Infospigot: The Chronicles

Guest Observation: Tom Kettle

Two or three weeks ago in my Irish history class, we were going the World War I years. One of the things the professor does is weave in poetry and song; he has even sung a song or two despite the palpable discomfort of many of his auditors. For the poetry, his habit is to declaim a stanza or two unless the piece is quite short. During the World War I lecture, he brought in a sonnet by a man well-known in Ireland but little known elsewhere: Tom Kettle.

Kettle was an Irish nationalist of the Home Rule stripe. Meaning: He hoped for an independent Ireland, but supported a campaign to create an Irish government that would still be part of the British Empire. Just as that goal was about to be realized, the European war broke out. When the fighting began, in August 1914, Kettle was in Belgium trying to buy guns for Irish nationalist militias. Instead, he spent several months helping the Belgians in their futile bid to hold off the German onslaught. Prompted largely by what he had seen, he volunteered for service in the British army when he returned home and recruited fellow Irishmen into the ranks. Among radical nationalists, who held to the age-old position that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity, Kettle's position was akin to a sellout. When the nationalists launched the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, Kettle was devastated; though in poor health, asked for a front-line combat position. He was sent to France to join an Irish unit in the Battle of the Somme.

It was there that he wrote "To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God":

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby's throne
To dice with death. And, oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

The poem's postscript reads: "In the field before Guillemont, Somme. September 4, 1916." Kettle died leading his troops into action five days later.

Technorati Tags: ireland

Today's Best Expression

"As mad as a hatter." That's a tried and true formulation, though maybe a little archaic. One of Kate's colleague's has supercharged it and and updated it a little. In reference to someone who might be a little off-center, she's fond of saying, "He's as crazy as a f---ing mad hatter."

So there, Charles Dodgson.

Guest Observation: Walt Whitman

From "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (part 6):

"I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

"I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution;
I too had receiv’d identity by my Body;
That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body."

***

That's it. Except to say this passage has always said something to me about the purely physical part of our identity, the part that engages on a level that we're only dimly aware of, the part that finds joy in something like running or cycling or walking long walks. The cognitive linguistics course I'm taking this spring, one of the ideas it promotes is that the language we use--especially the metaphorical language we use, sometimes to describe complex and abstract thoughts, experiences, and objects--comes straight out of our physical experience on a very basic level--both what we see and feel in the world and how our brains process it. Those last three lines from Whitman seem to come from the same place: He recognized his identity not just as his mind and thoughts but as something arising from the fact of his physical being amidst all the beings and things in the world.

***

And one last thing: Happy birthday, Ann!

Guest Observation: The Vulnerable Spot

"The report of Ross's death came over the telephone in a three-word sentence that somehow managed to embody all the faults that Ross devoted his life to correcting. A grief-stricken friend in Boston, charged with the task of spreading the news but too dazed to talk sensibly, said, 'It's all over.' He meant that Ross was dead, but the listener took it to mean that the operation was over. Here, in three easy words, were the ambiguity, the euphemistic softness, the verbal infirmity that Harold W. Ross spent his life thrusting at. Ross regarded every sentence as the enemy, and believed that if a man watched closely enough, he would discover the vulnerable spot, the essential weakness. He devoted his life to making the weak strong--a rather specialized form of blood transfusion, to be sure, but one that he believed in with such a consuming passion that his spirit infected others and inspired them. Whatever it was, this contagion, this vapor in these marshes, it spread. None escaped it. Nor is it likely to be dissipated in a hurry."

--E.B. White, "H.W. Ross"
In "Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976"

Technorati Tags: writiing

Tree, Lights, Bells

We're late with the tree this year. Kate and I went out and bought it yesterday from a place on University Avenue run by a San Francisco outfit that tries to help our burgeoning population of ex-convicts stay straight. We didn't decorate until tonight, though -- late tonight.

(And now, it's tomorrow already. Christmas Eve. On Saturday evening, I turned on an acoustic music show on one of the local FM stations, KALW, and there was a song about bells playing. Kate, hearing the word "tintinnabulation" recognized right away that the lyrics were from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Bells." I thought, but didn't say, that the singer sounded like Phil Ochs. We were both right. The poem and the song start with a lightness not often associated with Poe:

"Hear the sledges with the bells, Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars, that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells— From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells."

The poem gets darker as it goes along. The song is on iTunes. I want to say "amazingly, it's on iTunes, but I guess it's not so amazing anymore.)

