Another American legend is now gone, and I must admit that I find some of the movies that Paul Newman starred in as some of the finest films of the Twentieth century. One film that Newman starred in, HUD, elicited a comment from Newman before his death from cancer:

As Hud Bannon in “Hud” (1963) Mr. Newman was a heel on the Texas range who wanted the good life and was willing to sell diseased cattle to get it. The character was intended to make the audience feel “loathing and disgust,” Mr. Newman told a reporter. Instead, he said, “we created a folk hero.”

I watched that film a couple of years ago and it struck me in a particular way. I saw George Bush perfectly personified in the character of Hud and I saw many of my fellow Americans too. It’s a film I urge everyone to watch. Because we have a society filled with people who aspire to be just like Hud Bannon. Some of my favorite quotes from the movie appear below:

Homer Bannon: You don’t care about people Hud. You don’t give a damn about ‘em. Oh, you got all that charm goin’ for ya. And it makes the youngsters want to be like ya. That’s the shame of it because you don’t value anything. You don’t respect nothing. You keep no check on your appetites at all. You live just for yourself. And that makes you not fit to live with.

And another:

Homer Bannon: That’s your solution for getting out of a tight? To pass bad beef on to my neighbors who wouldn’t know what they was getting? Or maybe risk starting an epidemic in the entire country?

Hud Bannon: This country is run on epidemics, where you been? Price fixing, crooked TV shows, inflated expense accounts. How many honest men you know? Why you separate the saints from the sinners, you’re lucky to wind up with Abraham Lincoln. Now I want out of this spread what I put into it, and I say let us dip our bread into some of that gravy while it is still hot.

Homer Bannon: You’re an unprincipled young man Hud.

Hud Bannon: Don’t let that worry you none. You got enough for both of us.

Yes, the movie personifies George Bush. But it also personifies rich conservative America. I urge you to watch it. Because we need to bring back the Homer Bannons. I remember when there were plenty of them in America running small businesses. But it's hard to find one now. Because small businesses have a hard time making it when they behave responsibly like Homer Bannon. Paul Newman did some great things with his brand “Newman's Own” which donated all the money it made to worthy charities. No other companies in America have brands that behave that sensibly. At least if they have, I’m not familiar with them.

Paul Newman was an American hero. Rare in the film world. But Newman lived his life the way Americans should live their lives. If we could get more people to do so, America might have a chance at becoming a nation that is looked up to by the rest of the world as something to aspire to once again. But we have a long way to go to get the nation back to an honest status that other countries would like to emulate. Newman also proudly referred to himself as a liberal and was 19th on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. I’m proud to say that Newman belongs to those of us in the liberal camp, and conservatives can’t lay claim to the great legacy he left this nation.

The Obama campaign seems to have learned a thing or two from John Kerry’s passivity when a slimeball named Jerome Corsi swiftboated him in a lie-filled book.

Here’s the campaign’s prompt 41-page response (pdf file) to Corsi’s attempt to do the same thing to Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

If you loved the suspense and thrill-a-minute action of “My Dinner With Andre”, or you’re a Fritjof Capra fan, then you probably already know about the wonderful movie “Mindwalk”. If not, perhaps you’ve heard of the book The Tao of Physics. Capra described his motivation for writing the book this way:

Physicists do not need mysticism, and mystics do not need physics, but humanity needs both.

Ideas this all-encompassing are never bereft of controversy. Capra has been dissed by some physicists, but encouraged by others. He said:

I had several discussions with Heisenberg. I lived in England then [circa 1972], and I visited him several times in Munich and showed him the whole manuscript chapter by chapter. He was very interested and very open, and he told me something that I think is not known publicly because he never published it. He said that he was well aware of these parallels. While he was working on quantum theory he went to India to lecture and was a guest of Tagore. He talked a lot with Tagore about Indian philosophy. Heisenberg told me that these talks had helped him a lot with his work in physics, because they showed him that all these new ideas in quantum physics were in fact not all that crazy. He realized there was, in fact, a whole culture that subscribed to very similar ideas. Heisenberg said that this was a great help for him. Niels Bohr had a similar experience when he went to China.

Commenters at YouTube were unable to find “Mindwalk” from Netflix, so they were happy to find the full movie there. It stars Liv Ullman as the physicist, John Heard as the poet, and Sam Waterston as the politician, with music contributed by Philip Glass.

If you’re like me and have felt — for a number of years — the hand of a creepy, nauseating totalitarian government reaching down upon you and those around you and grabbing you by throat with its crushing choke hold — even more so since Bush took office — then this short film may appeal to you. The film was a second place winner of the 1990 Cannes Film Festival for best short and was produced by Barthelemy Bompard . It definitely has a Kafkaesque quality to it.

