and cool radiance.”

The most civilized of poets, the author of “Why the Classics,” Herbert captures the fashionable arrogance of those who encourage illiteracy and cultural vandalism, the “liquidators of the past.” Earlier in the day I started reading Monrovia Mon Amour (1992) by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), a chronicle of the doctor’s 1991 visit to Liberia during its civil war. In Monrovia he visits the sacked remains of the University of Liberia, the country’s only university, and because he’s a bookish man Daniels seeks the school library:

“The library had been the largest in the country (no larger, in fact, than an average municipal library at home), but was now in disarray. The chief librarian’s office looked as though a jealous spouse had gone on the rampage through it, exacting retribution for a recently discovered love-affair. On a desk was a small paperback, its front cover burnt. I opened it to see what it was: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. What would Ivan Sergeyevich, a man who valued civilization above all else, have made of this savagery? ..................................

From Burke to Kirk and Beyond...: Gay by choice?

From Burke to Kirk and Beyond...: Gay by choice?
Excerpt:
...no scientific study is going to solve or reveal the complexities of human sexuality. Any theory of human sexuality that locks out nurture and locks in nature will not stand for long. We are born with genes. We live our lives in and through our physical persons, and the experiences we have, good and bad, profoundly affect the choices we make, the choices we have, and the choices we defer. DNA matters, and in some cases it might be close to destiny, but DNA is not destiny.

Determinism of any sort is a harsh and false master. I reject them all.

Timothy Snyder: On dissent and “the stories people tell about themselves” | The Book Haven

Timothy Snyder: On dissent and “the stories people tell about themselves” | The Book Haven

Excerpt:

You don’t have to live under a totalitarian government to understand some of the head trips Timothy Snyder of Bloodlands fame describes in his provocative and incisive interview over at the Browser. We run them through our minds daily – at home, in the workplace, in our social circles.

Which hardly undermines the stories of people for whom the stakes were astronomically higher – those who face prison, death, or poverty for risking free expression. But it does make his observations universal.

His responses in the Q&A (with Alec Ash) are heartbreakingly insightful. But then, he is often quoting maestros. He recommends five books: George Orwell‘s Homage to Catalonia, Czeslaw Milosz‘s The Captive Mind, Adam Michnik‘s The Church and the Left, Milan Kundera‘s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless.

“The people whose books I’ve chosen lived in regimes which not only monopolized violence but threatened it in an everyday sense. And some of them suffered as a direct result of what they wrote,” he said.

Tim’s responses, and the books he has chosen, do not just tell us (as the subhead says) “how to challenge the over-mighty”; more importantly, they all demonstrate the way we delude ourselves – regardless of political stripe, personal beliefs, or external circumstances...................................

Sanctuary for the Abused: Why Doesn't the Victim Just Leave?

Sanctuary for the Abused: Why Doesn't the Victim Just Leave?
Excerpt:

Recently we repeated the exercise with a conference room full of 70 social workers, advocates, therapists, and mental health workers. “Why don’t some domestic violence victims leave the relationship,” we ask? “Call out the reasons!”

The answers, as always, come fast and freely. “Because she doesn’t think she can make it on her own.” “Not enough money to feed the children.” “She feels obligated to her marital vows.” “It’s learned helplessness.” “She doesn’t believe she deserves better.” “She doesn’t know where to go.” “She wants the children to have a father.” etc.

I jot down the familiar list until the group exhausts their thoughts. And there, again, is the enigma. How, at this date, with this group, - with almost every group - do so many miss the obvious? To be sure there’s truth and need for remedy in every reason given. But the one thing that should top the list, the thing that freezes so many women in place, is not even mentioned at all.

Women often don’t leave domestic violence because they know that when they do leave the danger of more severe violence increases dramatically. Violence, and the sheer terror of it, is one of the principle reasons women don’t leave. And the women are right!

Making Time For Study | The Jewish Week

Making Time For Study | The Jewish Week
Excerpt:
From historian David McCullough: “Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of ‘Anna Karenina.’ I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.”........................

Orwell's Picnic ~: Antonio Guzmán Capel

Orwell's Picnic ~: Antonio Guzmán Capel
Excerpt: [These paintings are extraordinary!]
....lawks a' mercy! Those still lifes!............

First Known When Lost: "When The Grey Moth Night Drew Near"

First Known When Lost: "When The Grey Moth Night Drew Near"

Anecdotal Evidence: `As If It Had Made Up Its Mind to Stay'

Anecdotal Evidence: `As If It Had Made Up Its Mind to Stay'
Excerpt:

By repute, the robin is the gentlest of birds, an honorary dove, at least to humans, though I’ve watched them pull meters of earthworm from the lawn. Between 1824 and 1826, John Clare composed a series of “Natural History Letters” (The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, edited by Margaret Grainger, 1983) to his friend James Augustus Hessey. Among them is a lengthy description of a robin he befriended as a boy growing up in Helpston:

“…in winter it will venture into the house for food & become as tame as a chicken—we had one that usd [sic] to come in at a broken pane in the window three winters together I always knew it to be our old visitor by a white scar on one of the wings [del. which might have been an old wound made by some cat] it grew so tame that it would perch on ones [sic] finger & take the crumbs out of the hand…it would never stay in the house at night tho it would attempt to perch on the chair spindles & clean its bill & ruffles its feather & put its head under its wing as if it had made up its mind to stay”...

