Bauerlein's Irony

Maybe he was serious.  Maybe he was up late downing pots of coffee because he felt obligated to squeak out some form of intellectual commentary on the state of higher education.  Maybe he knew what he was doing and knew it was flippin' hilarious.  Whatever the case, Mark Bauerlein of the Chronicle of Higher Education made me chuckle this morning.  In an article about the apparent lack of aesthetics in the ever-increasing vocational age and college students' inability to write palatable sentences, he writes this:

With college campuses becoming ever more preprofessional and vocational, it's getting harder for humanities teachers to get freshmen and sophomores to appreciate the aesthetic side of things.  That goes for both their interpretation of texts and for their creation of texts. They read everything for the kernal of fact and value, the information, the point, not for the expression (whether beautiful or vulgar or flat or conventional . . .).  And they write sentences that have no flair, no element of balance, rhythm, metaphor, or other aesthetic feature.

(emphasis mine).  I find this last sentence utterly hilarious in its own right, but the entire article is like this--short, pointless sentences with no imagery, flair, metaphor, or balance...

As Predicted

Remember back when I wrote about the posthumous publication of Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura?

This is the most ridiculous marketing ploy in the history of mankind.  People will do what I am doing now--they will berate the publishers, tear apart the novel before they have read it, then read it and pine for the last wishes of a great and dead white man--and the publishers will use it to make more fatuous and puerile productions to draw in those who have never before thought about reading a 500 page novel.

Well, now it's been released, and every publisher and reviewer out there is following my predictions to the  letter, viz.:

Before Nabokov's death in 1977, he instructed his wife to burn the unfinished first draft—handwritten on 138 index cards—of what would be his final novel. She did not, and now Nabokov's son, Dmitri, is releasing them to the world, though after reading the book, readers will wonder if the Lolita author is laughing or turning over in his grave.

Every review I have read concerns the nature of the release more than the actual content of the book.   I am dismayed, but not surprised.

Dystopia in Kentucky

 A few miles west of Cincinnati, near the northern Kentucky town of Petersburg, there’s a gleaming new monument to Christianist ideology called the Creation Museum. It was built by an Australian Biblical literalist named Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars, raised mostly in small donations. It opened over Memorial Day weekend with a blast of media attention (Edward Rothstein wrote two pieces about it for the New York Times), and since then ten thousand people a week have been flocking to its exhibits. Last Sunday, on a visit to my in-laws in Lexington, I joined them.

More here.

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #13

Prologue to the Adagios Quartet

One narrow world that might be anywhere; but, for you,
it's here and it's now, now. Palest full moon in the window,
muted blue-grey shadows, smoke coiling within
variegated scintillae of light.

Just lie there.

Don't move.

That's good. Nothing like a man who can follow
the figures of beauty, fathom the fingers, the splaying
of light. Your hands are beautiful, smooth
and worn, firm and supple, a hint of moisture
glancing off the wet plucked eye suspended in the balance,
in the frame, and yes, I'm calling your name, seeking, seeking, speaking
from experience, from what I know you crave; so, come,
here, now. I know what you need and you know how good
it can feel, giving yourself over to the abandoning emptying
and to keep breathing, hot, like that, on the back of my neck. Man . . .

Did a dame ever have it so good, so easy, a place to worship,
a temple in which to slide moist lips and eloquent tongue narrating
a wordless world turning upsy-turvy placing these jewels
ever so gently between teeth, and time, and breathe,
hallelujah, breathe, breathe, breathe. Wild and wondrous
before this fragility of need and it's heavenly to kneel,
desire flickering defiantly among stilled shiftings of forever,
lovely so opened, awake in my mouth. And, you know,

it's the rhythm,
it's the glide and sway, it's you moving with me and I with you
tasting the sweet explosions spectacularly cascading
across the moon drifting slowly
out of this poem, this frame, this time, air porous
with inevitability, menace and caress held at bay, thighs tangling
in strands of the futureless future guttering
among shafts of light and yes, that's it and that's all.

- Judith Fitzgerald gives an interesting assemblage of notes to her poem on her website.

The Pangrammatic News Continues!

Glum Schwartzkopf vex'd by NJ IQ

General H. Norman Schwartzkopf, Jr. found out on Wednesday morning that his knowledge of his home state was shabby to say the least.  When taking the online NJ IQ challenge, the retired General was amazed to discover that the most mall-per-capita city in the US was not indeed Hackensack as he thought.  This came as a major disappointment to him, though he soon recovered when he found something to be proud of, viz., that Ben Stiller was definitely NOT born in NJ.  Of course the military leader was quick to punt the criticism onto someone else when reporters began quizzing him about his failure.  

"You can't help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself," he said with a glare.

Having been the top Army representative during the Gulf war, reporters asked him what he thought about the state of the current struggle.  After pausing thoughtfully, he quipped, "Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion."