Postmodernism

A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.

Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself."

Thought of the Day

Blaise Pascal 1623 –1662

The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
Pensées (1670)


Thought, I love thought.
But not the juggling and twisting of already existent ideas.
I despise that self-important game.
Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness,
Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of consciousness,
Thought is gazing onto the face of life, and reading what can be read,
Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to conclusion.
Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges,
Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.
D.H. Lawrence 1885– 1930

City of Glass

City of Glass, and the two subsequent volumes that make up the New York Trilogy, is, on one level, about the relationship between an author, his characters, and the readers of the books that he writes. It is mostly concerned with the question of who has the real power in this relationship: the author, who is often equated to God and/or the Father, supposed controller of words and destinies; the characters, who in almost all of Auster's works become aware of the fact that they are trapped in someone else's story, and who usually react by taking control themselves; the readers, each of whose individual minds shape the words that Auster has written into their own version of the story that he is trying to tell; and even the critics, who try to exercise their own power over the books by imposing their interpretations on them as if they were law. These issues are explored through the comparison of the detective and the crime that he is investigating to the reader/critic and the book that he or she is reading (there are also some extremely compelling passages about the structure of Don Quixote that delve into these issues).
City of Glass is Paul Auster's first official novel, not counting the popular detective novel that he wrote under a pseudonym. It contains bits and pieces of ideas that he had been working on for years—the parts about the Tower of Babel were originally part of Moon Palace. It is a stunning exploration of identity and language told from a point of view that is never really made very clear. This is the book that begins the New York Trilogy, one of the few masterpieces in recent literary history. There is almost nothing more that I can say about it. One could easily write volumes on the 150-odd pages that make up this work, but one could never say it quite so well or simply as the novel itself. This book is so full of ideas that I am beginning to believe that it was never meant to be written about—only discovered by each individual reader.

Antoine 'Fats' Domino, 1928 -

Born in 1928 in New Orleans of Antoine Domino - FATS DOMINO - who back in the early 50s started playing his own mix of Cajun, blues, and boogie on the piano that jump-started rock and roll years before the term was invented. His big hits were "Ain't That a Shame," "Blueberry Hill," and "Whole Lotta Lovin'."

Muriel Rukeyser

Waiting for Icarus

He said he would be back and we'd drink wine together
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full-time
He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don't cry

I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets,
a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse
I remember she added : Women who love such are the
Worst of all
I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.

David Ignatow, 1914 - 1997

David Ignatow was the poet who wrote about the daily lives of urban workers. He was born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). His parents were Russian immigrants, and he was inspired to become a writer by his father's love of Russian literature. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Ignatow thought that his dreams of writing were over when his father forced him to work in the family binding company. But, he continued to write poetry, and when he was commissioned as a WPA reporter, his father paid for the publication of a small edition of David's poetry, Poems (1948). He gained critical acclaim, but he still needed to take on a variety of odd jobs, working as a shoe salesman, a shipyard handyman, and a clerk at a vegetable market to support his family until he finally secured teaching positions at Vassar College and Columbia University. He went on to write many more collections of poetry, including Rescue the Dead (1968) and I Have a Name (1996), but he never forgot his struggle with poverty as a young adult. In an interview with The Paris Review - when asked what would be the worst thing that could happen - Ignatow said, "Well ... losing my job, being out of money. Problems of love, problems of human relationships are secondary."


Self-Employed

For Harvey Shapiro

I stand and listen, head bowed,
to my inner complaint.
Persons passing by think
I am searching for a lost coin.
You're fired, I yell inside
after an especially bad episode.
I'm letting you go without notice
or terminal pay. You just lost
another chance to make good.
But then I watch myself standing at the exit,
depressed and about to leave,
and wave myself back in wearily,
for who else could I get in my place
to do the job in dark, airless conditions?

Paul Auster, 1947 -

The novelist Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey (1947). Growing up, he didn't get along with his father, who was an extremely distant, solitary man. Auster wrote, "Devoid of passion, either for a thing, a person, or an idea, incapable or unwilling to reveal himself under any circumstances, [my father] had managed to keep himself at a distance from life... In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man."

Auster's parents divorced when he was 15, and around the same time he decided to become a writer. He went to Columbia University in 1965, where he spent almost all of his time reading.

