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A Poem For Sunday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Today we post a poem chosen in light of the chapter “Capturing Animals” from Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from ‘Listening and Writing,’ a series we introduced yesterday that was designed by the poet Ted Hughes for the BBC in the 1960s and addressed primarily to children and teachers.

Early on in the book, he struck the note of his approach, “Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it . . . . Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. . . . The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them . . . then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written.”

The nineteenth-century English poet John Clare, whose poem appears below, wrote with exceptional ease, naturalness, and intimacy about the creatures of our world.

The Sand Martin by John Clare (1795-1864):

Thou hermit haunter of the lonely glen

And common wild and heath—the desolate face

Of rude waste landscapes far away from men

Where frequent quarries give thee dwelling place,

With strangest taste and labour undeterred

Drilling small holes along the quarry’s side,

More like the haunts of vermin than a bird

And seldom by the nesting boy descried—

I’ve seen thee far away from all thy tribe

Flirting about the unfrequented sky

And felt a feeling that I can’t describe

Of lone seclusion and a hermit joy

To see thee circle round nor go beyond

That lone heath and its melancholy pond.

(Photo of two sand martins by Jo Garbutt)

Hitler Before Hitler

Who embodied evil before the Nazi dictator? Tyler Cowen highlights an answer from Tim O’Neill:

People were generally very familiar with the Bible pre-1900, so the figures usually cited as the epitome of evil tended to be Judas Iscariot, Herod the Great or, most commonly, the Pharaoh of the story of Moses in Exodus. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote: “No man was a warmer wisher for reconciliation than myself, before the fatal nineteenth of April, 1775 [the date of the Lexington massacre], but the moment the event of that day was made known, I rejected the hardened, sullen Pharaoh of England forever.”  The Confederates referred to Abraham Lincoln as “the northern Pharaoh” and abolitionists in turn called slaveowners “modern Pharaohs”.  Americans also referred to all tyrants by comparing them to King George III and Napoleon was often cited as the ultimate bogeyman in Britain.  But generally it was Pharaoh who was used the way we use Hitler.

Quote For The Day II

“There is no man … however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory,” – Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove.

(Hat tip: John Benjamin)

Mental Health Break

A sunny rap from a tiny planet:

No God, No Problem?

Peter Watson rejects the view that “there is something missing in our lives” when we try to live without religion. He turns to his own recent book, The Age of Atheists, for examples of those who didn’t get down about the death of God:

I surveyed a raft of playwrights, poets, philosophers, psychologists and novelists who have been active since Nietzsche made his fateful pronouncement, many of whom did and do not share this view that there is something missing in modern life. Some did – Ibsen, Strindberg, Henry James and Carl Gustav Jung would all be cases in point. But far more did not see any reason to mourn the passing of God – George Santayana, Stéphane Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud of course, and, not least, the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. Alfred Sisley and Gustave Caillebotte, Degas, Pissarro and Renoir were each very different in artistic style but they did have something in common. As the art critic Robert Hughes writes in The Shock of the New, “It was a feeling that the life of the city and the village, the cafés and the bois, the salons and the bedrooms, the boulevards, the seaside and the banks of the Seine, could become a vision of Eden – a world or ripeness and bloom, projecting an untroubled sense of wholeness.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, reviewing Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God, tells a less happy story:

We are meaning-seeking animals. And if we can no longer believe in God we will find other things to worship.

Eagleton’s book is a brisk, intelligent, and provocative tour of Western intellectual history since the Enlightenment, understood as a series of chapters in the search for a God-substitute. The Enlightenment found it in reason, the Idealists in the human spirit, the Romantics in nature and culture, the Marxists in revolution, and Nietzsche in the Übermensch. Others chose the nation, the state, art, the sublime, humanity, society, science, the life force, and personal relationships. None of these had entirely happy outcomes, and none was self-sustaining. …

The result is that we are witnesses to the advent of the first genuinely atheist culture in history. The apparent secularism of the 18th to 20th centuries was nothing of the kind. God—absent, hiding, yet underwriting the search for meaning—was in the background all along. In postmodernism, that sense of an absence, or what Eagleton calls “nostalgia for the numinous,” is no longer there. Not only is there no redemption, there is nothing to be redeemed. We are left, Eagleton writes, with “Man the Eternal Consumer.”

Recent Dish on these questions here and here.

