It's Not a Shame to Love a Morning Brew

Here's the link to the first of my weekly-ish columns for the Truman Index.  The web page doesn't seem to have paragraphing at the moment, so if you are on campus, just pick up a hard copy somewhere if you want to read it. This will also allow you to see the somewhat awkward juxtaposition of my silly observations about coffee culture next to a very serious, and I think well done, column on alcohol dependency ... I wasn't aware of that when I was writing my column. Oh well. I suppose you get both light and serious this way.

Noli Timere

Seamus Heaney’s last words to his wife, sent in a text message, were the Latin phrase Noli timere: do not be afraid. I hesitate to stamp a meaning on these words, other than their undulating cadence, their peaceful music, their importance in many Bible passages. In some ways it seems almost immoral not to be afraid today, considering the precarious state of the world. But one of our best lights got as close as the living can come to death and had these words for us. Something to carry around and consider every now and then, like his small, solid poems.

It makes me sad that it is Heaney’s death that will be the thing that finally leads me to read more of his work. I had read his chart-toppers like “Digging,” and could probably recognize one of his poems if they were put in front of me (look for bogs, damp, and short, musical lines), but had never read a mass of his poems. However, based on the several obituaries and remembrances of Heaney that I have read (probably the most I’ve read about a recently-deceased person ever), it seems that this irony might just make him chuckle. My personal favorite essay on his death is from his friend Tom Sleigh, which gives a rare glimpse into a relationship between two practicing writers.

Something that makes Heaney’s last words ring even stronger is their harmony with the English poet John Keat’s last words, which were reimagined in this poem I’ve recently discovered:

Keats

Christopher Howell

When Keats, at last beyond the curtain

of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room

on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini

Fountain “filling him like flowers,”

he held his breath like a coin, looked out

into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.

He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s

weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”

and there he was, secretly, for the rest

of his improvidently short life: up to his neck

in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries

of street vendors, perfect

and affectionate as his soul.

For days the snow and statuary sang him so far

beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless

and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow

of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”

may enter you.

The Virtue of Not Being a Genius

Even though my reading backlog is as clogged as Highway 64 at 5:30 on a Friday, it often happens that I suddenly have a strong desire to read a particular book, totally out of my carefully planned sequence. Today it was George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War. He arrived in Barcelona in the besieged region of Catalonia as a journalist, but soon found himself joining the local socialist militia to fight against Franco’s fascist army, because “at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.” The memoir recounts Orwell's evolving understanding of the cold realities of the war alongside the relationships he made with the people he served beside. Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the book intersects pleasantly with a discussion we've been having in my creative nonfiction workshop at Truman about essays. This excerpt sketches pretty succinctly what it means to be an essayist, and why we are drawn to read their work:

“If we ask what it is that [Orwell] stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do. We admire geniuses, we love them, but they discourage us. They are great concentrations of intellect and emotion, we feel that they have soaked up all the available power, monopolizing it and leaving none for us. We feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be nothing. Beside them we are so plain, so hopelessly threadbare. How they glitter, and with what an imperious way they seem to deal with circumstance, even when they are wrong. Lacking their patents of nobility, we might as well quit. This is what democracy has done to us, alas—told us that genius is available to anyone, that the grace of ultimate prestige may be had by anyone, that we may all be princes and potentates, or saints and visionaries and holy martyrs of the heart and mind. And then when it turns out that we are no such thing, it permits us to think that we aren’t much of anything at all. In contrast with this cozening trick of democracy, how pleasant seems the old reactionary Anglican phrase that used to drive people of democratic leanings quite wild with rage—'My station and its duties.'

            

Orwell would very likely have loathed that phrase, but in a way he exemplifies its meaning. … [His works] seem to become what they are chiefly by reason of the very plainness of Orwell’s mind, his simple ability to look at things in a downright, undeceived way. … He is not a genius—what a relief! What an encouragement. For he communicates to us the sense that what he has done, any one of us could do.

           

Or could do if we but made up our minds to do it…”

             

A Poem a Day

The Poetry Foundation, publishers of Poetry magazine, have a "Poem of the Day" program that sends subscribers one poem every morning around 10 a.m. Like Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project and Billy Collin's Poetry 180 program and books, it's a small but concrete way of circulating poetry to a large audience and exposing new readers to the diversity and energy of contemporary poetry in a way that fits into a busy daily schedule. Having gotten their emails for about a year now, I can tell you that not every poem they send is great; some are delete-able; some are repeats; others you will find challenging (never a bad thing); but many, like the string of winners they have sent out this week, are absolutely worth it and will change your day for the better, if they are given the small moment of consideration they ask for. This morning's poem:

The World Is in Pencil

BY TODD BOSS

—not pen. It’s got

that same silken

dust about it, doesn’t it,

that same sense of

having been roughed

onto paper even  

as it was planned.

It had to be a labor

of love. It must’ve

taken its author some

time, some shove.

I’ll bet it felt good

in the hand—the o

of the ocean, and

the and and the and

of the land.

Source: Poetry (November 2011).

Other good poems from the past week from the Poetry Foundation:

“Knowledge,” by Louise Bogan

"After Work," by John Maloney

"Impromptu," by J. Allyn Rosser

By checking a box at the bottom of the website's page, you can subscribe to the "Poem of the Day" without getting annoying newsletters, et cetera.