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: The Joy of Writing

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: The Joy of Writing

Video: Dormouse snores while sleeping in zookeeper’s hand | The Sideshow - Yahoo! News

Video: Dormouse snores while sleeping in zookeeper’s hand | The Sideshow - Yahoo! News
(It's Worth It!)

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Reply to the Question: "How Can You Become a Poet?"

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Reply to the Question: "How Can You Become a Poet?"
Excerpt:
....By late August
crumple it in your hand
so that you smell its end-of-summer sadness

chew its woody stem

listen to its autumn rattle

watch it as it atomizes in the November air

then in winter
when there is no leaf left

invent one

~ Eve Merriam (1916-1992), American poet and playwright

Bloodlands|bibliokept

Bloodlands — Timothy Snyder | biblioklept
Excerpt:
Using primary sources written in at least ten languages, Snyder documents the nightmarish history of that portion of eastern Europe that stretches from Poland north to St. Petersburg and sweeps southwest to the point where Ukraine runs into the Black Sea.  In these places, the titular bloodlands, the policies of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin converged to kill approximately 14 million people in less than a quarter of a century.  Snyder postulates that the eradication of such large numbers of human beings was possible because National Socialism was the perfect foil to Soviet Communism, and vice versa,  and because each system allowed totalitarian one-party states to deflect blame for their respective failings onto the other, or onto large groups of relatively powerless national, ethnic, or religious minorities.  Rectifying problems required starving, shooting, gassing, or otherwise disappearing hundreds of thousands of the people who inhabited these regions and who had no intention or ability to subvert whichever ruling regime claimed them as subjects at any particular moment.  The particular atrocities committed in these areas were largely overlooked in the West at the close of World War II as these victims and their memories disappeared behind the Iron Curtain....
Read on
============

Bloodlands: summary

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Basic Books, Hardcover, 544 pages
ISBN-10: 9780465002399 / ISBN-13: 978-0465002399

Each of the dead became a number. Between them, the Nazi and Stalinist regimes murdered more than fourteen million people in the bloodlands. The killing began with a political famine that Stalin directed at Soviet Ukraine, which claimed more than three million lives. It continued with Stalin's Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, in which some seven hundred thousand people were shot, most of them peasants or members of national minorities. The Soviets and the Germans then cooperated in the destruction of Poland and of its educated classes, killing some two hundred thousand people between 1939 and 1941. After Hitler betrayed Stalin and ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans starved the Soviet prisoners of war and the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad, taking the lives of more than four million people. In the occupied Soviet Union, occupied Poland, and the occupied Baltic States, the Germans shot and gassed some 5.4 million Jews. The Germans and the Soviets provoked one another to ever greater crimes, as in the partisan wars for Belarus and Warsaw, where the Germans killed about half a million civilians. These atrocities shared a place, and they shared a time: the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945.....
Read his series of posts.....

Anecdotal Evidence: `Eager to Share What He Deemed Best'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Eager to Share What He Deemed Best'
Excerpt:

`Eager to Share What He Deemed Best'

Yvor Winters died on this day in 1968, a year of turmoil and grief, at the age of sixty-seven. His great poem “On a View of Pasadena from the Hills” concludes:

“The driver, melting down the distance here,
May cast in flight the faint hoof of a deer
Or pass the faint head set perplexedly.
And man-made stone outgrows the living tree,
And at its rising, air is shaken, men
Are shattered, and the tremor swells again,
Extending to the naked salty shore,
Rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore.”

Charles Tomlinson, the English poet born in 1927, visited Winters at his home in Palo Alto in December 1959, and recounts the meeting...

Barefoot and Pregnant: Why I Don't Make My Kids Wash Their Hands

Barefoot and Pregnant: Why I Don't Make My Kids Wash Their Hands

Anecdotal Evidence: `This I Find Unbearable'

Anecdotal Evidence: `This I Find Unbearable'
Excerpt:

You have to admire a reader equipped with sufficient enterprise to find something amusing in so dreary and obnoxious a writer as Jean-Paul Sartre. Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti quotes two characters discussing Hell in the Frenchman’s 1944 one-act No Exit (Huis Clos):

“GARCIN: Are there books here?

“VALET: No.”

The only infernal torment more insidiously cruel would be a library consisting exclusively of L'idiot de la famille and Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. Forty year ago, my professor of 18th-century English literature read aloud in class a characteristically opaque passage from Sartre’s L'étre et le néant devoted to the subject of holes. She tried valiantly not to laugh, but soon all of us were giggling. She and Mike read Sartre in the only spirit I find palatable.

