The Giro d’Italia—the second most important stage race in cycling after the Tour de France—is starting in Amsterdam this year, and a politician from the left-wing GroenLinks party has suggested that instead of having podium girls kiss victorious cyclists “podium guys” should be used. Heterosexuals, er, I mean, podium girls are “hopelessly outdated and sexist,” says Marco de Goede. Of course, de Goede is right that the use of podium girls is “sexist.” So let’s just have all the girls (and guys) stay home this year.

Clearly the homosexual agenda—both here and in Europe—is not tolerance but the celebration of homosexuality throughout society.

For all of you Walker Percy fans (and I am one of them), be on the lookout for the new Walker Percy documentary by Winston Riley. Mr. Riley’s previous documentary—on the artist Walter Anderson—won a number of awards and was broadcast on PBS.

According to Mr. Riley, the Percy film is intended for broadcast later this year, but there may be a few local screenings at film festivals. Or, if you are in New Orleans, you can catch a preview screening of the film scheduled to be shown in conjunction with the opening of the Walker Percy Center at Loyola on March 10th.

Thomas Mores of the world, unite!

(HT: Philokalia Republic)

Taking his cue from Wallace Stevens who said that poetry is the “supreme fiction,” Al Gore, as you may know, has published a climate change poem in his new book, Our Choice. The first stanza is actually not too bad, but it falls apart quicker than an arctic iceberg after that, alas.

What’s next for the indefatigable Gore? Rap?

Read the poem here.

In the November 17th issue of The Christian Century, Miroslav Volf reveals that he was one of the experts consulted by Yale University Press in The Cartoons That Shook the World fiasco and explains why he recommended that the press not reprint the Danish images. Doing so, Volf writes,

. . . would likely have provoked violence on the part of some who felt offended. That violence would have been unjustified and indefensible, of course, but that would have been of small comfort to any victims. The concern is not a matter of wanting to spare Yale a bit of trouble that a few extra police could easily prevent, as Bolton suggested. In the aftermath of the publication of the caricatures, Denmark was a comparatively safe place; Nigeria was not.

And because “the caricatures need not be reprinted in a scholarly treatise on their effects,” such an act would have been gratuitous. Though “gratuitously offending others may be our right,” Volf continues, “the exercise of that right hardly counts as a mark of a well-lived life.”

I have a lot of respect for Professor Volf and am sympathetic to his concern for non-Muslims in Muslim countries, but his reasons here are problematic.

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Having just received my own review copy of A New Literary History of America from Harvard University Press, I was intrigued to read Mark Bauerlein and Priscilla Ward’s email exchange on the book over at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Unsurprisingly, the book does not just focus on literature, but also on history, politics, popular culture and art in a series of discrete position papers arranged chronologically. No metanarrative here—except one, of course: what Bauerlein calls “a drama of multiculturalist emergence.”

Indeed, what struck me most in reading the exchange and in flipping through the book was that this is not a new literary history at all. It is simply a reification (to borrow that popular Marxist term) of what has long been assumed about the nature of history in general and American literary history in particular in the humanities. That Ward often encourages Bauerlein to write his own literary history on the figures and topics that have long been excluded while still claiming that the Harvard history is new and fresh is more than a little ironic.

Read the whole exchange here, in which in addition to his intelligence, Professor Bauerlein should be commended for his generous civility.

In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Xenia Markowitt, director of the Center for Women and Gender at Dartmouth College, answers the question: “Is It My Job to Teach the Revolution?” (Subscription required. The full article, however, is also available at Markowitt’s blog) Her answer, which is very telling, is both ‘”Yes” and “No.”

As the director of a women’s center, it is her job, she argues, to be an advocate for, and encourage other women to advocate for, women’s rights on campus—to “teach the revolution.” Thus, she feels compelled to support efforts to “stick it to the Man” even if she cannot help organize demonstrations, sit-ins, and so forth.

Indeed, she cannot help organize such activities because, as she frankly admits, she also “is the Man,” which, needless to say, she finds rather awkward. “Many of us,” Markowitt writes, “have positions that simultaneously require us to represent the institution as one of its officers, even as we hope to use our positions to agitate for social change.”

While this may be, it seems to me that the real source of Markowitt’s awkwardness is not so much that she must “agitate for social change” and “represent the institution” at the same time but that the revolution for which she continues to advocate has already happened—at least in a paradigm shift sort of sense.