CAUTION TO VISITORS AND FANS OF THIS BLOG: This film may cause nightmares, not that you might already be having them based upon reality. If you start it though, stay for the ending.

Thanks to Monique Frugier for sending me a link to this video.

Fourth annual Short Film Online Competition — Cannes 2008. The NFB, in association with the Cannes Short Film Corner and partner YouTube, is proud to announce that the winner of the NFB Online Competition Cannes 2008 is Alonso Alvarez Barreda for his short film Historia de un Letrero (The Story of a Sign) produced in Mexico/U.S.A.

With a stroke of the pen, a stranger transforms the afternoon for another man in this emotionally stirring short film by Alonso Alvarez.

Alonso Alvarez Barreda was born in Mexico City in 1984. He met Alejandro Monteverde, who was still in film school, and since then Alejandro became his friend and mentor. Alonso wrote, produced and directed his first short film, called El Algodonero.

His second short film, Historia de un Letrero, was named best short film in the Festival Internacional de Cine en Corto and also won the Hispanoamerican jury award in the Short Shorts Film Festival in Mexico City. It has also been an official selection at the San Diego Latino Film Festival, Cine Festival in San Antonio, Texas, Short Shorts Film Festival Monterrey and Morelos, and in the Short Film Corner in Cannes.

Currently, Historia de un Letrero is part of the regular programming on National TV in Mexico. Alonso lives in Los Angeles.

“When the underclass riots in this country, they don’t kill policemen and politicians, they steal merchandise. How embarrassing.”

…but Morris supposes erroneously. This is from an ad in the Human Events newsletter (subscribers only) for a new book called Fleeced:

Americans feel fleeced at every turn, and it’s no wonder. As more and more critical problems develop that need national attention, the White House and Congress are effectively AWOL. And who’s calling the shots instead? Big government, big business, big labor, and big lobbyists — all with self-serving agendas that do nothing to help the ever-increasing number of American people who are losing their homes, paying exorbitant credit card interest rates, and finding their jobs increasingly outsourced to foreign countries.

Make your blood boil? Make you want to toss out the greedy bloodsucking neocon DLC warmongers who have spent the last eight years flushing our economy, our constitution and our nation’s most sacred values right down the toilet?

Wait a minute, though. Here’s the full title of this outraged screed:

Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the New Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Fleecing Us…and What to Do About It

And here are the authors: Eileen McGann and her husband, Dick Morris. Yes, that Dick Morris. (The picture below shows two entirely different people. I include it only as an example of very poor taste.)

“In the United States, anybody can be president. That’s the problem.”

“I worry about my judgment when anything I believe in or do regularly begins to be accepted by the American public.”

Leonard Pitts Jr. captures the essence of the hysteria over the New Yorker cover.

Unless you’ve been in a cave for the last week, you’ve heard about and probably seen the cartoon showing Barack and Michelle bumping fists in the Oval Office, he in Muslim garb, she in Angela Davis, while a portrait of Osama watches an American flag burn in the fireplace. To me, even a straight description is humorous, and the cartoon is hilarious; but many Obama supporters apparently find it offensive.

Or perhaps it’s the long article about him in the same issue they’re worried about. But if they were offended by the cover, they probably wouldn’t read the article.

Which, to me, is part of the point of the cover.

To be effective, satire needs a situation it can inflate into ridiculousness. But the hysteria surrounding Obama has nowhere to go; it is already ridiculous. In just the last few days, we’ve had Jesse Jackson threatening to castrate him and John McLaughlin calling him an “Oreo.”

Add to that the whispers about Obama’s supposed Muslim heritage (not that there’s anything wrong with that), the “terrorist” implications of bumping fists, and Michelle Obama’s purported use of the term “whitey” (a word no black person has uttered since The Jeffersons went off the air in 1985), and it’s clear that “ridiculous” has become our default status. What once were punchlines now are headlines.

So, as absurd, as over the top, as utterly outlandish as the New Yorker image strikes the more sophisticated among us, there is a large fringe out there for whom it will represent nothing more or less than the sum of their fears.

Most of the arguments people made against the cover in the various comment sections I perused were strikingly weak. Anger certainly tends to cloud logic; as Bertrand Russell said,

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.

One person applied the theory of democracy to that of humor, proclaiming that it’s only satire if “at least” a majority thinks it is. (I’m not sure what’s more than a majority in this case. Since by definition at least the artist and the editor consider it satire, there’s no possibility of unanimity. But that’s how the argument was worded, so I reproduce it in case others grasp what I missed.) Another person argued that the November vote is a life-and-death matter, and the need to elect Obama, who presumably represents life, precludes Barack-mocking in the interim.

