Louis MacNeice: The Introduction

(Link. I read MacNeice's Collected a long time ago; he kind of trailed off in the forties before picking up in the late fifties, and so I gave up before this very good late poem.)

The Introduction
Louis MacNeice

They were introduced in a grave glade
And she frightened him because she was young
And thus too late. Crawly crawly
Went the twigs above their heads and beneath
The grass beneath their feet the larvae
Split themselves laughing. Crawly crawly
Went the cloud above the treetops reaching
For a sun that lacked the nerve to set
And he frightened her because he was old
And thus too early. Crawly crawly
Went the string quartet that was tuning up
In the back of the mind. You two should have met
Long since, he said, or else not now.
The string quartet in the back of the mind
Was all tuned up with nowhere to go.
They were introduced in a green grave.

Dept of Awful Puns

From the Diana Dillpickles archive.

Strong Bad on Love Poetry

Shakespeared!

Kay Ryan: Crocodile Tears

(from this month's Poetry.)

Crocodile Tears
by Kay Ryan

The one sincere
crocodile has
gone dry eyed
for years. Why
bother crying
crocodile tears.

This Week on the Dumping Ground

1. I'd plugged Priscilla Sneff's "Song"; Alan's set it -- rather intriguingly -- to music. Sneff, who has had a rough career so far, might be pleased to know that she's on her way to rockstardom.

2. Alan has posted a (very lightly edited) version of an IM conversation we had today, in which I pontificated on Obama's lack of worth.

Sarah Palin and "Experience"

I don't think Sarah Palin was that bad a pick on the merits relative to the alternatives on offer. (I'd still make a partial exception for Mike Huckabee.) As Gail Collins puts it:

she doesn’t seem much less qualified than Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota who most people thought was the most likely pick. Unlike Joe Lieberman, Palin is a member of the same party as the presidential candidate. And unlike Mitt Romney, she has never gone on vacation with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

The point is, "do no harm" wasn't really an option for McCain. And, of course, she's a she.

Update Nate Silver suggests that Olympia Snowe -- the Republican Senator from Maine -- would have been a smarter pick. I agree. It would've made a big news story, though perhaps not as big, and probably held up better, and reeked less of tokenism.

Plug: Sarah Heller

I enjoyed her poems in Realpoetik:

Everyone's Ex-Girlfriend
Sarah Heller

Everyone's ex-girlfriend keeps showing up.
She surfaces when I've only just relaxed,
when I let things be
soft. I recognize her because I've been her so well.
You have nothing to worry about,
he says. Why would I want someone
who tried so hard to hurt me?
And then the distracted look.

She used to scream at everyone,
was the first to walk out.
Everyone's ex-girlfriend
had sex with their good friends
during a phase.

Everyone's ex-girlfriend is always
meeting everyone late at night.
Busy girl. He says
Maybe I'll stop by after
and then calls from home.
I say Did you have a good time
and he says We've really grown apart.
But I can picture the tall bar stools.

You look great, they might
say to each other, shiny eyes. You always were
like that. Some things never change.
It's snowing! The snow is in their hair.

When he says It was wild to see someone
after so long, I hear Our skin was so cold.

Everyone says
I don't know who I am right now.
I feel like I haven't felt anything in a long time.

Alright, he says to her,
You're giving me a hard-on.
Really, she murmurs. She is so mean.
Her drink splashes around in her glass.
Touch it, he says.

Dylan and the Poets

Whether Bob Dylan's lyrics "are poetry" is an old, half-open, and largely uninteresting controversy. Christopher Ricks thinks they are, and wrote a book (Dylan's Visions of Sin) about them; Hitchens agrees, and wrote a very funny review of Ricks's book. Hitchens:

There are also those who maintain that Dylan can't really sing. (This latter group has recently been reluctantly increasing.) Of his ability as a poet, however, there can be no reasonable doubt.

Lawrence J. Epstein disagrees --

Dylan's musical achievements are those of a performance artist. Separated from the music and the nasal twang and the startling cadences of Dylan's voice, the written lyrics can seem desiccated.

So he can't sing and he can't write. Yet both writers claim to admire him, and I -- who find myself in sympathy with both views -- also consider myself a Dylan fan. You could argue that it's stupid to pass a song through a prism, extract a verbal essence and a musical essence, analyze each and add up the scores. However, a lot of medieval songs have survived without their settings, and can be appreciated as printed lyrics. (Not to mention Campion's magnificent songs.)

