It makes sense the short form … lacks a sturdy name: It’s varied, shifting, and hard to define, and its parameters are continually up for debate. Flash fictions have a narrative quality that makes them different from classical prose poems; at the same time, they tend to have a strong lyric element that aligns them with poetry. This formal uncertainty can be an attractive quality: It helps create the possibility for formal and emotional surprise. But you also don’t want to have too much carte blanche. You never want to enter the territory where you think, “Well, I can write anything and get away with it.” …
I’m interested in writers who are able to create a more blended kind of integration between the narrative and lyric drives—and I’ve noticed that in the short form, the lyric impulse becomes more pronounced. … One source of inspiration was Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, though it’s tricky to separate that book’s short sections from one another (the work really functions as a novel). Isaac Babel, who is in many ways my favorite writer, demonstrates the extreme compression I look for in very short fiction—whenever a writer can compress that much into a short space, I always feel that what we call “poetry” is lurking close by.
Previous Dish on flash fiction here. We also featured a piece of flash fiction as A Short Story For Saturday here.
On Thursday, James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, announced the appointment of Charles Wright as the new Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry:
Charles Wright is a master of the meditative, image-driven lyric. For almost 50 years his poems have reckoned with what he calls ‘language, landscape, and the idea of God.’ Wright’s body of work combines a Southern sensibility with an allusive expansiveness, for moments of singular musicality.
Truly, is there anybody better? No — though some equals among his peers come to mind. His body of work takes in Dante, the Civil War, Eastern philosophy, manhood, poetry and poets, and the superaliveness of a certain American mind in the second half of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first.
Wright was born in 1935 in Tennessee and served with the U.S. Army, first exploring poetry while stationed in Italy, and was later a professor at the University of Virginia. His influences range from the work of Ezra Pound to that of ancient Chinese poets. In 2011, he told PBS that the content of all of his poems, no matter their precise subject matter, is “language, landscape and the idea of God.” He also noted that his poems have gotten less “loquacious” as he’s gotten older. “I once said if a guy can’t say what he has to say in three lines, he better change his job,” he joked. “I haven’t gotten that far yet, but I’m down to six lines.”
His poetic bona fides are many: 24 poetry collections and two books of essays. A Pulitzer Prize. A National Book Critics Circle Award. A National Book Award. The International Griffin Poetry Prize. A Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. A National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. A term as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. The Library of Congress’ own award for lifetime achievement in the form. (And lots more.)
In an NPR interview about this appointment, Wright describes his sources of inspiration:
It’s always been the idea of landscape that’s around me, that I look at; the idea of the music of language; and then the idea of God, or of that spiritual mystery that we doggedly follow, some of us, all of our days, and which we won’t find the answer to until it’s too late — or maybe it’s not too late. Maybe it’s just the start, I don’t know.
In any case, that’s what I’ve always written about, and those three things are the meanings of my poems. The content changes — you know, what it’s about, this, that and the other — but the meaning has always been the same, the same thing I’ve been after. Ever since I was a tongue-tied altar boy in the Episcopal Church.
Wright hopes to bring a fresh perspective to the job:
As the new poet laureate, Wright will have few required duties. The library provides an office and allows each poet to define the job however he or she would like. (The salary is $35,000, plus $5,000 for travel — meager, even for a poet.) Some laureates stay in Washington and use the office, some don’t. “The most important thing that they do,” Billington says, “is to provide an inspirational example of how powerful poetry can be.”
Billy Collins (2001-2003) began a program to bring a poem a day into high school classrooms across the country. Ted Kooser (2004-2006) wrote a weekly newspaper column. And the most recent poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey (2012-2014), toured the country for a regular feature on the PBS NewsHour called “Where Poetry Lives.”
Wright has something quieter in mind. “I’m not going to be an activist laureate the way Natasha was,” he says. “She was great at it, but I’ve been around the block more than twice — I’m 79. I guess I’ll bring wisdom and good luck. It’s all a new experience for me. Basically, one has to pull up one’s socks and say, ‘I’ll do it.’ My wife wanted me to. She wouldn’t say so, but she wanted me to. I think she thought we’d be coming up to D.C. and going to museums.”