The prospect of a bookless life (or death), however, is genuinely frightening. In 1997, at the age of eighty-eight, William Maxwell published an article in the The New York Times Magazine in which he writes:................

Anecdotal Evidence: `You Can Refute Culture Only With Culture'

Anecdotal Evidence: `You Can Refute Culture Only With Culture'
Excerpt:

Eichenbaum’s frozen ink reminded me of a passage in A Voice from the Chorus, Andrei Sinyavsky’s account of the seven years he spent in a Soviet forced labor camp. Near the conclusion, he writes:

"I dreamed of the paper I am now writing on as of an open field or a forest: oh to be able to lose myself in it, to take off and run on breathlessly and, without reaching the end or even the middle, put down somewhere at the edge or in a corner just a few rapid lines. . ."

Unlike many lesser writers, Sinyavsky refused to let the blankness of the page intimidate him. Rather, it serves as a spur to his imagination, to the one thing that makes a writer a writer:

"You need paper to lose yourself in its whiteness. Writing means diving into a page and coming up with some idea or word. Blank paper invites you to dip down into its artless expanse. A writer is like a fisherman. He sits and waits for something to bite. Put a blank sheet of paper in front of me and, without even thinking, let alone understanding why, I am sure to be able to fish something out of it."

These paper-and-ink linkages came to me while reading a very un-Russian text, Thoreau’s journal, more than two-million words that ceased only when the writer could no longer lift his pen and dip it into the ink bottle. One-hundred fifty-five years ago today, on Jan. 23, 1857, Thoreau writes:

“The coldest day that I remember recording, clear and bright, but very high wind, blowing the snow. Ink froze.”

“His index cards never got stale.”

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: The Thought-Fox

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: The Thought-Fox

Anecdotal Evidence: `Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-Doux'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-Doux'
Excerpt:
n The Dunciad, another tour de force of cataloguing (the practice seems suited to satire), Pope gives us a list of competitive theatrical effects, designed to bring in the crowds:

“Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth,
A fire, a jig, a battle, and a ball,
Till one wide Conflagration swallows all."

And, of course, Belinda’s mock-epic toilet in “The Rape of the Lock”:

“The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,
Transform'd to Combs, the speckled and the white.
Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows,
Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.”
...

The Laws of Motion - Animated! ~ Kuriositas

The Laws of Motion - Animated! ~ Kuriositas
Excerpt:
Back in 1687 Newton first published the three laws of motion. They describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and its motion due to those forces. They have been expressed in many different ways over nearly three centuries, so here is yet another way of doing so – in animated form. I for one reckon that Newton would approve!

This is the work of Lindsay Gilmour, who ...

Laws of Motion | a short film by Lindsay Gilmour from

Anecdotal Evidence: `Ciphering Out How the Grass Grew'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Ciphering Out How the Grass Grew'
Excerpt:
The Contrary Farmer recalls a favorite pastime:

“As boys, we used our knives mainly to play a game we called `mumblety-peg.’ (I have a hard time believing this, but Merriam-Webster says the first known use of that word, mumblety-peg, was in 1647, and that it first referred to what the loser in the game had to do— pull a peg out of the ground with his or her teeth.)”

In Cleveland we knew the game as “mumbley-peg,” ...

First Known When Lost: Snow

First Known When Lost: Snow
Excerpt:
Today, we have had an unusually heavy snowfall for this part of the world. Unfortunately, it will disappear in a few days. But, there it is, for now: the world transformed. If you live near the Arctic Circle, do you ever lose this sense of wonder?

Explicit Snow

First snow is never all the snows there were
Come back again, but novel in the sun
As though a newness had but just begun.

It does not fall as rain does....

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Something That You Say'

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Something That You Say'
Excerpt:
...how would we know that — or care — if we did not read?”

We wouldn’t, of course, and do not. Reading ought to humble us, not swell us with self-satisfaction. “Reading is not a means of self-affirmation, but of self-denial.” We, readers and writers alike, are neither novel nor unprecedented: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Of course, we would have to read to know that thought, and to know it’s so. Seldom do the unread read themselves well, though having read much is no guarantee of self-knowledge.

“Regress — material, intellectual, and moral — can be as common as progress, if each new generation proves a poor custodian of the laws, behavior, knowledge, and learning inherited from those now gone.”..