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The above tagline is from the new “Futurisms” blog over at The New Atlantis. If you haven’t had the chance to check it out, I highly recommend you do. The blog engages techies who reduce human cognition to the material processes of the brain and who hope to harness technology to transform human nature, among other Faustian dreams.

While these “futurists” are a fringe group, the founders of the blog (Charles T. Rubin and Ari N. Schulman), argue that they are nevertheless worth debunking because they “are not unconnected to the central aims of the modern scientific project.” While I think the phrase “central aims of the modern scientific project” is a bit too general, they are certainly connected to a reductive materialism that characterizes a number of current scientific projects, including the Daniel Dennett camp of the cognitive sciences, which is still somehow very much the fashion in certain circles.

In English, for example, there are a number of literary critics who have attempted to “reread” humanity, to borrow Futurisms’ tagline, in great works of literature by reducing every emotion expressed in literary texts to certain capacities of the brain, which, in turn, are said to have been formed by that nebulous but convenient god-like force of social evolution. Not too long ago I heard a visiting literary scholar explain things such as love and justice in terms of the evolution of empathy. The care one feels for another, it was posited, was developed in packs of Neanderthals who learned that mutual aide led to increased individual benefits. Among numerous other things, I was struck by this “selfish” definition of love, which seemed to me, and still seems to me, to be very different from the sort of love depicted in most great works of literature, which in its idealized form is almost always self-sacrificial. As is all too often the case, efforts to “reengineer” or “reread” humanity turn out to be efforts to destroy what is distinctly human about it.

Anyway, by all means check out “Futurisms.” And speaking of all things human, be sure to check out Salvo‘s interview with First Things contributor and blogger Wesley J.
Smith.

Poet and translator Sarah Ruden will no longer publish with Yale University Press following its decision to remove the controversial Danish images—and all other images—of Muhammad from Klausen’s The Cartoons That Shook the World, and in a letter to the editors of The New Criterion, she calls other Yale authors to do the same. Her reason is that Yale violated a “crucial relationship of trust with an author’s mind and work,” and cannot, therefore, be trusted to deal with integrity in the future.

I think this is a fair and valid reason. Indeed, I think that conservatives (in particular, religious conservatives) need to be careful that our protests of Yale’s decision (if there are any further protests) do not have the appearance of being motivated by sour grapes—that is, that we appear to want Yale to publish the images of Muhammed, which were offensive to come conservative Muslims, simply because the American academy has disparaged both conservative thought and orthodox Judeo-Christian beliefs and values in recent years.

No doubt, Yale’s action in this case is inconsistent, but the issues of free speech and academic integrity are indeed the issues at stake here.

Over at Public Discourse, Matthew J. Milliner has written one of the best brief articles on conservatism and the arts that I have read in some time:

To familiarize oneself with contemporary conservative ideas and publications often means choosing culture wars over culture. Conservatives are practiced in lionizing the classics and lamenting the decline of Western culture, but should one wish to fully engage the culture of our time, a Leftward drift is difficult to resist. For example, the editor of a successful journal devoted to religion and the arts, Image, recently announced his need to “walk away from the conservative movement,” for he found the “imposed abstractions” of contemporary conservatism less than conducive to the sponsorship of poetry, art and fiction. While I take issue with his decision, I admit it is understandable, for the arts and contemporary conservatism don’t quite go hand in hand. There are, of course, exceptions. The New Criterion has, since 1982, been devoted to challenging the fact that “the Left defined the only possible standard of enlightenment in matters having to do with art and culture.” But, to my knowledge, The New Criterion never aimed to be the sole enterprise in this regard. As the arts rarely attain more than token coverage in conservative journals and forums, The New Criterion—passionately despised by the Left when not ignored—often seems to go it alone.

Conservatism’s less than energized attention to the arts is, to be sure, understandable. Sifting the wheat from the endless fields of present-day cultural chaff is a herculean chore, and appears a luxury considering the urgent issues that rightly occupy the conservative mind. Does one really expect a honed pro-life advocate to put down her pen mid-argument to embark on a pleasant afternoon gallery stroll? Likewise, should a disciplined poet, lost in contemplative gaze, interrupt a potentially fruitful reverie for a primer on the current state of bioethics? Perhaps not, but should conservatism wish to retain its current adherents and attract new ones, attention to the arts may not be a choice, but a mandate—for patronage of culture, rightfully pursued, recalls for conservatives just what it is they hope to defend.

Read the rest . . .

Perhaps, says David E. Anderson in an interesting review essay on a number of recent books of criticism on the sacramental element in poetry.