A Slip-N-Slide With Siddhartha

It’s not all fun and games at Suoi Tien Cultural Theme Park in Ho Chi Minh City, “the world’s first Buddhist waterslide park”:

You would think that a theme park attraction called the Palace of Unicorns would be a charming fantasy world. You’d be wrong. Located within Suoi Tien Cultural Theme Park in Ho Chi Minh City, the Palace of Unicorns is a graphic depiction of Buddhist hell. But the sight of torture and violence being inflicted on drug addicts, gamblers, and adulterers is just one small part of Suoi Tien’s diverse and colorful offerings.

Located next to a garbage dump, the amusement park, which opened in 1995, is full of huge sculpted dragons, tortoises, phoenixes, and Buddhas. Employees dressed as golden monkeys scamper around the grounds, tasked with creating mischief.

Suoi Tien is specifically devoted to the Southeast Asian animistic form of Buddhism, so “instead of Mickey and Daffy, Suoi Tien has chosen the Dragon, Unicorn, Tortoise, and Phoenix as its sacred animals.” As for what you’re seeing above?

Perhaps the strangest and most unnerving feature of the enormous park is the crocodile kingdom. A pond with over 1,500 live crocodiles, visitors are invited to feed them with raw meat attached to fishing poles.

The whole thing is quite impressive and constructed on a huge scale. Although, the lax safety controls -acres of wet, slippery concrete, low hanging stalactites in the cavern water slides, and the bay of crocodiles- remind you that you are not in Disneyland anymore.

(Photo by Mike Fernwood)

Suddenly Jewish

In an essay exploring notions of belonging, James Meek recalls how, shortly before her death, his grandmother revealed to the family the long-held “confession, or acknowledgment, that besides being Hungarian, she was Jewish.” Meek reflects on discovering an overlooked heritage later in life:

What I knew of Jews was gleaned – not that I was trying to glean – from news about Israel, from books and films about the Holocaust, from a TV play by Jack Rosenthal set in London called Bar Mitzvah Boy, and from Woody Allen films. I’m not sure I was even conscious in the 1970s that Woody Allen was Jewish. He was a funny American comedian who looked a bit like me. I had no Jewish experience. And then came Granny’s near-death announcement and it turned out me and my sibs had been having one. Not knowing we were having a Jewish experience was our Jewish experience.

Quarter Jewishness might seem a small and meaningless thing, and perhaps should be. It was Jewish enough for the Nazis to designate it as a particular category, ‘crossbreed of the second degree’. Under the terms set by the Wannsee Conference they were to be left more or less alone unless they had a particularly ‘Jewish appearance’ or ‘a political record that shows they feel and behave like a Jew’, in which case they would be exterminated along with the others. Israel, accordingly, under its Law of Return, offers citizenship to those with at least one Jewish grandparent. One day just after the turn of the millennium I was sitting in the canteen of the Knesset interviewing an MP for a newspaper article about proposed modifications to the Law of Return. At some point I mentioned my own grandparentage, which, having conferred Jewishness down the maternal line, made me of the tribe, halachically speaking. Before then the encounter had been rather stiff and remote; afterwards my interlocutor relaxed, smiled, chuckled, and made me understand that as long as his political rivals didn’t meddle with the law, I’d be welcome. It seemed an arbitrary offer to make an atheist who couldn’t say what and when the Jewish feast days were, or speak one word of Hebrew or Yiddish, and who had no intention of becoming Israeli. It was friendly, and gave me a warm buzz, yet it was odd. Like a credit card offer, I’d been pre-approved for membership, using the same criteria with which my forebears had been singled out for execution.

The Most Influential Rock Band Of All Time?

Jack Hamilton nominates Zeppelin:

Depending on your preference in white male hagiography, “modern” rock music is often said to have started with Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” or Sgt. Pepper, but these myths are wishful, and overly fanciful: Modern rock music started with Led Zeppelin. Their influence, for better and worse, over all that’s come since is singular. Punk in the 1970s was a rejection of their pompous pretentiousness, metal in the 1980s an affirmation of their excesses, grunge in the 1990s a reclamation of punk that often sounded a lot like Led Zeppelin. We have Led Zeppelin to blame for Creed; we have Led Zeppelin to thank for the White Stripes. They were a band loved by millions, but if you were smart, or just cool, you probably hated them. Led Zeppelin lifted popular music to new heights of opulence and ambition and in doing so made people fear for its future. … Forty-five years later, we live in their aftershocks.

