Why I prefer to read a poem than hear it recited

August 23, 2017 • 12:00 pm

When I was a  very young boy, I was an obsessive reader of Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts. Not only did I read it as soon as the daily paper arrived, but I cut out every strip and pasted it in a scrapbook, with a whole page reserved for the big Sunday color strip.  The animated films and television adaptations didn’t come out until 1969, when I was long past the age of Peanuts infatuation, but when I saw them I was horrified. The characters didn’t sound the way I thought they should sound! 

Mind you, I didn’t know how they should sound, for when I read comics or any work of literature, I don’t form a mental audio representation of the characters’ voices. (But when reading all literature, I always have an imagined visual representation of the people and the surroundings, as I think most of us do. (When I read Anna Karenina, for instance, I form an image of not only what Anna, Vronsky, and Levin look like, but also what the scenery and houses looked like.) It’s just that no voice would do; comics and literature don’t come to me with voices. That’s why, when I saw the first Lord of the Rings movie, I didn’t like it because the hobbits’ voices didn’t sound right; only Gollum’s seemed accurate.

And I think this goes for poetry as well—at least for me. When I read a poem I may conjure up a scene, but I never imagine a voice reading the words. And when I hear anybody doing that, even the poets themselves, I don’t like it. Poetry, at least for me, is meant to be read and not heard, even though its mental effect resides largely in the beauty or sonority of its words. Isn’t that curious?

I realized this again last night when, perusing YouTube, I was at first chuffed to come across Sylvia Plath reading her poem “Daddy”—one of the great poems of the twentieth century. I could read it again and again, and have done so many times, always enthralled with the wonderfully unexpected language and disturbed by the tortured picture of her father. Here’s the written version as given on the Poetry Foundation page:

DADDY
Sylvia Path
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

So I was delighted to find her reading it in a YouTube recording, as Sylvia Plath’s readings aren’t easy to come by. Here it is:

Many of you might like this, but I don’t. I don’t like the cadence, her voice sounds wrong (granted, no voice would be right!), and I don’t like the “eech” pronounciation of “ich”. Granted, this is one of the better readings I’ve heard by the composing poet, but I much prefer reading it to hearing it.

Particularly grating to me are readings by another favorite poet, T. S. Eliot. His voice is simply flat and monotonic, and overly “toff”, even though he was an American. Here he is reading what I consider his greatest poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, begun when the poet was only 22 and published when he was 27.

It’s a boring and almost pompous reading. I much prefer the written version, which you can find here.

So many poets decide to read their works in a monotone voice.  That, too, is my problem with Dylan Thomas, one of my favorites. Here’s his reading “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (not one of my favorites, but perhaps his best known work). I don’t like the semi-monotonic voice, the quavering tone, and the overly histrionic bits:

Maybe actors, trained to use their voices, can do a better j0b, for here’s Anthony Hopkins reading the same poem, but in a way I like much better (his version starts at 2:15 after an introduction):

In my life I’ve been to several presentations of poetry read by the writer, but I’ve never liked any of them. And so I’ve stopped going, for I prefer my poetry imbibed alone, perhaps with something else to imbibe. Am I alone in this opinion?

Antifa: a handicap for the Left

August 23, 2017 • 10:00 am

Antifa, the loosely-organized network of “antifascists” that comprises largely anarchists and socialists, has never appealed to me.  The problem is that while I like some of its aims: to oppose the Trump administration, to demonstrate against racism, to provide counterspeech in the face of odious speech, and so on, I nevertheless decry Antifa’s methods. Those include the use of physical violence against what they consider “hate-speech violence” (I detest physical violence unless it’s in self defense); the willy-nilly destruction of property and breaking of windows to demonstrate their hatred of capitalism; the wearing of masks to disguise their identity, many times to avoid recognition by the police; and their general hatred of police, who have in fact tried to protect them.

But many members don’t want to be protected, and come to demonstrations armed with sticks, brass knuckles, knives, and even guns. (In my usual but now unnecessary disclaimer, I’ll add that white supremacists, with their open display of weapons, are even more intimidating, and their views totally reprehensible. In terms of general ideology—save anarchism and violence—I’m very close to Antifa and not at all to their opponents).

Overall, though, I disapprove of Antifa and see them as one contributor to violence in these clashes. If they eschewed attacks on other people, their masks, and their wanton destruction of property, I’d be on their side, but I see them as damaging the Left, for any group that engages in violence loses some sympathy from the public. Antifa’s actions may even gain some sympathy for the white supremacists they oppose, though as long as that side also uses violence and carries guns, they’re not going to get any of sympathy.

CNN, which is not a right-wing venue, has a good article on the group, “Unmasking the leftist Antifa movement,” which includes a rare live interview (video at the top of the article) with some Portland members. (Portland, Oregon seems to be its unofficial headquarters.) The members, being cowardly, are of course masked. They do argue that the masks aren’t to hide their identity from the cops, but from “Nazis”:

In New York’s Union Square on May Day, a masked member of the Antifa group Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council told CNN why he wore black bloc and waved a black flag.

