Gautier

So Théophile Gautier. The first poet I'm studying in my French symbolists class. He's definitely not a Symbolist himself, being more of a late Romantic than anything. Yet he rejected the loose, undisciplined verse-style of the Romantics and developed a classical form more rigid than even Classicism had demanded. He had a heavy influence on the Symbolists insofar as he relied heavily upon images to transmit an experience, and cultivated what for many early moderns would become the highest poetic virtues: detachment and clear statement (and of course, in that evaluation we see a decided return to elements of the Classical aesthetic as well).

He's most well-known as a precursor to the Parnassians, whose high opinion of themselves can be seen in their group's appelation, which is obviously meant to remind us poor mortals (at that time so woefully in the clutches of romanticism)that they, the true poets, drink at the fonts of inspiration on Mount Parnassus itself, ethereal home of the Muses and source of many poetic marvels. Anyway, they were quite enamored of his doctrine of "L'Art pour l'art" - Art for Art's Sake, a doctrine whose primary thrust was to reject any sense of purpose - such as social commentary, cultural criticism, portrayal of abstract or transcendent truth - in art, saying that for art to be truly pure it must be free from such "ulterior motives". They also cultivated Gautier's example of exact and faultless workmanship as an answer to the excessive sentimentality of Romanticism.

Now the Symbolists rejected the Parnassians' clarity and objectivity as overly realistic (in the sense of being in the style of Realism or Naturalism); they had the notion, rather akin to Keat's concept of negative capability, that art should strive to portray absolute truths which cannot be accessed directly or exhausted by direct and clear imagery. They did, however, love the musicality of Parnassian verse, a quality which Gautier's example had helped the latter to achieve; and they admired his doctrine of "L'Art pour l'art" and his mood of ironic detachment.

That suffices as a basic description, though I'm going to post a poem, for those who can read it, which is a good example of what I mean, and much more revealing than a prose listing of qualities. Analysis may follow in a later post, though I don't promise it, and if it happens, will most likely happen in French anyway, so it won't be much use.

Keats on Negative Capability

“. . . [S]everal things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare posessed [sic] so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium [i.e., the vestibule or in-between space] of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
(Italics mine)

The Fall Semester, Anno Domini 2009

My classes for this semester:

• The famous Junior Poet, probably the class most defining UD-ness both by its widespread reputation and its consummate awesomeness (and yes, the word choice there is deliberately mixed in tone)
• Medieval Lit, a requirement for English majors
• Russian Novel, a very interesting class led by two of the pillars of UD academia, Dr. Dupree and Dr. Cowan, son of Louise Cowan, and heir to some of the founders of the university
• French Literary Traditions I; this is after taking Lit Trad III last fall semester
• Elementary Russian I, taught by the Physics professor, who is fluent and makes up for our tragic lack of a Russian department in this Cold War-minded/capable of recognizing what de Tocqueville and similarly perspicacious men have always seen, ie that Russia and America share essential, and almost surreal similarities in a historical sense while differing wildly in culture school. (How's that for a tangled sentence? Basically I mean: UD should have a Russian department.)
• and finally, a special reading course in French Symbolist poetry

I'm most excited about that last one, in some ways, because I wasn't sure that I'd be able to do something like this until the very first day of class. Basically I went to the head of the French department (who is going on sabbatical this semester), told him that there was no way that I'd be able to get a French major with the extraordinarily limited (understandably so, since practically no one here studies what is arguably the foremost literary language besides English in the world as far as English speakers are concerned) number of course offerings in the language each semester. I mentioned the fact that T.S. Eliot is my poet for J-Po, and explained my corresponding interest in the Symbolist movement that so heavily influenced him. Then I stated my proposition for this semester: instead of taking a fascinating yet largely impractical class in Elementary Hebrew, couldn't a study the French symbolists under the guidance of one of the teachers? And surprisingly, the answer was an enthusiastic "yes"! So now I basically have the privilege of being able to spend all the free time which I am not devoting to T.S. Eliot reading about and interpreting the (very arcane) works of poets such as Laforgue, Verlaine, Corbiere, and the not-quite-symbolists-but-connected Gautier and Baudelaire. And to cap it all off, I get to randomly go and have long conversations with the magnificently erudite Dr. Dupree (who does everything from tech trouble shooting in every department, to translating volumes of French poetry, to teaching classes in Old English) about anything he finds remotely pertinent. What could be a better way to get in an eighteenth credit?