In his 1989 Paris Review interview, Wright had this to say about what he looks for in poetry:
Music and substance, I guess, as most anyone would. One man’s music, naturally, is another man’s Muzak. One’s ear is one’s Virgil, however, leading you on. … One looks for a reach, an ambition. One looks for language, an exuberance. Well, one looks for Hart Crane and Emily Dickinson, for Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman. There seem to me to be certain absolutes in whatever field of endeavor one is in. In business and banking they may be availability and convertibility, security and safekeeping, minimal loss and steady, incremental accession. I don’t think it’s that way in poetry, though such values will get you to temporary high places. Brilliance is what you reach for, language that has a life of its own, seriousness of subject matter beyond the momentary gasp and glitter, a willingness to take on what’s difficult and beautiful, a willingness to be different and abstract, a willingness to put on the hair shirt and go into the desert and sit still, and listen hard, and write it down, and tell no one … Is that asking too much? Probably. Is there going to be someone to come along who fits this description? Probably. Will we recognize him when he comes? Probably not.
You can read over fifty of Wright’s poems here. His most recent collection is Caribou: Poems.
Zachary Copfer gives deceased figures, such as Darwin, a living tribute:
During his graduate studies in microbiology, artist Zachary Copfer invented a new type of photography, one grown entirely of living bacteria.
By exposing sections of microscopic organisms to radiation, he accelerates their growth, allowing them to multiply and compose vivid photographic portraits. Copfer’s subjects include both artists and scientists who inspire him; famous images Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso are replicated in Serratia marcescens, a human pathogen often associated with infections of the urinary tract and respiratory systems. …
Copfer’s portraits closely resemble the art of Roy Lichtenstein; his faces bear the same comic book-style polka dots made famous by the legendary pop artist. Also like Lichtenstein’s paintings and prints, they are duplicates of mass-produced, iconic public domain images. But quite unlike the work of Lichenstein and his colleagues, Copfer’s images are imbued with an undeniably unique and human tenor. These bacterial cells, some drawn from the bodies of the subjects they portray, are corporeal and therefore inevitably personal.
You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.
Isaac Chotiner is willing to consider some sort of response:
[I]t’s not clear what America can or should do, which is why remarks like those from John McCain, who called this “an existential threat” and seems to want some sort of huge response, are alarming. But that doesn’t let the United States off the hook, and certainly not at the rhetorical level. Would Obama say that the Cambodian genocide was ultimately up to the Cambodians to solve, after America bombed and destabilized the country? Was the genocide in the former Yugoslavia a Bosnian problem, even though the West kept an arms embargo on the Bosnians, essentially preventing them from defending themselves?
Wieseltierism really has taken over that magazine, from top to bottom. I’d say eight years of blood and treasure and failure in Iraq is enough. Unless, like Wieseltier, you see the entire planet as a patient and America as the only nurse. Relatedly, Noah Millman declares that people “who think the world will swiftly get more peaceful if we mind our own business may well be just as wrong as the people who think that by sticking our nose into other people’s business we can force the world to be peaceful”:
[W]e are responsible for the situation in Iraq.
We are directly responsible in that we broke the existing arrangement of power and installed ourselves as the occupier. We are also indirectly responsible inasmuch as our overweening hegemonic influence in the region means that inaction is also a kind of action. So, because the Syrian civil war has not resolved, but expanded and become more violent and extreme, and because that civil war and Iraq’s are, with the rise of ISIS, effectively merging, to the extent that we may be “blamed” for not resolving that civil war, we may also be “blamed” indirectly for the deterioration in Iraq.
None of which means we should make feel obliged to do something stupid and counter-productive, but it provides and genuine moral explanation for why we might feel obliged to do something.
I love this formulation: hegemony means inaction is action, so there’s no difference between the two! So let me put this as kindly as I can. We lost 5,000 young Americans trying to keep this centrifugal country in one piece. After eight years, and huge expenses in training and equipping the Iraqi army, we bear no blame and never have for the pathological sectarianism of so many Arab countries, culturally or politically. And it’s time to have enough self-respect to say so. The sanest, wisest way to wriggle out of this trap is precisely to do nothing – again and again – until the pathology of dependence is finished.
If there is something we can do, it should be to ratchet up our ability to monitor these groups – sorry, NSA-haters, but spying is one of our strongest and least disruptive tools in preventing attacks on the homeland – and to provide as much diplomatic and political advice, if asked, as to how to render the situation less volatile. But even there, the limits of our behavior are so much more profound than the potential. If you think Maliki pursued text-book sectarianism out of a whim, or could have been effectively dissuaded by a few American military officials, you are only missing the entire modern history of Iraq. And in sectarian warfare, there is usually very little magnanimity. Just payback – again and again and again.
Leave it alone. And do what we can to protect ourselves. That doesn’t guarantee anything. But intervention guarantees far worse.