He dropped out of graduate school to take a job mopping floors on an oil tanker, and then spent several years living in poverty in Paris. When he returned to the United States, he tried to make a living as a poet and translator, but he could barely pay the bills.

Auster was struggling with writer's block and depression, his marriage was breaking up, and then one morning he learned that his father, the man he'd never gotten along with, had died and left him enough money to support him as a writer. The first book he wrote with that support was a memoir about his father called The Invention of Solitude (1982).

Paul Auster has gone on to write many more novels, including Book of Illusions (2002) and Oracle Night (2003).

He said, "It still seems like a strange way to make a living, sitting alone in a room for long periods of every day... I never go out looking for stories to tell; they grow inside me and become a weird compulsion. So, even though the story might change day to day, I know the characters really well, because I've carried them inside my head for years."

The Parable of the Talents

Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also, the one with the two talents gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

After a long time, the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents brought the other five. “Master,” he said, “you entrusted me with five talents. See, I have gained five more.”

His master replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!”

The man with the two talents also came. “Master,” he said, “you entrusted me with two talents; see, I have gained two more.”

His master replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!”

Then the man who had received the one talent came. “Master,” he said, “I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.”

His master replied, “You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

“Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

- Matthew 25:14-30 (NIV)

On His Blindness by: John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,—
Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?
I fondly ask:—But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: God doth not need
Either man's work, or His own gifts, who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:—
They also serve who only stand and wait.

Seminar Topic for First Year American Literature (1DDDA-1DDEA)

Those of you who did not have a topic to present for your seminars in First Year American Literature (1DDDA-1DDEA) can work on: Observations from the back of the line (please see below) by Garrison Keillor.

Garrison Keillor 1942


Garrison Keillor, author and host of "A Prairie Home Companion" was born in 1942 in Anoka, Minnesota. He began his radio career as a student at the University of Minnesota, from which he graduated.

In 1969 he began writing for The New Yorker. It was writing an article about the Grand Ole Opry in 1974 that inspired him to create a live variety show for radio. Thus "A Prairie Home Companion" was born on July 6, 1974 in a St. Paul college theatre in front of an audience of 12 people.

In 1987, he ended A Prairie Home Companion and moved to New York where, in 1989, he started a new program, "The American Radio Company", which played to sold-out houses for four seasons. The show returned to the name "A Prairie Home Companion" in 1993 and is once again based in Minnesota. The decision to resume broadcasting under this widely recognized name has reconnected "A Prairie Home Companion" to its midwestern roots.

Garrison Keillor is the author of eight books for adults, and three for children. In addition to his books, he has written poetry and is a consummate story-teller whose voice can be heard on numerous recordings. He is married to violinist, Jenny Lind Nilsson, with whom he has a daughter.

One more spring in Minnesota,
To come upon Lake Wobegon.
Old town I smell your coffee.
If I could see you one more time --

I can't stay, you know, I left so long ago,
I'm just a stranger with memories of people I knew here.
We stand around, looking at the ground.
You're the stories I've told for years and years.

That yard, the tree -- you climbed it once with me,
And we talked of cities that we'd live in someday.
I left, old friend, and now I'm back again,
Please say you missed me since I went away.

One more time that dance together,
Just you and I now, don't be shy.
This time I know I'd hear the music
If I could hold you one more time.


Observations from the back of the line

Friday, April 11, 2008

For some people, the urge to compete is very, very strong, such as the tall red-haired woman last Sunday morning at LaGuardia Airport in New York who cut in front of me at the boarding gate and did it so smoothly, expertly, no body contact, you have to assume she's been acing people out all her life.

She was standing behind me and then alongside and then, although I was moving forward behind the old lady in front of me, Red Riding Hood planted her right foot in front of my left foot and leaned over and handed her ticket to the gate agent and without a murmur of apology or explanation, she slipped into the jetway.

Pure competitive urge, for no prize at all, as you see every day on the freeway at rush hour, the salmon leaping, cutting each other off, to get back home three minutes earlier than if they'd gone with the flow.

A few years ago I would have felt like pulling her hair out by the roots and spitting on her shoes and saying a few words about the importance of civility, but I am over that now.