Speaking of which, Andy Borowitz has written a fake Obama statement of sympathy with those who struggle to make jokes about him. The statement includes five officially sanctioned Obama jokes.

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, “You know, we don’t get many kangaroos here.” Barack Obama replies, “At these prices, I’m not surprised. That’s why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

This kind of thing is why Colbert has to push it so far, play such an over-the-top character, to satirize the current state of our various media. As Pitts says, “These days, there’s nothing more ridiculous than the truth.”

“Those who dance are considered insane by those who can’t hear the music.”

I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.

And another, completely unrelated, because you were wondering how they came about.

The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”

“The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

“If a man smiles all the time he’s probably selling something that doesn’t work.”

“They debated the NAFTA bill for a long time; should we sign it or not? Either way, the people get fucked. Trade always exists for the traders. Anytime you hear businessmen debating ‘which policy is better for America,’ don’t bend over.”

Though I’m saddened by the passing of George Carlin, whom I consider a standup comic of the first rank, I was not at first planning to add my voice to the din of eulogies.

What provoked me to reconsider was the emergence, apropos of nothing, of the memory of probably my favorite of his many bits, on the social meanings one might extract from the differences between baseball and football.

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park!
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.

In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.

The clincher, of course, comes in leading up to a description of the object of the respective games.

Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness.
Baseball has the sacrifice.

Football is played in any kind of weather: rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog…
In baseball, if it rains, we don’t go out to play.

Baseball has the seventh inning stretch. Football has the two minute warning.

Baseball has no time limit: we don’t know when it’s gonna end — might have extra innings.
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we’ve got to go to sudden death.

On the personal level there’s some irony for me in realizing that at the time I considered Carlin edgy but only mildly so. I remember visiting the house of a girl I had a crush on in junior high, and listening to Carlin’s Hippy-Dippy Weatherman stuff on records. We’d break into peals of that high-pitched teenage laughter that quickly becomes irritating even when you really like the kids currently inflicting the sonic pain. Regardless, parentage on both ends of the phone could be comfortable with us listening to Carlin.

In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.

In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! — I hope I’ll be safe at home!

One of the best things Carlin did for people of his time was to introduce them a subversive outlook in a friendly guise. Sure, he was a communist or an anarchist or a socialist or some damn thing, but he didn’t really seem dangerous.

He was, though, for instance, capable of creating the famous Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV, which while naughty in contemporary terms was also widely considered hilarious, thus passing on the meme.

“Living in the South was never an option — the main problem being they have too much respect for authority; they’re soldier-sniffers and cop-lovers.”

Who knew the little fellow was such a bookworm? And an author yet! Why, the man is a regular Obama except he can’t jump.

Bush also said he never saw the award-winning network television show The West Wing about a fictitious U.S. president, preferring instead to watch sports and read books.

“I seriously don’t watch TV. You know, I watch sports, but I’d much rather read books. And I do. I read a lot,” he said according to a transcript released by the White House.

All right, horndogs, here’s the first film from TruthThroughAction.org — “a new political organization founded by independent filmmakers in New York. By bringing the Indie community and political activists together, we're creating edgy short films and online videos that support the Democratic Party.”

It’s called Blue Balled.

From an article on Sven Lindqvist, a fascinating Swedish writer I’ve just discovered:

Lindqvist is no longer such a lustful traveller as he once was, and he lives quietly today in an apartment in a leafy square of central Stockholm, with his second wife, Agneta Stark, a distinguished economist. He is the fortunate beneficiary of a rather wonderful, typically Swedish, form of state bursary, whereby 150 of the country’s greatest artists and musicians, writers and poets are each guaranteed that if their annual income from their work falls below that of a metal worker, it will be topped up by the state. “If it’s Ingmar Bergman,” he says with a grin, “he won’t need to use it very often, but I’ve found it rather useful; for many poets, it’s their main source of income.”

I don’t know much about art, or about art history. I don’t always even know what I like, and when I like something, I don’t always know why. But I liked Robert Rauschenberg’s art, at least most of the time.

Which is odd, considering that before his death on Monday a good part of his energy went into a sort of counter to the only visual-art movement I ever really cared about, Abstract Expressionism. “Dr.” Barbara Rose, an art historian writing in the Wall Street Journal, who I suspect is not in fact a doctor but a Ph.D., ranks Rauschenberg second only to Jackson Pollock as the biggest innovator in art, and here again I exhibit my inability to perceive as an art historian would: I never gave a damn about Pollock. Some of his works are pleasant to look at, but none are impressive. I too can generate a huge amount of random stuff and select a tiny part of it that is less irrelevant than the rest, and as our sainted Veep says, So? In a decade or so computers will produce stuff at least as good as Pollock.