T.S. Eliot's Dramatic Lyric

The quality of T.S. Eliot’s lyric strikes me as essentially dramatic, which is a rather strange characteristic for lyric poetry, a genre that – according to many literary critics – is notable for its lack of what we think of as drama. (Sharon Cameron: “Unlike the drama, whose province is conflict, and unlike the novel or narrative, which connects isolated moments of time to create a story multiply peopled and framed by a social context, the lyric voice is solitary and generally speaks out of a single moment in time”) You can have conflict in ordinary lyric, certainly, but not necessarily in the sense of a multiplication of persons in mutual conflict; yet this is precisely what you could argue that Eliot is doing in, say La Figlia Che Piange, and certainly in The Waste Land.

There is certainly continual conflict deriving from the uncertainty, ambiguity, and thematic tension of each poem. Furthermore, the strong rhythmic thrust to all his verse (a rhythm that is not regular but rather that follows the natural rhythms of speech, correspondingly changing its force when the emotion of the utterance changes) enhances this dramatic quality, giving it a real-world feel and also increasing the dramatic tension and sense of conflict.

But one of the most striking aspects of this dramatic quality (in the world of lyric poetry at least) is the multiplicity of voices in poems such as The Waste Land. Note in the Wasteland alone the variety of voices which make themselves heard: Tiresias, Mr. Eugenides, the Cockney, Marie, and so on. And as in traditional theater, it's in these conflicting voices that the conflict of the poem is expressed. Are these voices merely diffractions of Eliot's own narrative voice, expressing by their very existence his own internal conflict? Or are they meant to be heard as the voices of conflicting forces in society?

In Tradition and the Individual Talent Eliot asserts the poet's need to sacrifice his own personality to the "collective consciousness" of his culture/tradition. Maybe for Eliot his poetic voice and his personal preoccupations can be conflated with the conflicts and contradictions of his own society: in voicing them as a single author, yet with many voices, he is perhaps reemphasizing that any society is essentially unified into one cultural entity. Yet the "collective consciousness" of one as divorced from its roots as he considered his own society is necessarily fragmented. Indeed, for Eliot, modern society is suffering not merely from a fragmentation of its thought, but from a fundamental schizophrenia rooted in the successful deterioration of a unified, objective sense of identity. Modernism's success in stranding modern culture without a tradition in which to find its meaning has created a void in the face of which individuals can either despair or desperately attempt to create their own meaning and identity.

Lack of cultural unity due to abandonment of tradition is precisely what Eliot is reflecting in his "cubist" method (of The Waste Land )of stranding cultural references as individual images that do not so much have a coherent meaning when juxtaposed as they provoke an emotional response of disgust with the emptiness of modern society (one cannot perhaps, even term it modern "culture") and elicit a desire for the type of meaning that a sound tradition (literary, philosophical, and -in Eliot's later poetry especially - religious) could provide. This is at least part of the explanation for the sense of alienation (again, often to the point of schizophrenia) of much of the rest of his poetry, though in most it is not as dramatically and jarringly expressed as in The Waste Land.

This sense persists in his post-conversion poetry, yet one does not get the sense that the alienation is so personal for Eliot any longer. In his adoption of the European and the Catholic traditions, he has a place, an identity, a more or less comprehensible role in time. The lack of cultural unity/identity manifests itself now as a societal malaise which the world around him suffers, but to which he now possesses the answers.

Ion

That's not a reference to chemistry. Rather it's to philosophy; specifically to the first of Plato's dialogues that appears in the Signet edition of Plato's collected works. My brother is reading the Republic and several others currently, and in a fit of nostalgia for freshman year of high school, I picked up his book and started from the beginning. I hadn't read Ion since way back then, and it's a much faster read at 20 than it is at 14, I can assure you.

For one thing, it's one of the shortest Socratic dialogues that I've ever read. Well actually, probably the shortest - even Laches seemed longer. I believe Cleitophon is the shortest that exists, but I've never read that one. Anyway, its remarkable conciseness: Socrates manages to turn the very pliable Ion's way of thinking completely around using even fewer arguments and examples than he usually needs to correct the generic dull-minded interlocutor. This brevity makes it quite an easy dialogue to follow, and the ubiquitous irony of the set-up and of the argument's course is much easier to pin down than usual.