A Common Reader: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters: 1925 - 1927

A Common Reader: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters: 1925 - 1927
Excerpt:
Michael Hoffman makes the observation that Roth “in those days was like an open knife, a mixture of prophet, revolutionary, and sociopath”. The bluntness he exhibits with his friends shows an honesty that often wanders into just being a jerk. Major topics recurring throughout these letters include
• the uncertainty of his newspaper job and his feeling of not being appreciated (not to mention the constant lack of money),
• the deterioration of German life on all fronts, although he doesn’t always feel he belongs in France,
• his assignment in Moscow,
• the care and sickness of his wife, and
• political and social movements (the percentage of names he mentions that end up becoming exiles is depressing).
...
But the firm persists in thinking of Roth as a sort of trivial chatterbox that a great newspaper can just about run to. Wrong. I don’t write “witty glosses.” I paint the portrait of the age. That ought to be the job of the great newspaper. I’m a journalist, not a reporter; I’m an author, not a leader writer. …
Spain is journalistically uninteresting. Italy is interesting, Fascism less so. I take a different position on Fascism than the newspaper. I don’t like it, but I know that one Hindenburg is worse than ten Mussolinis. We in Germany should watch our Reichswehr, our Mr. Gessler, our generals, our famous compensation program to landowners. We don’t have the right to attack a Fascist dictatorship while we ourselves are living in a far worse, secret dictatorship, complete with Fememorde[“an antrhopoligical label from the Dark ages for these political killings that appear in a list of shameful manifestation in the Weimar Republic”], paramilitary marches, murderous judges, and hangmen attorneys. My conscience would never allow me, as an oppressed German, to tell the world about oppression in Italy. It would be a rather facile bravery to report behind Mussolini’s back, and keep my head down in my homeland, and go on subsidizing the thugs of the Black Reichswehr with my taxes. …
There is so much going on in Russia, one doesn’t have to write about the Communist terror. The presence of so much new life springing up from the ruins will give me a lot of unpolitical material.....

We Are One: What I didn't learn...

We Are One: What I didn't learn...

O Thoughts!

h/t Broteblog

O Thoughts!

They were dwelling in the artist’s mind no doubt, and would have been developed by that patient, faithful, admirable genius: but the busy brain stopped working, the skilful hand fell lifeless, the loving, honest heart ceased to beat. What was she to have been — that fair Titania — when perfected by the patient skill of the poet, who in imagination saw the sweet innocent figure, and with tender courtesy and caresses, as it were, posed and shaped and traced the fair form? Is there record kept anywhere of fancies conceived, beautiful, unborn? Some day will they assume form in some yet undeveloped light? If our bad unspoken thoughts are registered against us, and are written in the awful account, will not the good thoughts unspoken, the love and tenderness, the pity, beauty, charity, which pass through the breast, and cause the heart to throb with silent good, find a remembrance too?  A few weeks more, and this lovely offspring of the poet’s conception would have been complete — to charm the world with its beautiful mirth. May there not be some sphere unknown to us where it may have an existence? They say our words, once out of our lips, go travelling in omne oevum, reverberating for ever and ever. If our words, why not our thoughts? If the Has Been, why not the Might Have Been?

Some day our spirits may be permitted to walk in galleries of fancies more wondrous and beautiful than any achieved works which at present we see, and our minds to behold and delight in masterpieces which poets’ and artists’ minds have fathered and conceived only.  ~William Makepeace Thackeray, Roundabout Papers, Chapt. 32, ‘The Last Sketch’

Ars orandi: the Art and Beauty of Traditional Catholicism: Collect of the Day: St. Anthony of the Desert

Ars orandi: the Art and Beauty of Traditional Catholicism: Collect of the Day: St. Anthony of the Desert
Excerpt:
Excerpt:

January 17—ST. ANTONY, Patriarch of Monks.

ST. ANTONY was born in the year 251, in Upper Egypt. Hearing at Mass the words, "If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor," he gave away all his vast possessions. He then begged an aged hermit to teach him the spiritual life. He also visited various solitaries, copying in himself the principal virtue of each. To serve God more perfectly, Antony entered the desert...

Wife Slips Into Madness As Husband Dies of Brain Tumor - Yahoo!

Wife Slips Into Madness As Husband Dies of Brain Tumor - Yahoo!

Excerpt:

[This 'headline is SHAMEFUL and INSULTING to people who take care of the people they love. The real madness is the total lack of support from people around them from the Church, family and medical profession. About the only 'attention' given is all about the 'making money' people. Once the pot is dry even the medical professionals most often disappear. She isn't mad she's an 'exhausted soldier' in the trenches of family and love who had to quickly face the cold, harsh reality around her. Catherine is a true 'heroine' to me and deserves a medal and everything else that's good!]

....just a few years into their new marriage, John Graves showed signs of having an affair. He seemed to lose interest in his wife, squandered company money and disappeared for hours at night.

Catherine Graves, now 45, even hired a private detective. But it wasn't another woman who was the problem -- it was an aggressive and fatal brain tumor that had slowly caused personality changes and eventually killed her husband of only five years.

"I faced a harsh reality," she said. "I thought I would be spending the rest of my life with him."

Graves said the crumbling marriage and then the exhausting care-giving that followed also caused her to lose her mind, a phenomenon that is all too common when family members are left without support to care for sick and dying loved ones...

...heir business crumbled with the economic downturn and their inability to work.

"I didn't leave the house for six months," she said. "I was homebound and had no interaction with other people."

Even the medical professionals had little sympathy, she said.