But there were several saving graces for Rauschenberg’s work, including his belief that art could change the world, his sense of humor, and his interest in turning the making of art into a community operation. In most cases it seems that painters are like writers in that their art is created in solitude. If I were given the choice of what to do in the next incarnation, I guess I’d probably pick music; musicians are poor like other artists, but at least they get to hang out with other musicians while they’re doing their art. Rauschenberg, who was heavily influenced by John Cage among many others, seems to have transcended that problem.

People ask me, “Don’t you ever run out of ideas?” In the first place I don’t use ideas. Every time I have an idea it’s too limiting, and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven’t run out of curiosity.

He also cut a heroic figure: paralyzed by a stroke in the late sixties, he continued to work to the end of his life. As late as two months ago, he traveled to Valencia, Spain, to applaud a friend’s opening.

But of course, the real measure of an artist is his work. If you haven’t seen much Rauschenberg, or if you want a good overview, check out

• ArtCyclopedia
• ArtNet

Truly amazing stuff. Go here to see what this is all about. Thanks to Asher Pavel for the link.

Late last month I reprinted (reposted?) a piece of mine that originally ran at Salon.com. I argued that Obama shouldn’t be slammed for borrowing words from another man’s speech, since political oratory has the same relationship to plagiarism that life forms have to carbon. As an example, I gave a line I once wrote for Mondale which has since been lifted thousands of times: "In Reagan's America, a rising tide lifts all yachts."

I just now got around to reading all the responses on Salon.com, and I’m glad I did. The 43rd and last comment rewarded me with one of those surreal flashes where for a moment you wonder whether it’s you or the other guy who just got off the space ship:

Jerome Doolittle was a late arrival (by at least 21 years) to the rising tide metaphor: JFK used it in a speech in Arkansas in 1963: "As the income of Michigan rises, so does the income of the United States. A rising tide lifts all the boats and as Arkansas becomes more prosperous so does the United States". The phrase is also attributed in Wikipedia to Sean Lemass, Irish prime minister, 1959-1964.

What's odd is Doolittle's change of words from "boats" to "yachts". A yacht is a symbol of lavish discretionary income, while a boat is a neutral object. A rising tide that lifts all yachts suggests a tide that favors the rich—or does so to my ear, at least. In 1984, Doolittle lit on what was already a cliche — and seriously weakened it in the attempt to make it his own.

In college I took a class on the New Novelists. We read folks like Samuel Beckett, Michel Butor, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The latter died Monday at the age of 85.

He was the most prominent of France’s so-called New Novelists, a group that emerged in the mid-1950s whose other members included Claude Simon, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute. Their experimental work tossed aside literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation.

“Tossed aside” might be an understatement. “Assiduously avoided” would work at least as well.

True to his artistic principles, Robbe-Grillet’s novels are composed largely of recurring images, impersonally depicted physical objects and random events of everyday life. However, beginning with his first novel published in France, Les Gommes (1953, The Erasers), Robbe-Grillet used and manipulated traditional and popular literary genres — working several times with the mystery novel from. (Robbe-Grillet’s first novel, A Regicide, was not published until 1978.) The Erasers mixes a detective story with Robbe-Grillet’s signature changing perspectives and detailed descriptions of natural objects such as a tomato wedge. The book received the Fénélon Prize in France in 1954. Robbe-Grillet was elected member of the prestigious Academie Francaise in 2004, the highest honor in France for a French artist, writer or intellectual. However, he never sat in any meeting of the Academie.

In addition to his novels, he did some movie work, most famously Last Year at Marienbad. He also wrote a book of essays called “Toward a New Novel” that was mind-expanding.

“The Academie Francaise today loses one of its most illustrious members, and without a doubt its most rebellious,” mourned President of France Nicolas Sarkozy.

Despite the New Novel’s focus on objective reality swept clean of human feeling or bias, French author Robbe-Grillet always insisted that the nouveau roman is entirely subjective — its world is always perceived through the eyes of a character, not an omniscient narrator. “The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it,” he once stated.

I’m a huge Ted Rall fan, but I understand why some people actively dislike him. He’s combative, in your face, opinionated, et cetera. Still, I think you gotta give it up, at least some of it, for a left-winger who’ll go on Fox and argue with the wingnuts. I’m not saying it’s a smart thing to do, but it takes guts.

Even for those not generally disposed to like Rall, I recommend today’s strip. It doesn’t have the mean streak, but it does have the political intuition and combativeness, along with the black humor.

I started to make this a comment on Jerry’s Kristol post, then decided the Russell quote wanted to be republished.