A new volume of poetry by Kevin Simmonds, Bend to It, arrives with praise from the celebrated California poet D.A.Powell, winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, who has said of Simmonds’ new poems, “Piercing the veil of a culture of silence, Kevin Simmonds brilliantly fuses quiet meditative traditions with a courageous impulse to dare beyond the boundaries of convention, to combine the bel canto of Italian art songs with the dynamic energy of James Brown; the tranquility of the zen masters with the fire and heat of the enraptured body.” We’ll post three of Kevin Simmonds’ poems this weekend.
“Lie” by Kevin Simmonds:
I’d write fewer poems
for my father to say
over the flat cell phone
he’s thinking of me
remembers some vital time
now history
when I was a small brown promise
with his wide nostrils flat feet
just like his daddy
all the women would say & feel good
about saying it
I would give up all the mouths
I’ve fallen into
even the soft ambulance
of a man’s body
Jurassic Park was released 21 years ago this week. Kottke recommends the above short documentary that reveals the technology behind the remarkably convincing special effects:
When Spielberg originally conceived the movie, he was going to use stop-motion dinosaurs. [Visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic] was tasked with providing motion blur to make them look more realistic. But in their spare time, a few engineers made a fully digital T. Rex skeleton and when the producers saw it, they flipped out and scrapped the stop-motion entirely. Fun story.
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has just opened up his company’s patents, saying that the company will not “initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.” In a conference call with reporters also on Thursday, Musk added that the company plans on aggressively filing electric car-related patents and opening them to the public as a pre-emptive measure to thwart other companies or potential patent trolls. This also applies retroactively to all currently held Tesla patents.
Musk isn’t naive, and Tesla isn’t a charity. Rather, he knows that Tesla’s real battle isn’t with other automakers for leadership of today’s niche market for electric cars. It’s the much greater struggle between electric cars and their gas-powered counterparts.
Viewed in that context, the obstacles to Tesla’s success aren’t the Nissan Leaf and the BMW i3—they’re the constraints of technology, cost, infrastructure, and customer expectations. The more money is put into electric batteries, the cheaper and more powerful they’ll become. The more electric cars there are on the road, the greater will be the demand for regional and national networks of electric charging stations. And guess what company will stand to benefit the most.
Tesla needs widespread adoption of electric cars and the easiest way to do that is to get other automakers to sell them too. More electric cars in the world means Tesla’s cars aren’t so weird, and they become an easier sell to a skeptical public. … At the end of the day, the biggest risk for Musk isn’t that BMW or Toyota will steal his technology. It’s that the big automakers might not be interested in electric cars enough to bother building them at all.
Meanwhile, Timothy Lee suggests that electric cars aren’t such a unique case after all:
The standard economic argument for patents assumes that without them, new inventions will be quickly imitated by competitors, destroying the ability of the original inventor to turn a profit. But if you look at the history of actual inventions, this is often not how things work out.
In practice, the biggest challenge many inventors face isn’t fending off copycats, it’s developing a market for the product in the first place. For major inventions, the potential market is usually much larger than the first few firms can hope to serve. The challenge is converting all those potential customers into actual customers. In a new industry, competitors can actually help with this by helping spread news about the invention, pioneering better sales techniques, and developing improvements that make the product more attractive.
Daniel Lewis, author of a biography of the Smithsonian’s first curator of birds, considers the importance of color dictionaries in the history of science:
Shy, retiring, and nerdy in the extreme, [ornithologist Robert Ridgway] was an astonishingly talented identifier and user of colors. This gift was key in a field where distinguishing among subspecies of birds with slight color variations was essential to understanding the mechanisms of evolution, speciation, and other scientific aspects of the natural world.
Ridgway wrote a short color dictionary in 1886, just as he finished work on a groundbreaking set of rules and guidelines for naming birds. He worked quietly on his color project for decades, until 1912, when he self-published a work with 1,115 named colors: Color Standards and Color Nomenclature. The book is filled with color swatches with names like Dragon’s-blood Red, which makes me think of blood dripping from a sword; or Light Paris Green, which seems like a holiday. …
These color dictionaries have a deep, personal, and complicated history – even though they emerged from a strong desire to quantify the world, as taxonomic publications tried to do in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Colors are slippery, and they say something about the personal prejudices and interests of the namers, at least as much as they speak to the qualities of colors themselves. We don’t use them anymore because in book form they would be impossibly unwieldy: There are now more named colors than you can shake a dragon at – far more than would fit into a single volume. But Ridgway’s legacy lives on – his book evolved into the Pantone color chart relied upon by graphic designers, house paint creators, interior designers, fashion mavens, flag makers, and anyone looking to identify colors.
The Dish 