In questioning Ion about the nature of his art of rhetorician, Socrates is basically doing what we would be if we tried to define the work of a literary critic; at least, so one might think of it. "The reciter," Socrates observes to Ion, "must be the interpreter of the poet's mind to the audience; and to do this, if he does not understand what the poet says, is impossible". This makes plenty of sense to Ion, who, though enthusiastic about his craft, hardly strikes one as the cleverest reciter of poetry to sing verse. Within a few paragraphs, he has Socrates running intellectual circles around him (as is Socrates' habit), as both begin to conclude that the reciter is altogether less qualified to judge the merit of the poet when, for instance, the poet sings of horsemanship than a skilled horseman, when the poet speaks of healing than a doctor. In other words, Ion is soon admitting, the reciter or actor has much less knowledge of anything that a poet writes about than the professional whose skill is that described; and any knowledge that the reciter does have is in virtue of his skill in that art. That is, a reciter may know the standards of good horsemanship because he possesses that skill to some degree himself, but only in virtue of that art does he know it, not in virtue of his art as a reciter.

Clearly this leaves them with the idea that there is no such thing as the art of reciting or acting, at least not such as Ion understands them and Socrates had just defined them at the beginning. Ion's proposed defense of the reciter's art is that he knows "what is proper for a man to say" - that is, he knows what a fisherman, a weaver, a slave, or a ruler would say in a given situation. But the argument Socrates has just used easily quashes that suggestion when he points out that surely a fisherman, a weaver, a slave, or a ruler would certainly know better than the reciter whether what the poet has written corresponds to the reality of the situation.

The dialogue ends with Socrates and Ion agreeing that the reciter really has no art or special knowledge at all: he is either a cheat, or when interpreting the great poets is "possessed by divine dispensation". Ion is serious. Socrates is most certainly not.

At least, it seems most unlikely that Plato, master of the literary art of the dialogue, would have so little respect for art that he would find it uninterpretable - or so little rationality that he would consider interpretation to be possible only through a divinely-induced frenzy. And of course, he never leaves the reader with a hard and fast conclusion to savour: these dialogues are meant to keep you thinking.

Well one of the first things this gets me thinking is that perhaps Plato wants to make a point about the nature of poetic art as compared to that of manual crafts or theoretical skills. The close connection he draws between the work and the interpreter necessarily makes us think, as he discusses the nature of the interpreter's understanding, also of what is being understood. Poetry is not one of the arts with a concrete, useful result, like a plow made by a blacksmith that can help create a garden, or a mathematical formula that allows certain buildings to be built; it is not, as Josef Pieper would say, one of the "servile arts". Thus it's not something that is properly encountered as a blacksmith would approach a "how-to-forge-a-good-plow" manual. You don't just want to judge poetry on the skill with which it describes isolated activities. It's a thing much more organic and coherent than a how-to manual; if it is good poetry, at any rate, it will say something not so much about fishing or smithing, as it will say something about the meaning of life. Yes, accuracy in the details is important, but only insofar as this will help give a truer picture of what life as a whole is truly like and how human beings will interact with this world.

The accuracy of description is not the end of poetry, though Ion quite misses the point and easily falls for Socrates' trap when the latter suggests that it is through his incessant questioning. And if there's some other type of truth present than the purely utilitarian, there is something more in poetry than a fisherman, a blacksmith, a horseman, or any other type of artisan will know by virtue of their art. There's nothing preventing the busiest artisan from being an interpreter of art on some level, but now the tables are turned from when Socrates suggested that the reciter only can judge the virtue of poetry by means of other skills that he possesses. It is not the case that the artisan will truly understand parts of Homer because he is a seaman and Homer talks about ships; rather he will understand all of Homer and be capable of judging his work, insofar as he understands human nature and something of what life in the world is all about.

Classic.

A rejection slip from a Chinese economic journal, quoted in Financial Times:

"We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity."

