Larry’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2020)

Larry’s comments from the Nonfiction Reading - Only the Best group.

Sher wrote: "..Our Soul Shall Never Perish.
Freedom Knows No Dying,
And the Greedy Cannot Harvest
Fields Where Seas Are Lying;
Cannot Bind the Living Spirit
Nor the Living Word.
Cannot Smirch the Sacred Glory
O..."

A perfect poem for today, Sher.

So simple ... so beautiful ... so sad.

My mini-review of Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff

If you want to understand what the latest research shows about the peopling of the Americas, then Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff may be the book for you. Raff is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas and is the President of the American Association of Anthropological Genetics. How and when did the Native Americans of the Americas and the Inuit of the northern lands come to live in the Western Hemisphere? She explains that the theory until recently that all the inhabitants came in three waves out of Asia isn’t quite supported by the most recent evidence and that there is strong evidence to support some earliest inhabitants actually came by water along the Pacific Coast.

A few minor criticisms. The writing is not elegant but it is clear. A bigger problem is the paucity of footnotes, even where they are definitely called for. I trust that she knows her material, but there are some issues like the evolution of the dogs who accompanied the first inhabitants where more footnotes are called for as she says the recent research has changed.

She is very repetitive in her statements about lack of sensitivity in the treatment by researchers of the remains of Native Americans/First Peoples. But I’m not sure at all that that should be a criticism. I think that she is generally right to make this point on a number of occasions. And at the end of the book, when she recounts the why the Kennewick Man’s remains were handled and tested, she really tells this story as well as any account that I I have read. (The Kennewick Man refers to a skeleton found along the Columbia River. The remains were about 9,000 years old, and some who first examined those remains postulated that he was of European origin. The final results proved otherwise.)

She easily provides the best detailed description I’ve ever read about DNA extraction and laboratory handling of ancient bones … she makes it methodical (she mentions that it can be so boring at times that listening to music or podcasts in the lab as she works is necessary) and fascinating at the same time. She does such a good job of reporting excitement shared with the need for cautious reporting of results.

Finally, she is excellent about the state of play in what we know and what we believe we know about the peopling of the Americas. As an important case, she reports the latest research including the anomaly relating to a discovery in 2016 of possible Australasian ancestry in some native South American populations. And she explains how strange this result is. I’ll just say that after much analysis it does not suggest a Transpacific migration. You can read the book to understand the two different possibilities that it does suggest. And if you have any interest at all how the Western Hemisphere came to be populated before Europeans arrived in 1492, that’s exactly what I recommend. Read the book.

John, I know this poem pretty well ... and indeed, today, "The world is too much with us." I FaceTimed with my older granddaughter Ella last night. Ella is in fifth grade and is friends with a Russian girl named Katya who is scared for her family back in Russia. It's easy to begin to react by saying that maybe we should be more concerned with Ukrainian children ... and that's probably where I end up. Ella's teacher actually briefed the students on the Ukraine situation yesterday. Briefed them briefly according to Ella. But Ella is concerned about her friend and her friend's sadness. I asked Ella what she told her friend ... and Ella said that she assured Katya that she was still her friend. The world is too much with us ... indeed.

The New Colossus
By Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

John wrote: "A good one by A.E. Stallings. I would say she is my favorite poet writing today. I have to look up the word “wroth” though. The poem signals spring to me.

FISHING

The two of them stood in the mi..."


John, you have converted us into Stalllings fans for sure. I love her choice of words ... and the clarity of expression ... even if we have to stop every now and then and look up words like "wroth."

Carol wrote: "Rather grim first lines for a love poem but the poet is saying that despite human mortality he holds his beloved in his arms."

Exactly my own feelings.

His words are often strangely combined ... understandable but evoking strange feelings ... all the way through to the end.

"Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love."

Thanks, John. I'll try to get to Clint Smith's book soon.

More Auden ...

Lullaby
W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

I'm checking the threads where I know I'm involved in a conversation ... that is not an optimal situation.

An announcement of this kind of major problem should appear here. That it doesn't is even more worrying.

https://help.goodreads.com/s/announce...

Carol wrote: "I also have not been getting notifications. I am always surprised Goodreads doesn't crash- it has so many users."

Carol,

I haven't either. I suspect that it is a major problem affecting all or almost all users.

I know that he kept revising many of his poems throughout his long career. The Auden Society is good at providing a book length study of those revisions for free.

https://www.audensociety.org/quesenbe...

This is on the first page of that Quesenbery study:

"As we shall see, Auden, throughout his career, could (1) abandon whole poems or parts of poems with ruthless finality, (2) tinker endlessly with others, while (3) leaving some poems virtually untouched. What he abandons tells us an much about Auden as does his tinkering and hands off policy."

The Fall of Rome
W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

(for Cyril Connolly)

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

John wrote: "This book was given an extensive review in the latest issue of The NY Review of Books by David S. Reynolds. It seems quite good and thus I purchased a Nook book of it from Barnes & Noble today and ..."

John,

I got that book after we heard a long interview with Clint Smith on the radio. I hope to get around to reading it in the not too distant future.

Larry

John, I listened to half of it on Sunday and the rest yesterday. It made me think how little I have listened to "girl rockers." That label is not meant to demean these women. I think that they have used that label themselves. I've listened to a number of groups with women singers, e.g. the Jefferson Airplane, and some of my favorite musicians are women singer-songwriters, e.g. Joni Mitchell. But these women rockers are different.

I also think I missed out on her ... and all the other groups you mentioned was just timing on my part. It was a time when I was working too hard ... and not taking out time to do things that I really enjoy, like listening to new music.

Anyway, I thought that the album was great. And yeah, her melodies were good .. along with her playing. I'll listen to more of her work.

It is unusual indeed ... and your reading is my own, Carol.

John wrote: "I am going to give Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair a thorough listen this weekend.

It has a background similar to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska because it started out as recordings on cassette. Pha..."

John,

I'll listen to it tomorrow!

Larry

From my friend Jack Hirschfeld, with his own words before the poem.

About this poem:
“Some time ago, I was visiting a very good friend in California, and while she ran into a supermarket, I stayed in the car with her daughter, who was four years old at the time. To engage her, I asked her one of those silly questions adults typically ask. I don’t remember my question, but I’ll never forget her answer. She looked me straight in the eye, shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘I don’t know, but answers may vary.’ So, this poem concerns itself with aging, loss, backward glances, some hard-won insights, and also asks a question at the end to which answers may vary.”

Nailing Things Down

may also kill them,
but she had no great plans
to live happily ever after.

Today is all she could manage,
that & the breathless sounds of Pres,
tamping down the day’s anarchy.

Twenty years earlier, her voice left her,
so she quit smoking. When it returned
it was vibrating like a dusty contralto.

Today she smells facts:
the air thick with tomorrow’s rain,
a slow leak in the basement.

The five shots of Jameson on his breath.

His undershirt brushed with
someone else’s perfume, a scent
she’d worn in high school—Shalimar.

Twenty years ago, on a dime,
she’d have cut or shot him to clear
the air, but today is not that day.

Today she looks at her body
with some hesitation. It’s late
in the morning & the gravy’s
gonna run thin tonight.

Will she miss the wanting, the having or the gone?

---Linda Susan Jackson

Carol wrote: "I wonder if the first lines are suggesting that she is a slave near Memphis by the Mississippi; that ultimately she will die and return in spirit to the Nile and to another Memphis."

It could be that, Carol. Good wondering.