Obama, Lakoff, and Conceptual Metaphor

Follow commentary on the 2008 US elections via George Lakoff's commentary and conceptual metaphor discussions. Other interests:

• TalkLeft: What Lakoff and Obama Do Not Understand (Jul 2006)


• AlterNet: The Secret of Obama's Success, He Listens to Lakoff (Feb 2008)


• Lakoff's Buzzflash Interview (Apr 2008)


• Obama in a Bind (Jul 2008): Christopher Lyndon talks to Lakoff

Neuro-Liberalism is William Saletan's NYT review (Jun 2008) of Lakoff's The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain:

Lakoff is a puzzle. No one has more brilliantly dissected conservative spin. "My goal as a scientist and a citizen is to make the cognitive unconscious as conscious as possible," he writes. But each time Lakoff the scientist exposes a right-wing frame, Lakoff the citizen substitutes a left-wing frame. First he shreds Bush's depiction of Iraq as a "war" that can end in "victory" over a united "enemy". Then he repeats each of Bush’s fallacies, oversimplifying the conflict as an "occupation" in which the United States is "losing" to a united "resistance". It's as though Lakoff were lobotomized.

Charles Bernstein's 'Poetry Bailout' Statement

[via Grand Text Auto] Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers by Charles Bernstein: From a statement read at an event marking the release of Best American Poetry 2008...

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance. Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

Michael Symmons Roberts on Science and Poetry

Michael Symmons Roberts talks to New Scientist (2007) on science and poetry.

'The Box' (poem read in the above video) from Corpus (2004):

In case of catastrophe,
winter can be recreated
from this skeleton of leaf.

All the bitter subtleties
of crab apple are tangled
here, as is the DNA

of dew-point calibration
of the second when a tree
lets go, the recipe for clouds

on the horizon like a new
born mountain range,
like north itself.

And with the leaf,
this relic box contains
a hair curl from a child

to reconstruct humanity,
though all the lights and currents
of his soul are lost to us.

Spores, antennae, claws,
the box will hold all evolution.
It will be full and empty.

More of his poems from The Poetry Archive.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 'Flow'

'Flow' and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1999) discussed by David Farmer.

Flow with Soul (2002): Interview by Elizabeth Debold where Csikzentmihalyi talks about evolution and greater complexity.

My hunch is—and, of course, there is no proof of this—that if an organism, a species, learns to find a positive experience in doing something that stretches its ability; in other words, if you enjoy sticking your neck out and trying to operate at your best or even beyond your best, if you're lucky enough to get that combination, then you're more likely to learn new things, to become better at what you're doing, to invent new things, to discover new things. We seem to be a species that has been blessed by this kind of thirst for pushing the envelope. Most other species seem to be very content when their basic needs are taken care of and their homeostatic level has been restored. They have eaten; they can rest now. That's it. But in our nervous system, maybe by chance or at random, an association has been made between pleasure and challenge, or looking for new challenges.

The Creative Personality: Ten Paradoxical Traits

Alliteration and Memory Performance

Sweet Silent Thought: Alliteration and Resonance in Poetry Comprehension (2008) by R Brooke Lea, et. al.:

We used current theories of language comprehension as a framework for understanding how alliteration affects comprehension processes. Across three experiments, alliterative cues reactivated readers' memories for previous information when it was phonologically similar to the cue. These effects were obtained when participants read aloud and when they read silently, and with poetry and prose. The results support everyday intuitions about the effects of poetry and aesthetics, and explain the nature of such effects. These findings extend the scope of general memory models by indicating their capacity to explain the influence of nonsemantic discourse features.

Discussion by Dave Munger here.

Favourite Derek Walcott Poem

'Love After Love' (year unknown) by Derek Walcott:

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Jonah Lehrer on Porn

The Neuroscience of Porn:

Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed.

Further information: Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind 'the great leap forward' in human evolution by V.S. Ramachandran

The STANDUP Project

The STANDUP project (System To Augment Non-speakers' Dialogue Using Puns): Collaborative project between the School of Computing at the University of Dundee, the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and the Department of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen, funded by EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council). The project began in October 2003 and ran until March 2007.

Oliver Sacks on iPods

'Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes' in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks (2007):

Half of us are plugged into iPods, immersed in daylong concerns of our own choosing, virtually oblivious to the environment--and for those who are not plugged in, there is nonstop music, unavoidable and often of deafening intensity, in restaurants, bars, shops, and gyms. This barrage of music puts a certain strain on our exquisitely sensitive auditory systems, which cannot be overloaded without dire consequences. One such consequence is the ever-increasing prevalence of serious hearing loss, even among young people, and particularly among musicians. Another is the omnipresence of annoyingly catchy tunes, the brainworms that arrive unbidden and leave only in their own time--catchy tunes that may, in fact, be nothing more than advertisements for toothpaste but are, neurologically, completely irresistible.

James Fenton on Douglas Dunn

'Goodbye to All That?' from The Strength of Poetry (2001) by James Fenton:

There was a time when, given the belief that empire was an absurdity and 'all that was in the past', a poet like Douglas Dunn could write his 'Poem in Praise of the British' confident that his ironies were shared....One could say of it that it takes nothing seriously, is unshockable and untroubled. The past is this wonderful absurdity. the politicians of the Right are not to be feared. We are living in this wonderful afterglow, and all is well. One of the things one would not have guessed about Terry Street when it came out was that its author was Scottish. In fact, given that most of the poems in the book are about a working-class district in Hull, one might perhaps have supposed him English. 'A Poem in Praise of the British' was untypical of its volume, but not untypical of the way Dunn later wrote at times, when he wrote as if he were expressing himself in French, in an easygoing, dandyish way of which sometimes tempted him. But what is absolutely untypical of the later Dunn is the insouciance with which he treats the subject of empire. Within ten years, in the volume called Barbarians, which shows the influence of the hard revolutionary Left, you find a poem called 'Empires' which might alos have been written to remedy the defects in seriousness of the earlier one....Soldiers are no longer funny. Empire is no longer an amusing mystery. By now Dunn has begun to think of himself as a barbarian to idenitfy with the victims of empire. And this phase gives way to a further phase in which, to a great extent, his Scottishness becomes his subject matter. He returns to his roots.