"It was so about the patient -- there was nothing for me," she said.

"I held together really well," Graves said. "People commented that I was doing such a great job."

But after he died, she never dealt with the grief and plunged forward on "autopilot," even dating. Eventually the stress of caregiving hit her.

"I crashed," said Graves, who eventually sought counseling and was put in an intensive outpatient treatment program.

She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and dissociative disorder.

"I check out mentally," she said. "On the outside I looked normal, but I was so disconnected and far away. ... I had alienated myself from everyone, even from myself."

Care-giving experts like Lynn Feinberg of AARP say that caregiver stress is a "huge issue."

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: For the traveler ...

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: For the traveler ...

"Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day"

            Skaters' Waltz

'. . . So tempting to let freeze
   One's deepest, darkest pools
And learn to skim with ease
   Thin ice; for who but fools

Dive into who-knows-what?'
   'But if the ice by chance
Breaks?'  'But if not, if not?
   And how it glitters!  Dance!'

A. S. J. Tessimond, Selection (1958).

"I'll tell you one thing that really drives me nuts, is people that think that Jethro Tull is just a person in the band.")  The song is "Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day" (from the album War Child, which was released in -- ah, Time! -- 1974).  It was written, and is sung by, the inimitable Ian Anderson.  This is from the third verse:

And as you cross the circle line
The ice-wall creaks behind
You're a rabbit on the run.
And the silver splinters fly
In the corner of your eye
Shining in the setting sun.
~posted by Stephen Pentz at ‘First Known When Lost’ blog

Art Inconnu - Little-known and under-appreciated art.: Maria Blanchard (1881 - 1932)

Art Inconnu - Little-known and under-appreciated art.: Maria Blanchard (1881 - 1932)
Excerpt:   [In tribute to 'Alessandra'....]
Maria Blanchard was born horribly disfigured from a fall that her mother took while she was pregnant. Her disfigurements included enanismo, which is like dwarfism, a hump on her back, much like a polio victim would have and cojera, which is a deformity in the hips, making walking very difficult. She was often referred to as "the witch". This led her to live a life of solitude. However, this did not stop Maria from becoming a great artist.....
Maria Gutierrez Blanchard was the first-born child of Conception Blanchard and Enrique Gutierrez. She was born in March of 1881, in Santander, Spain. In 1903, Maria moved to Madrid so she could study to become a painter. Her teachers included Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor, Manuel Benedito andEmelio Sala.

In 1909, Maria's hard work and training won her a grant to continue her studies in Paris, at the Academy Vitti (Academie Vitti), where she studied under Hermengildo Anglada Camarasa, and Kees Van Dongen. While at the Academy, Kees taught her how to break out of the constraints on her artwork that she was taught while studying in Spain. It was during this time that she was introduced to Cubism, after meeting artists such as, Jacques Lipchitz and Juan Gris. These two artists greatly influenced much of Maria's future works....
...

- Speaking of Maria Blanchard
Perhaps just by being Maria Blanchard she is giving a second lesson from her position, a lesson in getting the work done, despite disability and pain, despite poverty, despite gender and the lack of critical acclaim. Despite all that, an artist finally is not necessarily the one with wealth or health or fame: she is the one who creates art.
NOTES
i "Elegia a María Blanchard," in the original Spanish online. The translation referred to here (in addition to my own) is that of Christopher Maurer's in Deep Song and Other Prose by Federico Garcia Lorca. Edited and Translated by Christopher Maurer (NY: New Directions, 1980.)

How to Become a Writer

How to Become a Writer

Excerpt: h/t Matt Rowan at Bob Einstein’s Literary Equation 
HOW TO BECOME A WRITER       R-KV-R-Y  a Quarterly Literary Journal

by Lorrie Moore    First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star
missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is
best if you fail at an early age -- say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that
at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry
blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables.
Show it to your mom. She is touch and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who
may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll look
briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a donut. She'll say: "How about
emptying the dishwasher?" Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Accidentally break
one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for
starters.....

Dolce Bellezza: Sunday Salon: The Library Phantom

Dolce Bellezza: Sunday Salon: The Library Phantom

Some Advice To New Or Aspiring Authors

Some Advice To New Or Aspiring Authors

Guest opinion: Hope defines us, so persist - Spokesman.com - Jan. 15, 2012

Guest opinion: Hope defines us, so persist - Spokesman.com - Jan. 15, 2012

Anecdotal Evidence: `Eternity Is Here'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Eternity Is Here'
Excerpt:
In one of the last poems Winters ever wrote, “A Song in Passing,” dating from the early nineteen-fifties, I hear echoes of the themes Shade/Nabokov will weave into “Pale Fire” a decade later:

“Where am I now? And what
Am I to say portends?
Death is but death, and not
The most obtuse of ends.

“No matter how one leans
One yet fears not to know.
God knows what all this means!
The mortal mind is slow.

“Eternity is here.
There is no other place.
The only thing I fear
Is the Almighty Face.”