We start from the Times hiring of neocon attack dog and serial reality denier Bill Kristol, not only a neocon but the son-in-law of the father of the neocons; that is, he didn’t even make the journey from Trotskyism himself. Calculating an equation based admittedly on at least one irrational variable, I’m not surprised that Kristol didn’t know “Invictus”. And I don’t just ascribe this simply to his congenital inability to see reality; Bob Altemeyer explains all.

As the first term of the equation, I wasn’t taught most of what Jerry asked and my score on his test is embarassingly low, though I’m old enough to remember the Winston jingle, and I might do better on the yellow-submarine test. But even growing up in Appalachia, in the ninth grade I was taught “Beneath the blows of circumstance/my head is bloody but unbowed” (or maybe it should be “unbow’d”…). It was of the few poems I really fastened onto in public school, other than haiku which I loved as soon as I came across Basho. You gotta take a poet seriously who said that a great writer will produce perhaps a dozen quality poems in a lifetime; in other words he’s looking at 204 syllables. Otherwise my tastes in poetry were pedestrian, like nineteenth century; I was caught up in Beckett and Faulkner.

The second term of the equation is, perhaps confusingly, the first point: that “Invictus” is a strong statement, or more accurately a statement of strength. The way I read it, the poet has attained some level of comfort with the dangers of the world; he knows he’ll eventually be overcome by them but has made peace with that. Thus he has a certain superiority to his fate, which allows him to imagine himself unbeatable. As Bertrand Russell put it:

The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things — this is emancipation, and this is the free man’s worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of Time.

This feeling, or philosophy, of harmony with the universe is entirely alien to the necons, and to Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarians in general. One of their basic characteristics is the view, nearly always acquired in childhood, that the world is a dangerous and unfriendly place, people are basically bad-hearted, and you protect yourself from the necessity to interact with others if you can; in a word, their weltanshauung is fear. Combined with a sense of self-righteousness maintained by avoiding those who disagree with them, this produces a combination of subservience to convention and submission to authority with aggressive impulses that are inhibited until they’re perceived to be sanctioned by that authority. Thus an Altemeyerian High RSW.

Kristol and his fellow neocons are scared. They gained control and failed utterly, and now see themselves and their fearful prescriptions rejected wholesale by the society they inhabit and look down on. They can’t imagine seeing the world as William Ernest Henley did: they are neither the masters of their fates nor the captains of their souls. They know themselves poorly enough still to believe that all evil comes from outside. Thus they hate, and feel righteous about doing so. Their point of view requires universal agreement; otherwise the curtain will be drawn aside and they’ll be forced to confront the nagging feeling that they’re completely full of shit.

It may be that it is not poetry passing from the scene, but the strength of character and of world view required to grasp an idea entirely different from one’s own. As the machinery of society increasingly conforms to our individual whims, the difficulties inherent in personal relationships will become more irritating, and we’ll seek more balms for the pain of paying attention.

But I’m an optimist; I think relationships will continue to be worth it. For those for whom it’s too painful, we’ll have holodecks.

Below is the lede of William Kristol’s not too bad column in today’s New York Times.

In his victory speech after winning the South Carolina primary Saturday night, John McCain acknowledged the economic challenges we face, and then said: “But nothing is inevitable in our country. We are the captains of our fate.”

McCain comes from a generation that, in its youth, was made to memorize poetry. And when I was able to get in touch with him Sunday in Florida, he told me that one of the poems he had memorized in school was William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” (1875).

It sounds from this as if Kristol spotted “captains of our fate” as something a little more flowery than McCain’s standard oratory, perhaps even poetry of some sort. In any event, an obscure reference worth chasing down with the senator himself.

If Kristol couldn’t quite place “Invictus” I’m not surprised. Ten years or so after he was graduated from Harvard, I warned one of my classes there not to put off something or other, since "at my back I always hear time's wingèd chariot hurrying near."

They looked puzzled, as if I had broken into demotic Greek. Did what I just said sound like me? I asked. No. Did you think it might have been a quotation? Probably. Has anyone ever heard of a poem called "To His Coy Mistress?" Of Andrew Marvell? No and no.

The next day I handed out the easiest poetry quiz I had been able to put together. The students were to fill in the missing word or words from lines that I figured every high school over-achiever would surely know…

I figured wrong. None of the freshmen got, "The boy stood on the burning _____." None got, "Half a league, half a league, half a league _____." One got, "Beneath the spreading chestnut tree the village _____ _____." One got, "I met a traveler from an antique _____." Only one got, "You're a better man than I am, _____ _____." (Two others guessed, "Charlie Brown.") The highest score was 14 right out of 20 questions; the lowest was two right; the average was seven.