The Text, the Book, and the iPad

For your consideration: a thoughtful, concise editorial notebook from Verlyn Klinkenborg of the Times trying to parse through the nature of reading books on e-readers, and what may be lost. It's something we have all thought about, but I think it bears further discussion. Like him, I'm divided on the issue, more so than I have been in the past. In my polemic high school journalist days, I would have said that taking away a physical book and replacing it with electronic text is excising one brick from the temple of literacy, and other such wounded, sorrowful expressions.  However, could e-readers make books more affordable? Could they help us share beloved passages more quickly? Could they reduce our use of trees? Could they help create a more democratic, competitive market for writers? Some of the answers are clearer than others.

Yet for my own part, physical books have acted not just as monuments to the achievement of reading a book, but as a concrete way of organizing the landscapes, characters, and stories of a particular reading experience. As Klinkenborg says, the book's physicality is a "constant reminder," peculiarly alive, mysteriously like the presence of a friend. Not to mention that I have great appreciation for the art of typography and layout, the particular makeup--even, if we were to be rather Victorian for a moment, the physiognomy--of a book that make it memorable and contribute to the book's personality along with the author's words. The decision of the layout editors and jacket designers are meaningful, and comparable to the director's arrangement of artwork in a museum or the approach to a piece of music chosen by an orchestra conductor.

If you showed me a page of semi-recycled paper with Garamond typeface and chapter names with dagger-like serifs, I would know without having to read the words that I was looking at a Harry Potter paperback. If I saw a tall glossy page with Caslon body text and wacky Art-Deco headlines, I would know I was seeing a page from the New Yorker. At least in our current culture of literacy, a connection of touch as well as thought that binds the reader to the text. For a dose of literary piety, look up copies of the galleys and proofs passed between Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker to see the amount of work that goes into the typesetting even for a single poem. (I don't provide a link partly because I can't find one, and partly because I want you to engage the blessed difficulty of books and libraries.)

Seeing the Book of Kells this summer in Dublin was a powerful new point in my understanding of books. The library of Trinity College only displays one spread each from the two folios of the Book of Kells, but any page is a calligraphy performance and a display of the miniaturist art of illumination. In addition, the monks that copied the Gospels into these books would sometimes, when visited by a thought, write down a small poem about their lives in the margin, further personalizing the book and creating some of our first examples of written vernacular poetry. Within this highly energized culture of printing from our past, single letters became stained-glass windows.

I have not been awed by or befriended texts I have read online. Indeed, I have struggled to maintain even a mere civil acquaintanceship. Reading Henry James' novella Daisy Miller and Edith Wharton's not-so-short-stories online dried my eyes out and gave me headaches. I was inclined to blame the authors for this suffering, to damn them for their massive paragraphs and lack of pagination, even though the printed copies the authors intended would have solved those problems. I do not have an iPad or e-reader, but I have seen how their darkened screens and attractive typefaces make the experience easier on the eyes. Yet there is no invitation to dog-ear, to bend the spine to favorite passages, to jot colloquies with the author or characters into the margins, to make the book irretrievably yours as a printed book offers. Still and all, maybe we will see the day when the craft of electronic printing matures enough to rival the craft of printed texts.

Watercolor: NUI Galway Quadrangle

I added watercolor to a sketch from today. Not necessarily finished, but probably all that I'll have time for while I'm here. I didn't actually do this at twilight, but I have seen the place at twilight, and I like it better that way.

A didgeridoo! As the Galway Arts Festival kicks into gear, the buskers get more and more inventive and frenzied.

Lastly: I did not know this mammal, called a pangolin, existed. It is apparently the only mammal that has keratin scales, and it is also known as the scaly anteater.

Some Sights and Sounds from Ireland

Oh, hi. It's been a while since I've posted anything here, and I did actually have plans of regular updates. Fortunately/unfortunately, it seems I don't have time for that. But here's a few pieces of some of the more vivid experiences of my time in the city of Galway and excursions to other parts of Ireland.

A whirlwind of sound: a traditional ("trad") session in progress tonight at the Tig Coili pub, one of my favorite places in Galway. They're midway into a set of reels. Why can't St. Louis have music this good on a Monday night?

The Cliffs of Moher, on the coast of County Clare. The pathway along the cliffs is lined with large sheet rocks you might make out in the top right. My first sketch in Ireland was begun while I rested after feeling light-headed and queasy from the long and stomach-churning bus ride down from Galway. It was a gloomy day with low clouds moving in, but somehow that felt right.

A view from inside Dun Aonghasa, an Iron Age fort on the edge of a different set of spectacular cliffs (you see a number of those around here.) Dun Aonghasa is on Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands, southwest of Galway. On that day we had brilliant sunshine.

The view of Dingle Harbor from our hostel. We spent a weekend on the Dingle Peninsula, which is part of County Kerry, a 5-hour bus ride south of Galway. It was an excellent weekend besides sharing a room and single bathroom with 11 other guys (way too much drunken giggling between 2 and 3 a.m. among some of the other occupants of the room.) We also had the best weather of the trip so far--resplendent sunshine but mild temperatures and a light, persistent sea-breeze.