Song of a Reformed Headhunter

My dear friend and colleague Helaine has just published a wonderful textbook for teaching Homer or studying him on one's own. Homer and the Homeric Hymns provides substantial selections, freshly translated, from  The Iliad , The Odyssey and eight Homeric Hymns . These passages, focusing in turns on the different gods, are accompanied by thoughtful commentary on Homer's art, with detailed footnotes on background, literary terms and vocabulary. Each chapter ends with questions for discussion, and suggestions for analytic and creative writing exercises. There are even sample essays to aid training in composition. Indices of mythological and literary terms enable easy cross-referencing. Helaine is a master teacher. She has taught English for over thirty-five years, and this book is really a treasury of those years of experience. As a colleague, she is always generous in sharing ideas and resources. When I taught sixth-grade English for the first time, her guidance meant the w...

Recommended by friends, 3 Idiots is an extremely well done, extremely entertaining comic caper, with a big heart and boundless energy. After watching it last night, I wanted to watch it all over again, all 170 minutes of it. It had such life in it. Netflix plot summary: "While attending one of India's premier colleges, miserable engineering students and best friends Rancho (Aamir Khan), Farhan (Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi) struggle to beat their school's draconian system, which, in their eyes, unfairly values grades over creativity. Loosely based on Chetan Bhagat's best-selling novel Five Point Someone , this entertaining Bollywood comedy also stars Kareena Kapoor (Rancho's love interest) and Boman Irani (the tyrannical dean of the Imperial College of Engineering)." The film narrative takes the form of a search for Rancho by his two former friends, the college scenes played as flashbacks, and so ends with finding Rancho, and the fulfillment of his f...

de Kooning's paintings make sense for me when they are seen as a part of the whole, a restless, always-moving whole. They are experimental in spirit, and so they change in method, materials and manner, although the themes of women and landscape recur in the oeuvre. The women appear in early abstracted interiors, then appear in later abstracted landscapes, and they become landscapes in the third Woman series. He is Matisse painting outdoors. His textiles and fabrics are the patchworks of light. He abstracts his figures more radically than Matisse ever did, reducing them to floating fragments and suggestions, but the love of women holds him, as it did Matisse, to figuration. His art is essentially erotic. The breakthrough black-and-whites, painted in 1945, I find fascinating, even moving. They make beautiful, entangled shapes. Again and again, as if fighting against a strong innate feeling for shapeliness, de Kooning breaks his compositions apart. He does to achieve intensity. He p...

This afternoon, LW and I heard Britten's War Requiem (1961-62) performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Slovenian Sabina Cvilak sang soprano, Ian Bostridge tenor and Simon Keenlyside baritone. I was especially taken by Cvilak's singing. The London Symphony Chorus, directed by Joseph Cullen, and the American Boychoir, directed by Fernando Malvar-Ruiz, completed the roster of performers. The Requiem has six movements: Requiem aeternam, Dies irae, Offertorium, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and Libera Me. In counterpoint to and ironic commentary on the Latin text are poems by Wilfred Owen. The bell-ridden first movement, for instance, is countered by "Anthem for Doomed Youth" ("What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?"). The effect is intended to be jarring, or at least dissonant, but I found myself wishing that Britten had not tried to combine prayer and protest. As a protest, the work came off as hectoring. As a prayer, well,...

Last Wednesday, GH and I heard the London Symphony Orchestra, led by Sir Colin Davis, performed an all-Sibelius program at Carnegie Hall. Nikolaj Znaider soloed in the Violin Concerto in D minor, and he was terrific, warm and delicate in the quiet passages. I have his performance of Elgar's Violin Concerto on my iPad, and listen to it over and over again. For some reason I did not care so much for Symphony No. 2 performed after the intermission. It was a rather more unconventional program last night at Alice Tully. A part of White Light Festival, "A Homage to J. S. Bach" looked at how Russian composers have been influenced by Bach's musical forms while using a modern tonal idiom. The program was headlined by Gidon Kremer, who played with beautiful intonation a chaconne from one of Bach's partitas. I also enjoyed very much Shostakovich's Piano Trio 2, which Kremer played with cellist Giedre Dirvanauskaite and pianist Andrius Zlabys, both from Lithuania. Kreme...

Received my copy of New Poetries V yesterday. It's a beauty. It has a nice thick feel to it. The cover image, by Isabel Schmidt, is full of overlapping gentle things in soft colors. Beyond advocating for his poets, Michael Schmidt's preface says a number of useful things on the principles that should guide an editor or anthologist: Editors who are not promoting a movement or a group, when they tear open an envelope or click an email attachment, hope to be surprised by the shape on the page, by syntax, by the unexpected sounds a poem makes, sometimes with old, proven instruments used in new ways. They might hope to find evidence of intelligence. And they respect creative disobedience. Where there are schools they look for the truants; where there is a consensus with its levelling decorums, they edit against it. They are not looking for unschooled talent but for poetry as discovery in form and language. And the question of relevant subject-matter need arise only if it doe...