I don't care if you step on my blue suede shoes, just don't steal my laptop and don't hurt my baby. I'm not the judge of other people's manners. I come from quiet mannerly Midwestern people and evidently she was raised in a home in which you had to elbow your way to the feed trough. Not her fault, just as what manners I have are to my mother's credit and not mine.

Back where I'm from, it's considered boorish to thrust yourself forward ahead of those who've been waiting longer. We are brought up to defer, an After You Alphonse reflex, and wave others to go first at the intersection, and sometimes we use deference aggressively, as a way of encouraging fools to walk out on thin ice and fall in, so we can enjoy seeing them flounder and then perhaps rescue them.

And so committee meetings in the Midwest can be torturous: The knowledgeable sit back and listen to some clueless gasbag blow for awhile and the main questions are never addressed and eventually the meeting grinds to a halt and some poor soul is left to do the hard work on her own and the gasbag goes on to his next triumph.

The daughter of a friend is 15 and full of the competitive urge, anxious to start driver's ed and get on with her life, miffed about the twerp who beat her out for class president, horrified by a rash of pimples, worried that she is ugly and that her Wal-Mart clothes are not cool enough and where will she go to college and why doesn't her boyfriend call her. The other night at supper, she asked, "Is fellatio considered a normal sexual practice?" and her poor father almost coughed up a hairball.

It's an agonizing time when you feel your peers edging ahead and the cool people aren't seeking you out and almost every day somebody announces a cool new job, or a big romance, or the receipt of an awesome gift, some fresh kill from the jungle, and it depresses you.

You don't want to be a loser. And you sense the fact that, in life, so much - so very much - is pure luck, no matter what they want you to think, and an angel may knock at your door in the person of a beggar, and you say No, and that No will resound for the rest of your born days. It is agonizing to think about.

I don't care about the red-haired woman: It's the 15-year-old who matters. Whatever happens, be observant, darling, and First Place is not a good observation point. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

There is grace afoot in the world and it will find you. You don't have to be first in line: It will be diligent in pursuing you and passing on its gifts, which are faith, hope, love and a sense of humor. The harder you strive for a gift, the more it eludes you, so let the lady step ahead of you. Keep your eyes open.

Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard on U.S. public radio stations. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

From: Herald Tribune Published April 11, 2008

Gregory Orr, 1947 -

Gregory Orr was born in 1947 in Albany, New York, and grew up in the rural Hudson Valley, and for a year, in a hospital in the hinterlands of Haiti. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University.

He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005); The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002); Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); Burning the Empty Nests (1997); City of Salt (1995), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Poetry Prize; and Gathering the Bones Together (1975).

He is also the author of a memoir, The Blessing (Council Oak Books, 2002), which was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the fifty best non-fiction books the year, and three books of essays, including Poetry As Survival (2002) and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry (1985).

He is considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse. Much of his early work is concerned with seminal events from his childhood, including a hunting accident when he was twelve in which he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, followed shortly by his mother's unexpected death, and his father's later addiction to amphetamines. Some of the poems that deal explicitly with these incidents include "A Litany," "A Moment," and "Gathering the Bones Together," in which he declares: "I was twelve when I killed him; / I felt my own bones wrench from my body." In the opening of his essay, "The Making of Poems," broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Orr said, "I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive."

In a review of Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved from the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ted Genoways writes: "Sure, the trappings of modern life appear at the edges of these poems, but their focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time. It's an experience usually reserved for reading the ancients, and clearly that was partly Orr's inspiration."

Orr has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, he was presented the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence, where he worked on a study of the political and social dimension of the lyric in early Greek poetry.

He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.




Father's Song

Yesterday, against admonishment,
my daughter balanced on the couch back,
fell and cut her mouth.
Because I saw it happen I knew
she was not hurt, and yet
a child's blood's so red
it stops a father's heart.
My daughter cried her tears;
I held some ice
against her lip.
That was the end of it.
Round and round; bow and kiss
I try to teach her caution;
she tries to teach me risk.

Robert Bly, 1926 -

The poet Robert Bly was born in Madison, Minnesota (1926). He served in the Navy during WWII, and then entered Harvard University, where, he later said, "One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life."

