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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Seven Short Poems by Lucian Staiano-Daniels.
2. Reflections on Anonymity 2 by W.D. Jackson.
3. On Learning a Poet I Admire Often Carries a Pocket Knife by David Greenspan.
4. Hautes Études and Mudra by Michael Londra.
5. Rhyme as Rhythm by Adam Piette.
6. Windows or Mirrors… by Charles Martin.
7. Three Texts by Rupert M. Loydell.
8. Two Poems by Moriana Delgado.
9. Mariangela by Ian Seed.
10. Six Prose Poems by Pietro De Marchi, translated by Peter Robinson.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections,Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but you can start here with ITEMS PUBLISHED DURING OUR 2023 HIATUS (July-August 2023):
Master Ru by Peter Knobler | Four Poems on Affairs of State by Peter Robinson | 5×7 by John Matthias | You Haven’t Understood and two more poems by Amy Glynn | Long Live the King and two more by Eliot Cardinaux, with drawings by Sean Ali Shostakovich, Eliot and Sunday Morning by E.J. Smith Jr. :: For much more, please consult our massive yet still partial archive.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying
· Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
DEPARTMENTS
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Blogs, spurious and routine.
A Fortnightly Commentary on
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
by Mason Currey
Knopf | 304 pp| $24.95 | Picador | £12.99
Spurious, Dogma, Exodus
by Lars Iyer
Melville House
By MERRITT MOSELEY.
A typical comment from W.:
Or this:
When, in Dogma, W. gets a chance to appeal his dismissal, he asks Lars to accompany him, because “he wants the equivalent of an idiot child, W. says. He wants the equivalent of a diseased ape with scabs round his mouth throwing faeces around the room.”
NOT MUCH HAPPENS to Lars and W. in the course of these three books, and the trilogy ends almost arbitrarily without overt resolution and without any summing up. Readers have been reminded of Vladimir and Estragon and there is certainly something Beckettian about Iyer’s two philosophers—they can’t go on, they’ll go on. If there is hope in this story it comes from its being told. Lars, the narrator, about whom we learn only what he reports W. saying about him—which is often abusive and exaggerated—keeps telling the story.
The three novels are undoubtedly funny, perhaps most likely to stir nervous laughter from those who share their concern about the decline of humanistic education. But they are deadly serious, too, and not just about philosophy departments. Iyer is trying to demonstrate the malign consequences of capitalism and neo-liberalism across all of society. There is real outrage about its victims.
Are Lars and W., then, representatives of what post-industrial, consumerist western society does to philosophers? In part. Their constant references to real philosophers—Weil, Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig, Blanchot, Kristeva—better philosophers, philosophers compared to whom they are “hinderers of thought”–testify to their feeling that they have missed their time: “Sometimes, W. thinks it’s fallen to us: the great task of preserving the legacy of Old Europe.” Like almost every noble ambition this one is quickly subverted: “We’re delusional, W. says. He knows that. We’ve gone wrong, terribly wrong, he knows that, too. But don’t we belong to something important, something greater than us, even if we are only its grotesque parody?”
LARS AND W. are victims of their time and place. In one of his outcries, W. says, “The thinker needs a milieu . . . A place to think. Kant in his Konigsberg, walking the same route every day. Kierkegaard in his Copenhagen, wandering among the crowds . . .” Perhaps this explains why, having visited Middlesex University and agreed that it has the “crappiest of campuses,” they seem unsurprised when before the novel ends the philosophy department at Middlesex has been shut down.
But if they are victims of belatedness, of their milieu or lack of it, of the triumph of soulless social conditions, their plight is also their own fault, and they know this, too. They worry that “We’ve nothing to do: isn’t that our problem? They observed that great philosophers (unlike them) “have always had unfeasibly high voices.” But beyond their voices, their “stupidity,” their “idiocy”—acknowledged by both, with W.’s saving proviso that he is less idiotic than Lars—there are their habits. One of these, for instance, is spending far too much time drinking. But more broadly, they lack system. In his clearest acknowledgement, W. declares
There was a time when W. had the necessary structure, when he was one of the fabled postgraduates at the University of Essex:
W. IS RIGHT, of course. They do need a system, a structure, a routine. For examples of how they might arrange their lives to produce thought, we can turn to Daily Rituals, a recent book by Mason Currey. Interestingly, this book originated as a blog (at http://dailyroutines.typepad.com), just as Spurious did (http://spurious.typepad.com). Mason Currey relates how, wasting time to keep from completing a writing assignment, he began looking into the daily routines of successful writers, which became his Daily Routines blog: an effort which required him to settle down to a daily routine himself, with a 5:30 wake-up time. The result is Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. The subtitle is a little misleading, as he includes scientists and architects and philosophers, as well as composers, painters, and writers: a hundred and fifty-five in all.
