By STEPHEN PAGE [The Guardian] – The definition of “book publisher” is up for grabs, and those in the industry will have to be brave and imaginative, in double-quick time, to lay claim to this new definition. Others might find it easier to begin with a blank sheet.
At heart, publishers exist to create more value for writers than writers can (or wish to) create for themselves. Continue reading “Noted: How to tell a good publisher from a lousy one.” »
By ROBERT GOTTLIEB [The New York Review of Books] – Edmond de Goncourt overheard a conversation in a Paris restaurant: “The Sarah Bernhardt family—now, there’s a family! The mother made whores of her daughters as soon as they turned thirteen.” For once, the gossip was more or less true. Sarah’s sister Régine died at the age of nineteen, “after a miserable life of neglect and prostitution.” Sarah seems to have taken a more businesslike approach to prostitution. She collected about her a group of male admirers whom (according to a rival actress) she called her “stockholders.” One of those investors may have been the father of her son, Maurice, who was born in 1864.
Continue reading “Noted: For Sarah Bernhardt, inspiration was the trick.” »
By ANELISE CHEN [The Rumpus] – As for me and a lot of the classmates and writers I queried, we find this debate about whether to MFA extremely dull. “How can free time and community support be a bad thing?” “If anything, I feel more free to experiment because I’m exposed to writing I wouldn’t otherwise have read.” For a person who really wants to become a writer, none of this matters. She will go to school if she feels it will help her become a better writer; she will not go if she feels it will harm her. She will teach in a Program if she needs the money, she will not teach if she is can find another way to make a living. Even if she decides the Program is nonsense, she can go her own way.
Continue reading “Noted: Has college creative writing gone terminal?” »
The Levytator, by Prof. Jack Levy – but surely inspired by Maurits Cornelis Escher.
So uplifting.
By KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH [New York Times Book Review] – [Sam] Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science — the right values being ones that promote well-being. “Just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health,” he writes, “it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being.”
But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Continue reading “Noted: Sam Harris, meet Jeremy Bentham.” »
The whole works.
By WILLIAM CARROLL [Public Discourse] – Many cosmologists who now routinely speak of what happened “before the Big Bang” think that to reject some original Big Bang is to eliminate the need for a Creator. They deny the need for a Creator because they think that “to be created” means to have a temporal beginning. In such a scenario, accepting or rejecting a Creator is tied to accepting or to explaining away an original Big Bang. You might remember Hawking’s famous rhetorical question: “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?”
Continue reading “Noted: Stephen Hawking, the ages of ages, and that metaphysical moment.” »
By R.R. Reno [First Things] – In one of the sharply worded passages of the New Testament, Jesus teaches that he came to bring division, not peace: “father against son and son against father.” As Edmund Gosse draws him memoir of his life with his ardently believing father to a close, he rues this sad fact. “What a charming companion,” Gosse observes, “what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend my Father would have been, and would pre-eminently have been to me, if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all.”
Continue reading “Noted: Edmund Gosse in the uncomfortable ante-chamber to an unexplored palace.” »
By CAROL CHRIST [RaVoN – Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net] – In the same year that Victorian Studies began publication [1956], Walter E. Houghton published The Victorian Frame of Mind
Continue reading “Noted: How did the Victorian Age feel to the Victorians?” »
By CYNTHIA HAVEN [Stanford Report] – All early drafts of the U.N. genocide convention included social and political groups in its definition. But one hand that wasn’t in the room guided the pen. The Soviet delegation vetoed any definition of genocide that might include the actions of its leader, Joseph Stalin. The Allies, exhausted by war, were loyal to their Soviet allies – to the detriment of subsequent generations.
[Historian Norman] Naimark argues [in Stalin’s Genocides
Continue reading “Noted: When will it be time to declare Stalin 'horrible officially'?” »
By CONRAD BLACK [The New Criterion] – The socio-cultural question that bedevils the future of newspapers is rooted in the decline of the prestige and credibility of the media. It is obvious and notorious that the traditional national media of the United States has fragmented in market share and lost ground heavily to newer forms of media opinion-leading. Special bugbears of the traditional liberal national media are the talkshow and television commentators of the Right, such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, and many others. Continue reading “Noted: How bugbears devoured the mainstream media.” »
By JEAN-LUC GODARD [interviewed in Film Comment] – There is no intellectual property. I’m against inheritance, for instance. There’s no reason why the children of an artist shouldn’t benefit from the rights of their parent’s work, until they come of age . . . but afterwards, I don’t see why Ravel’s kids should own the rights to “Boléro”…
If I had to defend myself against the accusation of stealing images in my films, I would hire two lawyers with two different approaches. One would defend the right of quotation that only barely exists in cinema. In literature we can quote at length. In the Henry Miller book [Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller] by Norman Mailer, 80 percent of it is Henry Miller and 20 percent is Norman Mailer. Scientists don’t have to pay royalties to use a formula devised by a colleague. This is quotation, yet only cinema refuses to authorize it. I read Marie Darrieussecq’s Police files, and I think it’s very good because she takes a historical look at the question. Really, author’s rights are impossible.
Continue reading “Noted: Jean-Luc Godard issues you a license to steal 'Breathless'.” »
By SAM CRANE [The Useless Tree] – It’s true that Confucius stands for a meritocracy of sorts. And I agree with those Confucian modernizers that say full inclusion and participation of women in public life is completely consistent with Confucian principles (even though the historical uses of Confucianism in China were powerfully patriarchal). A modern Confucian meritocracy would include women.
But there are a couple of problems when we think further about the extent to which the current Chinese experience and practice of meritocracy might impress and attract people in foreign countries (which is what soft power is ultimately all about). A simple question: is the PRC right now a beacon of meritocracy?
Continue reading “Noted: Does China deserve to be called a 'beacon of meritocracy'?” »
Arvo Pärt discusses a triad in “Für Alina” at a masterclass.
By MICHAEL NELSON [Claremont Review of Books] – An additional advantage that the academies have over ROTC is their ability to respond swiftly to changing military challenges. Soon after 9/11, Sosh created the Combating Terrorism Center and the academy increased every cadet’s mandatory foreign language training from three days per week to five. Annapolis recently initiated cyber warfare studies and ramped up its own foreign language requirement. These are changes that civilian universities with ROTC units either could not make or have made much more slowly. Samet and other English department faculty teach their classes knowing that “poetry is more important to the cultures with which U.S. troops will come in contact…than it is to our own.” She wants her students to be able to both “handle a grenade launcher and share an appreciation of Rumi with an Afghan colonel.”
Continue reading “Noted: Winning hearts and minds with Rumi.” »
By YANG HENGJUN [China Media Project] – Today, thirty years on, China has reached another critical juncture. We have made wondrous achievements in economic development. But this development has, at the same time, exposed the unsuitability of our political system. Government controls are now seriously out of joint with China’s ever rising and expanding civil society.
In this moment, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, among others, have emphasized repeatedly that China must move forward with the process of opening and reform, and that China must also deepen political reforms. And also in this moment, so reminiscent of the clamor thirty years ago, we hear certain people standing up and saying we need to distinguish clearly between socialist democracy (社会主义民主) and Western democracy (西方民主).
Continue reading “Noted: This 西方民主 of yours will only bring chaos and destruction.” »
John Wilkinson’s
Adages for Poetry Students
Chris Miller reviews Chaos and the Clean Line by Stephen Romer
AND Two Essays
by Alan Wall
See also Garin Cycholl’s new review of Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard
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
Previous Serials
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.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
More daily in
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
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.