Boston, MA (as if there were any other Boston)

So just prior to my family's epic hike of Katahdin, I decided to spend a day in Boston, both to look around the city, and to visit a friend from Chicago who's staying there for about three weeks. My sister was going to come with me, but she chickened out (jk Mary!), claiming that she would need more than four hours of sleep before hiking Katahdin (what nonsense!). So another friend from Maine who had spent the summer doing biochem research in Boston came along instead.

It was quite a lot of fun going down there at any rate, and considering that Katahdin turned out to be hikeable on what ended up being about 3 hours of sleep, the trip was less rash than it might sound. I travelled down on the new bus line that extends from Augusta to Portland and then on to Boston. (Huzzah for the introduction of some basic public transportation to central Maine!) Basically this meant getting up at 4:30 to ensure that I could catch the 6:15 a.m. bus, a rather tedious hour-and-a-half-long ride to Portland, a bit of a wait as the bus became crammed with so many passengers in Portland that the friend who was supposed to travel down with me couldn't board, and then another couple of hours spent watching "Mr.Bean's Holiday" without any sound.

Then Boston, South Station; and the epic Revolutionary War era site-seeing commenced. Well, actually I at first only walked to the Old South Meeting House, dating from 1729, and famous for Sam Adams' planning of the Boston Tea Party there in 1773. That was while I waited for my friend to arrive on the next bus. Once she arrived, we went to Mass at the cathedral, lugging backpacks all the way in pretty sweltering heat, but finding the beautiful church worth the trouble of getting there.

Lunch in Boston Commons was nice; it cooled us off a lot to be able to just sit around on the grass and talk and eat carrots and fruit and homemade bread with peanut butter for a while. We followed that up with a walk towards Faneuil Hall, through Quincy Market, and to the wharf, which was much cooler and another nifty area with a most Bostonian feel to it. Once we met up with my other friend, we went towards the North End, which is both Little Italy, and a site saturated with Revolutionary relics. Now Little Italy was particularly fascinating this day because there was a celebration in honor of Our Lady going on, and it seemed like the entire section of town was out to celebrate. There was a huge procession carrying a statue of Mary and Jesus on a litter covered with streamers and a canopy. The procession moved through streets crammed with vendors selling canoli, Italian ice, gelato, and practically every other Italian-American food known to man, and it would stop every few yards as children from overhanging balconies would shower it with pounds of confetti and streamers, people set off fireworks, and one of about six Italian-American marching bands would play. Each time it stopped, the men carrying the litter would pass long streamers to the crowd, and people in the crowd would tape dollar bills to the streamers until they were full. Then the resultant money-chains would be taped to the litter like decorations. Definitely the most unusual thing about the entire celebration.

Nothing else was quite as exciting as that, but we did get to see (not for the first time for me) Paul Revere's house; the Old State House, oldest public building in Boston, dating from 1713; the Old North Church, where we marveled at the fact that families would come to church to sit in cubicles; and the Copp's Hill Burying Ground. All good stuff, which helped to refresh a little of my elementary school American revolutionary history, and reignite my interest in that period.

No recounting of a trip would be complete without a brief overview of food consumed; for dinner this day we went to a bakery, bought a loaf of bread, then bought some tomatoes, cheese, and an avocado at a grocery store and ate near the harbor where some musicians had set up and a moderate number of people had gathered to listen and enjoy the growing cool of the evening.

The "Problem" of Universals Applied to Standards

The “problem of universals” has presented itself to philosophers as one of the most basic metaphysical puzzles since the time of the ancient Greeks,so it's no surprise I'm taking an interest in it after a few semesters at UD. A universal is fundamentally distinguished from the individual, or “particular,” objects that we encounter in day-to-day living in the sense that it refers to the core similarity between diverse objects. For instance, in the sentence “This round-ish, red-colored fruit is an apple,” “this round-ish red-colored fruit” signifies a particular because it refers to an individual being, whereas “apple” is a universal because it refers to some category of appleness of which all individual apples are part. The “problem” with universals is the question of whether they exist at all, of whether they are real or merely constructs of the human mind. The nature of our answer to such a query is of vital importance: it does not simply determine our view on universals themselves, but has a much broader significance for our understanding of how we should approach the world. One substantial ramification of our answer is the effect it will have on our understanding of whether or not we can apply standards to the beings in our experience.