Bly is the author of more than 30 books of his own poetry, including Silence In The Snowy Fields (1962) and The Light Around The Body (1967.)

Robert Bly, who said, "I know a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty than they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone... "By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life."

Bly also wrote, "Being a poet in the United States has meant for me years of confusion, blundering, and self-doubt. The confusion lies in not knowing whether I am writing in the American language or the English or, more exactly, how much of the musical power of Chaucer, Marvell, and Keats can be kept in free verse. Not knowing how to live, or even how to make a living, results in blunders. And the self-doubt comes from living in small towns."


Gratitude to Old Teachers

When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake,
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?

Water that once could take no human weight-
We were students then-holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.

Donald Hall, 1928 -

The newly appointed poet laureate of the United States, Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut (1928). He's the author of many collections of poetry, including The Dark Houses (1958), Kicking the Leaves: Poems (1978), and Willow Temple: New and Selected Poems (2003).

As a boy, he spent summers on his grandfather's farm in New Hampshire, and he often listened to his grandfather recite long narrative poems like "Casey at the Bat." It was one of those summers at his grandfather's house that Donald Hall began writing his own first poems at a tiny desk in the room where he slept. His first literary hero was Edgar Allan Poe. Hall said, "I wanted to be mad, addicted, obsessed, haunted, and cursed; I wanted to have eyes that burned like coals, profoundly melancholy, profoundly attractive."

When he was 16, he met Robert Frost at a writers' conference, and while he was in college he met the elder poets T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas. He said that meeting professional poets gave him the idea that being a poet was something that you worked at steadily, for a long time.

His collection White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 came out this year. He was named the poet laureate this June.

Donald Hall said, "I try every day to write great poetry—as I tried when I was 14. ... What else is there to do?"



We Bring Democracy To The Fish

It is unacceptable that fish prey on each other.
For their comfort and safety, we will liberate them
into fishfarms with secure, durable boundaries
that exclude predators. Our care will provide
for their liberty, health, happiness, and nutrition.
Of course all creatures need to feel useful.
At maturity the fish will discover their purposes.

______

An old life

Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
Then I sat in my blue chair
with blueberry bagels and strong
black coffee reading news,
the obits, the comics, and the sports.
Carrying my cup twenty feet,
I sat myself at the desk
for this day's lifelong
engagement with the one task and desire.

D.H. Lawrence

The Elephant Is Slow To Mate


The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse

and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.

They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood.

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850 - 1894

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1850), who was a sickly, moderately successful essayist and travel writer, living in France, when one evening he walked to a friend's house, looked in through the window, and fell instantly in love with a woman sitting there at the table. To make a grand entrance, he opened the window, leapt inside, and took a bow. The woman was Fanny Osbourne and she was both American and unhappily married. She had come to Europe to get away from her husband, but after spending months getting to know Stevenson, she decided to go back to California.

Stevenson got a telegram from her a few weeks after she'd returned to the United States, and he decided on the spot to drop everything and go persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him. His health, as always, was terrible, and the trip to the United States almost killed him. He collapsed on Fanny Osbourne's doorstep, but she nursed him back to health. She did divorce her husband, and they got married in San Francisco and spent their honeymoon in a cabin near an abandoned silver mine.


They moved back to Scotland with her son from her previous marriage, and one rainy afternoon the following summer Stevenson painted a map of an imaginary island to entertain his new stepson. The map gave him and idea for a story and in a single month he had written his first great novel, Treasure Island (1883), about the young Jim Hawkins, who finds a treasure map and goes on a journey to find the treasure. He meets pirates, survives a mutiny, and gets to know a one-legged cook named Long John Silver. The book has been in print for 124 years now.


Around the same time that Treasure Island was published, Stevenson woke up one morning and told his family that he did not want to be disturbed until he had finished writing a story that had come to him in a dream. It took him three days to write it, but when he read the story aloud to his wife, she said it was too sensationalistic. So he sat down and rewrote the whole thing. By the end of the week he was fairly happy with the result, which he called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), about a scientist who invents a chemical that changes his personality from a mild-mannered gentleman to a savage criminal.


