2013 – Page 808

Toward A Less Conventional Poetry

David Yezzi provides a searing critique of what he claims is the shallow optimism of contemporary poetry:

The spectrum of subjects for poetry should be as broad as the spectrum of human emotions, which is not to say that all emotions are equally admirable, only that we exclude consideration of them at our peril.

How did the main effects of poetry ever boil down to these: the genial revelation, the sweetly poignant middle-aged lament, the winsome ode to the suburban soul? The problem is that such poems lie: no one in the suburbs is that bland; no reasonable person reaches middle age with so little outrage at life’s absurdities. What an excruciating world contemporary poetry describes: one in which everyone is either ironic, on the one hand, or enlightened and kind on the other—not to mention selfless, wise, and caring. Even tragic or horrible events provoke only pre-approved feelings.

Poetry of this ilk has a sentimental, idealizing bent; it’s high-minded and “evolved.” Like all utopias, the world it presents exists nowhere. Some might argue that poetry should elevate, showing people at their best, each of us aspiring to forgive foibles with patience and understanding. But that kind of poetry amounts to little more than a fairy tale, a condescending sop to our own vanity.

Converting To Atheism

In a recent interview, Susan Jacoby described how and why people become atheists:

[U]nless you’re raised atheist, people become atheists just as I did, by thinking about the same things Augustine thought about. Certainly one of the first things I thought about as a maturing child was “Why is there polio? Why are there diseases?” If there is a good God why are there these things? The answer of the religious person is “God has a plan we don’t understand.” That wasn’t enough for me.

There are people who don’t know anything about science. One of the reasons I recommend Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, is that basically he explains the relationship between science and atheism. But I don’t think people are really persuaded into atheism by books or by debates or anything like that. I think people become atheists because they think about the world around them. They start to search out books because they ask questions. In general, people don’t become atheists at a late age, in their 50s.

All of the atheists I know became atheists fairly early on. They became atheists in their adolescence or in their 20s because these are the ages at which you’re maturing, your brain is maturing, and you’re beginning to ask questions. If religion doesn’t do it for you, if, in fact, religion, as it does for me, contradicts any rational idea of how to live, then you become an atheist, or whatever you want to call it – an agnostic, a freethinker.

I’m currently working on a book on a history of religious conversion. One conversion narrative is always like Saul on the road to Damascus. A voice appears out of the sky, you fall off your horse, you hit yourself on the head, and when you wake up you know Jesus is the lord. That’s the classic sudden conversion narrative. It doesn’t happen that way with atheism. People don’t wake up one morning and say “Oh God! I’m an atheist.” You don’t fall off a horse and wake up and say “Oh! There’s no God. Ah. Now I know.” No. It’s more a slow questioning, if you were brought up religious, of whether those things make any sense.

Passing Through The Garden

Ashley Makar poignantly reflects on how her cancer diagnosis changed her perspective on the story of Jesus and his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane:

I used to identify with the disciples in this Bible story. By the time they got to the Garden of Gethsemane, they’d followed Jesus all over Galilee, healing the sick and feeding the hungry, standing up to the Pharisees. They were on the run from the Roman authorities, and they must have been exhausted, collapsed at the feet of the olive trees. But Jesus wouldn’t give his friends a break. Watch and pray with me, he said, demanding vigilance, when I imagine they could hardly keep their eyes open. For years I’ve wanted to talk back to Jesus on behalf of the disciples: Let them have a nap, I’ve wanted to say. And stop making me feel guilty about all the times I’m too tired to be vigilant in the face of others’ pain.

I’m still a sleeping disciple, prone to compassion fatigue, much of the time. But since my cancer diagnosis, I’m beginning to empathize with Jesus at Gethsemane: Just as he’d gotten his life’s work going, just as he was planting the seeds of a new society, just as he was gaining followers willing to give up everything for justice and love, he found out he was probably going to die, at the age of 33. I can imagine Jesus, dashing his knee on the rocky grounds of Gethsemane, the garden it could be—the Kingdom of God on earth—if only he didn’t have to die early.