The only question everybody got right was a freebie I had thrown in: "This Bud's for _____." Actually I thought I had thrown in another freebie, "Winstons taste good, like a _____ _____," but only four students got it. Cigarette ads, I remembered too late, had disappeared from TV when they were barely out of diapers. Nor was my class an exception. When a colleague, the poet Felicia Lamport, gave the same quiz to her students, they did no better.

Stupidity can hardly have been the reason. Harvard undergraduates are by no means as brilliant as the world imagines, but most of them are above average and a few are very bright indeed.

Nor were my students likely to have neglected their poetry homework in high school. They didn’t make it to Harvard by neglecting homework. If they hadn't learned poetry, no one had given it to them to learn.

This turned out to be the case. One or two of the students said they had been made to memorize a passage from Shakespeare in high school, but that was all. Most had been required to read a handful of poems; none had ever been moved to memorize one on his or her own. When I told them I had done that very thing as a schoolboy, and more than once too, they couldn't see the sense in it.

There they were then, poetry aliterates but no more to be blamed for that than a glass is to blame for being empty. Nobody had bothered to fill them, as a wonderful high school teacher named Jack McGiffert had once tried to fill me.

To see whether Mr. McGiffert had been an exception, though, I gave my quiz to the other writing teachers in the department. The older they were, the better they did. The youngest teacher, who was working on his doctoral dissertation in English Literature and is now a tenured professor, scored as poorly as my class had.

Well, what does all this mean except that each generation has its own language, its own poetry? After Felicia Lamport gave my test to her students they made up a test for her, with questions like, "We all live in a yellow _____." She only got two right.

This misses the point, though. I might have expected my father to be ignorant of Doonesbury, for instance, and he was. He might have expected me to be ignorant of Krazy Kat, and I was. But neither of us was ignorant of Poe and Whitman, Keats and Shelley, as Harvard's freshmen were and no doubt still are.

Still, what's the difference? Poetry is just the latest thing to have dropped off our cultural radar, after all; it joins mythology, the classics and the King James Bible below the horizon. And who cares, anyway?

Margaret are you grieving over golden oldies leaving? Of course you’re not. Who needs artifacts from the primitive dawn of communications technology when there’s a reality show right up there on the plasma screen?

So, yo, Margaret — This crud's for you.

If even one of you out there missed the absolute greatest newspaper story in years, I’d feel terrible if I didn’t put it up for you. The excerpt below is from the second-day story in today’s New York Times. But start with the first-day story.

Detective Rapp looked out the window and saw the unwieldy trio. Something about the way they struggled to balance the man in the chair caught his eye.

“At this point, when they approached closer, I saw the body and I said, ‘Well, this is a dead guy,’ ” Detective Rapp said on Wednesday in a phone briefing…

Today marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Simone de Beauvoir. “At 15,” Wikipedia tells us, “Simone de Beauvoir had already decided she would be a famous writer.” Apparently this is a legitimate aspiration for the French, following perhaps the example of Victor Hugo’s “I will be Chateaubriand or I will be nothing.”

Fans of de Beauvoir might enjoy the quiz at the Guardian. My score: 8 out of 10.

BTW, don’t click the photo until you’ve been quizzed (if you intend to be); the Wikipedia entry has the answers to some of the questions.

This is a painting by my severely autistic brother, Mickey. It shows one of the staff at his group home, Old North. Click on the picture for a larger version. If you’d like to see more, go to The Outsiders Gallery.

I have somewhere here a copy of Theodore Dreiser’s Tragic America. Don’t confuse this book with his earlier one that was made into a movie several times over. Fortunately someone has transcribed a portion of the book to the web. Published in 1931, the book received terrible reviews and even more terrible sales. The book is long on facts and figures which don’t stand the test of time. Nevertheless, the book does have its fine points. For all you fans of fhe Apple computer, Dreiser also had much to say about AT&T, Apple’s new marriage partner. As soon as I can find my copy, I'll be transcribing portions of it here. Stay tuned.

I decry the power of the Church and its use of that power, in America in particular! Throughout the world, as all know, the churches are so organized as to have the wealth, size and formation of a great corporation, a government, or an army. And in America, the wealthy individuals who rule in corporate affairs appear to be attracted to the church by reason of its hold not only on the mind but the actions of its adherents. Politically, socially and otherwise, they count on its power and influence as of use to them. And not without reason, since especially among the ignorant and poor, its revealed wisdom counsels resignation and orders faith in a totally inscrutable hereafter. In short, it makes for ignorance and submission in the working class, And what more could a corporation-minded government or financial group, looking toward complete control of everything for a few, desire? .......