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Lovely ...

Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: Lovely ...

Stanford Magazine > September/October 2002 > Showcase > AuthorAuthor

Stanford Magazine > September/October 2002 > Showcase > AuthorAuthor
Excerpt:
Helen Pinkerton
“She has written some of the best poems of her generation,” says poet and scholar Timothy Steele, ’70. Pinkerton’s mentor, Yvor Winters, deemed her “a master of poetic style and of her material. No poet in English writes with more authority.” The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, calling her style “austere,” notes that “her carefully crafted poetry is profoundly philosophical and religious.”
....“I think the kids today aren’t learning the art of poetry. They’re told that everybody can be a poet,” she says. “Not everybody is capable of being a poet —just like everybody isn’t capable of being a fine ballet dancer or a fine pianist.”...
Pinkerton was born in Butte, Mont. Her father was a copper miner; her mother had been raised in an orphanage—“or whatever is the politically correct term nowadays,” she qualifies. When Pinkerton was 11, her father was killed in a mining accident, leaving her mother to rear four children, including two teenage boys and a 6-year-old girl. The death created a decade-long crisis of faith for Pinkerton, whose parents were Catholics. Perhaps this is one reason faith is a running theme of her poems. She describes her central concerns as Thomistic—focused on St. Thomas Aquinas’s “questions of being and existence.”...
Meeting [Yvor]Winters turned her aspirations upside-down. “I discovered a whole new world, which was the serious writing of poetry,” she says...

A second turning point occurred a few years later, when she read Moby Dick on an ocean liner going to Europe after completing her master’s. It became the subject of her 1987 scholarly work, Melville’s Confidence Man and American Politics in the 1850s—and of a number of her long narrative poems. “I gave a lot of my life to Melville,” she says.

But poetry always came first...............~Cynthia Havens

Really!!!!

We learned how to care, about ourselves and about each other.......We were relatively well behaved. We’re people pleasers,... Momestary
h/t We Are One blog.
[My Note: Most of us who are afflicted by the former dis-ease of people pleasing were specially 'honed' that way by the angry, narcissistic, self-seeking manipulations of the really crazy control freaks around us.  They enjoy the use of 'anger' in their love of power.  The liberation comes when we realize these people are the ones really imprisoned by the 'King Midas' syndrome.  In fact their 'uniforms' are actually easy 'see throughs'.  I did 'stop'.   I was able to 'stop' from becoming entwined in the madness when I was really gifted with the truth and 'real love' which is ALWAYS freeing.  It's nice to know you don't have to do or be anything to be loved.  REALLY!]

First Known When Lost: Skating On Thin Ice

First Known When Lost: Skating On Thin Ice

Anecdotal Evidence: `Memorability and Concision'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Memorability and Concision'
Excerpt:

“Phillips, whose touch harmonious could remove
The pangs of guilty pow'r, and hapless love,
Rest here distress'd by poverty no more,
Find here that calm, thou gav'st so oft before.
Sleep, undisturb'd, within this peaceful shrine,
Till angels wake thee, with a note like thine.”

In his welcome appreciation of Samuel Johnson the poet, Clive Wilmer praises the seldom-anthologized “An Epitaph on Claudy Phillips, a Musician” as a “moving tribute.” ................

We Are One: Where's your focus?

We Are One: Where's your focus?

Dark Refuge

Dark Refuge

Marks in the Margin: Life in a Fishbowl

Marks in the Margin: Life in a Fishbowl

The Saguaro Cactus And Its Greedy Guests ~ Kuriositas

The Saguaro Cactus And Its Greedy Guests ~ Kuriositas

Marks in the Margin: Bookstore Revivals

Marks in the Margin: Bookstore Revivals
Excerpt:

All my life, though, among my daydreams about careers that might have made me happy, has been this one: a small shop somewhere, some partner and I buying and selling used books. Sigrid Nunez The Last of Her Kind

Is there anything more pleasurable than walking into a bookshop, a small independent bookshop and roaming around the tables and bookshelves for a while? Just poking around, having a look, selecting a book to read for a while, moving on to another one.

Patrick Kurp writes about such an experience on his blog Anecdotal Evidence: “I grew up a hunter-gatherer, with the emphasis on hunter. Truly, hunting is the thing, not the gathering. Stalking the butterfly is the adventure, not the netting, pinching and pinning. Trolling the dim shelves of a book shop, alert and expectant, outweighs the pleasure of finding the three-volume Everyman’s edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy priced at $10. Ordering the same from Amazon.com is not the same. My Burton carries an addendum of happy memory, a covert connection to an autumn afternoon in Schuylerville, N.Y.”

There are still a few book lovers dedicated to preserving this type of hunting by opening and maintaining independent bookstores of their own. ...

Interpolations

Interpolations: Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation.
Excerpt:

For a 180-page novel, tinkers by Paul Harding does some pretty extraordinary things.