'A Poem in Praise of the British' (quoted in the above essay) from Terry Street (1969) by Douglas Dunn:

The regiments of dumb gunners go to bed early.
The soldiers, sleepy after running up and down
The private British Army meadows,
Clean the daisies off their mammoth boots.
The general goes pink in his bath reading
Lives of the Great Croquet Players.
At Aldershot, beside foot-stamping squares,
Young officers drink tea and touch their toes.

Heavy rain everywhere washes up the bones of British
Where did all that power come from, the wish
To be inert, but rich and strong, to have too much?
Where does glory come from, and when it's gone
Why are old soldiers sour and the banks empty?
But how sweet is the weakness after Empire
In the garden of a flat, safe country shire,
Watching the beauty of the random, spare, superfluous,

Drifting as if in sleep to the ranks of memorialists
That wait like cabs to take us off down easy street,
To the redcoat armies, and the flags and treaties
In the marvellous archives, preserved like leaves in books.
The archivist wears a sword and clipped moustache.
He files our memories, more precious than light,
To be of easy access to politicians of the Right,
Who are now sleeping, like undertakers on black cushions.

Garrison Keillor Reads Anthony Hecht

Garrison Keillor reads The Ceremony of Innocence from Collected Later Poems (2004) by Anthony Hecht.

He was taken from his cell, stripped, blindfolded,
And marched to a noisy room that smelled of sweat.
Someone stamped on his toes; his scream was stopped
By a lemon violently pushed between his teeth
And sealed with friction tape behind his head.
His arms were tied, the blindfold was removed
So he could see his tormentors, and they could see
The so-much-longed-for terror in his eyes.
And one of them said, "The best part of it all
Is that you won't even be able to pray."
When they were done with him, two hours later,
They learned that they had murdered the wrong man
And this made one of them thoughtful. Some years after,
He quietly severed connections with the others
Moved to a different city, took holy orders,
And devoted himself to serving God and the poor,
While the intended victim continued to live
On a walled estate, sentried around the clock
By a youthful, cell phone-linked praetorian guard.

Roger Caillois on Schizophrenia

Mimicry and Legendary Psycasthenia (1935):

I will [...] briefly describe some personal experiences, but which are wholly in accord with observations published in the medical literature, for example with the invariable response of schizophrenics to the question: where are you? I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species.

The Gay Brain

The Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström research on cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects has been generating a lot of online discussion.

Neuroanthropology has more extensive links and discussion:

Trying to shoehorn sexuality into one socially and politically charged box just does not work well from an anthropological point of view. As one example, men in some cultures go through different life stages, and in some of those stages homosexuality is the normal way of being, whereas at other times heterosexual relations are the norm. .... On the neuroplasticity and experience/behavior side, this type of approach generally leaves out something every consenting adult knows. Sex matters! The experience of a sexual encounter helps shape our desires, our pleasures, our associations.

Retana on Las Poetas Filipinas

De la evolución de la literatura castellana en Filipinas (1909) by W.E. Retana:

La responsibilidad que los poetas han comenzado á contrer (Guerrero sobre todo), no puede ser meyor. Filipinos se halla actualmente en un periódo crítico, de renovación si cuunde, y arriaga en la conciencia popular, una literatura enfermiza, decadente hecha por jóvenes que se compbien en llamarse a sí mismos ,,valetudinarios,, ó, lo que esigual inútiles, padiós nacionalismo! el pueblo irá derecho á la impotencia, que pueblo que se connaturaliza con el pesimismo literario, es pueblo huerto. Hoy los vates, más que nunca, hállanse obligados á hacer sonar la trompa resonante de la épica, no el figle tristón de la endecha ó la balada; hoy mas que nunca han de probar, pero en castellano rotundo, clásico, desposeído, de la false pedrería del filoneísmo preciosista, que son hombres, hombres cabales, bien diferentes de ciertos estetas á quienes toman por modelos. No es un Verlaine lo que necesita en estos momentos filipinos; lo que necesita es un Quintana: no un model, que ayude á caer, sino un modelo que ayude á subir...; Arriba, poetas!

Reviewing Cognitive Enhancers

Which Cognitive Enhancers Really Work: Brain Training, Drugs, Vitamins, Meditation or Exercise?: Brilliant entry that discusses in brief current research in cognitive enhancement techniques such as the popular Nintendo DS brain training softwares, drugs, nutritional supplements, meditation and exercise.

Reuven Tsur on the Heart Conceit

[old] What is Cognitive Poetics? (1982) by Reuven Tsur:

According to migratory theory, someone at the dawn of the history of literature happily 'hit' upon this heart-conceit; from this point on, the conceit migrated until it reached the Arab poets in Spain, who transmitted it to the Hebrew poets of the eleventh century in Spain, as well as to the Provençal poets, who are known to have influenced the poets of the dolce stil nuovo in Italy, who are known to have influenced English Metaphysical poetry. The geographical proximity of Provençe to Paris may account for the appearance of the conceit in Villon's poetry. This explanation is not without geographical or chronological plausibility; but it appears to be too concrete, too uneconomical, and to leave too much to chance. Above all, it does not explain how poets and readers of poetry handle novel conceits. it fails to explain why an earlier poet should be more likely to 'hit' upon a certain conceit than a later one. In addition, the above explanation is counter-intuitive from the point of view of what we seem to know about the inventiveness and ingenuity of the Metaphysical poets.

Reuven Tsur Interview

Interview with Reuven Tsur by Beth Bradburn:

When I was a teenager, at high school, studying Hungarian poetry, I was very much annoyed by the fact that our literary studies concerned mainly the idea contents of poetry. I had very strong intuitions that the most important things in poetry were not conceptual, but something of the kind that, now I know, was 'perceptual'. I spent the ensuing decades in a pursuit of that 'perceptual' something. One of the main problems appeared to be this: language by its very nature is conceptual; but it is an observational fact that poetry sometimes conveys emotional, perceptual, or mystical qualities. At the university, in Israel, I was exposed to 'New Criticism', and was committed to close-reading of poems as the only worthy critical activity. But I always felt that there was that important something which I later called the 'perceived effect' of the poem, and I soon realized that this could not be accounted for merely by appealing to the structure of the text; one had to assume a perceiving consciousness. Wellek and Warren along with Wimsatt and Beardsley provided the theoretical constraints within which I attempted to solve the problem. The latter warned against the 'affective fallacy', while the former conceived of a poem as of 'a stratified system of norms that is a potential source of experience', but categorically rejected all psychologization of the literary endeavour. I thought, therefore, that I must eschew what is individual and idiosyncratic in poetic experience, and pursue the intersubjective foundations of the 'perceived quality'. Eventually I found the redeeming formula in a noncognitive context, in L.C. Knights' Notes on Comedy...