The Picture Of Controversy

Early into his long profile of Terry Richardson, Benjamin Wallace sums up why the fashion photographer holds “a singular, controversial position” in his field:

He has cultivated a reputation of being a professional debauchee, a proud pervert who has, outside his commercial work, produced a series of extremely explicit images—often including himself naked and erect—that many find pornographic and misogynistic, and which can make viewers distinctly uncomfortable. In recent years, a number of the models in those images have indicated that they, too, weren’t altogether comfortable, filing lawsuits and, increasingly, speaking up in essays and interviews. Richardson has been called “the world’s most fucked up fashion photographer” by the website Jezebel, “fashion’s shameful secret” by the Guardian, and “America’s Next Top Scumbag” by Wonkette. Baron von Luxxury, a Los Angeles DJ, wrote a song called “Terry Richardson” with the lyrics “She’ll have a few more sedatives / I’ll have whatever comes next / And then I’ll burn the negatives.”

Callie Beusman rips Wallace to shreds for “consistently gloss[ing] over Richardson’s sketchy behavior.” Robyn Pennacchia shakes her head in disgust, and Mary Elizabeth Williams is also unsympathetic:

There are, to be fair, references to lawsuits “quietly settled” and some of the more vivid and troubling stories about the photographer, including Charlotte Waters’ account from earlier this year of a session in which “He also straddled me and started jerking off on my face. He told me to keep my eyes open super wide.” But the overwhelming image is of a man who grew up listening to his father banging Anjelica Huston in the next room and struggled with addiction, who now “meditates and attends AA meetings and exercises daily” but still “obviously misses the old Terry.” …

I find it more damning than anything else out there written about him, because it shows a man of deeply arrested maturity, a man who lives in “always the same clothing, always the same pose in front of the camera, always the same sandwich.” I don’t find understanding some of the reasons someone might be selfish and unfeeling toward vulnerable women any excuse at all; I just find it, if anything, more compelling evidence of the credibility of his accusers.

One of those accusers is Anna del Gaizo, who says she is bothered by “the fact that this man, who has announced with his actions that his desires, fantasies, and yes, his raging boner are more important than another human being’s state of mind or consequential distress, continues to be revered, hired, and supported by celebrities, professionals, and publications alike. And that’s really the problem here.” Tom Hawking, who finds Wallace’s profile “startlingly sympathetic,” doesn’t disagree:

The quality of Richardson’s art is beside the point. Throughout history, societies have been notably willing to indulge the whims of those it deems to be worthy artists, from the catankerous to the thoroughly unpleasant to the downright criminal. To an extent, this comes back to the good old question of art/artist separation. But … Richardson’s life and his art are so intertwined that it’s impossible to separate them. …

[W]e return [to] the fact that we’re talking about consent and exploitation, about a man coercing young women into situations they find threatening, and/or to do things they might be reluctant to do, or simply just don’t want to do. Richardson is a grown man in a position of power, and the accusation is that he has exploited this power to, in his own words, become “a powerful guy with his boner, dominating all these girls.” Sure, it’s perversely fascinating to know why this might be. But ultimately, the only really important question is how to stop it.

Related Dish on the conundrum of great art and its perverted purveyors here.

(Photo of Terry Richardson by Dave Tada)

A Flirty Fail

Your next attempt to flirt will most likely bomb, if a new study is any indication:

People – both men and women – are just not very good at recognizing flirty behavior, new research shows. The study paired up 52 college women and 52 college men, sat them in a room, and told them to talk for ten minutes. Afterward, the participants were each asked (separately) whether they’d flirted a little with their conversational partner, and whether they thought their partner had flirted. Both men and women were very good at judging when someone was not flirting; more than 80 percent of the pairs could correctly sense a just-friends situation, the researchers found. But they were less accurate at recognizing when someone was flirting; men only answered correctly 36 percent of the time, and women judged accurately 18 percent of the time.

Rachel Raczka adds:

At the end of the study, the researchers concluded that flirting is decoded and deciphered by humans in the similar way we detect lying. Hall said that humans tend to have difficulty spotting a liar because the common assumption is that people are telling the truth. Flirting — as well-intended as it can occasionally be – falls into a likewise category, and most people require third-party confirmation to recognize.

Or perhaps students at the University of Kansas just skew awkward?