Not the least of which is that readers must engage in the very activity the novel is about in order to appreciate the glorious mechanics of it all.

Namely, tinker.

Before we poke and fiddle at this claim, let’s get our bearings first.

We Are One: Sexual Abuse

We Are One: Sexual Abuse
Excerpt:
***** Reading this may be offensive or triggering for some readers*****
Continue on at your own risk.

I put sexual abuse in a class of its own. True it is a form of physical abuse but it is also an emotional abuse. The combination of these two leaves long lasting scars.....

First Known When Lost: "To Mend A World You Had Not Made"

First Known When Lost: "To Mend A World You Had Not Made"
Excerpt:
My posts in the new year have all been, by chance, bird-themed. Hence, a change of subject may be in order. However, R. S. Thomas's "A Marriage" prompted a memory of the following poem by Michael Roberts (1902-1948), in which birds once again make an appearance.

Poem for Elsa

That day the blue-black rook fell pitifully dead
You wept and stormed, tossing your lovely head,
Hurling commiseration into broken skies
That wept and wept, vainly as any eyes.

You pitifully wept, nor would be comforted
Till a bedraggled robin chirped unfed
Begging for comfort-crumbs, and sought your aid
To mend a world you had not made....

Paul Davis On Crime: 'Sherlock Holmes': Hollywood Finally Plays By The Book With Watson

Paul Davis On Crime: 'Sherlock Holmes': Hollywood Finally Plays By The Book With Watson

Happy 600th birthday, Jeanne d’Arc! | The Book Haven

Happy 600th birthday, Jeanne d’Arc! | The Book Haven
Excerpt:
Almost all little girls have a love affair with horses. [I did!] They also seem to go through a Joan of Arc phase, too. I was indifferent to the equestrian sports – but I read all the books in my library on the illiterate virgin from Domrémy who gave birth to a nation.
...She may be a powerful reminder that events can be successful without turning out quite as we imagined...
We know her, not only as a warrior, patriot, and saint, but also as the heroine of two great plays: Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, and Jean Anouilh‘s The Lark.

The most famous passage from Shaw’s play follows her agreement to sign a confession renouncing her “voices,” to live under permanent confinement.

“You think that life is nothing but not being dead? It is not the bread and water I fear. I can live on bread. It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again climb the hills. To make me breathe foul damp darkness, without these things I cannot live. And by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your council is of the devil.”

Anecdotal Evidence: `Both Screen and Gateway'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Both Screen and Gateway'

mulderfan: ARE WE BEING ABUSED?

mulderfan: ARE WE BEING ABUSED?

Self Affirmation

This is my daily affirmation: You cannot reason with these people or appeal to them either emotionally or intellectually. Passivity makes you a target, aggression delights them, and assertiveness is met with contempt. Time to face the fact that, regardless of your best efforts, these people will not change…EVER!

A Year With Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ: Beauty of Inscape

A Year With Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ: Beauty of Inscape
July 19, 1872
...Stepped into a barn of ours, a great shadowy barn, where the hay had been stacked on either side, and looking at the great ruddy arched timberframes---principals(?) and tie-beams, which make them look like bold big A's with the cross-bar high up---and I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.,,,p.211, Journal

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Curious Remedy for Present Cares'

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Curious Remedy for Present Cares'

First Known When Lost: "We Met Under A Shower Of Bird-Notes"

First Known When Lost: "We Met Under A Shower Of Bird-Notes"

LES FEMMES - THE TRUTH: Who's Influenced Your Life?

LES FEMMES - THE TRUTH: Who's Influenced Your Life?
Excerpt:
Do you ever think about the people who have influenced your life even though you've never met? Our family and friends impact us in obvious ways. But what about others: our ancestors, the authors of the books we read, the postman, the truck drivers who deliver the food we buy to the store?

Today I was thinking about the authors of the books I love. These are authors who write books that you read twice. They make you think; they entertain you, they enrich your life....

We Are One: What is abuse?

We Are One: What is abuse?

Blazing Cat Fur: Meet the academics who are trying to redefine pedophilia as ‘intergenerational intimacy’

Blazing Cat Fur: Meet the academics who are trying to redefine pedophilia as ‘intergenerational intimacy’

¡Bemsha SWING!: Three Kinds of Magic

¡Bemsha SWING!: Three Kinds of Magic

A Common Reader: Fortunata and Jacinta

A Common Reader: Fortunata and Jacinta
Excerpt:
In trying to get caught up on what others have posted I found The Neglected Books Page's comments on Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós, calling it "The Greatest Novel You’ve Never Heard of". Well, now you've heard of it--read the comments at the above link for a good overview.

In another online life, I had a personal finance blog, although I included anything I found interesting. About six years ago I started reading this book and enjoyed it so much I had three posts on it. I still think it has one of the most memorable introduction of a character I've ever run across. If you're looking for a good meaty novel to read this year (I'm especially thinking of those that tackled The Maias recently), I highly recommend Fortunata and Jacinta....