Such lyric is distinguished from other contemporary poetry by being metrically adventurous and lyrically straightforward. Here's a relatively literary example, Campion channeling Catullus:

Silly Traytresse, who shall now thy carelesse tresses place?
Who thy pretty talke supply, whose eare thy musicke grace?
Who shall thy bright eyes admire? what lips triumph with thine?
Day by day who'll visit thee and say ' th'art onely mine '?
Such a time there was, God wot, but such shall neuer be:
Too oft, I feare, thou wilt remember me.

If you were to find a phrase for this sort of writing, it probably wouldn't be "brambled verbal density" (Luc Sante on the music he listens to, via Zach). It couldn't; the musical settings would have drowned out any serious verbal complexity, and this was among the formal constraints on Campion. One way to state the distinction is that Campion's lyrics, while sometimes insipid, are always well-behaved poems; Dylan's, while they contain phrases and lines better than anything in Campion, never cohere as good poems. Dylan is a good poet like the Pound of the Cantos is a good poet; most of his lines are flabby and unmusical on the page, but you can't dismiss the writing because occasionally Dylan comes up with stuff like this:

I know that evening's empire has returned into sand

the haunted frightened trees

The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.

The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face

See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees"
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel

I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,

If poetry is "memorable speech," I would say all of this qualifies. Dylan is a gifted surrealist. However, there isn't a single Dylan lyric that I can read through without wincing, and few famous ones that even cohere emotionally as printed. The unity of Dylan's songs is a product of his "cawing, derisive" (Larkin) voice, not his lyrics; take the voice away and the payoff lines live in rather squalid surroundings.

[Incidentally, the best thing in Hitchens's review is this factoid:

(Rushdie, who invented the game [of retitling Shakespeare's plays as if they were written by Robert Ludlum], came up with The Elsinore Vacillation, The Dunsinane Reforestation, The Kerchief Implication, and The Rialto Sanction.)]

Herodotus, Population Biologist

I was at a population biology talk today, where the usual cute historical snippet was Herodotus's theory of low birth rates among predators --

The lioness, on the other hand, which is one of the strongest and boldest of brutes, brings forth young but once in her lifetime, and then a single cub; she cannot possibly conceive again, since she loses her womb at the same time that she drops her young. The reason of this is that as soon as the cub begins to stir inside the dam, his claws, which are sharper than those of any other animal, scratch the womb; as the time goes on, and he grows bigger, he tears it ever more and more; so that at last, whenthe birth comes, there is not a morsel in the whole womb that is sound.

The Hidden Johnson

George Packer notes that Wednesday is LBJ's centenary. It's a shame that the president who got Civil Rights through Congress -- surely the most important piece of legislation since WW2 -- is not being more widely honored. Johnson's legacy has suffered from his not being a very nice guy, and more substantially because of Vietnam; but Vietnam's over, and the consequences of Civil Rights are still with us.

At the very least, the fact that it's the Democratic Party that's nominating a black man for president is almost entirely due to Johnson. They ought to acknowledge that in Denver.

PS Like Packer, I basically assented to Hillary's infamous comparison between Johnson and King. And was delighted when it led to the following gem:

Earlier that day she had even attacked Obama using Mondale's famous line about Gary Hart, "Where's the beef?" But now she seemed to be shedding her private dismay that she could never be a charismatic politician like Obama or Kennedy, or her husband, and embracing her inner Johnson.

Lieberman Lives

Bill Kristol, Ezra Klein, and Patrick Ruffini (sort of) argue that McCain should pick Lieberman. As a news story, this will mean a huge boost for McCain because it will make him look centrist. I can't imagine Lieberman being much use on the campaign trail, but that probably doesn't matter. Unless the evangelicals stay home this November, and they won't, this could be terrible for the Democrats.

Biden and HRC

Jay Cost also thinks HRC would have made a better choice for veep. Seeing him make the case, though, I'm having second thoughts:

Hillary brings just about every upside Biden brings. She brings seasoning. She brings toughness. She brings facility in debates. Meanwhile, her downsides largely overlap with his. She highlights Obama's inexperience. She is not consistent with his message of change.

See, I'm not so sure about the toughness thing. She might have pulled a John Edwards 04 and sabotaged (or done nothing to help) the ticket. It would've been the rational thing for her to do: if McCain wins, she's got a good shot at the 2012 nomination; if Obama wins, she can't run until 2016, which might be too late.