Just as I’d begun following my vocation to work with refugees, just as I was finding ways to write about God, just as I’d begun living into beloved community, I found out I have incurable cancer, at the age of 33. My life’s work would only be a drop in the bucket of the radical transformation Jesus was trying to make of the world. And I won’t suffer like he did: Cancer is no crucifixion. But sometimes I stomp my feet on the ground of all I feel is being taken from me.

(Image: Agony in the Garden by Andrea Mantegna, 1460, via Wikimedia Commons)

Matter Over Mind

Priscella Long is disturbed by neuropsychologist Benjamin Libet’s experiment on human decision-making:

The decision was to move a hand. Each person was instructed to move his or her hand whenever the desire arose, to report the precise time this wish or intention to move the hand appeared, and then to go ahead and move the hand. Subjects sat in front of a clocklike face with a light going around like a minute hand, only faster, so that milliseconds could be reported.

The results had ominous suggestions for our idea of free will:

The [subjects’] decision to move the hand occurred in the following order. First neurons fired in the premotor cortex (neurons responsible for planning and executing hand motions). These neurons communicated to the motor cortex, which fired, sending instructions to the motor neurons in the spinal cord that make the muscles contract. At this point—and not before—the subject “decided” to move his or her hand. The “decision” to move the hand occurred before but extremely close to the time the hand moved, a long 350-400 milliseconds after the brain began the process of signaling the hand to move.

What are we to make of this? Is it me or my brain that decides things? [Author Christof] Koch writes, “At least in the laboratory, the brain decides well before the mind does; the conscious experience of willing a simple act—the sensation of agency or authorship—is secondary to the actual cause.”

Bonding Over Booze

Jessica Freeman-Slade reviews Rosie Schaap’s memoir, Drinking with Men:

As a teenager, she’d dress like a Gypsy and offer tarot card readings on the Metro-North New Haven line for free beers; as an adult uncovering her latent spirituality, she’d find refuge in bars between stints as a volunteer chaplain at the foot of ground zero; as a married woman, it took a special bar in Montreal to feel her relationship coming apart. To be a bar regular, she says, is all about “adapting—and about enjoying people’s company not only on one’s own terms, but on others.” We go to bars to find ourselves in other people’s habits, and in finding other people, find ourselves.

Freeman-Slade tested out Schaap’s advice in bars across New York City:

[Midtown East and West] is where I first started to see what Schaap was drawn to in her favorite bars: the friendships between the patrons, and the warm greetings by the bartenders that recognize them. At the Archive, a little place in Murray Hill where the happy hour red wine was perfectly quaffable, I found a gaggle of midtown lawyers, each clinging to his bar stools and ordering an elaborately named scotch or whiskey of choice. “Can you believe how expensive it is to drink in NY?” asked a red-faced man in a too-tight shirt, leaning across my chair to snatch his vodka-and-soda. “It’s a luxury activity,” I respond, and we clink our happy-hour drinks in solidarity. A frizzy-haired woman to my left swished a diluted cocktail between her teeth as she complained about her work week to the bartender, but even she declined a refill. “I’m going to surprise my husband tonight,” she snickered, and then added, with a low raspy chuckle, “I hope it’s not a bad surprise.”

Such confessionals would be out of place at a fancier bar, but watching people ease out of the workdays can be your first instruction in how to drink like a grown-up. Schaap said, “I’ve come of age in bars,” and perhaps the post-work drink is how you first observe functional adults at play.

The Novelist’s Dream Diary

In a review of La Boutique Obscure, a dream diary by Georges Perec, Tom Jokinen remembers another famous attempt:

Graham Greene also kept a dream diary, which was published after his death in 1991 as A World Of My Own. As Malcolm Bradbury points out in his review for the New York Times, Greene believed in worlds beyond what he called “The Common World” of shared reality: he believed in the mysteries that exist “in the bathroom cupboard, in secret tunnels under the ground, in the labyrinthine world of espionage, in the realm of sexual deceit,” and in dreams. As a Catholic, albeit a Catholic troubled by the arbitrary constraints of the earthly church, he believed too in the world we’re not meant to see except through Revelation. The diary is a stealth autobiography of Greene’s life in the dreamworld. … In an odd way, both A World of My Own and Perec’s La Boutique Obscure are works of non-fiction.