Mary Gilmore's Little Shoes That Died

The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore: Mary Gilmore was Australia's foremost woman poet during the first half of the twentieth century and it was as a poet that she wanted to be remembered when she died in 1962. More attention however has been given in recent years to her long and eventful life, her role as feminist, her championing of Australian literature as an instrument of national identity and her activism for various forms of social justice.

'The Little Shoes That Died': Also included in the anthology Hell and After (2005) edited by Les Murray:

These are the little shoes that died.
     We could not keep her still,
But all day long her busy feet
     Danced to her eager will.

Leaving the body's loving warmth,
     The spirit ran outside;
Then from the shoes they slipped her feet,
     And the little shoes died.

Luce Irigaray on Sharing the World

Sharing the World: From Intimate to Global Relations: We are accustomed to considering the other as an individual without paying sufficient attention to the particular world or specific culture to which the other belongs. A phenomenological approach to this question offers some help, notably through Heidegger's analyses of 'Dasein', 'being-in-the-world' and 'being with'. Nevertheless, according to Heidegger, it remains almost impossible to identify an other outside of our own world. 'Otherness' is subjected to the same values by which we are ourselves defined and thus we remain in 'sameness'. In this age of multiculturalism and in the light of Nietzsche's criticism of our values and Heidegger's deconstruction of our interpretation of truth, Irigaray questions the validity of the 'sameness' that sits at the root of Western culture.

How to Share the World: Luce Irigaray's public lecture at Queen Mary, University of London on 19 June:

We cannot share the world as it already is, with the exception of the natural world. The world that we can share is always and still to be elaborated by us and between us starting from what and who we are as humans here and now. Humans who endeavour to use their own energy as well as that arising from their difference to create a world in which we can live in peace and happiness.

The End Doesn't Justify the Memes

Mind Hacks lists two TED talks on memes:

• Daniel C Dennett on 'the awesome power of memes'.


• Susan Blackmore on 'memes and temes'.

Months ago, reading up on this area of study, memetics seemed worth considering (especially Blackmore's passionate explanations). But after reading Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (2000), a collection of essays by experts from different fields on this new discipline, edited by Richard Aunger. I was quite disappointed that in Dennett's foreword he says 'I am not entirely persuaded by any of the chapters in this book'. (vii)

Of the nine contributors to the collection five object to the idea forwarded by memeticists:

• Rosaria Conte makes a most polite assessment of meme literature using the social cognitive perspective. She praises advantages of the field and describes some disadvantages but focuses on one unsatisfactory aspect: the conceptualization of the requirements of memetic processes.



• Robert Boyd and Peter J Richerson conclude that memes are not 'a universal acid' (one of Dennett's metaphors in Darwin's
  Dangerous Idea) and assert that 'population thinking is a better mousetrap'. (161)



• Dan Sperber's objection has to do with memeticists not having empirical evidence to support their claims that '...in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all or nearly all their relevant properties for other elements of culture that they replicate.' (173) He ends by saying 'imitation, even if not ubiquitous, is of course well worth investigating. The grand project of memetics, on the other hand, is misguided'. (173) But there's hope in studying imitation.



• Maurice Bloch puts forward the previous arguments against the diffusionists by American and British critics:
  
  
  1. Memes like traits don't spread like a virus but are 'continually and completely made and unmade during communication' (I still have to read more on this) and;
  
  
  2. Culture is not a single isolable type which means that transmission of it is of many types. (201)
  
  
  He simply thinks that memes don't exist and Blackmore (whose 'The meme's eye view' essay argues strongly for memes) hasn't presented convincingly her case.



• To this Adam Kuper agrees by concluding that '[memetecists have] yet to deliver a single original and plausible analysis of any cultural or social process'. (187)

Coriana Six provides a more thorough assessment of the collection (December 2007).

In Blackmore's The Meme Machine and most of her articles found online, it is easy to take Bloch's side. Blackmore is quite passionate about her study but most of her research is speculative. She has an article in Aesthetica Magazine (July 2006) called Memes, creativity and consciousness:

We are the meme machines that culture is using for its own propagation. No wonder the planet is in such dire straights; we have unwittingly taken on this parasitic new replication system and it is spreading all over the globe, using up all the natural resources. This is how I became interested in the role of art and creativity. We may think that human consciousness is what makes us creative, but on this new view, all creativity is an evolutionary process. Just as elephants and the AIDS virus were novel creations of genetic evolution, so all of music, literature, and art are novel creations of memetic evolution. We human meme machines copy old memes, mix them up in our heads, and spew out new combinations--the most creative of us being the best copiers and recombiners of memes.

Reading this should convince any artist that memeticists like Blackmore 'overstand' the creative processes. In his recent Enlightenment lecture at the University of Edinburgh, Steven Pinker was asked his opinion of memes. His reply: after 32 years, the study of memes has yielded no great progress. In How the Mind Works (1997) he says: '...a complex meme does not arise from the retention of copying errors...[but] because some person knuckles down, racks his brain, musters his ingenuity, and composes or writes or paints of invents something'. (209)

---

Mind Hacks also reports that in 2006 Dennett had a falling out with fellow Darwinian Michael Ruse.

Some of the exchange can be found in When evolutionists attack, where Ruse says:

'I am a hardline Darwinian and always have been very publicly when it cost me status and respect--in fact, I am more hardline than you [Dennett] are, because I don't buy into this meme bullshit but put everything--especially including ethics--in the language of genes.'

The Study of Memory

The origins of the study of memory: Focusing on the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus. This begins Cognitive Daily's History Week entries (inspired by this fun challenge for science bloggers).

[other History Week entries] A baby's psychological development at six months | Gestalt-o-mania

Famous People and Their Contributions to the Study of Memory: Featuring Ivan Pavlov and his famous dog, Karl Lashley, Donald Hebb, and William James.

Darwin a Plagiarist?

Mail-boat record 'proves Darwin stole his original ideas from a Welsh scientist’: 'Professor Gaastra’s great contribution was that he was able to show that two crucial letters written by [Alfred Russel] Wallace between October 1856 and March 1858 arrived in Britain long before Darwin admitted they had. Wallace’s ideas appeared in Darwin’s work soon afterwards.'