The new issue of Poetry Magazine is dedicated to two new “movements” in American poetry: Flarf and Conceptual Writing. I use quotation marks around the word movements because I think the word gimmick is more accurate. Unfortunately, I can’t use the word gimmick. You see, “I” don’t really exist in the strict sense of the word. Words are the software to the hardware of my brain. “I” don’t think. “I” don’t create. Ergo, “I” don’t exist. Instead, “I” am made of the words that other people, who have somehow escaped the cave—blasted technocrats!—have coined. All “I” can do is use quotation marks to let “people” know that “I” am not happy about it. If only I could be like Flarf poets, who accept their imprisonment with such childlike (but also heroic!) giddiness. They are so lucky.

And what is Flarf, you ask? Well, as far as I can tell, it is the use of already formulated, often bizarre, awkward or childish phrases found online to create a poem with as little conscious direction (and concern for aesthetics) as possible–a sort of automatic, kitsch, electronic collage, if you will. According to Kenneth Goldsmith:

Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

Language, of course, is not just matter. It always says something as well, and there is always an “I” who is doing the saying, no matter how fractured or limited that “I” might be. And what Flarf says, according to Goldman, is that there is no stable “I”:

Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever.

Language, the world, and the self are in constant flux. This is nothing new. And, as numerous critics have noted over the years, it is a self-defeating statement. The very enunciation that the world and the self are in flux implies a fixed position.

Flarf poets, however, at least according to Goldsmith, seem happy to ignore to this fact. And why is that? I am not sure. However, I wonder if it has something do with the fact that if you imagine that you are not a fixed point on a line, it is easier to maintain the fantasy that life is but a series of discrete moments of pleasure and pain. We are not responsible adults anymore who one day must answer to our maker. We are children playing on a playground, caked in snot and sand. In this sense, I think Flarf is a pretty faithful expression of the bareness of Western philosophical materialism.

Yet, there is also an element of tacit acknowledgment in some Flarf poems that modern life is paltry, superficial and painful. In these poems, there is an element of regret that there is not more to life than this. In the poem, “Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas”, Nada Gorden, for example, expresses a childlike desire to escape the violence she finds in the world around her. The escape she offers in the poem, however, is a sort of limp humor. She ends the poem:

Unicorn believers don’t declare fatwas.
So worry about something more important
like getting hit in a collision between
a comet being ridden by Elvis, and Hitler
riding a Unicorn. It’s a psychedelic unicorn light show

It’s as if she is saying ignorance is bliss, which, of course, it often is, even if it is also always far from noble.

One of the tenets of deconstruction is that all texts resist closure. There is always more than one meaning to a text.

There is a kernel of truth in this. Because of our finite nature, there are certain things that human language cannot express, and because our nature is further limited by the effects of sin, our use of language is often imperfect. Furthermore, in literature, novelists and poets will often make use of ambiguity to express more than one thing in the same utterance, which, in turn, represents our complex experience of the world.

The problem of course is that post-structuralist apologists have raised the absence of closure to the status of some sort of epistemological absolute. This puts them in the awkward position of claiming that the sole closure is the absence of closure. If you mention this to a member of the post-structuralist priesthood, they are likely to mumble something about aporias thinking that this gets them off the hook, which, of course, it does not.

Over at the National Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet, Martin Earl offers an interesting ethical critique of this deconstructive tenet. Whimsically comparing the rise of deconstruction with the rise of digital cameras, Earl argues that one of the goals of deconstruction was to liberate the reader from the supposed tyranny of the author:
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There has been some discussion here on First Thoughs on the use of the term anti-abortion instead of pro-life in the mainstream media to refer to the view that abortion is murder. Terms are important. However, while Ryan Sayre Patrico and Nicholas Frankovich disagree as to whether we should fight the term anti-abortion or not, overall, those opposed to abortion have done a good job pushing the media to use its self-defined designation to refer to its position.

I am not so sure this is the case with respect to the issue of gay rights. Here, gays and lesbians have largely defined the terms of the argument. Take the terms gay and lesbian themselves, for example. These are almost unquestioningly used today to refer to particular categories of people. They make the tacit argument that someone who engages in homosexual relations is a different kind of person from those who engage in heterosexual relations. R. V. Young rightly argues that this is a distinctly twentieth century meaning of the term. However, alternative terms have rarely been
proposed, and none have stuck. Another example is the term homophobia. While it is a mental health term that should be used to denote an irrational fear of homosexuals, it is used by gay activists, as Chris Kempling argues in his fascinating article at the Catholic Education Resource Center, to refer to “the unwillingness to approve of homosexuality.” Kempling continues: “Even toleration without approval is defined as homophobic. So if you have a moral objection to homosexuality, you are ‘mentally ill’ and require re-education.”