David Auerbach considers Perec’s final dream in the book – “Perec and his father chased, captured, and imprisoned by Nazis in short, punchy scenes”:

Ending the dream journal where and when he did was wise. “I thought I was recording the dreams I was having,” Perec writes in the book’s introduction. “I have realized that it was not long before I began having dreams only in order to write them.” As Perec hints, the dreams recounted in La boutique obscure chart out not just his recurrent obsessions but also a linear narrative about dreaming, telling a story about the journal itself and the pain that went into its composition, a pain that ultimately stems from the author’s loss of both his parents in World War II. By the end of the book, Perec’s dreams are crying out for him to stop writing them down.

You can read some excerpts from Perec’s journals here and Sasha Archibald’s analysis of Perec’s dreams here.

Face Of The Day

A description from Juxtapoz:

[Françoise Nielly]’s colorful portraits, created using thick strokes of oil on canvas, are based off simple black and white photographs. According to her bio, Nielly ‘takes a risk: her painting is sexual, her colors free, exuberant, surprising, even explosive, the cut of her knife incisive, her color pallete dazzling.’

Ending With A Bang

Maureen O’Connor proclaims that “the celebrity sex tape is dead”:

The same day that Ray J’s “diss track” [about his sex-tape encounter with Kim Kardashian] appeared online, porn megastar James Deen confirmed making a “sex tape” with former Teen Mom Farrah Abraham. As Abraham went through the motions of sex tape denial, feigning litigiousness and “shock,” Deen described the “sex tape” as a professional, commercially produced porno: “Definitely not dating. Got tested together on Friday and then saw her on set. That is my only experience with the lady.” As the Awl’s Choire Sicha notes, “This is not a sex tape! This is a good old-fashioned porno. And so we have come full circle.”

Her theory:

Now that homemade celebrity nudity is available for free en masse — from hackers, from social-media-enabled starfuckers, and from social-media-enabled celebrities themselves, sometimes by accident — perhaps the value of the sex tape has diminished, while the betrayal associated with selling one has gone up. To make and save a sex tape, in 2013, requires a level of trust higher than the asking price for most sex tapes.

Tracy Clark-Flory notes a double standard when a starlet makes a sex tape:

It seems there’s an unspoken rule in our culture: As long as you’re an unwitting — or “unwitting” — porn star (i.e., you appear embarrassed and ashamed of your sex tape), you’re allowed to be more than just a porn star. You can sell your own perfume line at Walgreens and Wal-Mart. You can make $10,000 a tweet and broadcast your wedding on E! and star in Super Bowl commercials. It becomes a comeback tale. But if you make the intentional, unabashed choice to expose yourself to the world for profit, you are forever defined by it.

A Poem For Saturday

“An Inheritance” by Naomi Replansky, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2013 William Carlos Williams Award:

“Five dollars, four dollars, three dollars, two,
One, and none, and what do we do?”

This is the worry that never got said
But ran so often in my mother’s head

And showed so plain in my father’s frown
That to us kids it drifted down.

It drifted down like soot, like snow,
In the dream-tossed Bronx, in the long ago.

I shook it off with a shake of the head.
I bounced my ball. I ate warm bread,

I skated down the steepest hill.
But I must have listened, against my will:

When the world blows wrong, I can hear it today.
Then my mother’s worry stops all play

And, as if in its rightful place,
My father’s frown divides my face.

(Reprinted from Collected Poems © 2012 by Naomi Replansky. Used by kind permission of David R.Godine, Publisher. Photo of Grand Concourse and E 161 street in the Bronx, circa 1900, via Wikimedia Commons)

Year: 2013