More on the Drinking Age

There's a flurry of editorials about that proposal to lower the drinking age. I'm a little surprised the story didn't die out, as the proposal obviously won't be implemented and it hasn't been an especially slow week. The Post had a particularly irritating editorial about this, in which they advised skeptical readers to "take a good look at numbers posted by Mothers Against Drunk Driving" -- as if you would trust anything coming out of a group like that. No one on either side of the debate mentions that the vast majority of underage drinkers neither binge-drink (guess this depends on how you define binge-drinking) nor drive drunk (at least, not especially often), and the current law is an unreasonable imposition on them. If your only objective in life is to reduce car accidents, then I have a brilliant idea -- raise the driving age to 25! Or 40! You would be astonished at the resulting decline in car accidents.

That said, my sense is that the college presidents' notion that binge drinking has anything to do with the legal status of booze is wrong. (cf. Finland, the UK) The most effective way to cut down on booze at parties is probably to raise the tax; party organizers are not, in my experience, immune to costs. I think this will affect parties more than individual / small group drinking, though obviously it isn't going to stop the more extreme cases, and there will be a general decline in the quality of social life. Btw, if people are that into reducing drunk driving, why not make it a felony? This has the added merit over the current approach that it might deter drunk driving among 22-year-olds. (It'd be interesting to compare DUI fatalities for 18-21 year olds back in the 60s and 70s with similar numbers for 21-25 year olds. If they are not significantly different, it's rankly unjust to let one group drink and forbid the other.)

In general, the argument is taking place on the wrong turf. The Star-Ledger suggests that the burden of proof is on people who would lower the drinking age. I disagree; forbidding a subset of adults from doing what other adults can is facially unreasonable except in the presence of a very compelling state interest. I'm willing to acknowledge the possibility that such an interest exists -- it depends on the numbers, which seem to me ambiguous (e.g. a 10% drop in drunk driving among underage drivers doesn't cut it) -- and that it really is a good idea to keep the age at 21 (in which case, wouldn't 22 be even better, as I argued last time?), but no one's trying to make that case.

Biden vs. Motherhood

I am, needless to say, with Biden on this one. You've probably heard me rant about how militant irrational groups of "moms" are a disastrous influence on politics -- on autism, crime, education, drinking, and goodness knows what else. Anyway, this is what Biden has to say, via Yglesias:

I would note parenthetically that we no longer have soccer moms in San Diego or Wilmington or Washington or Seattle, we have security moms. An abnormally high percentage of women between the ages of 25 and 40 with children, believe that they are likely to be a victim of a terrorist attack, which is not accurate but close to 40% believe that. Which has another destabilizing effect on us as a country.

So it does.

"A Crazy Cancer-Ridden Dishonest Madman"

Matt Stoller at OpenLeft discusses McCain's so-called cancer problem. His post is representative of the left's inability to launch effective negative attacks. I love this bit:

McCain is 72 years old and he was a POW, a member of a group with high rates of illness due to ill-treatment on the part of their captors.

I know it's supposed to be a good idea to go after your opponents' strengths. But negative politics is an art, and tone-deafness of this magnitude is a serious handicap if you want to be any good at it.

Devouring Seamen

I'm reading Alasdair MacIntyre's book After Virtue, which is a general attack on modern ethical philosophy and (among other things) a defense of Aristotelian attitudes towards morality. It's a well-written and occasionally provocative book; I'll have more to say about it when I finish it, but I wanted to flag a supposed counterexample to the no-ought-from-is principle that MacIntyre attributes to A.N. Prior:

He is a seaman. Therefore he ought to do whatever it is a seaman ought to do.

Let's replace the noun to sharpen the point:

He is a homosexual. Therefore he ought to do whatever it is a homosexual ought to do.

On the idiomatic reading of the inference -- "he is a homosexual, therefore he should behave like one" -- the ought, if it's a moral ought, doesn't follow from the is. (Ask Ted Haggard.) If, on the other hand, it is a prudential ought -- if he doesn't behave like a homosexual he will cease to be a homosexual -- then the inference goes from a fact to a fact. Alternatively, it goes from a desire to continue to be a homosexual and a set of beliefs about the world and language to a course of action that would fulfill the desire. This isn't an is-ought inference, it's instrumental reasoning.

Let's try the narrow reading, which I take to be:

for all X and q (if all H's ought to do X and q is an H then q ought to do X).
p is an H.
for all X (if all H's ought to do X then p ought to do X).

