Both of my computers are dead–but only as far as the Internet and e.mail are concerned. So I signed up with Comcast for a high-speed connection and bought a cheap laptop at Walmart to use from now on (I hope) for the Internet and e.mail. The technician won’t be hooking me up until Saturday, I won’t be posting another entry till then or Sunday.
My e.mail address will change, I’m pretty sure. Further information in due course.
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Tough day. Got knocked off the Internet again early last evening. Got no help at Staples, where I’d bought it, when I took my laptop to their service people. The usual problem: it’s dial-up, so basically obsolete. I played around with my other computer, though, and finally, somehow, got it working. I think what made my Windows Live Mail allow me to get and send e.mail again was that I made my Windows Explored my defaulte Internet browser!
I got some work done on my next Scientific American blog entry that seemed pretty good to me. I had more fun with footnotes. There’s a slight chance that tomorrow I’ll manage my first more than C- blog entry. I’ll be happy if I’m merely able to post some entry.
Oh, one other bit of news: I filled out a questionnaire for book reviews the National Book Critics’ Circle, of which I’m a member, sent me. It was concerned with reviewing ethics. I said concern with reviewing ethics is moronic: it’s up to the reader to be able to tell the difference between unsupported assertions whether favorable or unfavorable from words worth attending. I also said review editors should not refuse to assign reviews of self-published books and the like. I then commented that they should refuse to assign reviews of commercially or academically published books. Or books that had won NBCC awards! I lied, then, though, for I added that I was just kidding–but to completely. I think I may be the only otherstream critic in the organization. Richard Kostelanetz got me in over twenty years ago. They’re good people, just not in the same world I’m in.
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I’ve been having more problems with my computer. Am again emotionally exhausted. So, just a poem today–if I can paste it here (in my computer where I compose my entries) and then post the entry on the Internet.
It’s by Wallace Stevens:
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer nightWas like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whomThe summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itselfIs calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
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I talked myself into trying to get this blog going again, beginning easily, with a bit of Grumman boilerplate in response to a New-Poetry thread that began with a post about a review by William Logan of two books by British Poet Laureate Carol Duffy in which he derided her use in one poem of the word, “swoon.”)
In one post to the thread, Richard Wilsnack mentioned that he “happened upon this quote in Poetry magazine this past week, and it echoes Logan’s bit” :
[Philip Levine] was blunt and categorical in his statements. He introduced the class to Hemingway’s notion of a “shit detector.” He pointed to the use of “azure” in a student’s poem. “Question: When is the last time you heard the word ‘azure’?” A few students fidgeted uncomfortably. “Answer: The last time you did a crossword puzzle.”…Fake language made bad poems.
—Mark Levine, “Philip Levine,” in Remembering Poets, Poetry (March 2102)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/245418
My first thought was about how Philistine Levine is. A poet’s duty, it seems to me, is to use as much of the language he can. But do try to use it freshly.
Later I realized my biased aesthetic cerebral zone had led me astray, not for the first time. More accurately, the lofty reasoning zone in my cerebrum told me I’d gone astray. According to it (and I tend to yield to it more readily than to any other of my zones although I recognize that it, too, has biases), there are many good ways to do poetry. One surely is to use the whole language, but that doesn’t mean the use of only the words in a given narrow lexicon might not enable a poet to do things a whole-language poet would not be able to do. Key words: “focus” and “intensity.”
The classical haiku is an excellent example of the use of ordinary words only.
I suppose I would go on to say the truly greatest of poets would use all possible words at times, but also limit himself at times.
Hey, I may not be saying much, but at least I’m saying! And ultimately the issue involved, critical fairness, is consequential. In the same thread, I expressed the wish that Logan wouldn’t write about dead poets only. One witless participant at New-Poetry quickly let me know that Carol Duffy is alive. ”Not by my standards,” quoth I.
I didn’t go on to state my standards, but I guess I ought to. I consider a poet to be a contemporary dead poet if he does nothing of significance (yes, here comes the boilerplate I’ve no doubt repeated more times than any other over the years) that many poets who have been literally dead for fifty or more years did.
An insult to poets like Carol Duffy? Not necessarily, because I truly do believe that a contemporary dead poet can write poems of the highest value! Such poems will still annoy me and make me call their authors dead, which isn’t fair to them, but is fair to the many poets whose work is crowded out of cultural visibility by dead poems, most of them decidedly not of the highest value. The world needs to be told that living contemporary poets exist. There may be a better way than using terms like “dead poets” to get the word out, but I’ve never found it.
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My connection to the Internet has stayed good for more than 2 days now. I’ve been getting and sending e.mail all right, too. So things may be okay.
I’m finally getting a little writing done, but so far not for my blog. I’m not sure when I’ll get back to it. (This ain’t back to it.) Just don’t have no blog thawts . . .
I expect they’ll start coming again. I hope so.
Best to all, Bob
It looks like I’ll be off the Internet for several days, maybe longer–except when I can use a friend’s computer as I now am. I can’t get or send e.mail, either. I consider myself forced to connect through Comcast, the cable company down here–and get a new computer. I can’t afford to but can do it with my credit cards. I’m sure Paul Krugman will see me through the bankruptcy sure to follow.
Later test: If the following shows up, it means maybe things for some unknown reason are back to normal: BBBB.
Hmmm. Apparently it did. So now I’m not sure what to do.
Now this wretched blog has turned against me: when I try to paste a text into it, it leaves the Internet. I’m 78% ready to give the Internet up–except for e.mails. And my Scientific American Blog. I probably won’t. I’m taking some more time off from this blog, though. I’ll report back in a week if I haven’t starting posting here again by then.
This may be a good thing, it may force me to focus on books. A week or so ago, I had started once again to finish the revision of my Shakespeare book. I’ve posted five or six chapters in my Pages section here during the past few days. There are twelve or thirteen chapters in all, but the last two or three need a lot of work–complete overhauls, in fact. The others should not take long–although I’m finding to my dismay that they are much more flawed than I thought they were.
I’m also working on an essay of five or six thousand words about Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, by Diana Price, which is perhaps the most propagandistic book yet written denying Shakespeare’s authorship. If the essay goes well, I may use it as just one chapter in a book about propaganda.
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Whee, I’m sort back. All I have is a coinage I came up with this morning, “validapistemology.” A brutally pretentious coinage, perhaps, but necessary–for me, if no one else. It means “the study what knowledge is true, what not true, and why,” and is pronounced vaah LIH duh PIHS tuh MAH luh jee. I figured there was already a word for this but the Internet couldn’t find me one. “Epistemology” seems to me simply the neutral study of knowledge–what we know whether true or not. And logic seems to me only a record of how to determine whether something is logical or not, but not really if something is true. That was enough for me to make up yet another preposteorus word. Who knows if even I will ever use it.
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I seem to be back on the Internet, and getting e.mail. Getting there took too much out of me these past three days for me to catch up with this blog, so I’ve decided to keep off it for another few days–till this coming Saturday, I think. I hope you poor folks won’t be too devastated.
Look for slowness of e.mail response, too–although I’ll try to check my inbox once or twice a day.
I’ve been disconnected from the Internet and e.mail since Friday. Things look bad. Staples says there’s nothing wrong with my computer. My computer says my modem is defective, but I have two, one of which I just bought, and neither works. Aside from that they work with my laptop–but I can’t connect to the Internet using it, either, who knows why. No telling when I’ll be on the Internet again. I hope everyone knows that another installment of my Scientific American blog is up.
best to all, Bob