Marks in the Margin: The Commonplace Book Tradition

Marks in the Margin: The Commonplace Book Tradition
Excerpt:
...on Fear from my commonplace book:

“Is it so that everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness? ….Why else do we hold on to all these broken marriages, false friendships, boring birthday parties? What would happen if we refused all that, put an end to the skulking blackmail and stood on our own?” Pascal Mercier

“…sometimes seeing one’s fears written down, seeing them articulated, can reduce their efficacy. I don’t mean that having them before you on a piece of paper causes them to evaporate, but it can lessen their potency.” Elliot Perlman

The Window in the Garden Wall--A C.S. Lewis Blog

The Window in the Garden Wall--A C.S. Lewis Blog
Excerpt:

The whole Telmarine army was rushing toward them. But now the Giant was stamping forward, stooping low and swinging his club. The Centaurs charged. Twang, twang behind and hiss, hiss overhead came the archery of Dwarfs. Trumpkin was fighting at his left. Full battle was joined.

"Come back, Reepicheep, you little ass!" shouted Peter. "You'll only be killed. This is no place for mice." But the ridiculous little creatures were dancing in and out among the feet of both armies, jabbing with their swords. Many a Telmarine warrior that day felt his foot suddenly pierced as if by a dozen skewers, hopped on one leg cursing the pain, and fell as often as not. If he fell, the mice finished him off; if he did not, someone else did.....

Barefoot and Pregnant: A Brave New World

Barefoot and Pregnant: A Brave New World

Anecdotal Evidence: `Their Flawless Shambles'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Their Flawless Shambles'

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Little More, Please'

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Little More, Please'

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Pretty Words

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Pretty Words

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Poet's Work

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Poet's Work

Abbey-Roads: News bites...

Abbey-Roads: News bites...
Excerpt:

The Bishop has two kids.
VATICAN CITY Jan 4 (Reuters) - An assistant bishop of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles in the United States has resigned because he had a secret family, including two teenage children.
The Vatican said on Wednesday that Pope Benedict had accepted the resignation of Gabino Zavala, an auxiliary bishop of the diocese which has been plagued by sexual scandals. - More here. Stuff like this is not even shocking any longer. Apparently Fr. Maciel wasn't the anomaly many of us thought.......

[Let us pray for the whole state of Christ's Church.]

First Known When Lost: "To Fling His Soul Upon The Growing Gloom"

First Known When Lost: "To Fling His Soul Upon The Growing Gloom"
Excerpt:
As I have observed on more than one occasion, each generation believes that it is living in a time in which the world is going to Hell in a handbasket. (The Baby Boom Generation -- of which, alas, I am a member -- is particularly prone to self-regarding, self-aggrandizing delusions about its historical uniqueness and importance.) Thus, some may look upon the coming year with a bit of trepidation. I respectfully suggest that, in order to gain some perspective, they have a gander at, say, Herodotus.
[My note: 'Uniqueness' may mean 'infamous'! I am not proud of the inroads of anti-Christian, anti-freedom of the individual, and communism's tyranny in our 'free' (once upon a time and long ago...sigh) country.]
.....
The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be..............~[Hardy]

Dragonflies Draw Flame

My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, -- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
~The Windhover

 ... and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.  ~"The Wreck of the Deutschland"

….. Christian spirituality and Hopkins…”in the conjunction of prayer and poetry "there lives the dearest freshness deep down things" -- the encounter with self, the search for God's touch, the feeling that Christ finds me in all the imperfect particularities of my life, and therein invites, encourages, and challenges me to act justly, compassionately, faithfully.”  It spurs me to continue the quest for some sense of normalcy and integration.  In Hopkins' words:

...the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
          --"As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame"

Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit: Ignatius Gathered A Body Of Mystical Men

Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit: Ignatius Gathered A Body Of Mystical Men
Excerpt:
St. Ignatius of Loyola spent part of 1523 and 1524 in the Holy Land. He had to leave it sooner than he hoped due to the difficult political situation. After returning from the Holy Land hefound himself in Alcalá. Here he not only gave his spiritual exercises but also explained Christian doctrine. Here he used the expression “Spiritual Exercises” for the first time. During this time he attracted large crowds wherever he went and a few of his listeners became his companions. He and his companions were jailed by the Inquisition for almost two months under suspicion of being Alumbrados, members of movements who claimed direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The Inquisition found no errors in what they taught but ordered them not to wear their pilgrims’ robes and not to teach on matters of faith and morals until they had completed their studies. They continued onto Salamanca to study where they were again imprisoned. Their notes were examined, these notes would eventually become The Spiritual Exercises. Again they were acquitted. Ignatius went to Paris to study. During these student days Ignatius gathered a body of mystical men around him who were united by love of Christ and each other. On August 15^th 1534 in Paris, Ignatius and his first companions took private vows of poverty and chastity.......................

Bifurcaria bifurcata: The 2011 challenge ends

Bifurcaria bifurcata: The 2011 challenge ends