Assuming ought statements obey first-order logic, this is valid reasoning; however, the conclusion has no normative force. To make the conclusion normative one would have to satisfy the protasis with an ought statement, in which case one would have deduced an ought from an ought.

Of course it's possible to construct an ethical system with very few extralogical principles; utilitarianism is an example; but you can't do it without some extralogical input, and there is no reason to suppose that a small number of universal core principles gives you a better ethics than a laundry list of ought statements. (And good reason to suppose that there's no Occam-like principle -- all known simple systems are simplistic.) So it's difficult and probably impossible to come up with a useful way to adjudicate between moral systems that's independent of whether you like the results -- which limits the power of moral reasoning to guide your actions.

NB I was misquoting from memory; Prior's original example said "sea-captain" rather than "seaman." For obvious reasons I will not correct the post.

Re: "What became of the USSR?"

There's a fairly prevalent myth that the former Soviet medal-generating machine is in disrepair, because Russia's a distant third (or fourth, depending on how you count) in the medal tally. A quick look at the tally shows, however, that this is a matter of bookkeeping. Here are the numbers:

Russia 17 + 17 + 22 = 56
Ukraine 5 + 4 + 10 = 19
Belarus 4 + 3 + 8 = 15
Georgia (!) 3 + 0 + 0 = 3
Kazakhstan 1 + 4 + 6 = 11
Azerbaijan 1 + 2 + 4 = 7
Uzbekistan 1 + 2 + 3 = 6
Estonia 1 + 1 + 0 = 2
Latvia 1 + 0 + 1 = 2
Lithuania 0 + 2 + 3 = 5

Subtotal (without Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan etc.): 34 + 35 + 60 = 129
(cf. US: 30 + 36 + 35 = 101)

So the former USSR is doing about as well as it was.

Word Rescue Squad: fist/feist

[What follows is the OED entry for fist(2).]

fist, n.2 [pr. like "feist," which is a variant spelling.]

SECOND EDITION 1989

Forms: 5 fyyst, 5-7, 9 fiste, 6-7 fiest, fyest, fyst(e, 9 Sc. feist, 7, 9 fist. Also FOIST.

1. A breaking wind, a foul smell, stink. Obs.

1440 Promp. Parv. 163/1 Fyyst, stynk, lirida. 1511 Demaundes joyous in Kemble Salomon (1848) 288 It is fartes and fyestes. a1529 SKELTON Elynour Rummyng 343 Jone sayne she had eaten a fyest; By Christ, sayde she, thou lyest, I haue as swete a breth As thou. 1605 B. JONSON, etc. Eastward Hoe IV, Fivb, Marry, fyste o' your kindnesse. I thought as much. 1611 COTGR., Secrette..a fiste. 1664 COTTON Scarron. 44 With that he whistled out most mainly. You might have heard his Fist..From one side of the skie to th' t' other.

[The entry goes on to talk about "fisting-hounds."]

Collins on Lieberman

Many people on the left have been picking on Joe Lieberman, but I think Gail Collins's snark today is one of the best:

Lieberman used to be a perfectly good senator, but somewhere along the line he began thinking of himself as being above the partisan fray, and it had a terrible effect. When he ran for vice president, he was so busy being pompous that he didn’t notice that Dick Cheney had won the debate. (Of all the negative achievements in Lieberman’s career, it’s hard to top making Cheney the most likable man in the room.)

Collins has been a bit off lately -- her columns have had the half-hearted fluffiness of stale cotton candy -- but today's column is very good.

Priscilla Sneff: Song

(Link. Sneff's work is generally not my cup of tea, but I'll make an exception for this one, mostly because of the last stanza.)

Song

Whether he live or no
The meadow shimmer as ever
And heat render the long stems low
And the sun stroke the river

And silence take me in
Undoubling its front door
To a room like the room inside my skin,
Its broken furniture,

And I lie on the single bed
Older; the linen is taut.
My own bare arm lies under my head
Shifting little or not

When night calls to its own,
Ruffling its owls together,
And their eyes blink at the shining moon,
And the moon glows in the river.

Cosmic Justice

I've been reduced to playing internet boggle to procrastinate -- it's a game I'm ambivalent about because I'm not very good at it. However, sometimes I have a stroke of luck (click image to enlarge) -- though I suppose if anyone was going to see "indolence" in the circumstances...