But what are the aims and methods of procedure of these missionaries who proceed from America into China, India, Siam, and elsewhere? These are interesting, for, as you will see, they have their roots in something very peculiar here. In China, for instance, our missionaries — those of the Protestant persuasion, at least — work with the government there just as closely as do the corporations that have their origin in this land. And with the corporations there also. And are frequently as much the emissaries of American trade as of religion, and even more so. For whereas formerly the missionaries used to go to convey a spiritual message, to-day at least one very important phase of their purpose is to effect as well as share material or economic “blessings” for the natives, such blessings, for instance, as our ‘Very material corporations manufacture and seek to distribute as widely as possible; bathtubs, sewing machines, electric lights, or, refrigerators, or in other words, anything and everything that our modern corporations make. In other words again, "Make ‘em modern!” That means more business for home corporations, doesn't it? And I am not talking wildly, for only read, as I have done, the writings of our very up-to-date missionaries of this hour. And furthermore, most missionaries now believe that they should be protected with gunboats — they who supposedly represent that Jesus who taught peace! And to show the growth of our missions, the American Baptist Missionary Union, which was organized in 1846 and had nothing to go On, in 1893 had an income of $485,000. And now ....!

I would also note that a Wikpedia entry tells me that “[i]n 1935 the library trustees of Warsaw, Indiana ordered the burning of all the library’s works by Dreiser. ” The best books may very well be the ones that have been ordered burned .

I've done several posts featuring Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Many people have apparently been deeply moved by the song. The song does that for me.

For many years many people believed that the second movement was about the bombing of Guernica by Franco and Hitler. Recent revelations have revealed that this isn’t the story of the song, although the song is about death. Death is always a personal tragedy. So for those who have suffered death, either due to unfortunate circumstances, or due to authoritarians who create death for their own purposes, the story of Concierto de Aranjuez is one that should surely resonate in the soul of those who have one. So here is the story of Concierto de Aranjuez. And here is Rodrigo himself.

Thank God for Peter in Germany, who casts an anthropologist’s eye on the United States of Repression for we who dwell inside the bubble. He sends this from The Independent:

One of Germany's best-selling children's authors is embroiled in an extraordinary transatlantic row about nudity after a U.S. publisher refused to accept one of her books because it contained naive sketches of an art gallery with works depicting naked bodies …

The 59-year-old author said her American publisher had refused to accept her latest book for U.S. distribution because it contained elements deemed potentially offensive, including drawings of people naked or smoking. Berner said her U.S. publisher, Boyds Mills Press, had objected in particular to one of her illustrations which showed adults and children in an art gallery where the portrait of a naked woman was on show together with a seven millimetre high sculpture of a naked man exhibiting a barely discernible penis …

Berner said no other country had raised similar objections. In Germany — a country where nude public bathing is normal — the author's spat with her U.S. publisher met with blank incomprehension. “Micropenis excites U.S. publishing house” wrote Der Spiegel magazine in its online edition.

I’d tell you what I think about all this, but why bother? Human Too Human has said it for me:

But to show scenes of war and destruction, to go to church and see paintings of naked men tortured and flogged and crucified, to even hear gory and morbid details of torments inflicted on “saints”, to be exposed for hours to the vulgarity and superficiality of TV shows, quizzes, ads and so forth is OK in the USA …

Time for some light entertainment again. Enjoy!

“No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.”

Kurt Vonnegut, I barely knew ye.

Since most of our readers probably weren’t able to see Joe Bageant speak in Philadelphia, he's kindly transcribed the text of his unusually cogent speech onto his webpage. Rest assured, Bageant fans — judging from the picture currently posted at the top of his webpage, it looks like Joe quickly reverted to the Joe Bageant we all know and love, the one whose taste for libations and raucous rhetoric appears to remain intact and unabated. A portion of Joe’s upbeat talk on the state of the nation follows. By all means go read the rest:

Here’s a fact that is so absurd you don't know whether to laugh or cry: Nearly 40% of households surveyed making less than $30,000 a year believe they are in the top 10% of Americans when it comes to income! In a similar, though more extreme national delusion, millions of North Koreans eating wild grass soup during the winter under Kim Jong-Il, believe they live in the richest nation on earth, and that America wants to attack them out of jealousy. Such are the results of successful propaganda.

More Rodrigo. Right now, only a fantasy.

I can’t pass up an opportunity to shill for my favorite author by pointing to a review of his book.

I found the review so in tune with my take on the book that I started looking for an email address for the reviewer. I mean, he even mentioned the edition I own and named its editor, well known in his own right.

Unfortunately I’m a bit late.

Kenneth Rexroth, a native of Indiana, became an icon of the San Francisco Beat movement. He was a political anarchist, poet, and gifted translator. Rexroth died in 1982. Many of his writings are available on the excellent Bureau of Public Secrets site.