Among the reasons we may wish to preserve a coherent system of standards in our world-view is that in so doing we retain the necessary rational tool for making judgments about the beings and situations that we encounter over the course of our lives. When capable of applying standards to the objects of our experience we are empowered to make rational decisions about those objects depending on what our standards are and how those objects live up to them. For instance, if we have a standard that sets out certain criteria for what makes a thing an apple, we can use this standard in evaluating specific objects to determine which one is the apple and will therefore be tasty to eat. Without such criteria, there is no way of determining what a thing is, at least not in terms of what practical repercussions its essence can have on you. A natural corollary to this ability to define something is, from an Aristotelian viewpoint, the ability to determine whether it is good as what it is. Thus is you know what an apple is, and you know that a specific object is an apple, you also know that if that particular apple happens to be rotten, it is not good; it is not fulfilling its being as an apple to the fullest potential.

From the preceding discussion it is clear that if we want to preserve the reality of standards, it is necessary to reject the view that universals are non-existent. By the extreme nominalist (universal-rejecting) position, only words can be general. There is, however, no underlying reality that these words are signifying. That is, we may call a variety of objects “apples”, but in doing so we are not expressing any fundamental unity of essence but only denoting certain accidental similarities between everything that we categorize under that term. Such a position necessarily excludes the notion of real, objective criteria against which a particular being can be weighed. We can, true enough, apply general terms to specific objects by the nominalist theory, but such application does not constitute a real judgment of those objects if it is not in reference to something real. Perhaps phrased as the nominalists have it, exclusion of the universal from the ontological chart may seem harmless enough when it comes to our standing example of the apple. If we can at least recognize that all things we call apples will share the attributes of tastiness and not be poisonous, we will feel safe enough eating one whether its “appleness” is real or merely a verbal construct. However, when we turn our consideration towards less concrete matters it becomes apparent that there are many universals—truth, goodness, and beauty in particular—which seem crucial to a complete understanding of the world in which we live. Yet these have no specific concrete expression such that considering them solely as accidental properties will serve our apparently innate desire to take them as standards to guide our approach to being. In this vein we should also consider that though we can accept the apple as edible from a nominalist point of view, there is no logical way for us to evaluate its goodness. It shares the accidents of all other particulars to which we apply the general term, but it cannot be judged a good apple unless there is a standard of appleness by which we can analyze it.

Thus it is clear that if we find the ability to judge objects of our encounter both valuable and necessary based on the nature of our experience of the world, we must think of universals as realities. There is a myriad of ways in which to formulate our conception of universals, but I will focus only on Aristotle’s, which is notably opposed to the platonic idea that universals have some separate, vague existence as un-instantiated forms. Drawing apprehension from his foundation, we receive a picture of universals as “ways of being”: realities which exist but not independently of and separate from particular beings. That is, they are real only insofar as they are instantiated in individual, actual beings. Individual apples, then, are united by virtue of an appleness that exists in and through them.

This way of understanding universals has a compelling consequence when considered in light of the determination to preserve the rational concept of standards. If it is a valid move to consider universals as containing criteria by which we can assess an individual being, there must be some perfection of that being which the universal implies and comprehends. And if the universal exists only insofar as it does in actual beings, there must be some being in which each one exists—either substantially or in the soul through knowledge, as Aquinas, building on Aristotle, puts it—perfectly. Though this idea deserves to be more fully developed than I have space to do in this essay, it suggests another compelling reason for belief in God. According to Christian thought, God Himself is that Being in which all created things have their being. Thus, the apple would exist in God perfectly in his comprehension of it, whereas the pervasive characteristics of being—truth, beauty, and goodness—exist as modalities of Himself as He interacts with our world.

And now for some spiritual enightenment....

Here's a choice selection from our local retreat center; thought y'all might be interested.

Dowsing as a Tool for Self Knowledge and Decision Making

Many people are familiar with the ancient form of dowsing for water by using a Y-shaped hazel tree branch. Dowsing is enjoying resurgence in alternative medicine fields as a simple, powerful, and fun way to make decisions regarding your health, spirit, and emotions, for example. Anyone can dowse as long as they keep an open mind; appreciate listening to their inner spirit, and practice. We'll learn to dowse using L-rods, pendulums and everyday household items, and we'll learn how to use dowsing to aid in the decisions you make every day. You'll be amazed by how clear your answers become as you begin to learn and trust the ancient and fun art of dowsing.