Darwin 'ripped off' theory of evolution: According to author Roy Davies, former head of factual programming for BBC Wales, new evidence demonstrates that Charles Darwin stole his theory of evolution from a Welsh scientist working in Indonesia.

The Darwin Conspiracy: Origins of a Scientific Crime:

[The book] examines how Darwin struggled for years in scientific dead-ends until he was presented with the solution to the greatest scientific puzzle of his day by a naïve naturalist collecting beetles in a tropical jungle. So began the conspiracy by which eminent scientists promoted the ideas of Darwin ahead of those of Wallace in order to achieve ever-lasting fame for their greatest friend. Using extensive research about contemporary shipping time tables and Darwin's own correspondence, the author challenges the commonly-held belief that Darwin scored a scientific breakthrough when in reality he used another man's insights for his own benefit, and committed one of the greatest scientific crimes in history. [This book] is a true story about deceit and deception and stands as an outstanding metaphor for the idea of survival of the fittest.

The Alfred Russel Wallace Memorial Fund: 2008 marks the 150th anniversary of the Darwin and Wallace’s discovery of natural selection, yet although this is probably the most important anniversary in the field of biology (and beyond), we are aware of very few events planned to mark this momentous occasion!

Pride and Prejudice...and Autism

So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in Pride and Prejudice (2007):

[This book] looks at eight seemingly diverse characters in Austen's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice, who display autistic traits. These characters--five in the Bennet family and three in the extended family of the Fitzwilliams--have fundamental difficulties with communication, empathy and theory of mind. Perhaps it is high-functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome that provides an explanation for some characters' awkward behaviour at crowded balls, their frequent silences or their tendency to lapse into monologues rather than truly converse with others.

Book review by Michael Giffen: There's a danger when we apply clinical disorders to persons or characters we don't understand or don't like. Look at what critics who never knew Patrick White did to him and his novels.

High among the frontier problems between psychoanalysis and criticism, C.S. Lewis notices some critics use psychoanalysis to infer the pathology of an author from his or her work, which results not in literary criticism but in pathological biography.

Dan Sperber on Cultural Transmissions

An Epidemiology of Representations (July 2005): A talk with Dan Sperber.

Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying contents from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be a coding-decoding system, a transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power, by intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could deliver a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who assume that imitation and communication provide a robust replication system.

Neurology of the Arts

Neurology of the Arts: Painting, Music, Literature (April 2004) edited by F Clifford Rose: This book is the first attempt to provide a basis for the interaction of the brain and nervous system with painting, music and literature....The section on literature relates to Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Conan Doyle, James Joyce, and the poetry of one of England's most famous neurologists, Henry Head.

[pdf] The Neurology of Art--The Example of Giorgio de Chirico by Julien Bogousslavsky:

Blanke and Landis emphasize how a neurological condition undoubtedly influenced the work of one of the greatest modern artists. Since a disease may help understand artistic features, and art may help understand the manifestations of diseases, further studies in the 'neurology of art' would certainly be interesting and useful.

Style follows content: On the microgenesis of art perception (November 2007) by M Dorothee Augustin, Helmut Leder, Florian Hutzler, and Claus-Christian Carbon: While effects of content were present at all presentation times, effects of style were traceable from 50 ms onwards. The results show clear differences in the microgenesis of style and content, suggesting that in art perception style follows content.

Pinker in Edinburgh

Steven Pinker at the University of Edinburgh's Enlightenment lecture series: In his lecture, Prof Steven Pinker will explore an example of each: everyday metaphor as a window into human cognition; swearing and taboo words as a window into human emotion; and indirect speech-veiled threats and bribes, polite requests, and sexual come-ons as a window into human relationships. 6 June at McEwan Hall.

[video] Pinker's TED Talks lecture on The Stuff of Thought (July 2005): In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds--and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize.

(Thanks to aliiis for the announcement.)

The Most Important Six Seconds of 1969

The Amen Break (2006): In the year [1969], an American soul group called The Winstons released a seven-inch single called 'Amen, Brother'. Little did drummer GC Coleman know that the eight-bar drum 'break' in the middle of the track would far surpass him in fame and acquire an identity of its own.

The Amen Break and the Golden Ratio by Michael S Schneider: I became intrigued when I saw an image of the audio waves themselves because I immediately recognized the Golden Ratio in the structure of its timing. And I was surprised to find an even deeper relationship to the structure of the human body.

[via gerunding]
Nate Harrison explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop (2004): This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the 'Amen Break. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music--a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures.

[video] Compelling 'Amen Break' variation is Vic Acid, a Squarepusher and Aphex Twin collaboration--the music of This is hell (2006), an animated video clip by Paco Rico.

Bad Rhymes

Rhyme Crime: The 20 Worst Rhymes in Pop Music: When Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder managed to rhyme 'public' and 'subject' in 'Tears of a Clown', it was sheer genius. Getting that perfect coupling of words and phrases is what makes for a brilliant song. Then there are musicians who just write down words because they rhyme, or because they think they rhyme, and hope that we won't notice that the lyrics don't make any sense. Some examples:

Giant steps are what you take, Walking on the moon, I hope my legs don't break, Walking on the moon. Sting phones it in again. Are limb injuries a big concern for astronauts? Really? Wouldn't an injury be less likely in the diminished gravity? 'It’s one giant leap for man, it’s one, ouch, my ankle!' On the Peking ferry I was feeling merry, Sailing on my way back here, I fell in love with a slit-eyed lady, By the light of an eastern moon, Shangai Lil never used the pill. You have to love this [Rod Stewart] verse from what is actually a great song. It has it all--cultural insensitivity, geographic fallacies, clichés and of course really bad rhymes. Shanghai Lil sounds like a Sino-Germanic hooker from a 1930's movie. The only thing a river knows, Is runnin' to the sea, And every spring when a flower grows, It happens naturally. Where is our Gravol? [Michael] Bolton makes Lionel Ritchie read like John Keats. I'm like a bowl of gumbo, You ain't hotter than this, I'm what they play in the clubo. All right, making fun of Mariah Carey is like making fun of the kid with the helmet on the short bus, but c'mon, this line deserves some recognition. But then again, Carey is like gumbo--lumpy, thick, and of indeterminate ethnicity. (Ed Note: Thanks to user CentralTheme for pointing out that the offending gumbo/clubo rhyme is rapped by Mystikal, not sung by Mariah. For more Mystikal related hilarity, checkour Cliffs Notes on Mystikal's 'Pussy Crook'.)