One of the reasons that opponents of abortion have developed terms to refer to their own position is that it is a battle over innocent lives, and can be understood as following the divine command to protect the poor and the helpless. This is not the case in opposing those who engage in homosexual activity. Yet, as Kempling goes on to point out, gay activists are increasingly focusing on “re-educating children in public schools.” And Carson Holloway argues in today’s “On the Square” piece that the success of the same-sex
marriage movement would constitute a “complete repudiation not only of the traditional definition of marriage, but of the social authority of tradition as such.”

While still showing respect to all people as beings created in the image of God, to what extent should those who view homosexual relations as wrong and harmful, develop alternative terms to refer to those who engage in such relations and to the issues surrounding so-called gay rights? For example, to what extent should we use the phrase “men who engage in homosexual relations,” or some much more concise phrase, instead of the term gay or homosexual? What other terms or arguments should be redefined?

Perhaps this is overkill on the poetry, but I think that Stephen Burt’s recent article in the Boston Review is interesting given the recent discussion of poetry here at First Thoughts. For Burt, the days of “slippery, digressive, polyvocalic, creators of overlapping, colorful fragments” are numbered. The “new thing” in poetry, he writes, will not so much be in narrative but in a renewed preoccupation with objects: “The new poetry, the new thing, seeks, as Williams did, well-made, attentive, unornamented things. It is equally at home (as he was) in portraits and still lifes, in epigram and quoted speech; and it is at home (as he was not) in articulating sometimes harsh judgments, and in casting backward looks. The new poets pursue compression, compact description, humility, restricted diction, and—despite their frequent skepticism—fidelity to a material and social world.”

I’m not so sure about this. I think the poet Henry Gould is right when he says with respect to Burt that “the framework seems to be, again, a focus on the pendulum of style.” And while I am not sure that Gould is right to associate this preoccupation with style with the puritan poet Edward Taylor and the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, he goes on to write: “The thing I keep coming back to is the historical aspect of Christianity . . . the absolute local “thingness” of the Incarnation . . . & how the Eastern Orthodox concept of “divinization” somehow echoes, yet corrects & resolves the Faustian egoism of Western Renaissance-Romantic consciousness (precisely because that divinization is dependent on the unique history—the abject-glorious historical actuality—of Incarnation).”

This made me think of the recent poetry of Scott Cairns whose contemplation of the material world in his poems is a form of meditating on the expression of God’s character in creation, however muted by sin.

Joe asks if the popularity of Billy Collins’ audio recordings is good for poetry. I am no poet-in-residence at First Things, but I would like to answer a revised version of Joe’s question: Is Billy Collins’ popularity itself good for poetry? My answer: “Yes.”

Leaving the issue of talent aside for the moment, one of the reasons Billy Collins is so popular is that he writes for a general rather than specialized audience. Like Wordsworth, Collins understands the poet to be “a man speaking to men” rather than a poet speaking to (aspiring or accomplished) poets. Wordsworth’s definition of a poet as “a man speaking to men” is, I think, an apt description of the modus operandi of some of the best poets in English, past and present. This does not mean that these poets write for a general audience alone. To state the obvious, there are a number of levels of significance and a good deal of formal innovation in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, for example, or in Frost’s lyrics. Specialized knowledge, however, is not required to enjoy these poems.

While Collins’ poems sometime lack multiple levels of significance or formal play, which for me at least, can make him a bit boring on occasion, this is preferable to poets who seem to be interested in nothing but formal play or multiple levels of signification. In such cases, the result is often a poem that is as predictable as Collins’ (albeit in its own “innovative” way) without the initial surface interest. Such poems, it seems to me, are often written for poets alone (and perhaps with the purpose of securing a teaching post alone), and while they are sometimes treated as being of greater literary value than Collins’ poems because of their supposed technical innovation, I think the best poems are both accessible and innovative, both written for the general reader and the aficionado, at the same time.

Collins is good for poetry to the extent that he reminds us—in a roundabout sort of way—that poetry should serve a certain public good (whether that good is to provide pleasure or to challenge accepted beliefs), and that this good does not have to come at the expense of formal innovation (even if it perhaps sometimes does in Collins’ case).