You know, you just have to keep your mind wide enough open so that it can fall out somewhere near the beginning. Preferably around where they start talking about the water in the ground mirroring your chi patterns. It's when you get into how the energy of manifestation from the matrix of life follows an intuitive guidance along a path that seems to be new yet feels old, etc. that things really start getting interesting!

Labyrinth Day

On the first day of the last month of 2009, come and walk the indoor labyrinth. Where are the endings and beginnings in your life? Settle your heart, mind, and spirit for the season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The labyrinth will be set up in the southwest room for your journey. Information about the labyrinth and reflective questions will be available for your use. Arrive and depart at your own pace.

If you get really lost, maybe they'll come find you if you yell long enough.

The Sacred Art of Healing Through Laughter: Become a Clown!

Allow your "inner child" some play time. Give yourself a new name and create a character that speaks to your inner dreams or outer fancies. Clowning can be amusing, transforming, and healing too. The basics of balloon sculpturing and a bit of magic will be included for fun.

Inner dreams? Outer fantasies???? Do we want to know?

Earth Stations

Join us as we journey in prayer with pictures, poetry, chants, and wisdom from many cultures to bring us into the spirit of solemn reflection on behalf of a wounded earth. Outdoors 3-4:30 pm unless it is raining (dress warmly), and indoors in the chapel 6-7:30 pm. Bring a drum, rainstick, or sound maker if you want. Walk the Earth Stations on your own anytime this week (call ahead to arrange). FREE.

But... donations to PETA are accepted. Oh yeah, and it's a good idea to have your costume incorporate a lot of bandaids, ankle wraps, and fake limb casts just to make the "wounded earth" motif extra clear.

Picturing Prayer

"Pray always," we have been told. This weekend retreat is an invitation to "Pray all ways." The movement will be gentle. From moments of tranquility born of centering prayer, we will 'pray' the Presence of God as captured through the eyes of a digital camera. The rhythm will be from inner stillness to outer awareness and back to our Center. Participants should come equipped with a digital camera. If you have no camera, come with a sketch pad and pencil in order to 'picture your prayer.' Come. Pray always. Pray all ways.

Capture your inner stillness on film using our new x-ray equipment. Or go old school with the "down-the-throat" camera. Outer awareness is well portrayed through keeping the eyes wide and mouth slightly open, hands hanging loosely at your sides. Come yourself to learn the gnosis of photographing your incorporeal Center from our tranquilizing guru!

Let the battle begin!

I know, I know. Given the current maelstrom of public policy coverups, attempts to socialize our health care, and other random bad news from the political realm of the good old USA, you might be expecting the title to be serious. You never know - I have been known to branch off into politics before if the situation was aggravating enough (as it jolly well is now). But that's not my concern at the moment. (And before I begin arguing against the proposed national health care, I want my facts sorted rather more neatly than they are now.)

When I say battle, I mean, all-out paintball war!!! Who'd've thunk it? Ostensibly quiet, reserved me turning into a paintballing maniac. Well, I'll admit that there is a good handful out there in the world who might have suspected. But, hey, this was totally sweet! A family in northern Illinois invited all 20 something of us counselors and teachers a few weekends ago to their house for a couple of days just so that we could enjoy their epic-awesome paintballing paraphernalia. They're actually a family that I already knew slightly from UD - one of the classic dynasty families with a sibling graduating nearly every year for about ten years. Pretty awesome.

They have a house near a largeish pond, and for the paintballing, after we got all geared up, the dad and one of the daughters (a recent UD grad!) took us out to a thickly overgrown island just off shore. The actual wars lasted only about 20 minutes each, but we had 4 or 5 of them in one afternoon, and given the strenuousness of even moving a couple of feet while staying undercover, that was plenty. Just to brag a little bit, I have to say that I was pretty amazing at sneaking. I would come up about a foot away from on of the other team's snipers and then they would have to fall back out of position as I hooked around and snuck up further.

It's acutally not quite as great as it might sound, because when you get that close, you can't fire at all...so it wasn't completely effective. Add to that the fact that I used less than a quarter cannister of ammunition per game in my enthusiasm for thriftiness. Ah well. C'est la vie. It was jolly fun overall.