[poll] Taxing Music: BBC Radio 6 Music's quest to find the worst music lyrics:

#6: Toto's 'Africa' The wild dogs cry out in the night, As they grow restless longing for some solitary company, I know that I must do what's right, Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti. #1: Des'ree's 'Life' I don't want to see a ghost, It's the sight that I fear most, I'd rather have a piece of toast, Watch the evening news.

Poetry Doctor: How to Tell Good Rhymes from Bad Rhymes (2007) by David B Axlerod: If a poem is obsessed with rhyming, if the rhyme is clearly there in the way of saying what the poet means, it can be said to be a bad rhyme. This, of course, assumes that the purpose of the poem is to say something to the reader and that the message comes before the rhyme.

Guide to Bad Rhymes (2006) from the Worldwide Center for the Study of Lief: A list of the most annoying, cliché words pairs that should be avoided as much as possible. They represent the most widely used rhymes that can ruin songs by their predictability.

Heretical Rhyme Generator: This assault on the aesthetic brought to you by Steric Hindrance Inc.

Shakespeare and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

[via Cosmic Variance, poem] Sonnet 64 by William Shakespeare:

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Shakespeare and Thermodynamics: Dam the Second Law by Frank L Lambert: This web page is for individuals in the humanities and the arts or business and the legal professions so that they can sense the remarkable importance of activation energies in understanding the working of our second-law world.

Two Cultures: Websites relating to the Snow-Leavis Controversy.

The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure by Martin Portner. The key principles:

Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals. The ingredients of desire may differ for men and women, but researchers have revealed some surprising similarities. For example, visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men. Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.

The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure by Martin Portner. The key principles:

Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the brain and nervous system, which controls the sex glands and genitals. The ingredients of desire may differ for men and women, but researchers have revealed some surprising similarities. For example, visual stimuli spur sexual stirrings in women, as they do in men. Achieving orgasm, brain imaging studies show, involves more than heightened arousal. It requires a release of inhibitions engineered by shutdown of the brain’s center of vigilance in both sexes and a widespread neural power failure in females.

Edwin Morgan on Iain Crichton Smith

The Contribution of Iain Crichton Smith (2000) by Edwin Morgan:

Things that restrict and stifle have always been Smith’s target. In his own upbringing, the long arm of the Free Church became the focus of deep feelings of enmity which permeate many of his poems. The claim to be right, the claim to have the truth, the despising of pleasure, the indifference to art, the willingness to condemn and if possible punish the slightest backsliding, the inability to compromise, and perhaps worst of all, the incomprehension of any conception of creative change or growth: these were damning factors in Smith’s eyes.

'The Gaelic Proverb' (quoted in the above essay):

The Gaelic proverb says,
sad is the state of the house
without a child or cat.

But sad is the state of the child
who carries his house on his back
like a trapped snail.

And the cat who cannot go out
into the deep greenery
but sits on the spinster's lap
narrow and infertile,
as the wild sun goes down.

[pdf] Real People in a Real Place (1982): The islander has never had the chance of staying where he is: history has condemned him to departure, and afterwards to the choice of whether or not to return.

David Tennant's Hamlet

This summer The Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Hamlet features David Tennant as the melancholy Prince of Denmark and Patrick Stewart as Claudius.

Tennant takes a break from the TARDIS (September 2007): Under a compromise agreement, Tennant is expected to return to the role for [Doctor Who's] fifth series since its revival, in 2010. He has agreed to film three extended bank holiday specials to keep fan’s happy during 2009.

[from shironezumi] Neil Gaiman on Tennant's Hamlet:

"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and...for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?"

Kieslowski on the World

Krzysztof Kieslowski: Everyone wants to change the world whenever they make the effort to do something. I don't think I ever believed the world could be changed in the literal sense of the phrase. I thought the world could be described.

The Wislawa Szymborska Remix

[video] Wislawa Szymborska on the Szymon Majewski Show.

Symmetry and Orgasm

[via Mind Hacks] Human female orgasm and mate fluctuating asymmetry: Abstract of research by Randy Thornhill, Steven W. Gangestad, and Randall Comer. Human, Homo sapiens, female orgasm is not necessary for conception; hence it seems reasonable to hypothesize that orgasm is an adaptation for manipulating the outcome of sperm competition resulting from facultative polyandry.

Symmetry is Related to Sexual Dimorphism in Faces: Data Across Culture and Species: Research by Anthony C Little, et al. In humans, the face has been extensively studied in terms of attractiveness. Faces have the potential to be advertisements of mate quality and both symmetry and sexual dimorphism have been linked to the attractiveness of human face shape.

Steven Pinker on Combinatorial Grammar

'The Infinite Library' in Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999): Pinker argues that language is composed of a mental dictionary and a mental grammar of creative rules:

Combinatorial grammar allows us to talk about a combinatorial world, a world in which violets could be red or a man could bite a dog. Yet familiar objects and actions around us often form a noncombinatorial list of distinctive kinds. When we merely have to single out one of them, a combinatorial system is overkill. We never will have to refer to fish with an enmity to sheep or to military actions with scales and reddish flesh, and that's what a combinatorial system for words like Wilkins's allows us to do. To refer to everyday things it's easier to say dog or fish than to work through a complicated taxonomy that is just a fancy way of singling out dogs or fish anyway.

Exchange between John R Searle and Pinker on the book (June 2002).

Pinker: How can we explain these cavalier misreadings? For ten years Searle has insisted that he has a philosophical argument which proves that cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and linguistics are based on 'stunning mistakes'. The main mistake lies in analyzing mental phenomena as forms of information-processing.

Searle's three basic objections to Pinker's account are 1) 'an obsession with combinatorial grammar is not a defining feature of rationalism in its debate with empiricism'; 2) 'when [Pinker] does try to describe the essential difference between rationalism and empiricism he gets it wrong'; and 3) 'the debate about the past tense is not a case in which "two great systems of Western thought (rationalism and empiricism) may be tested and compared on a single rich set of data"'.

Outrageous Fortune

Slings and Arrows (2003-2006): Great Canadian TV comedy series about theatre, Shakespeare, Hamlet. It ran for three seasons and starred Paul Gross as Geoffrey Tennant, a 'legendary theatrical madman' who takes over as artistic director of a theatre company when his mentor passes away.