Those two books made Stevenson rich and famous. He spent the rest of his life traveling from one place to the next, producing about 400 pages of published work a year. He finally settled on the island of Samoa, where his health improved greatly, and in the last five years of his life, he wrote 10 more books. He died at the age of 44, not from his respiratory illness, but from a stroke. His contemporaries saw him as one of the greatest writers of his generation, but he's now remembered mainly as a writer of adventure stories. Critics wish he had finished the last novel he had been working on, about colonial life in Samoa, because the fragments that survive are among his best work.

Robert Louis Stevenson, who said, "Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."

18. The Land of Nod

FROM breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.

All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do—
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.

The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.

Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.

__________

A Thought (From Child's Garden of Verses)

It is very nice to think
The world is full of meat and drink,
With little children saying grace
In every Christian kind of place.

_____________


*A friend is a gift you give yourself.

*All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

*Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

*Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

*Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

*For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

*He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.

*I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

*I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

*If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

*If we take matrimony at it's lowest, we regard it as a sort of friendship recognised by the police.

*If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

*It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

*Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others.

*Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

*No man is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable.

*Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.

*Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

*Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

*Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

*Quiet minds can't be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

*The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

*The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

*The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

*You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.

John Milton, December 9, 1608 - November 8 1674

John Milton was born in London (1608), who started writing poetry as a young man, but before his career as a poet could really take off, England began to fall into a civil war, the king was overthrown and a new form of government, known as the Commonwealth was established, led by Oliver Cromwell.

Milton responded to the situation by becoming a pamphleteer. Nobody really knew how the new government would work, and Milton became an advocate for greater civil rights and religious liberty. He wrote about expanding the right to divorce your spouse and he made one of the first comprehensive arguments for the freedom of the press. The Parliament had recently passed a law requiring government approval of all published books. Milton wrote, "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye."

Milton eventually took a job as a Latin secretary for the government, translating letters for international correspondence. He was struggling to raise his three daughters, and he was slowly going blind. Then, suddenly, the government he worked for fell apart, King Charles II was restored to the throne, and all the leaders of the Commonwealth were hanged. That summer, a warrant was issued for Milton's arrest, but he was kept in hiding by his friends. His pamphlets were publicly burned. He was eventually pardoned, but he became an outcast, and people said that God had struck him blind for his sins against the king.

Milton was devastated by the restoration of the monarchy, but without a job, he finally had time to devote to his poetry again. He'd long thought that there needed to be an epic poem in English, and he had originally thought it would be about England. But instead, he decided to write the poem about the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and humanity's fall from grace.

He composed the verses in his head, at night, and in the morning he would recite them to anyone near by that would take dictation. He originally called the poem "Adam Unparadised," but he changed the title to Paradise Lost. There was some question as to whether it would be approved for publication by the government, since Milton was such a notorious dissident, but it finally came out in 1667. It begins: "Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, / Sing Heav'nly Muse..."

When the poem appeared in print, Milton's contemporaries were astonished. People couldn't believe that a man generally thought of as a washed-up, outcast, political hack had written the greatest work of literature in a generation. The poet John Dryden wrote, "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too." Milton was 58 years old, and he'd finally become a respected poet.

*The mind can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven.

*So dear I love him that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life.

*Subtle he needs must be, who could seduce Angels.

*Loneliness is the first thing which God's eye named, not good.

*I am a part of all that I have met.

*Jealousy is the injured lover's hell.

*Long is the way And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.

*Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

*The end of learning is to know God, and out of that knowledge to love Him and imitate Him.



PARADISE LOST

First Book

The Argument

The First Book proposes, first in brief, the whole subject, Man's disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise, wherein he was plac’t: then touches the prime cause of his fall, the Serpent, or rather Satan in the Serpent; who, revolting from God, and drawing to his side many legions of Angels, was, by the command of God, driven out of Heaven, with all his crew, into the great Deep. Which action passed over, the Poem hastes into the midst of things; presenting Satan, with his Angels, now fallen into Hell-described here not in the Centre (for heaven and earth may be supposed as yet not made, certainly not yet accursed), but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest called Chaos. Here Satan, with his Angels lying on the burning lake, thunderstruck and astonished after a certain space recovers, as from confusion; calls up him who, next in order and dignity, lay by him: they confer of their miserable fall. Satan awakens all his legions, who lay till then in the same manner confounded. They rise: their numbers; array of battle; their chief leaders named, according to the idols known afterwards in Canaan and the countries adjoining. To these Satan directs his speech; comforts them with hope yet of regaining Heaven; but tells them, lastly, of a new world and new kind of creature to be created, according to an ancient prophecy, or report, in Heaven-for that Angels were long before this visible creation was the opinion of many ancient Fathers. To find out the truth of this prophecy, and what to determine thereon, he refers to a full council. What his associates thence attempt. Pandemonium, the palace of Satan, rises, suddenly built out of the Deep: the infernal Peers there sit in council.

