Song of a Reformed Headhunter

When "inoperancy" (to use Eliot's word) threatens, as it does this early morning hour, after useless attempts to read, first, The Wings of the Dove , then, Time Out New York , I experience the time as dry. So did Eliot, in the red rocks of "The Waste Land", and in the empty pond of "Burnt Norton." I read "The Four Quartets" essentially for consolation , I realize this morning. For a description of spiritual desert, and then for a description of the plenitude of the sea. The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices, ...

To map a cough , using schlieren photography, Dr. Gary Settles, an engineering professor, teamed up with Dr. Julian Tang, a virus expert from Singapore. 

TLS October 24 from William J. R. Curtis's review of The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical writings on architecture , edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer: In another suggestive passage, from "In the Cause of Architecture IV: The meaning of materials--stone" (1928), Wright underlines his obsession with strata of rock as an inspiration for horizontal stratification in buildings, and reiterates the larger theme of "Nature" as a model for architecture. Read the grammar of the Earth in a particle of stone! . . . For in the stony bonework of the Earth, the principles that shaped stone as it lies, or as it rises and remains to be sculptured by winds and tide--there sleep forms and styles enough for all the ages, for all of Man.  We might bear this in mind when looking at Wright's later masterpiece, Fallingwater (1936), with its cantilevered concrete ledges, rusticated stone walls and natural boulders. Not that one should expect simple linkages in either direction...

Longinus, in A Treatise on the Sublime, describes Sappho's achievement thus: Do you not wonder how she gives chase at once to soul and body, to words and tongue, to sight and colour, as as if scattered abroad, how, at variance within she is frozen and burns, she raves and is wise? For she is either panic-stricken or at point of death; she is haunted not only by one single emotion but their whole company, All things befall a lover, but she took the extremes of love's history and binding them in one achieved a masterpiece (trans. by Frank Granger). The description is alluring, especially given the fact that, not withstanding the recent discovery of a nearly whole poem, all we have of Sappho's poetry are fragments. And few, therefore precious, are the glimpses of poetry in this ALSC conference where the linguistic currency is made up largely of abstraction. I was glad to encounter a poet I did not know in Sarah Barnsley's talk on "Sappho, Mary Barnard and American Mod...

In this 1995 book, Bersani begins with a stark statement: “No one wants to be called a homosexual.” He is not thinking, primarily, of closeted gay men or women, but the aversion to “homosexuality” on the part of self-identified homosexual activists and theorists. According to Bersani, queer theorists like Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, and Michael Warner have taken “queer” to delineate political rather than erotic tendencies. In their writing, they have erased the specificity of gay identity in favor of transcendence over the homo-hetero binary, or of social constructivism or of historicizing the category; these theorists fear, rightly, to essentialize gay identity, a move that would fall in with heterosexist practice. Though he is opposed, like the other theorists, to essentialist definitions, Bersani wants to reinstate the specificity of gay identity—same-sex desire—because one needs to oppose heterosexism on behalf of something, from the position of somewhere, however compromised so...

Remedial reading continues. TLS August 1 2008. From Chris Andrews' review of Donald L. Shaw's Spanish American Poetry after 1950: Beyond the vanguard : [Shaw] points out, for example, how [Olga] Orozco's Esbozos frente a un modelo (Sketches in Front of a Model), where the idea that writing poetry is like trying to "translate a text written in a constantly changing code", echoes Borges's famous statement in La Muralla y los libros (The Wall and the Books): "this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon". * The young ultraist Borges believed that metaphors are the primordial element of poetry, and that they should be both novel and "effective" ( eficaz ), but by the 1950s he had decided that the real primordial element is rhythm and that all good metaphors are variations on familiar ones. Shaw suggests that Borges had lost faith in metaphor's capacity to "open up new dimensions of reality...

A friend, Jane McKinley, is the musical director of The Dryden Ensemble, which specializes  in performing 17th and 18th century music on period instruments. The group was playing an all Bach program in Princeton this afternoon, and so I hopped onto the New Jersey Transit from Penn Station, and was in the university town in about 80 minutes. I had planned time to visit the Princeton University Art Museum before the concert. It is a small teaching museum that is also open to the public, and free. I did not care very much for its small collection of 16th-18th century European (many Dutch) paintings, although I liked Abraham Bloemaert's The Four Evangelists (1612-15) for its inquiring lion looking so incongruous beneath the table.  In the 19th to mid-20th century section, I was very taken by Gabriele Munter's  Self-Portrait in front of an Easel , and by Edouard Vuillard's gorgeous Woman in an Interior (Madame Hessel at Les Clayes) . The lower galleries held collections of anci...