Technorati Tags: xmas

'Inimical Forces'

A while back, I mentioned a book I'd like to read: "The Greatest Battle," by Andrew Nagorski. It's an account of the battle for Moscow in World War II. Although several of the blurbs on the back cover describe the book as gripping, I'd say it's deliberate and workmanlike, almost plodding. But Nagorski does a thorough job relating the story of the German invasion, the Soviet defense, and Hitler's and Stalin's roles in the disasters that befell both armies and the calamity that was visited on the Soviet Union first through Stalin's policies of purge and terror and second through Hitler's determination to destroy the nation and its political system. I'd say go find it used or borrow it from your library if you like military epics.

Nagorski does talk a lot about the scale of the killing in the German-Soviet fighting. Of course, the entire war involved killing on a fearsome scale. You can read through the numbers, but I don't think there's any way to comprehend them. I always find myself thinking about the events that led to the catastrophe, and my thoughts always settle on Hitler and how he was able to move an entire nation to start in on such an enterprise.

Earlier today, Kate was reading a book of short pieces E.B. White wrote for The New Yorker. She read several of them, all from the 1930s, aloud. Here's one -- The New Yorker holds the copyright -- published two months or so after Hitler came to power in 1933. It was titled "Inimical Forces":

"Einstein is loved because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it. Not long ago Einstein was here and made a speech, not about relativity but about nationalism. 'Behind it,' he said, 'are the forces inimical to life.' Since he made that speech we have been reading more about those forces: Bruno Walter forbidden by the Leipzig police to conduct a symphony; shops of the Jews posted with labels showing a yellow spot on a black field. Thus in a single day's developments in Germany we go back a thousand years into the dark, while a great thinker, speaking not as a Jew but as a philosopher, warns us: these are the forces inimical to life."

[The book: "Writings from The New Yorker, 1927-1976." At Amazon and many other fine retailers.]

Guest Observation: The Names of Things

From the "I Should Really Go to Bed" Department (Kate and the dog have gone off to sleep, and I'm sitting up here alone), there's this nugget from Pablo Neruda's poem "Too Many Names":

"... When I sleep all these nights,
what am I named or not named?
And when I wake up who am I
if I wasn't when I was asleep? ...

"... I intend to confuse things,
to unite things, make them new-born,
intermingle them, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the unity of the ocean,
a generous wholeness,
a fragrance alive and crackling."

The translation? It's by Stephen Mitchell, who lives a few blocks from us, I hear. It's in his book of selected Neruda poems, "Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon."

Technorati Tags: poetry

Technorati Tags: poetry

Today's Top Research

My foray into matters of Irish Americana tonight has me reading about the Irish community, German Americans, and World War I. Yes: Irish Americans and German Americans made common cause to try to keep the United States out of the war. Ireland's longstanding grievances against Britain motivated the Irish; support for the Fatherland inspired the Germans. I've found lots of interesting and informative stuff on the topic, but I wound up searching the New York Times archives for stories about William Jennings Bryan's role as an advocate of U.S. neutrality.

I found one precious item from June 1915, a week or so after Bryan had resigned as secretary of State because he could see by President Wilson's reaction to the Lusitania sinking that his argument didn't stand a chance in the administration. The item is about a speech that Bryan was supposed to make in Chicago to the Sons of Teutons. The group had invited Bryan, thinking he would inveigh against U.S. ammunition shipments to Britain and France and renew his call for an embargo. But when the Sons of Teutons found out that Bryan instead intended to urge the warring parties to enter peace negotiations, they met him at the train station and said the speech was canceled. At least that was the Times's version of events.

I came across a more recent item, too: a March 1967 piece by historian Barbara Tuchman ("The Guns of August," etc.) published in The New York Times Magazine and titled simply, "How We Entered World War I." I haven't read Tuchman's books for decades, but this article is a reminder of why her histories are so accessible: she was a great writer (and yes, a capable historian, too). I found this in her description of the American and German diplomatic struggle over limits to submarine warfare: "Each time during these months when the torpedo streaked its fatal track, the isolationist cry to keep Americans out of the war zones redoubled."

"... The torpedo streaked its fatal track." I'll remember that one for awhile.

Liberal Arts Tuesday

Ancient advice
Athena -- "clear-eyed," "her eyes glinting," "brimming with indignation," and in disguise -- to Telemachus at the opening of "The Odyssey":

"For you,
I have some good advice, if only you will accept it.
Fit out a ship with twenty oars,, the best in sight,
sail in quest of news of your long-lost father.
Someone may well tell you something
or you may catch a rumor straight from Zeus,
rumor that carries news to men like nothing else. ...
Now, if you hear your father's alive and heading home,
hard-pressed as you are, brave out one more year.
If you hear he's dead, no longer among the living,
then back you come to the native land you love,
raise his grave-mound, build his honors high
with the full funeral rites that he deserves--
and give your mother to another husband.