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing, Heav’nly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou knowst; Thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That, to the highth of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
Say first, for Heaven hides nothing from thy view,
Nor the deep tract of Hell, say first what cause
Mov’d our Grand Parents, in that happy state,
Favour’d of Heaven so highly, to fall off
From their Creator, and transgress his will
For one restraint, lords of the World besides.
Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?
Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was whose guile,
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The Mother of Mankind, what time his Pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels, by whose aid, aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equalled the Most High,
If he oppos’d, and, with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God,
Raised impious war in Heav’n and battle proud,
With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.
Nine times the space that measures Day and Night
To mortal men, he, with his horrid crew,
Lay vanquished, rowling in the fiery Gulf,
Confounded, though immortal. But his doom
Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him: round he throws his baleful eyes,
That witnessed huge affliction and dismay,
Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate.
At once, as far as Angel's ken, he views
The dismal situation waste and wild.
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.
Such place Eternal Justice had prepared
For those rebellious; here their prison ordained
In utter darkness, and their portion set,
As far removed from God and light of Heaven
As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.
Oh how unlike the place from whence they fell!
There the companions of his fall, o’erwhelmed
With floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire,
He soon discerns; and, weltering by his side,
One next himself in power, and next in crime,
Long after known in Palestine, and named
Beelzebub. To whom th’ Arch-Enemy,
And thence in Heaven called Satan, with bold words
Breaking the horrid silence, thus began.
"If thou beest he; but Oh how fallen! how changed
From him, who, in the happy realms of light,
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine
Myriads, though bright-if he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the glorious enterprise,
Joined with me once, now misery hath joined
In equal ruin; into what pit thou seest
From what highth fallen: so much the stronger proved
He with his thunder: and till then who knew
The force of those dire arms? Yet not for those,
Nor what the potent Victor in his rage
Can else inflict, do I repent, or change,
Though changed in outward lustre, that fixed mind,
And high disdain from sense of injur’d merit,
That with the Mightiest raised me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits arm’d,
That durst dislike his reign, and, me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power opposed
In dubious battle on the plains of Heaven,
And shook his throne. What though the field be lost?
All is not lost-the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome.
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power
Who, from the terror of this arm, so late
Doubted his empire-that were low indeed;
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall; since, by fate, the strength of Gods,
And this empyreal substance, cannot fail;
Since, through experience of this great event,
In arms not worse, in foresight much advanced,
We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal war,
Irreconcilable to our grand Foe,
Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heaven."

Unreliable Narrator

In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction[1]) is a literary device in which the credibility of the narrator is seriously compromised. This unreliability can be due to psychological instability, a powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader or audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but third-person narrators can also be unreliable.
The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to his unreliability. A more common, and dramatic, use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. This twist ending forces the reader to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In many cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving the reader to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.
The literary device of the unreliable narrator should not be confused with other devices such as euphemism, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, pathetic fallacy, personification, sarcasm, or satire; it may, however, coexist with such devices, as in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, a satire[2] whose narrator is unreliable (and thus not credible). Similarly, historical novels, speculative fiction, and clearly delineated dream sequences are generally not considered instances of unreliable narration, even though they describe events that did not or could not happen.
Some works suggest that all narrators are inherently unreliable due to self-interest, personal bias, or selective memory; "reliable narrators" would be "unreliable narrators without hints or clues of their very own unreliability".

Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007)

American short-story writer Grace Paley was born in New York City (1922), who was a politically active poet and mother in Greenwich Village when, one day, she got sick and was forced to arrange for her children to go to an after-school program for several weeks while she stayed home and rested. Without the children to take care of, she sat down at a typewriter and started writing stories that captured the voices of immigrant women in her neighborhood. Her first short story, "Goodbye and Good Luck," begins, "I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn't no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don't be surprised — change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused."

Paley's three collections of short stories were published in 1994 as one book, The Collected Stories. She died this past August (2007).

Donald Justice, 1925 - 2004

The poet Donald Justice was born in Miami (1925). He grew up in Florida during the Great Depression. His father was an itinerant carpenter, but his parents gave their boy piano lessons, which inspired Donald Justice to try to become a composer. He eventually switched to writing.

He started out as a minimalist poet. He came out with a book about once every ten years. And then in 1982, went back to his home state of Florida and found the landscape so different that he suddenly began to write poem after poem about his childhood. He died in 2004, just a few weeks before his collected poems came out.
___________
Pantoum Of The Great Depression

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on
We managed. No need for the heroic.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don't remember all the particulars.

We managed. No need for the heroic.
There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
I don't remember all the particulars.
Across the fence, the neighbors were our chorus.

There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows
Thank god no one said anything in verse.
The neighbors were our only chorus,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.

At no time did anyone say anything in verse.
It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.
No audience would ever know our story.

It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us.
We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
What audience would ever know our story?
Beyond our windows shone the actual world.

We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
Somewhere beyond our windows shone the actual world.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.

And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
We did not ourselves know what the end was.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.
We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues.

But we did not ourselves know what the end was.
People like us simply go on.
We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues,
But it is by blind chance only that we escape tragedy.

And there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.

Mona Van Duyn May 9, 1921 – December 2, 2004

Poet Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa (1921). Her mother was an extremely strict and protective woman and Van Duyn often felt as though she were growing up in a prison. She had to go to bed every night at 7:30 and her mother kept her home from school for weeks on end if she showed the slightest sign of a cold. She said, "[Any] attempts at disobedience were quickly squashed by frightening threats that I would get sick and die, since my parents would refuse to pay the doctor bills."

Since she was rarely allowed to leave the house, she started reading all the time, even though her mother warned her that so much reading could cause her to lose her mind. At school, the other kids made fun of her because she was such a good student and because she was so tall. She was the tallest woman in her town and she sometimes wondered if she might be the tallest woman in the world. The only place she felt free was in her notebook, which she began filling with poetry.

After high school, she thought she wanted to be a writer or a dress designer, and only chose writing because a professor in college encouraged her. She got a degree in English and became a college professor, and finally published her first book of poetry, Valentines to the Wide World, in 1959. She was thirty-eight years old. She later said, "For half my life, nobody knew I wrote."

She published many books of poetry, including Near Changes (1990), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her Selected Poems came out in 2002.



Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri
The quake last night was nothing personal,
you told me this morning. I think one always wonders,
unless, of course, something is visible: tremors
that take us, private and willy-nilly, are usual.

But the earth said last night that what I feel,
you feel; what secretly moves you, moves me.
One small, sensuous catastrophe
makes inklings letters, spelled in a worldly tremble.

The earth, with others on it, turns in its course
as we turn toward each other, less than ourselves, gross,
mindless, more than we were. Pebbles, we swell
to planets, nearing the universal roll,
in our conceit even comprehending the sun,
whose bright ordeal leaves cool men woebegone.

Jane Smiley, 1949 -

Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles (1949). She came from a family of journalists, but when she was growing up, she loved horses. She read every book about horses she could find and invented imaginary horse farms. She grew to be six feet two as a teenager. She said, "I didn't want to be a writer when I was in high school; all I remember wanting to be was shorter." But she wrote her first novel as her senior thesis at college. She said, "My plan was to go to England and then sort of wander around the world, with my typewriter in one hand, my banjo in the other, and my backpack on my back."

Instead, she got married. She had two daughters before she published her first novel, but she made sure that she had at least three or four hours of babysitting every day so she could write. She had a list of four novels she planned to write: an epic, a tragedy, a comedy, and a romance.

She's best known for her novel A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear, set on an Iowa farm, told from the perspective of the daughters. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and its success enabled Smiley to quit teaching and fulfill her lifelong dream of owning thoroughbred horses.