A random thought

So, how would it be if I were to take it into my head to change the design of this page? I would have to think about a new one. I would have to go through the dreadful html headache to tweak the boring template blogspot offers. I would have to spend precious time doing it. But it might look more interesting. Then again, I don't mind it now. The whole black-and-white theme is rather dear to me. As is the darling sepia picture of Professor Tolkein in his armchair.

Any thoughts?

The Forgotten Inkling

What a dramatic opener, no? Charles Williams, the forgotten member of the literary group that so many fans of 20th century literature know and love, friend of J.R.R. Tolkein, Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis, to name a few.

So who is he, and what does he write about? Intrigued by this question and by the relative lack of any information about this fellow, I've been remaining keenly alert to any copies of his works that I find lurking in hidden corners of used bookstores (often his books are drastically overpriced - in my opinion - online) and I know have a respectable collection of his novels. These are often described, by the few critics who address them at all, as "spiritual thrillers". I'm not quite sure what to make of such a description, which seems to me to be unhelpfully vague. There's certainly a rather chilling aspect to those I've read, and they all treat things that our culture tends to consider fantastic - such as souls, ghosts, life after death, etc - as having a very real and substantial effect on the ins and outs of material existence. (I look forward to giving some thought eventually to William's philosophical compatability with Gilbert Ryle, but that will take a few more reads, I think.)

There's a definite power to his writing, which really draws you up into the story, but my one concern with the books - particularly Descent Into Hell (a book very sound in its moral philosophy, but perhaps just a tad questionable in its metaphysics) - is that their plots are dreadfully confusing. I closed Descent Into Hell with a clear idea of what it was trying to say and of the basic arc of moral development among the characters, but without a firm grasp of how or when anything happened.

I exaggerate. I did understand a lot of it, but there were some portions that seemed to get so wrapped up in mysticism that the logic of the plot is defied. Maybe this is an effect he's trying to acheive. I wouldn't doubt it, given his purpose in writing. My judgment as to its literary merit, however, I think will have to wait to give me a chance to do some second readings.

Chicago

So to elaborate on the esoteric reference in yesterday's post, I will give a brief explanation of where I currently am and why.

Location: Chicago, Illinois
Mission: To help mentor and tutor inner-city kids in basic academics and to encourage character formation: good habits, acquisition of good goals and virtues, etc. I'm doing it through a program associated with Opus Dei.

However, I won't discuss that much because it's work and people's privacy is involved and all that. Rather I'll focus my attention on jotting down some impressions of the "Windy City" (which actually is very windy just now, though the city was nicknamed that not in reference to gusty weather conditions, but to loquacious politicians). Not that I'll be writing a lot. As usual, the vast majority of my time will probably be occupied, partly by the program, partly by the fun evening activities we counselors will be doing as a group.

I must say, it strikes me as a very nice city. Other than Boston, I haven't had much contact with American cities, and this is nothing at all like Boston or anything I encountered in Europe. It has a pronounced skyscraper skyline, a forest of surprisingly aesthetically pleasing buildings towering hundreds of feet above you. It's a clean city, especially compared to Rome which, like most Italian cities, has the less-charming side of being rather filthy. And like Syracuse, NY, my mom's childhood homebase, it has a multitude of small ethnic neighborhoods with lots of good ethnic food and families who have lived in the same area since their grandparents got off the boat.

This night we went to get Italian ice (something unknown in Italy, as far as I remember) in the Italian quarter. The place was this tiny family-owned shop tucked at the corner of a row of rather nice apartment buildings. "Mario's" it's called, and the real Mario himself came out and regaled us with a long story about how his dad started him in the business - making lemonade and selling it for 5 cents a cup on the sidewalk - when he was six because he was too hyperactive in school. He proudly told us of his refusal to use computers, palm pilots, calculators, or anything remotely technological (he keeps his accounts on a cardboard box because it doesn't get lost like small scraps of paper do), and his even more vigorous refusal to make it into a franchise, despite his kids' solicitations. What made the tales he spun especially entertaining was the classic Italian American accent he told them all in - all in all, it seemed like he could have stepped right out of the movies (some of which - he said - were supposed to include his stand, but whose directors were firmly turned down when they wouldn't let his own workers stand in as the Italian ice sellers in the movie).