Oliver's dream is the pilot.

[videos] Try the trailer, then the pilot on YouTube in parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

[thanks to wheresmycow for suggesting this, and for keeping the sanity and faith: 'Good madam, stay awhile; I will be faithful.']

Stephen Dobyns on Yannis Ritsos

Ritsos and the Metaphysical Moment in Best Words, Best Order (1996) by Stephen Dobyns:

For Ritsos, what is important is that a connection is made between human beings and that our lives have been increased. This is his business as a poet: to help us live by awakening us to something beyond the mundane, by trying to connect us to a mystery that his poems celebrate.

The Meaning of Simplicity from Ritsos in Parentheses (1979) translated by Edmund Keeley:

I hide behind simple things that you may find me;
if you don't find me, you'll find the things,
you'll touch what my hand has touched,
the imprints of our hands will merge.

The August moon glitters in the kitchen
like a pewter pot (it becomes like this because of what I tell you)
it lights up the empty house and the kneeling silence of the house--
always the silence remains kneeling.

Every word is a way out
for an encounter often canceled,
and it's then a word is true, when it insists on a meeting.

Three more from The Negatives of Silence (1987).

Nick Joaquin on Filipino Smallness

A Heritage of Smallness by Nick Joaquin:

The depressing fact in Philippine history is what seems to be our native aversion to the large venture, the big risk, the bold extensive enterprise. The pattern may have been set by the migration. We try to equate the odyssey of the migrating barangays with that of the Pilgrim, Father of America, but a glance of the map suffices to show the differences between the two ventures. One was a voyage across an ocean into an unknown world; the other was a going to and from among neighboring islands. One was a blind leap into space; the other seems, in comparison, a mere crossing of rivers. The nature of the one required organization, a sustained effort, special skills, special tools, the building of large ships. The nature of the other is revealed by its vehicle, the barangay, which is a small rowboat, not a seafaring vessel designed for long distances on the avenues of the ocean.

[pdf] Who Owns Nick Joaquin Now? (July 2004): Who owns the copyrights to Nick Joaquin's extensive works, now that he has died, gotten cremated, and romantically gone to the eternal beer garden?

Philippine Graphic reissued 'Bat Lake', Joaquin's last novel (2004).

Thirty Years of Spam

Spam turning 30 this month, no gifts please: The culprit: Gary Thuerk, a marketer for the old Digital Equipment Corporation. His crime: Sending a sales e-mail to 393 users on Arpanet (then a US government computer network and the predecessor of today's Internet). Little did Thuerk know that he'd just become the world's first spammer.

One of the best spams ever (2002): Received by Scott Graneman.

Ethnomathematics

[pdf] Peace, Social Justice, and Ethnomathematics (2007) by Ubiratan d'Ambrosio:

Issues affecting society nowadays, such as national security, personal security, economics, social and environmental disruption, relations among nations, relations among social classes, people's welfare, the preservation of natural and cultural resources, and many others can be synthesised as Peace in its several dimensions: Inner Peace, Social Peace, Environmental Peace and Military Peace.These four dimensions are intimately related. Social Justice, the theme of this book, naturally leads to Social Peace. Although, as I said, the four dimensions of Peace are intimately related, in this chapter I will focus my reflection on Social Justice and how can Ethnomathematics contribute to it.

Ethnomathematics: an absolute key for Mathematics education (1998): Needless to say how native algorithms to perform these operations are culturally-dependent and, therefore, are different. That is why the (Ethno)-Mathematics becomes absolutely essential for mathematics education.

Ethnomathematics Digital Library (2005): Around seven hundred items relevant to the Pacific region.

[old video] Filipino must-see, popular 'Ethnomathematics': If you're Filipino, once you see it, you will know the 'algorithm', then you will want to wash your eyes.

Nice Guys Finish How?

Why Nice Guys Finish Last: Manliness 101 suggests dropping the 'nice guy' act and 'getting with the programme'. Finding a woman should not be the sole purpose of your time. Act naturally as a man and don’t perceive women as better than you, and the good relationships will come.

[via infoshop] Nice Guys Finish First (1987): Richard Dawkins discusses selfishness and cooperation.

Parts 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Foreign Policy's Public Intellectuals

The Top 100 Public Intellectuals: From the list created of a hundred names compiled by Foreign Policy, the public is asked to vote for five intellectuals. They are some of the world's most introspective philosophers and rabble-rousing clerics. A few write searing works of fiction and uncover the mysteries of the human mind. Others are at the forefront of modern finance, politics, and human rights.

Here is a personal shortlist:

• Noam Chomsky: Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955...a groundbreaking linguist and a prominent critic of US foreign policy.


• Richard Dawkins: Seminal 1976 work, The Selfish Gene, explores the role played by genes in the evolutionary process. He may be better known today for the criticisms of religion and 'intelligent design' theories.


• Daniel C Dennett: Austin B Fletcher professor of philosophy at Tufts University, where his life's work is building a 'philosophy of mind' to explain how human consciousness works.


• Umberto Eco: His dense novels...are a dizzying blend of philosophy, biblical analysis, and arcane literary references. An expert in the burgeoning field of semiotics, he is president of the Advanced School of Humanist Studies at the University of Bologna.


• Douglas Hofstadter [not in list]: College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. His rsearch focuses on consciousness, creativity, at the nature of thinking.


• James Lovelock: His great contribution to science is the famous Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth can be thought of as a giant organism.


• Steven Pinker: Johnstone family professor at Harvard University and author of seven books. A frequent essayist, he focuses on language and cognition in his research.


• V.S. Ramachandran: Directs the Center for Brain and Cognition and at the University of California, San Diego. Dawkins calls him the 'Marco Polo of neuroscience' for his work on behavioral neurology.


• E.O. Wilson: Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and naturalist, [he] argues that human behaviour can largely be explained by biology. He is Pellegrino university professor emeritus of entomology at Harvard University.

Heterophenomenology and Qualia

Heterophenomenology is Daniel C Dennett's third-person approach to the science of consciousness. It's similar to a method that readers of literature use to believe, detail, and interpret the actions, thoughts, and characters of what they read to form their definitive version of the work of art.

Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005) is Dennett's later book on heterophenomenology.

An End to Qualia? Dennett's Defense of Heterophenomenology (Spring 2007): A short review: Dennett goes on the offensive against the 'new mysterians', those who argue that the problem of consciousness is fundamentally unsolvable or requires an explanatory framework outside that used by observational science.