Empty Seats

Fallows poses and resolves an interesting question:

In several previous posts I've mentioned the paradox of Olympic tickets being flat "sold-out," yet huge tracts of seats sitting empty. Many people have written in to solve the mystery. This, from Alf Hickey, reflects the consensus view:

Large amounts of empty seats are actually quite common at Chinese concerts or sporting events that claim to be "sold out." The reason for this is that a large amount of tickets are given to the bigwigs who organize the events so they can guanxi them out ["build relationships"] as needed. Since the Olympics had so many different organizing bodies, the central government, the local Beijing government and the Chinese Olympic committee, I'm sure there were vast amounts tickets given to various officials.

The reason that these tickets are not used is that by the rules of Chinese guanxi, you don't refuse a gift, especially not from someone connected enough to get Olympic tickets. So the tickets to the rowing finals are probably in the hands of people who have no desire to see the event, but just needed to stay in the good graces of some random Beijing bureaucrat. I suspect that the tickets have already changed hands more than once, passed along like a box of moon cakes that no one actually wants to eat.

The Drinking Age

So college presidents think the drinking age is too high. No surprises there. "Mothers Against Drunk Driving" thinks it's too low. This reinforces my feeling that parents should have no political power. What I would suggest, though, is that it would be sensible to have a drinking age that lines up with a natural division in one's life -- so, e.g. 14, 18, 22 are all more sensible drinking ages than 16 or 21. One problem with the status quo is that about 50% of college students can drink legally and the other 50% can't, so it's trivial to procure booze. If you really wanted to make it harder for college students to drink, it would make sense to raise the age to 22 and restrict volume per sale for anyone under 25; this would drive up the effective cost of alcohol for college students, and would partially solve the fake ID problem because everyone in your group would be illegal.

Would this reduce alcohol consumption? Probably not, because Popov is a Giffen good. On the other hand, it would spoil the current, barely acceptable status quo; and perhaps eventually lead to a rational drinking age like 18.

A Note on the Veepstakes

There are basically two principles involved: 1. a lot of positive press is a good thing, 2. though veeps don't actually help much, they can screw things up pretty badly. Veeps do not bring their home states, etc.

The Dems go first so the GOP pick will be a response to the Dem pick. The Dems have five sorts of choices -- Clinton, Gore, Biden/Nunn, Bayh, and Kaine/Sebelius. I would rank them in that order. The higher-profile the veep the better; it'll focus attention on the Democrats but not on Obama, with whom the public is a little bored. I used to think Clinton would be a bad idea and to some extent I still do, but everyone else I'd have liked (Webb, Edwards, Rendell, Strickland) is out, and the remaining "sensible" options are impossibly boring. Gore would bring a lot of good feelings but might be unsound on the offshore drilling issue, which Obama wants to compromise on. If neither of those is possible, it seems like Biden is the best of the rest of the pack, being an established and articulate figure that a lot of people have kind of heard of. Nunn is a paler version of Biden. The others, besides being anticlimactic and killing the news cycle, will not attract attention and have no electoral upside, being mediocre speakers and having no real story to keep the newspapers busy. (cf. Jim Webb) There is always the danger that Clinton will be a disaster, but Republican attacks on Clinton will energize the (overhyped) PUMA types.

The Republicans have three options: Huckabee, Romney, and nonentity (Pawlenty, Crist, Jindal, etc. -- unknown figures). Romney would be a terrible choice -- 1. he has a turd for a personality, and no one liked him in the primaries; 2. he's a corporate fatcat and will hurt in Ohio. Huckabee appears not to be in the running, which I think is silly because, if Obama plays it safe and his VP announcement sinks in the press, it's a good opportunity for McCain to pick up some momentum by picking a well-known VP. Of the available candidates, it seems like Huckabee, though risky, has the biggest upside -- he's close to the Jesus freaks in Colorado, and to the Appalachian types in Ohio, and would be an effective campaigner in both states. (On the other hand it's possible that enough people are terrified of Huckabee and the religious right that he'd sink the ticket.) If Obama picks someone high-profile, McCain should go with a nonentity because he can't win the celebrity war.

The real question is whether McCain can win on "acceptability." My sense is that he can't, quite, against Obama alone -- Kerry nearly won in 2004, and did about as badly as Obama with the Appalachian types -- but might be able to against Obama/Clinton. The problem is he hasn't got too many options against Obama/Clinton.

PS I'm told that Tom Ridge isn't a nonentity. Who knew.

A Beached Walrus in Abkhazia

(via Andrew Sullivan)

PS Note that this post is in doubly poor taste because the men are at a funeral.