November 11, 2013 The Poem Stuck in My Head Ivor Gurney’s “To His Love” By Glyn Maxwell Ivor Gurney in 1920. In honor of Veterans Day, we are re-running this favorite post. In the last century, a few years of sodden slaughter in France and Flanders turned British poetry from Keatsian lyricism to raw, aghast reportage. Isaac Rosenberg’s poems, for instance, moved from prewar patriotic exultation—“Flash, mailed seraphim, / Your burning spears”—to, three years later, this numb, bone-dry mutter from the trenches: “Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew / Your cosmopolitan sympathies.” In Ivor Gurney’s “To His Love” you see the thing happening not in mid-career but in mid-poem—between lines, in a line break, specifically the last one. It’s the most astonishing line break I’ve ever encountered. It’s the sound of a culture’s poetic history cracking in half. “To His Love” begins as an almost doggedly traditional elegy, with the Byronic echo of “We’ll walk no more on Cotswold.” It meanders through rivers, beasts, flowers, and the old tropes—nobility, “pride,” “memoried.” We are lulled into thinking that the urgency of “Cover him, cover him soon!” arises from intense soldierly love, rather than the desperate need to hide a shredded corpse, that “red, wet / Thing.” The euphemistic Latinate décor is stripped away; the haplessly tall T does it’s pitiful duty by the form, like a Tommy too shell-shocked to hide, a standing target. The fragile Gurney was gassed and traumatized by the war, and he lived out his days in asylums. Read More
November 11, 2013 Quote Unquote Weapons of Mass Instruction By Sadie Stein VONNEGUT I took my basic training on the 240-millimeter howitzer. INTERVIEWER A rather large weapon. VONNEGUT The largest mobile fieldpiece in the army at that time. This weapon came in six pieces, each piece dragged wallowingly by a Caterpillar tractor. Whenever we were told to fire it, we had to build it first. We practically had to invent it. We lowered one piece on top of another, using cranes and jacks. The shell itself was about nine and a half inches in diameter and weighed three hundred pounds. We constructed a miniature railway which would allow us to deliver the shell from the ground to the breech, which was about eight feet above grade. The breechblock was like the door on the vault of a savings and loan association in Peru, Indiana, say. INTERVIEWER It must have been a thrill to fire such a weapon. VONNEGUT Not really. We would put the shell in there, and then we would throw in bags of very slow and patient explosives. They were damp dog biscuits, I think. We would close the breech, and then trip a hammer which hit a fulminate of mercury percussion cap, which spit fire at the damp dog biscuits. The main idea, I think, was to generate steam. After a while, we could hear these cooking sounds. It was a lot like cooking a turkey. In utter safety, I think, we could have opened the breechblock from time to time, and basted the shell. Eventually, though, the howitzer always got restless. And finally it would heave back on its recoil mechanism, and it would have to expectorate the shell. The shell would come floating out like the Goodyear blimp. If we had had a stepladder, we could have painted “Fuck Hitler” on the shell as it left the gun. Helicopters could have taken after it and shot it down. INTERVIEWER The ultimate terror weapon. VONNEGUT Of the Franco-Prussian War. —Kurt Vonnegut, the Art of Fiction No. 64
November 11, 2013 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 6, or Crowdsourcing By Alexander Aciman Bodleian Library, University of Oxford This fall, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along As we find ourselves in the midst of Nielsen sweeps month, it seems a good time to consider the facto that can ensure the longevity of certain shows. Yes, critical acclaim is great, but in the end, critics are only a small fraction of a high seven or even eight-figure audience turnout, and critics certainly don’t get a show a spot after the Super Bowl. For this, we rely on the viewers, and this week, it’s their turn to speak. Jim—Chicago, IL 2/5 Stars When I saw promos for The Inferno, I thought to myself “wow, what an incredibly awesome sounding name for a show.” And then when I learned it was about hell I thought it would be full of action and adventure, and because Virgil and Dante were traveling together, I even assumed it would be some sort of buddy cop series. It turns out I was wrong. So far, in Canto III and in Canto V, Dante has fainted. TWICE. Get out of the kitchen if you can’t stand the heat. And somehow, after fainting, at the beginning of the next Canto Dante mysteriously ends up somewhere new, probably because Virgil had to carry him. If I were Virgil I would slap some sense into Dante, or ditch him next time he passes out. And on top of that Virgil is clearly the best character but we don’t get enough of him. Maybe there will be some sort of Virgil spinoff. Read More
November 8, 2013 Look The Great Columbia Book Slide of 1934 By Sadie Stein In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too shallow for human use. (Which is probably good, considering this was on a college campus.) Not to be confused with the recreational-use book slide from the Panorama House: … or the bokstörten of the Stockholm Public Records Building:
November 8, 2013 Bulletin Claire Vaye Watkins Wins Dylan Thomas Prize By Sadie Stein We are delighted to announce that Claire Vaye Watkins has won the Dylan Thomas Prize, awarded to the best work of literature published by an author under the age of thirty, for her debut short story collection Battleborn. Read an excerpt of Watkins’s story “Gold Mine,” from issue 195, here.
November 8, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Baseball, Giacometti, Literary Sprinting By The Paris Review Missing baseball yet? I am: I miss the slow churn of the season, I miss sitting in the stands, shielding my eyes from an afternoon sun as a hit flies into the air—is it foul? is it fair?—only to be caught at the wall by an outfielder. I miss the rhythm of apparent inactivity mixed with maximum tension. (I don’t miss the Cubs never winning a World Series.) What is beautiful about Steven Millhauser’s single-sentence story “Home Run” in Electric Literature is that not only does it celebrate our national pastime, it celebrates this rhythm through language. As editor Halimah Marcus explains in her introduction, “With nary a punctuation mark other than a comma, Millhauser builds momentum like the titular home run—the linguistic equivalent of bated breath, of rally towels, of screaming from your seat, of going, going, gone.” —Justin Alvarez In celebration of Neil Gaiman’s recent appointment at Bard College (my alma mater), I’ve been spending my evenings with American Gods. Not generally a reader of fantasy, at first I found myself echoing a question asked early on by our protagonist, Shadow: “What should I believe?” When we received an answer—“Everything”—it came from a man with a buffalo head. The book is a compendium of mythological tales, mixed together with intelligent precision and strewn with horror and humor. Ancient deities war with the rising gods of a digital world; a junkie leprechaun roams the streets in search of a misplaced gold coin; morticians by the names of Ibis and Jacquel chew on small bits of organs as they reseal their cadavers. Oh, and Lucille Ball is a god of the new millennium. Yet at the core of these phantasmagorical episodes is a commentary on melting-pot America, where the titans of other worlds are forgotten and replaced by newer, trendier gods—“gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon.” It’s no wonder that this novel has won both Hugo and Nebula awards or that the Internet has been in a frenzy over the rumored HBO adaptation. —Caitlin Youngquist Read More