The significance of the number seven, the fragmented self, the gay transnational Asian poet, the Singapore poetry scene, self-publication and critical legitimacy, literary awards, and poetry free-for-all... ...in my interview in Lantern Review . The beautiful Wendy Chin-Tanner puts the move on me.

Too tired to post anything substantial, but do want to record a couple of things before they fly out of my head. Yes, this is a mishmash. Watched, or was it heard, Wynton Marsalis at 50 on PBS last night, while unfriending more than a hundred people on Facebook whom I have never talked to and who never talked to me. I liked the more complex, more "classical" compositions than the more populist ones. But what do I know about jazz? Zilch. I heard jazz at Iridium once, a long time ago, and did not enjoy the music, though the company was delightful. In New Orleans earlier this year, I heard an old-style jazz band, and imagined that this was the kind of music that Larkin loved and hated Charlie Parker for destroying. GH and I watched Weekend last Saturday night. There are at least four different movies that go by that name on imdb, not including movies titled The Weekend . You would have thought that directors or studios would try harder to come up with something original. The...

Last Saturday, VM and JF drove GH and I to Storm King. We first took a long hike on the mountain, and then made our way to the Art Center. The grounds of the sculpture center were beautifully landscaped. The museum building overlooked the meadows to the North-west and the North woods. To the south was the leisurely undulating South Fields where gentle knolls raised monumental works like Mark Di Suvero's Pyramidian (1987/88) against a background of sky, and a mirror-clear serpentine pond provided the perfect playground for Roy Lichtenstein's Mermaid (1994). Yellow-brown grasses that came up to the knee were sculptured for contrast to the green fields. At the very end of the South Fields was the highlight of the walk for me: Maya Lin's Storm King Wavefield (2007-08). The artist who designed the darkly shiny Vietnam War Memorial worked here with mounds of earth. The grassy mounds did not look very special when we walked past them, though they were taller than we were and qui...

Last night GH and I attended the opening night of a new season of music by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. The highlight of the evening for me was Haydn's Symphony No. 73 in D Major (The Hunt), played with thrilling color and dancing rhythm. The disappointment was Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major, with Gil Shaham. The first two movements were too slow, and lost the drama of the work. Shaham was clear and delicate in the quieter passages but did not bring out the architecture of the concerto. The evening began with Mendelssohn's Fair Melusina Overture . The program note explains: In medieval folklore, Melusina was a beautiful girl cursed to take the form of a mermaid one day each week. She married the knight Reymund, and forbade him from ever seeing her on Saturdays. He betrayed her one fateful day, spying on her in the bath, and she disappeared forever from sight of humans, although the sound of her wailing remained. The music went from a rolling "water" the...

I’ll be there right away— says the rocking horse. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Wait a minute— xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says the clock. Not so loud— says the tin whistle. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx This way— xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says the mirror. In here— says the keyhole. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The bed, busy with blankets, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says nothing.

Laugh all you want— he is taking the scaffolding down, this young man in a yellow hard hat xxxxx he is taking the scaffolding down xxxxx with the other deliberate fellows xxxxxxxxxx he is unscrewing the steel brackets xxxxxxxxxx he is dismantling all the right angles xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx he is switching eyes with me— xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx the kind fellow—as I hammer past xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx he is taking the scaffolding down, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx unlocking the entrance to the bank.

Listen. I will say this only once—           in your language— tonight’s special is a spring quartet         with pinto beans, capers, bell peppers, wild onions            and a lemon source. You can have either a tambourine          or a side of basilisk but not both. I advise the basilisk.          For drinking I have a medium-bodied Hungarian tune           from lost-and-found. I also have a delicious Sangiovese         but it is not for you. There are three desserts tonight.            Yes, quite a spread. An American confection, heavy,            sweet and empty, nine hundred and eighty calories            minus the Yiddish, a fruit tart in a major chord called           The Less De...

Quiet, please— the beach is turning over to sleep, drawing up to its shoulders the slipping blanket of the sea. The old Ferris wheel is slowing to a final stop, its wooden cars empty. The stands are closing. On the pier, extended like a promise, the lines are reeled back to their hollow round casings. The patrol boat is circling an invisible crater xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx as if a man is drowning.