“We cover our face because the Nazis will try to find out who we are. And that is a very bad thing because they harass people,” he said. “We’re trying to stop them from organizing. … When they organize, they kill people, they hurt people, they fight people. And we’re the ones who are fighting back.”

It’s a position taken by many Antifa activists: “This is self-defense.”

I think that’s not quite honest, for has there really been a campaign by “Nazis” to out Antifa members? Their real worry is, I suspect, that they’ll be identified by the cops when they break the law, something they admit they do all the time (my emphasis below):

Antifa activists often don’t hesitate to destroy property, which many see as the incarnation of unfair wealth distribution.

“Violence against windows — there’s no such thing as violence against windows,” a masked Antifa member in Union Square told CNN. “Windows don’t have — they’re not persons. And even when they are persons, the people we fight back against, they are evil. They are the living embodiment, they are the second coming of Hitler.”

Crow [Scott Crow, former member of the movement] explained the ideology this way: “Don’t confuse legality and morality. Laws are made of governments, not of men,” echoing the words of John Adams.

“Each of us breaks the law every day. It’s just that we make the conscious choice to do that,” he said.

Antifa members also sometimes launch attacks against people who aren’t physically attacking them. The movement, Crow said, sees alt-right hate speech as violent, and for that, its activists have opted to meet violence with violence.

This is a mantra we’re going to hear increasingly often: since “hate speech” is violence, it should be either banned or met with counter-violence—of the physical type. It distresses me to see many on the Left reassessing their view that “hate speech” is still free speech, and trying to find a way to stifle it. Antifa wants to shut it down by physically hurting those who utter it. Even the ACLU is pondering the issue, though I think they’ll come down on the right side. (I’m not overly concerned with their recent declaration that they won’t defend groups who openly carry guns.) The problem, as always, is this: who is to define and then censor “hate speech”?  Surely we don’t want the government to do that, for that would, as a principle, give the Trump administration the right to make such judgments. I still favor the courts’ present interpretation of the First Amendment.

The Antifa group interviewed in the CNN video

If you don’t think Antifa comes to rallies expecting and wanting a fight, here’s what happened during the June 4 clash in Portland between the alt-right and Antifa:

Before the June event, “we saw on social media that there was a lot of threats being put back and forth that gave us a lot of concern about physical violence,” Portland police spokesman Pete Simpson said.

Hoping to keep June 4 from becoming another May Day, police created a human barricade. Officers stood shoulder to shoulder between two city squares — one filled with alt-right groups, the other with Antifa activists.

After a few hours, it seemed peace had won the day. But then police caught whispers that Antifa members were planning to push past police into the alt-right rally square.

Officers moved in with rubber bullets, pepper spray and smoke bombs. They pushed the masked Antifa activists into a corner and detained them. Many shed their black clothing and left it on the streets as police decided whom to arrest.

“We did seize a large number of weapons or things that could be used as weapons,” Simpson said. “Everything from knives to brass knuckles to poles and sticks and bricks and bottles and road flares and chains. One hundred percent, they came geared up to fight if it would be allowed.”

Here’s Antifa on the cops, who, I think, are unfairly demonized (remember when they were called “pigs” in the Sixties?); many cops are good people, they have a dangerous job, and without them society would fall apart, as it did during the Montreal police strike of 1969. Who will maintain law and order if we get rid of the police? Antifa? Here’s what many members think of the cops:

Activists don black bloc [the name for their black clothing and masks], Crow said, as a means to an end.

“People put on the masks so that we can all become anonymous, right? And then, therefore, we are able to move more freely and do what we need to do, whether it is illegal or not,” he said.

And that means avoiding police, whom many Antifa members see as an enemy, as well as skirting the scrutiny Antifa activists often get from alt-right trolls on the Internet. Black bloc, one member told us, also unites the movement.

For the time being, until they renounce violence and eschew their weapons, I’m giving these thugs a pass. In fact, even Noam Chomsky dislikes Antifa, calling them a “major gift to the right”. As The Independent reports,

Noam Chomsky has launched into an attack on the anti-fascist movement and argued its actions are wrong in principle and it is a “major gift to the right”.

The eminent intellectual, who is described as the father of modern linguistics, argued the movement was self-destructive and constituted a tiny faction on the periphery of the left.

. . . . Chomsky, a leading voice on the left who is famed for his critique of US foreign policy, neoliberalism and the mainstream media, has now criticised Antifa.

“What they do is often wrong in principle – like blocking talks – and [the movement] is generally self-destructive,” the 88-year-old told the conservative paper.

He added: “When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it’s the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is. That’s quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the opportunity for education, organising, and serious and constructive activism.”

