Year: 2013

Robert Archambeau explores it:

When the wind, in an Auden poem, says “come,” we are not getting a representation of nature as something different from ourselves: we are getting a glimpse of human temptation and desire. When the water in “Streams” comes across as playful, we are not being told about the quality of nature so much as about certain human moods and capacities—Auden’s personification of water is much closer to a Greek naiad than to the streams above Wordsworth’s ruined abbey. When Auden gives us a landscape, he is less interested in it as a place or an ecosystem or as a physical reality—like Schiller’s Greeks, he rushes past its otherness and uses it as a way of describing human psychological states. …

The critic G.S. Fraser once remarked that Auden, unlike many of his contemporaries, was always interested in the moral rather than the sensuous element in his images, writing,

“Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm” where most poets would have written something more like, “Lay your golden head, my love / Heavy on my cradling arm.” There is truth in this—Auden’s is a world of psychology and morality rather than of creaturely sentimentality. And, despite his love of a particular kind of landscape, full of disused mines and scarred limestone cliffs, he is never a particularly visual poet, preferring to allegorize, personify, and psychologize where a more usual sort of modern poet would concentrate on physical detail and specificity. Even “In Praise of Limestone,” a poem whose title seems to promise an evocation of a specific natural landscape and its otherness, quickly turns back to the human: “examine this region / Of short distances and definite places,” he writes,
“What could be more like Mother?” You see the pattern: Auden turns to nature to find something specific to the human psychological drama.

Previous Dish on Auden here, here, and here.

Joseph Stromberg explains why scientists draw on pop culture when naming new species, citing the genus of ferns named for Lady Gaga and the jellyfish and bee species named for a character from “The Big Bang Theory”:

“Mostly, when you publish research about termite gut microbes, you don’t get much interest—even most of the people in the field don’t really give a crap,” says David Roy Smith, a scientist at University of Western Ontario who studies these and other types of microorganisms for a living. Recently, though, he saw firsthand that this doesn’t always have to be the case: His colleagues discovered two new species of protists that lived inside termite guts and helped them digest wood, and the group named them Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque, after the mythical creature Chtulhu, created by influential science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft.

“I remember Erick James, who was the lead author on the study, telling us that he’d named it something cool right before we submitted it, but we didn’t really pay him much attention,” Smith says. “Then, afterwards, day after day, he kept coming into the lab telling us he’d seen an article on the species on one site, then another. By the second week, we were getting phone calls from the Los Angeles Times.” Eventually, James was invited to present work on the protists at an annual conference of H.P. Lovecraft fans, and a search for Cthulhu macrofasciculumque now yields nearly 3,000 results.

Thomas Frank proposes retiring the phrase “I would argue”:

I’m familiar with this particular cliché-formation because in the early 1980s, when my friends and I were high school debaters, we talked this way all the time. Arguments were what allowed us to keep score back in those days: one team argued for something, the other team argued against it, and the argument was won or lost. But high school debate was a game – a game for teenagers. The point wasn’t for an individual debater actually to believe any particular argument and win the room over with the radiance of his faith; it was for him to be able to argue anything. Insincerity was essential.

For the commentator class, the usage has a similar distancing effect. It’s a sort of shortcut to objectivity, which suggests that the pundit in question doesn’t actually believe something – oh heavens no! – but is merely reporting that the belief might be held by someone, somewhere. So when Nina Easton appears on Fox News and says (in a sentence I have chosen for its utter averageness) that “one could argue that Barack Obama’s smartest political move was putting Hillary Clinton in his cabinet so that she wasn’t outside with Bill Clinton causing mischief,” she isn’t actually asserting this as the truth. She’s only reporting that one might assert this, were one so inclined. Modifying “argue” with “could” or “would,” as Easton does here, distances the wise person even further from the forbidden stuff of opinion.