TLS September 16 2011 from Seamus Perry's review of Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali (translated by William Radice); The Essential Tagore (edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty); Boyhood Days (translated by Radha Chakravarty); and Farewell Song (translated by Radha Chakravarty): Tagore's familiarity with the nineteenth-century poets was evidently very deep, and in his critical pronouncements, he can sound the clear high note of Romantic idealism which Yeats would have recognized. "The world becomes another world in our mind.... This act of the mind enables us to individualize external reality"; and an even more strikingly Yeatsian turn, "How to express the world the mind creates within itself? It has to be expressed in such a manner that it leads to a mood". * Many of Tagore's best writings are animated by a similar sense, sympathetic but accepting, of the unshapely desultoriness of the lives that they narrate, as though exploring th...

xxxxx I won’t lie— the cats bothered me. There were four of them— xxxxx three shaggy black ones and a ginger— but they seemed more. They nosed around the yard xxxxx like a party of scouts. They measured the top of the fence in steps in both directions. xxxxx They mewed and were answered. I watched and watched for the others until night xxxxx made it impossible to count for sure. Day brought back the cats and their number. One xxxxx short of the fingers on a hand. Two short of ten if the number of the creatures were doubled. xxxxx Eight short of twenty if they were tripled. If they were multiplied by five, there would be twenty xxxxx but where were the other sixteen hiding? I caught the ginger staring at me through the window xxxxx the morning before the cats disappeared. I watched and watched but they did not come back. xxxxx I lost four cats but they had seemed more. for Rachael Briggs

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx My mouth is dry as I speak— the arm thrown round me was encircled xxxxx with two bracelets, one, two leather thongs were tied together at their ends xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx by tiny coils of wire pulled towards each other and closed by an S-shaped clasp; xxxxx the other, a thin ring of nickel with a running groove that made the single round xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx look like two. Inside the circlets, the arm xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx was withering, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx hair bristling, but the leather preserved its O xxxxxxxxxx and the nickel resisted oxygen and shone.

To be brief— when I entered the grotto to find the Buddha                                carved from the living wall of the cave, I wasn’t expecting the bats                                            hundreds of furry pulses agitating the air                   with more than blood.           In the fearful disorder,                                            image, wing, shadow, I stumbled out,                   my face                               flittering still wit...

Last night, the New York Philharmonic performance of Brahms' Symphony No. 3 sounded wonderfully fresh. The first movement was particularly dynamic. I did not care for the thick orchestral textures of movements two and three, but the last was again eloquent. The sun rose majestically, and the effect just fell short of the sublime, because the last part was played a little too softly. I was sleepy throughout the Berg violin concerto, but electrified by the Brahms after the intermission. It reminded me why I attend actual concerts instead of listening to a CD at home. The program began with Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in D minor. Frank Peter Zimmermann and Alan Gilbert made a well-matched pair of soloists. TB was thrilled to hear the piece because she has been working on it with her music teacher, L, whom GH and I met that evening. L applauded the Bach enthusiastically and seemed to like the Brahm too. After the concert, he recited to me the opening of The Canterbury Tales ....

In the words of its brochure, "Living as Form" presented "over 100 artists and projects, 25 curators, and 9 new commissions highlighting 20 years of socially engaged art." On Sunday GH and I wandered through the mostly empty Essex Street Market building in which the exhibition was held. The projects were not readily comprehensible, their explanations in densely written booklets, their images played on looped videos. Mitch Corber was there to show the interviews and books of Poetry Thin Air Cable Network, as was Cindy Hochman. Cindy was kind to press on me a copy of her new chapbook The Carcinogenic Bride , but I insisted on paying a poet for her work. The poetry is lively. I particularly like the last poem "Under Anesthesia," in which the disoriented patient addresses the doctor like a lover in a swirl of weird imagery and knowing humor: Doctor, I am lying on your table with my compliant bones Doctor, soon you will be under my anonymous skin Doctor, y...

GH and I wanted to see Richard Serra's new works at the Gagosian Gallery, and so took in other galleries on a pleasant, if drizzly, Saturday afternoon. At the Magnanmetz Gallery, Colombian artist Miler Lagos built an igloo out of books from a defunct US Navy base library. The old index cards papered a nearby corner. On the other end of the gallery, his video Water House  (2011) showed a water tank floating on water. It keeps water out instead of water in, and so becomes a kind of ark. At George Billis, American artist Adam Normandin showed photorealistic paintings of freight trains. I like the idea of reproducing spray-painted graffiti on uneven metal sidings with oil paint on a flat canvas. Affirmation was particularly compelling an image. Another artist, British Paul Winstanley, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, painted from photographs, mostly his own. Showing people alone in public spaces, the soft-focused works seemed to meditate on people meditating in a moment snatched from t...

Another America the eye-white sky-light white-light district of lunar lusts      Mina Loy, “Lunar Baedeker” Port people with sea for eyes and river mouths set up campfires, courses of dirt, and chandelier palaces The other Paris who picked Hera, objectively most beautiful, for the apple from the Hesperides received the city, the arrangement of avenues, handkerchief parks, noon showers that flirt with bicyclists but keep their promise to the asphalt, midnight inheritance of the stars, cemeteries on land Sailors on saddles sing of the jacaranda district ride, singing, to the silver altar in the silver Basilica The tango schools once taught men only to drop like a purple petal from the mouth of the gaucho