Sounds like a man after my own heart. In fact it’s a bit spooky.

Here’s a few of the best paragraphs from the review:

One of the greatest stories, true or fictional, in all literature is Gibbon’s account of the life and martyrdom of Boethius under the Ostrogoth Theodoric. Senator, poet, philosopher, man of reason, he was the last of his kind in all these categories. The story is an incomparable masterpiece of prose. From the opening sentence, “The Senator Boethius is the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman,” Gibbon builds a mighty organ toccata. He always seems to see ahead to every echo and resonance and inversion of rhythm, through the idyllic description of The Consolation of Philosophy to the terrible climax — the philosopher garroted and clubbed to death in the last gloomy hours of Theodoric, followed by the swift cadence, and the coda of the martyrdom of his fellow Senator Symmachus — four crowded pages of the most solemn music. Each man speaks in his own style. Gibbon speaks with such sublimity because, sitting in his quiet study, he was totally involved in the defense of reason against the triumph of barbarism and superstition and the ruin of all bright things.

At the beginning of the fall of Rome, Saint Augustine wrote The City of God; and Gibbon, looking back in his book from the walls of burning Constantinople in the final fall, on the eve of a new age of enlightenment, is in fact committed to the same interpretation of history as Augustine. Against the destructive irrationality of circumstance and the folly of mankind stands the community of the elect. In Augustine it is the community of faith; in Gibbon the elect of reason, a society that transcends history. The ideal Rome that Gibbon describes in his opening chapters on the Antonines is a passing avatar of the enduring City of Enlightenment. This, after all, is the subject of all tragedy: the defeat of the ideal by the real, of being by existence.

And:

In his own time, Gibbon’s Latinate antithetical style already sounded archaic, yet it is still today eminently suited to his solemn subject. How else is one to describe the beauty, lechery, and political malevolence of Theodora, or the economic folly of her husband, Justinian, than in a quiet language derived from the letters of Cicero, the most ironic passages of Thucydides, and the innuendos of Tacitus? For the Muse of History appears like the child Theodora in the arena, dancing naked on the head of a bear, more often than she appears as the noble goddess of Livy’s and Plutarch’s mythologies. What better response to the spectacle than the caustic caution and gentlemanly calm, the prudent incredulity Gibbon developed in meditation on a thousand years of the slow triumph of disorder — meditation by the orderly Swiss lake of Voltaire’s exile?

I’ve been thinking for some time that a nice name for a poem might be “Ode to Pandora’s Box&rdquo since no one seems to have named a poem as such yet. I’ve even thought about writing something along those lines as a response to that famous Ode to a Grecian Urn. Alas. Writer’s block, perhaps more appropriately named the lazies has gotten me in its grip. Thus this poem entitled The Box by Lascelles Abercrombie will have to suffice for now. Happy Holidays one and all.

Once upon a time, in the land of Hush-A-Bye,
Around about the wondrous days of yore,
They came across a kind of box
Bound up with chains and locked with locks
And labeled “Kindly do not touch; it's war.”
A decree was issued round about, and all with a flourish and a shout
And a gaily colored mascot tripping lightly on before.
Don’t fiddle with this deadly box,Or break the chains, or pick the locks.
And please don’t ever play about with war.
The children understood. Children happen to be good

And they were just as good around the time of yore.
They didn’t try to pick the locks
Or break into that deadly box.
They never tried to play about with war.
Mommies didn't either; sisters, aunts, grannies neither
’Cause they were quiet, and sweet, and pretty
In those wondrous days of yore.
Well, very much the same as now,
And not the ones to blame somehow
For opening up that deadly box of war.
But someone did. Someone battered in the lid
And spilled the insides out across the floor.
A kind of bouncy, bumpy ball made up of guns and flags
And all the tears, and horror, and death that comes with war.
It bounced right out and went bashing all about,
Bumping into everything in store.And what was sad and most unfair
Was that it didn’t really seem to care
Much who it bumped, or why, or what, or for.
It bumped the children mainly. And I’ll tell you this quite plainly,
It bumps them every day and more, and more,
And leaves them dead, and burned, and dying
Thousands of them sick and crying.
‘Cause when it bumps, it's really very sore.
Now there’s a way to stop the ball. It isn’t difficult at all.
All it takes is wisdom, and I’m absolutely sure
That we can get it back into the box,And bind the chains, and lock the locks.
But no one seems to want to save the children anymore.
Well, that’s the way it all appears, ‘cause it’s been bouncing round
for years and years
In spite of all the wisdom wizzed since those wondrous days of yore
And the time they came across the box,
Bound up with chains and locked with locks,
And labeled “Kindly do not touch; it’s war.”