James Longenbach on Jorie Graham

The Wasted Land: Longenbach's review of Sea Change (2007) by Jorie Graham:

In Sea Change, Graham traffics in large statements ('the / end of the world can be imagined', 'fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef'), but at times her thought can seem muddled, her diction puzzlingly imprecise, as when she writes that love is 'like a thing floating out on a frail but / perfect twig-end.' How do we respond to a poet who is certain about the Great Barrier Reef but evasive about what stands before her eyes? .... Counting the swans, observing them closely, is for Yeats a way of reinhabiting ordinary life, as it is for Graham. Except that Graham is suspicious of the work of precision: to her, it feels like 'ownership', as if to name the world certainly were to lock it down, close off possibility, get it wrong. This suspicion is commendable philosophically and politically--especially if one's subject is the end of the world; nobody wants to be Chicken Little. But it's poetically problematic, since poems thrive on precision, and with a skilled poet like Graham, the avoidance of precision should not be anything but precise--a conscious choice to appear confused and incomplete. Why would a poet feign the inability to find the exact word for the thing at the end of a branch? Are a poet's errors of perception comparable to the mistakes that raised the temperature of the Gulf Stream, forcing a plum tree in Normandy to blossom out of season?

[poem] Summer Solstice (2007) from Seachange

The Stuff of Pinker

[video] Steven Pinker on I Want That! (2006): Mr Cube loves Smart Furniture.

Of thought and metaphor (January 2007): On Pinker's new book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

'Look at almost any passage and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works. 'Rather than occasionally reaching for a metaphor to communicate, to a very large extent communication is the use of metaphor.'

[old video] The Stuff of Thought (September 2007): Why don't we make grammatical sense when we swear?

[old science news] Holy @&%*! Author Steven Pinker Thinks We're Hardwired to Curse:

[He] takes a fresh look at the 'poo-poo theory', which proposes that swearing was actually the first form of language. He points to the fact that brain-damaged patients who lose the power of articulate speech often retain the ability to curse like a sailor. 'Since swearing involves clearly more ancient parts of the brain...it could be a missing link between animal vocalization and human language.'

What the F***? (October 2007) by Pinker:

The strange emotional power of swearing--as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures--suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.

The Dialectic of Narrative: The Pretextual Paradigm of Discourse in the Works of Madonna

[via neatorama] The Postmodernism Generator: Written by Andrew C Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars, and modified very slightly by Josh Larios (this version, anyway. There are others out there).

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (1996): Alan Sokal's now famous parody essay that was published in Social Text.

More papers on the 'affair' here.

The Abuse of Science: An Interview with Alan Sokal:

'But our dispute is not primarily with philosophers of science. We're more worried about the gross abuses and gross exaggerations of these ideas which originated in philosophy of science but which have trickled down in vulgarised form to anthropology and cultural studies. People just talk about the incommensurability of paradigms as if it were an established fact.'

[wiki] Sokal affair.

The Real Siegfried Sassoon

Regeneration (1991) by Pat Barker is the first in the trilogy of novels on the First World War. The excerpt below narrates the first meeting of poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The stuttering Owen asks the older, established poet to sign five copies of Sassoon's book:

Owen, feeding the names, would have given anything to say one sentence without stammering. No hope of that--he was far too nervous. Everything about Sassoon intimidated him. His status as a published poet, his height, his good looks, the clipped aristocratic voice, sometimes quick, sometimes halting, but always cold, the bored expression, the way he had of not looking at you when you spoke--shyness, perhaps but it seemed like arrogance. Above all, his reputation for courage. owen had his owen reasons for being sensitive about that. Sassoon reached the last book. Owen felt the meeting begin to slip away from him. Rather desperately, he said, 'I l-liked "The D-Death B-Bed" b-best.' And suddenly he relaxed. It doesn't matter what this Sassoon thought about him, since the real Sassoon was in the poems.

The Death-Bed from The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1918):

He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped
Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;
Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,
Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.
Silence and safety; and his mortal shore
Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.

Someone was holding water to his mouth.
He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped
Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot
The opiate throb and ache that was his wound.
Water--calm, sliding green above the weir.
Water--a sky-lit alley for his boat,
Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers
And shaken hues of summer; drifting down,
He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.

Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,
Blowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.
Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars
Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;
Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,
Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes.

Rain--he could hear it rustling through the dark;
Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;
Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers
That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps
Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace,
Gently and slowly washing life away.

He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain
Leapt like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore
His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.
But someone was beside him; soon he lay
Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.
And death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and stared.

Light many lamps and gather round his bed.
Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
He's young; he hated War; how should he die
When cruel old campaigners win safe through?

But death replied: 'I choose him.' So he went,
And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.

More from the Siegfried Sassoon collection at Bartleby.

Wilfred Owen in Edinburgh

[old] Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (2002) by Dominic Hibberd.

[Wilfred Owen] was almost ready to begin his annus mirabilis. Identifying himself with other people was not only an ergotherapeutic discipline but also what poets had to do. Keats had said that a poet should be 'continually informing and filling some other body', and Shelley had argued that it was through exercise of the poetic imagination that people could learn morality and love, putting themselves 'in the place of another and of many others', making the pains and pleasures of humanity their own. Wilfred wrote a little poem, 'Six O'Clock in Princes Street', imagining how he could join the happy crowds in town.... But his old ambition to be a meteor-poet, flying above the ordinary, meant he had to follow his own course, not keeping step with the crowd but following 'gleams unsafe, untrue', 'tiring after beauty through star-crowds'.

Six O'Clock in Princes Street from The Collected Poems (1963):

In twos and threes, they have not far to roam,
       Crowds that thread eastward, gay of eyes;
Those seek no further than their quiet home,
       Wives, walking westward, slow and wise.

Neither should I go fooling over clouds,
       Following gleams unsafe, untrue,
And tiring after beauty through star-crowds,
       Dared I go side by side with you;

Or be you in the gutter where you stand,
       Pale rain-flawed phantom of the place,
With news of all the nations in your hand,
       And all their sorrows in your face.

More from The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.

Michael Hofmann's Bricks and Blank Spaces

[review] Selected Poems by Michael Hofmann: ...prove[s] that he is a precise poet of desolations and furies, says George Szirtes.