After she bought a dozen horses, she wrote her novel Horse Heaven (2000) about the world of horse breeding and racing. It was one of the happiest periods of her life. She said, "When I was writing [my novel] about horses, it just added to my pleasure. I'd get up, read something about horses, then go feed the horses. I'd get rid of the children by sending them off to school, then I'd write about horses and read more about horses. Ride the horses, feed the horses again ... it was really wonderful."


________________________________________
COLD FRONT

APRIL 18, 2005

When I was a young woman in Iowa, one quality I considered indispensable in a prospective mate was the willingness to drive to a coast. Over the years, there were trips to every conceivable coast, including Puget Sound, Niagara Falls, and Santa Barbara. Thus it was that, in January, 1984, when my daughters were five and a half years and fourteen months, it did not occur to me to worry about our journey by car all the way from Ames, Iowa, to the southern tip of Florida and then back up the coast to Sag Harbor. We just told several friends we were heading their way, threw some things into the back of the Chevy Cavalier wagon, and strapped the girls into their seats. We didn’t look at the weather report. Perhaps, therefore, we should not have been surprised when we were overtaken by sleet and snow an hour later and forced to stop far too soon at a Holiday Inn only a hundred miles or so from our house (twenty-nine hundred miles to go). When we got up in the morning and went out to the parking lot, the sun was suspiciously bright, but to us it seemed that Florida was just over the horizon.
There was snow all the way to Nashville, where we stayed with my uncle. In gratitude for his hospitality, my husband shovelled my uncle’s two-hundred-and-twenty-foot driveway. The neighbors came out to watch, and we soon discovered why—Nashvillians didn’t mind being snowed in, and, anyway, as soon as the sun came out in the morning the snow began to melt. But we were Iowans, and Florida was just over the horizon.
Crossing into northern Alabama, we admired the ice-covered trees, the graceful sweep of the highway through the hills, and the bright grass by the roadside that seemed to be strewn with shattered glass. We were alone on the highway with our snow tires. Not even road crews had come out with sand. We didn’t intend to be reckless—it simply never occurred to us to stop. At the end of a very long day, we reached Montgomery, where we pulled off into the parking lot of the first motel we saw.
Once we got some food, and unpacked a few things from the car, and visited with some friends who lived there, it was midnight. At this point, the fourteen-month-old decided that she was going to learn to walk. She staggered back and forth from one end of our motel room to the other for two hours, before falling over in her sleeper. Right about then, I noticed that the doors of the motel rooms kept slamming, and that lots of big semis were idling in the parking lot. We were up by six.
We smiled and made pleasant conjugal conversation. His job was to drive, and mine was to keep the peace. In the Florida Panhandle, we finally relaxed—no more snow. That was probably why the children started to fuss. It was also probably why he said, “Can’t you do something to shut them up?,” and why I took a bag of small wrapped soft candies out of the glove compartment and tossed them over the back of the seat to shouts of joyful disbelief. When I looked around, I saw it was the best game ever—unwrapping each piece and having the bliss of abundance melt in their mouths. I knew this stopgap offended him, though, so that’s probably why I said, “So, if something happened to both of us, who would they go to?”
He said, “My sister, of course.”
And I said, “Oh, not her. My—”
I don’t clearly remember that argument, except that it went on for five days and had many branches—down the sunny west coast of Florida (Me: “She’s twenty-two!” Him: “Her B.A. is in education!”), in low voices at my mother’s house (Him: “There’s something more going on here!” Me: “Why would you think that?”), through tight lips at his sister’s apartment in Boca Raton (Me: “They would never get to see my family!” Him: fraught silence), through a blinding rainstorm up the South Carolina coast (Me: “Yeah, right!” Him: “Say what you really think, I want to hear it”), and all through Washington, D.C., where we were supposed to stop for dinner with friends. We were getting along so badly by then that when he missed the exit I didn’t dare say anything. When I called my friend from a hotel in Trenton to apologize, she informed me that only two days before she had fallen down the stairs and broken her arm, but she had cooked dinner anyway. I apologized again. I didn’t try to explain; she didn’t have any kids. But years later, when she had two boys of her own, she said to me, “I was angry then, but I understand now. You were on a family vacation.”