W and Lars could benefit from some advice about drinking from George Sand or Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote that “the very excellent organization of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor.”
It is true that few of Currey’s artists have to teach, while, as Lars’s report of W’s report about his university laments:
What of the creators who interest Lars and W.? Kafka, for instance? They are lost in despairing admiration for him. How did he live?
Despite having a full-time job at an insurance company, Kafka finished work at 2 in the afternoon, took a nap, did ten minutes of exercise naked at an open window, took an hour’s walk, had dinner, and sat down to write at 10:30 p.m.
Despite having a full-time job at an insurance company, Kafka finished work at 2 in the afternoon, took a nap, did ten minutes of exercise naked at an open window, took an hour’s walk, had dinner, and sat down to write at 10:30 p.m., working for hours before snatching a little sleep in the wee hours and then going to his job. Kant fixed his own routine about age forty; rising at 5 a.m., he lectured and wrote, and ate lunch until about 3:00; he then took his walk, every day at 3:30, visited a friend (the same friend every day, Joseph Green) and after a bit more work, retired at precisely 10:00. Notice the importance of a more ordinary person as friend: as Kant has Joseph Green, Kafka’s walks were often with Max Brod, his supporter and literary executor. W. and Lars wonder:
WHAT ABOUT KIERKEGAARD? Kierkegaard is the looming presence in Exodus—the philosopher of despair—the one thinker of whom W. concedes Lars some awareness, if only because Lars is half-Danish. He explains the Kierkegaard project: “We have to become more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard, W. says. More Danish than the melancholy Dane!” They will work backward from all of Kierkegaard’s finished works, to his mind, his cultural milieu, even his physiognomy. Of course, like most of W.’s ambitions, this one declines into bathos:
Oddly this does not deter them from lecturing on Kierkegaard on their speaking tour around the perishing universities of Britain. W. frequently reads lines from Kierkegaard that he has transcribed into his notebook, and even says “Kierkegaard foresaw us . . . He knew we were coming. Why else would he write so many pages on the dangers of religious enthusiasm, of drunken religiosity and of religious phantasmagoria?”
Now, Kierkegaard—there was a man with regularity and external structure. He wrote in the morning and then took a long walk through Copenhagen at noon each day, returning to write for the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening. He had some peculiarities associated with the way he took his coffee, which was more a syrup made of energy-giving sugar than a real liquid, but he hewed to a system that helped him produce the collected works, spanning Lars’s windowsill, with “their sober spines, the different colours. . . the sheer bulk of them . . ..”
W. knows this and he used to know it better—his systematic day as a postgraduate included regular walks. There is a long passage about walking:
Soon, the suggestion of walking as a way to ideas, having then become walking as a way to have ideas about ideas, peters out into ideas about walking. The most amusing is W.’s analysis of the differences in the two men’s “philosophy of walking.”
So much for walking, now a topic for philosophizing and blame-placing.
Iyer nicely captures the results of lives conducted without system in a system almost without life. W. and Lars will never be heroes of thought and sometimes they give up on the bare possibility of thinking—because the times are bad but just as much because they lack a daily ritual. They will never produce Either/Or or the Critique of Pure Reason. But Iyer’s brilliant perception is that their fecklessness makes them alive, makes them surprising, makes them funny. No one would want to read three novels about the real thinkers, with their productive customs, Thomas Hobbes’s nap or Victor Hugo’s daily visit to the barber. But W. and Lars, drinking gin on the train, or brainstorming a new philosophical system (Dogma), with rules like “always use Greek terms that you barely understand,” addressing a bored audience of six in Nashville or watching their pro-Humanities protesters all fall asleep, have a variety that custom cannot stale.
♦
Merritt Moseley is a Professor of Literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville in the US and the author of several books on recent British fiction. He is still casting about for a daily routine.
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Publication: Monday, 25 November 2013, at 01:58.
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