"Modern Life" in poetry

Interesting verse (examples from Joan Houlihan's review of Matthea Harvey's new book of poems Modern Life):

I put on my coat of pastilles and glass and hit the road
with a Phillips screwdriver. Dog Pants. The way out is in,
cried a newly promoted magpie. Look inside me, Trojan
the Horse said. Someone succumbed to a shape of stars.
Someone folded in like an Robo-accordian. Someone
smelled a herd of centipedes. Someone wondered why
poetry so publicly acclaimed could be so barren of life.

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Required reading

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (and Wiki). I like this guy. He speaks espresso-black, concrete blocks of Truth. This is a man with a ferocious ego. Read it.

A simple illustration:

He reads for 60 hours a week, but almost never a newspaper, and he never watches television.

“If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.”

But the biggest rule of all is his eccentric and punishing diet and exercise programme. He’s been on it for three months and he’s lost 20lb. He’s following the thinking of Arthur De Vany, an economist – of the acceptable type – turned fitness guru. The theory is that we eat and exercise according to our evolved natures. Early man did not eat carbs, so they’re out. He did not exercise regularly and he did not suffer long-term stress by having an annoying boss. Exercise must be irregular and ferocious – Taleb often does four hours in the gym or 360 press-ups and then nothing for 10 days. Jogging is useless; sprinting is good. He likes to knacker himself completely before a long flight. Stress should also be irregular and ferocious – early men did not have bad bosses, but they did occasionally run into lions.

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Compiled Reading List

I know I already posted about what books are on my list for post-graduation but it's much more convenient for me if they are in one place and updated. They are in some kind of order, with most wanted near the top. From here on I'll just modify this post as the list expands rather than add new posts.

Round 1 (immediate):
V.S. Naipaul: Guerillas
Hesse: Steppenwolf
Goethe: Faust part 1
Keats
Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Auster
Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature
Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality, Social Contract
Wilde: Dorian Gray
Mishima: Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Round 2:
Homer: the Iliad and/or Odyssey
Dylan Thomas
Hesse: The Glass Bead Game
Rupert Brooke: Collected poems
Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned
Plath
Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five
Kafka: The System, The Metamorphosis

Round 3:
Faulkner: Light in August, A Fable
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
Dante: Divine Comedy
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Moveable Feast
Shakespeare: sonnets, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet
Lord Tennyson: Ulysses
Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals
Emily Dickinson
Wittgenstein: Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics), or Philosophische Bemerkungen
Mann: The Magic Mountain
Sophocles: Antigone
Vasilii Semenovich Grossman: Life and Fate
Tennyson: suggestions?
Shaw: Pygmalion (maybe)
Goethe: Götz von Berlichingen
Oppen
Carver: Will you Please be Quiet, Please?, Cathedral
Bertrand Russell: Principles of Mathematics
Schiller: William Tell

Pre-concert lecture

I just lost half my dignity by having to record a pre-concert lecture for my music history course. It's on Haydn's Symphony No. 4, Szymanowski's first Violin Concerto, and Mendelssohn's "Italian" symphony. Simply listening to my voice over and over when editing, saying horrible horrible things, squeezed what little happiness I had in me straight out into the open, where it was caught by huge invisible butterfly nets, jumbled up a bit and deposited some place where I won't be able to find it; somewhere in a tiny pocket of time.

Click here for the link.

Imagine if space/time had little pockets everywhere, that you could see and slip things into, like little cotton bulges in mid-air. or maybe little black holes sitting just over your head, sucking ideas out of you without you even noticing.

Ives and the Music of The Future

From an article by Charles Ives, Music and Its Future:

THe future of music may not lie entirely with music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits, the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of. Or to put it the other way around, what music is and is to be may lie somewhere in the belief of an unknown philosopher of half a century ago who said: "How can there be any bad music? All music is from heaven. If there is anything bad in it, I put it there - by my implications and limitations. Nature builds the mountains and meadows and man puts in the fences and labels." He may have been nearer right than we think.

Gas Tax

There's been a lot of talk about a gas tax, what with the Lieberman-Warner bill being debated on the Senate floor. I read an enlightening op-ed in the Journal a few weeks ago that contextualized the discussion of such a tax in such a way that helped form my own opinion into a somewhat more concrete form. Summarizing, the article shed light on the progressive view, at least currently progressive, that ultimately, in the struggle to stop global warming, society should strive to reduce できれば the consumption of gas by the masses; a gas tax does exactly this. There are other effects, however, on businesses and such that raise prices of goods and services, which happens to be the core argument against such a tax. The appropriate approach to "solving" global warming through this conduit is reducing the public's reliance on gasoline by improving mass transit. Cap and trade seems to be a decent solution for the other sector, but politics has of course infiltrated this system by inappropriately compensating large corporations and others with heavy influence in Washington. This is completely unacceptable and defeats the purpose entirely. Someone needs to step into the scene with the reputation, strength, and integrity to slap the lobbyists on the wrist, wrest the opium pipe away from the corrupt, and return the system to something even close to resembling a functioning and accountable government.

The Mikado

Some great Gilbert humor from The Mikado by G&S:

(of the Mikado's son and his fleeing from his unattractive wife-to-be, Katisha)

Pooh-Bah: I'm surprised that he should have fled from one so lovely.

Katisha: That is not true. You hold that I'm not beautiful because my face is plain. But you know nothing. You are still unenlightened. Learn, then, that it is not in the face alone that Beauty should be sought.
My face is unattractive.
But I have a left shoulder blade that is a miracle of loveliness. People come miles to see it.

My right elbow has a fascination that few can resist.

Pooh-Bah: Allow me.

Katisha: It is on view Tuesdays and Fridays on presentation of visiting card.

As for my circulation, it is the largest in the world.

Ko-Ko: And yet he fled.

The Mikado: And he is masquarading in this town disguised as a second trombone.