Reviews and News:
Don Paterson's sonnets: "His 40 Sonnets are wide-ranging in subject and voice—from the casual terror of being stuck in an elevator to the guttural jabberwocky at a séance—but they tend toward ordinary life, his metaphysical conceits sandbagged with sardonic wit."
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Jeff Koons's banality: "Bouquet of Tulips is a gigantic forearm and hand (Koons says it 'references [sic] the hand of the Statue of Liberty holding the torch') clutching a bunch of pastel green, pink, yellow, blue and white balloon tulips—not exactly the sort of thing that springs to mind when one thinks about the Bataclan killings."
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In praise of Derek Walcott's epic of the Americas: "I found Derek Walcott's Omeros in the stacks of the Montclair Book Center in New Jersey: a frail blue paperback with a seahorse on the cover and the previous owner's phone number across the flyleaf's edge. It was literary flotsam, a poem I hadn't heard of and couldn't place in time or tradition. Here were the names of Homer — Hector, Helen, Philoctete, Achille — but also Voodoo deities and lines from 'Buffalo Soldier,' ghosts of Troy but also camera-wielding tourists and fishermen revving chain saws as they prepared to fell the ancient trees (those last silent 'gods' of a pre-Columbian past) on a forested volcanic slope. The stanzas moved to Dante's terza rima, but the poem began in patois: 'This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.'"
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Is it wrong to tidy up Emily Dickinson's "torturous" punctuation? Would anyone want "a smoother Dickinson, with standardized punctuation, explanatory titles, and regularized rhymes? That's exactly what people got up to 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson issued the first variorum edition. If Dickinson was unhappy with what the Springfield Republican did to 'A narrow Fellow in the Grass,' it's a good thing she didn't live to see the handiwork of her first editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Nevertheless, it's easy to see why Todd (the mistress of Dickinson's brother Austin) and Dickinson Bianchi (Austin's daughter) felt compelled to tidy her up. Partly they were palliating her blasphemy and harrowing skepticism (among the poet's other scandalous habits of mind), but they were also making a sincere and, given the state of the manuscripts, heroic effort to put Dickinson within the reach of common readers. Editorial practices are more transparent today, and despite my frustration with Dickinson's orthographic idiosyncrasies, I am hardly advocating a return to the sentimentalized Dickinson of earlier editions. I am suggesting, however, that there's no shame in reading this dash as a comma or overlooking that one entirely."
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What the move of a Cadbury chocolate factory from England to Poland reveals about the EU and the shortcomings of global capitalism: "Sometimes globalised consumer capitalism links communities in these two radically non-conformist EU states, links them, in that strange way of globalisation, without doing anything to bring them together... Anna Pasternak, who worked at the new chocolate factory in Skarbimierz, noticed the age of the equipment on the production lines. The wear on the metal caused by decades of Somerdale workers' hands was the only message the British employees sent to their Polish successors. I met Pasternak in her flat in Brzeg, the nearest sizeable town to Skarbimierz. I asked her how she felt about what had happened to the British factory. 'I never really thought about it,' she said. 'We lost so many jobs here in Brzeg … We didn't feel sorry that others lost theirs … It's somewhere else in the world. We don't physically know these people.'"
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A new selected Shelley: "One of the many virtues of Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy's editing of the present volume is that, while finding space for all of The Defence of Poetry, they see fit to give us only five pages from 'On Christianity' and none at all from 'The Necessity of Atheism.' For it is not as a sneering pamphleteer or amateurish philosopher that Shelley lays claim to our attention."
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Atlantis, Daniel N. Robinson argues that more information does not always mean more understanding because understanding is narrative:
"In attempts to account for distinctly human endeavors, explanations have a narrative quality. Thus, Jane's aspiration to be a concert violinist accounts for — that is, explains — the many hours of practice expended over a course of years. Henry wishes to understand the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. The story — the explanation — runs along these lines: Wellington, after the battle of Quatre Bras, moved his forces to Waterloo. The allied Prussians moved to positions drawing a large portion of the French forces away from Waterloo to Wavre. With Prussians attacking Napoleon's right flank and Wellington attacking the center, Napoleon's fate was sealed.
"Try to translate these two explanations — for why Jane practices the violin, and for why Napoleon was defeated — into terms faithful to evolutionary biology or neuroscience or the concentration of potassium in the human body. Try again. Alas, the thing just doesn't work. Now adopt the empirical stance and see if you can come up with a theory of any sort that, even if not complete, would still be adequate for explaining these events. This won't do much for us either, for events of historical moment express the beliefs, skills, powers, and plans of specific persons who, if removed from the narrative, leave us with an entirely different set of events. No doubt, absent a properly functioning nervous system, Jane can't even hold the bow of a violin. Absent the evolutionary roots and branches, there are neither armies nor nations. We might agree with all of this and, at the same time, acknowledge the unique, personal, individuated character of those responsible for the events in question. There could not be War and Peace had there not been a developed language. But there could not have been War and Peace had there not been Tolstoy. What we search for to account for the great novel is not a causal theory but a deeper understanding. Here, then, is the Verstehen school of historiography, which does not try to find a causal explanation of an event based on objective factors alone, but rather to understand the particular intentions and contexts from the standpoint of the people involved.
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"In May 2009, M.I.T.'s Technology Review published a brief online essay titled 'The Foundation of Reality: Information or Quantum Mechanics?' After citing some leading-edge theorizing, the essay concludes that 'it is not the laws of physics that determine how information behaves in our Universe, but the other way round. The implication is extraordinary: that somehow, information is the ghostly bedrock of our Universe and from it, all else is derived.'
"'Information,' of course, is not palpable. Its place is found within advanced theories that rely on unseen properties and events that are probabilistic in principle. It is said that ours is an 'information age.' This is apt at several levels. Thanks to Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, and other mathematicians, engineers, and cryptographers, we now have a veritable metric for information, and we are but a click or a swipe away from megabytes on any topic of our choosing. Our world's broadcast technologies alone were able to transmit some 430 exabytes (1018 bytes) in the year 1986 and 1,900 exabytes three decades later. The sky's the limit. Yet, the bounty might be fool's gold to those who merely click their way to facts. Consider the Oxford English Dictionary, the second edition of which contains 59 million words and requires 540 megabytes of storage. Randomly accessing the contents is unlikely to generate a string yielding King Lear. We cannot explain Shakespeare's achievement by noting how much information is contained in a play, or how much information was available to him when he wrote it. Nor are the uncertainty relations revealed at the quantum level of any consequence here.
"Shakespeare's 'stance' was a narrative stance; by revealing the reasoning and ambitions of his characters, their foibles and highly individuated personalities, he was able to tell a story. The story of the person is readily recognized as the story of a type of person. And then one discovers that each such type is present in each of us, to be tapped or suppressed by opportunity, fate, contingency, or mere luck. 'The play's the thing' reminds us that it is only when the story is fully told that we can locate ourselves within it. What counts here is not information in the dimensionless sense of bytes, but meaning in the full sense of a story told."
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Photo: Supercell over windfarm
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Poem: Aaron Belz, "The Nature of Love"
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