More JPo?

Huzzah! I'm quite excited and have good reason to be. I'm here in Chicago (long story, may be told later, if I feel like it) and was just talking to another English major from the University of Dallas. She's graduated, went on to graduate school at Christendom, and now has a masters from that school, I believe.

Anyway, I decided to ask her advice about taking six classes during the Junior poet semester. Would it be at all feasible, I wondered? A teacher and several (non-jpo taking) students had strongly discouraged it when I first signed up, so I had been second-guessing myself for a little while. But this most marvelous UD-er assured me that it might be tough, but it was definitely possible. And worth doing, too, since (and this was my reason for taking all six in the first place) they're really awesome classes which are either required for my major or won't be offered again during my time at school.

So here's the tentative list for next semester, the first one that I'm really excited about since I'm finally getting out of core classes (which are great but rather too easy) and moving on to some upper-level high interest stuff.

• Literary Study I (i.e. Junior poet)


• Medieval Literature


• Elementary Russian I


• Russian Novel


• Irish History


• French Literary Traditions II

Junior Poet and the (crazy?) upcoming semester

So this fall I'm going to be starting the famous Junior poet project that all UD English majors must complete before moving on in their academic careers... well, I mean, they could always scurry off to some ignominious alternative if the prospect of delving into the life and works of a single major English-language poet is too daunting. We leave them that choice. Yet no self-respecting English major would do that, not even one so intimidated by poetry as I.

Yes, I hate to break it to a scandalized world, but for all my obsession with the great classics of every age, I am not a fan of poetry. As a kid I hated the lack of storyline, and even more, despised the blatant emotionalism that characterized so much of it. I'm thinking Tennyson of Byron here, really, or maybe one of those typical English didactic poets who addressed poor Victorian children about the virtues of the ancient Romans. That these characterizations are a gross over-simplification I am well aware, but my childhood experience mars my enjoyment of fine verse nonetheless.

Yet I am slowly beginning to shed this prejudice, which means that there's some hope for me in the upcoming semester. I trace the first loosening of my unflinching disdain to my sophmore year in high school when I really read and listened to "The Raven" for the first time. Yes, it's an emotional poem, but the pulsing urgency of the rhythm captivated me, appealing as it did to my fascination with the sound and cadence of language.

Literary Traditions II at UD was another important step. I had a quite brilliant English teacher for this class, whose common-sense approach to poetry helped to weaken my vague idea that most poetry people were hopelessly head-in-the-clouds types who believed - in classic Rousseauian fashion - that the words of the poet came straight from the mouth of the divine forces of nature. And we covered a remarkable variety of verse, so with my exposure to the form somewhat increased, I began again to be delighted by the variety of styles, tones, rhythms, and so forth.

But for this class I return to the one poet I really have liked through all this time: T.S. Eliot. Some dislike what is seen as a tendency in his poetry to put all human experience under a microscope to examine the most common human emotions scientifically. He does have a penchant for intellectualization, but it is not so much an emotionless intellectualization as one that rebels against the simple conventions of poetic expression: why does the subject of poetry always have to be love, for instance, and why always the same two or three well-worn metaphors, once fresh, but now seldom more than lazy imitations of the brilliant poets of the past? And why must poetry idealize emotion for its own sake, as Rousseau and his ilk would have it?

There is a certain pessimism and cynicalness in his pre-conversion poetry, it's true. He's disillusioned with the world, caught up in a vortex of questions about the impact of temporality on human life, on the effect of language on human knowledge, on the apparent meaninglessness of modern life. These are concerns he retains after his conversion, but they are approached in a different way once he turns to Anglican Christianity to find a solution. There is still a sense of dissatisfaction with the world, but it is a dissatisfaction that points to a solution, often only subtly. There's no longer a feel of emptiness in the poems, as you end with after reading The Wasteland and his repetitive, slightly ominous, yet almost forlorn invocation of the thunder at the very end.

Anyway, those are just some preliminary ramblings on the fellow's work, based on my as yet quite superficial readings of his works. Plenty more musings will likely follow, because I think I'll probably have the subject on my mind more than once in the coming six months.