"Then,
once you've sealed those matters, seen them through,
think hard, reach down deep in your heart and soul
for a way to kill these suitors in your house,
by stealth or in open combat. ..."

-- From the Robert Fagles translation (and for bonus points, the transcript of a 1997 Fagles interview on the PBS "NewsHour")

Go Bears

"There's an old folk saying, 'Life's a dream; please don't wake me up.' That's how I feel about my life, my years at Berkeley. When I hear UC Berkeley denounced for lawlessness, debauchery, free thinking, subversion, harboring communists and radicals, exposing students to radical ideas— whenever I hear those charges made, that's when you'll hear me, wherever I am, shout: Go Bears!"

--Leon Litwack, UC Berkeley history professor, upon retiring from teaching last spring (and for bonus points, the alumni magazine, California, carried a couple nice pieces on Litwack this fall: one on his career and final lecture, one from a former student).

Book I Want Got

"The Greatest Battle." A friend of ours once had a job that required him to travel to Moscow several times. He recalled a remarkable sight on the road into the city from the airport: a monument-sized tank trap, built to commemorate the Red Army's last-ditch defense of the capital against Hitler's army in World War II. The battle's denouement is a martial epic, with the invaders on the city's outskirts, below-zero temperatures, and a fierce counterattack by troops rushed thousands of miles from Siberia. I heard the author of the book on NPR today. He got access to Soviet sources, both documentary and human, that were off-limits to western historians until recently.

Prose on His Birthday

A friend notes, by way of The Writer's Almanac, that today is Dylan Thomas's birthday. If you're not familiar with him, Thomas attracted wide notice at a very early age -- he was barely 20 -- and, thanks to radio, became something of a celebrity poet both in Britain and the United States. If for nothing else, you know him for the lines, "Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage at the dying of the light." But he was also a self-destructive alcoholic, and he drank himself to a very early grave. He wrote a poem marking his thirtieth birthday, and another marking his thirty-fifth; he was dead before his fortieth.

Anyway, my friend pulled out a copy of "Quite Early One Morning," a collection of short Thomas pieces. She read a funny number he wrote about reading poetry aloud. She said it made her angry that he was just allowed to drink himself to death. Which made me think how his story might have played out today, assuming a poet of his stripe might still be considered a person of public note.

The picture that comes to mind is celebrity rehab; lots of relapses; lots of People and EW items on his case; maybe a feature or two cataloging the squalls between him and his wife, Caitlin (who wrote a memoir that has the aggrieved and enraged title, "Left-over Life to Kill"); you could even imagine the tabloid headlines: "Dylan: Blotto Again!" or "Caitlin Says, 'I Hate You!' " But Dylan might live through all this, at least long enough to go on a fortieth or fiftieth birthday reading tour or to embarrass himself with an attempted hip-hop turn on the "People's Choice Awards" (a New York Times reviewer asks, "What do people still see in this bloated, flabby lump?"; the Post is more concise, "Fat, Not Phat"). He might survive the "has-been rhymester" headlines long enough for the rehab to finally stick; and then, unsurprisingly given his religious Welsh upbringing, he's born again and puts out a volume of Christian poetry ("Songs of Praise to Him Who Made Me"; example first line: "Go ahead, go gentle into that good night/Jesus is waiting with a shiny new night-light"); the reception among the literati is scornful; hard-core born-agains distrust his history of dissipation and foreign accent; but Dr. Phil sees an inspirational story, welcomes him into the fold for "getting real," and "Songs" is launched onto the lower rungs of best-seller lists along with the latest Dan Brown and Suze Orman offerings. Then follows a popular autobiography, "Singing in My Chains," a children's book, "A Wale of a Poet," and a concert tour with Sting and Bono. Alas, even in the company of such spiritually attuned and clean-living rockers, the lures of the road catch up to him. He disappears from his hotel suite after a sold-out Meadowlands show. The next day, a fan sells TMZ a video of Thomas downing shots at New York's White Horse Tavern and boozily denouncing "that wanker Dr. Phil"; the poet is arrested for public indecency after urinating in the doorway of a Manhattan fire station; from a Riker's Island jail cell he apologizes to his fans and Dr. Phil. He goes back into rehab. And, after a tearful confession of error on Oprah, gets a new book deal.