[old interview] Where is our home key, anyway? (1999): Before I discovered blank space, or had any use for it. Other people’s poems were like swans carved out of butter, or something. My things looked dense, uncompromising, undifferentiated. The 'brick' was to suggest utility, interchangeability, compactness, aggressiveness even. I began by despising most poetry for being archaic and mindless and ornamental and unnecessary. Of course, a lot of it still is.

'Body Heat' originally from Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983):

This evening belongs to a warmer day--
separated clouds, birds, bits of green...
We wake late, naked, stuck to each other:
the greenhouse effect of windows and bedclothes.

Fifty years late, you finish Love on the Dole.
--Who knows, perhaps it can really be done?
The Boots hair-setting gel no longer works;
your pecker is down. The underdog's leather jacket

is here to stay, the stubborn lower lip
of the disconsolate punk...The poor hedgehogs,
they must help each other to pull off the leaves
that covered them while they were hibernating.

Manila Envelope

Manila Envelope (1989) by James Fenton is a limited edition collection printed in the Philippines. It has thirteen poems, ending with the Tagalog "Maski Papaano" above. Fenton explains: When I lived in Manila, I knew several aspiring poets who felt some frustration at the lack of any outlets for their work. I suggested self-publishing as the answer. This is what I had done over the years with John Fuller and with my brother. Poetry publishing is anyway a small-scale operation. In Manila, where the situation was ideal for the small press, such ventures were not well known.

[audio] 'The Milkfish Gatherers' cleverly translates two naughty Tagalog names of fish ('tampal-puki' and 'tarugo') into English [detail pointed out by J Neil C Garcia]:

Rummagers of inlets, scourers of the deep,
Dynamite men, their bottles crammed with wicks,
They named the sea's inhabitants with style--
The Slapped Vagina Fish, the Horse's Dick.

Polillo 'mets' means it is far away--
The smoking island plumed from slash and burn.
And from its shore, busy with hermit crabs,
Look to Luzon. Infanta melts in turn.

The collection begins with Blood and Lead:

Listen to what they did.
Don't listen to what they said.
What was written in blood
Has been set up in lead.

Lead tears the heart.
Lead tears the brain.
What was written in blood
Has been set up again.

The heart is a drum.
The drum has a snare.
The snare is in the blood.
The blood is in the air.

Listen to what they did.
Listen to what's to come.
Listen to the blood.
Listen to the drum.

James Fenton on Wilfred Owen

'Wilfred Owen's Juvenilia' by James Fenton (The Strength of Poetry, 2001):

...a complicated set of forces combined to release [Owen] from the spirit of his juvenilia. When reasoning about our creativity, we cannot assume that causality is going to behave in thew ay causality normally behaves. There must be such a thing as causality, we assume; but we cannot expect to understand its workings. In the writing of poetry we may say that the thing we predict will not happen. If we can predict it, it is not poetry. We have to surprise ourselves. We have to outpace our colder calculations.

To-- from The Collected Poems (1963):

Three rompers run together hand in hand.
The middle boy stops short, the others hurtle:
What bumps, what shrieks, what laughter turning turtle.
Love, racing between us two, has planned
A sudden mischief: shortly he will stand
And we shall shock. We cannot help but fall;
What matter? Why, it will not hurt at all,
Our youth is supple, and the world is sand.

Better our lips should bruise our eyes, than He,
Rude Love, outrun our breath; you pant, and I,
I cannot run much farther; mind that we
Both laugh with love; and having tumbled, try
To go forever children, hand in hand.
The sea is rising... and the world is sand.

More from The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.

John A. Wheeler (1911-2008)

John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96: ...a visionary physicist and teacher who helped invent the theory of nuclear fission, gave black holes their name and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, died Sunday morning at his home in Hightstown, N.J.

Cosmic Variance: Goodbye: Tribute by Daniel Holz (where the photo above is taken from): For two years I sat at the feet of the master, and I absorbed as much as I could. I learned about science, and about life. Wheeler had broad interests. We would often discuss biology, or history, or poetry.

Gémino H Abad's Native Clearing

As Imagined, As Lived: Sense for Language, Sense of Country (2008) by Gémino H Abad:

If we ask why the system of education in any country includes its literature as a required subject, the answer is pretty obvious: because a country's literature is its own image, that is to say, its imagination of how its people think and feel about their world and so, justify the way they live. In short, its literature is its lived ideology. In that light, our country's literature is 'our native clearing' within the language that has been forged and adopted for the artistic mimesis. Now, one's country is basically how one imagines her. Note the poetical gender: Inang Bayan. For one's sense of country is essentially a poetic sense: an imaginative perception of our day-to-day living in the very element of our history and culture.

Douglas Dunn on Creative Writing Programmes

[pdf] Douglas Dunn interview (The Dark Horse, 1999) by Gerry Cambridge:

DD: A lot of reviewing in the literary magazines as opposed to the newspapers, strikes me as being done by post-graduates who are actually printing a chunk of a thesis. By and large I think Universities are a good thing, because I work in one; but their influence on literature is not always good. GC: Why? DD: It academises it. Full stop. Nothing more to say, really. So a writer who works in a university has to protect him or herself. Kathleen Jamie and John Burnside have just been appointed to the School of English in St Andrews, to teach creative writing. I’ll have to look after them. Make sure they don’t get into bad habits. GC: Was St Andrews the first University in Scotland to institute a degree in creative writing? DD: Yes. It’s a one year post-graduate course; it started in 1993. GC: In America creative writing courses are ubiquitous. Some critical opinion over there feels that’s a negative thing. If there were many more creative writing courses in Scottish Universities would it be healthy? DD: Perhaps not. But I don’t think every University needs to have one; there isn’t the market. We get by because we attract quite a lot of Americans who are disenchanted with what’s on offer in the USA. And they want to come and study at St Andrews, in a different culture. And it’s not sitting around talking about your feelings. If they do the poetry course with me then they have to learn versification, as well as study poetry of the past; one of the essays they have to write is on the history of Blank Verse, in Blank Verse. Or they could do a history of the rhyming couplet in rhyming couplets. GC: And how long does this history have to be? DD: At least 150 lines. GC: You mentioned earlier that some of these students can’t study Robert Frost at an American University. That seems an extraordinary situation. DD: Absolutely. If it continues, American culture, never mind American poetry, will go down the drain.

A Removal from Terry Street from Terry Street (1969):

On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus U.S. Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

More on Arlindo Correia with Portugese translations (2004).