Unfortunately, some have criticized Chomsky for this view, saying, mistakenly, that it comes close to Trump’s “both-sides-are-responsible” speech that tellingly failed to decry the bigotry of the alt-right. But Chomsky didn’t mean anything like what Trump meant: he’s simply abjuring violence as a useful or effective weapon. So I think Eleanor Penny, quoted below, is misguided:

Eleanor Penny, who has written extensively on fascism and the far-right, told The Independent: “Chomsky treats the battle against fascism as a battle for moral purity than can be won when the left remain respectful, polite, and deferent.”

She added: “But fascists have no interest in winning that battle. They don’t care about respecting free speech or the right to a fair trial; they’ve openly declared their murderous intent towards people of colour (and other undesirables) and they’ll pursue that goal by any means necessary. In this context, physical resistance is a duty, an act of self-defence, not an unsightly outpost of leftist moral decline.”

Here she’s actually endorsing unilateral violence against fascists—on the grounds that their ideology is hateful.  And by “physical resistance” she clearly means “attack.”

But that won’t work. This is a battle of ideas and it will be won not by violence or weapons, but by better ideas. White supremacy is on the wane in America, despite the visibility of some of its supporters. Even most Republicans publicly decry bigotry. The arc of history is indeed bending toward justice, and, in my view, the best way to deal with white supremacists (I go back and forth on this daily) is to ignore them or, better yet, show up and mock them, as one guy did who marched next to them, drowning out their slogans by playing a loud tuba. Surely mockery is a better weapon than violence!

When you’ve lost Chomsky, you’ve lost the far Left.

Readers’ eclipse photos

August 23, 2017 • 8:00 am

If I’d thought of it, I would have asked readers to send in photos that they took of the solar eclipse. But several did anyway, and here they are.

These are from Michael Glenister:

I drove from Vancouver down to Jefferson, Oregon to see the eclipse.  Even heading down the day before traffic was bad (the typically 2 hour drive to Seattle took 4 hours), and motels jacked their prices (eg. Super 8 in Salem wanted over $700 for one room for one person), so I made alternative arrangements.  No matter where you were, or how off the beaten track the roads were, people were out watching the eclipse (example provided).  Unfortunately that also meant we all headed home around the same time, so the congestion was terrible.  It was a lot of work for a very quick 2 minutes of totality.

That being said, the eclipse was in a word, beautiful.  Pictures don’t quite get across the effect as the edges of the moon gleam.  Imagine a really nice full moon, then imagine all but the edges of the moon are black.  It almost looked like something you would see in Lord of the Rings or some fantasy film where an evil spell steals the sun.  I just wish it could have lasted for hours.

Anyway, attached are my photos.  The pre-eclipse shots I took simply by taping my eclipse glasses over the lens of my camera.  I then removed it for the totality shots.  I also took a movie of the landscape during the eclipse to show how the light levels changed.  I was surprised that even at 90% I didn’t notice much difference in the light levels.

This is a sample of how people set up to watch the eclipse on pretty much every road I drove on.  Every rest stop was full of cars.  Any quiet road on which you could pull off to the side had cars.  Personally, I hunted for higher ground to try to catch the shadow moving across the countryside, and to set up my laptop camera to record it.  The quality isn’t great, and the wind shook the camera, but you are welcome to check out my posts on my Facebook page. [JAC: There are several movies near the top of the page.]

A lovely photo of eclipse totality from reader Barbara Wilson:

We set up chairs and tables in our driveway in Corvallis, Oregon, and enjoyed the eclipse.  Totality, taken with an ordinary camera.

And its shadow:

Leafy trees created crescent sun images on the sidewalk, lawn, and house. After totality the crescents pointed the other direction.  That makes sense and but I was surprised.  This eclipse was a great experience.

Before totality:

After totality:

Reader David called my attention to a photo (not his, I think) of one of the “eclipse viewing camps” in Oregon, where there were areas of totality. Look at all those people!

Unfortunately, I lost the name of the reader who sent these photos and description, but please write me if these are yours and I’ll give credit, location and any other information. At any rate, one reader photographed the eclipse through either a pinhole camera or binoculars and projected the image, which is this:

The reader went for a walk with his dog, and saw the reflections of the eclipse on the ground, having been filtered and projected through tiny interstices between the leaves of an overhanging tree:


And then, on the deck, similar shadows were projected through the holes in a metal table:

Finally, you may have noticed the absence of cats. To remedy that, reader jsp sent a photo of a great Cat Eclipse tee shirt:

Honey came back yet again

August 23, 2017 • 7:15 am

My duck Honey is clearly messing with me. After a full day’s absence, in which I convinced myself that she was gone and tried to accept it, she reappeared at lunchtime yesterday. We communed at length at lunch and teatime, and much corn and many mealworms were consumed, but this roller-coaster of emotions is unsettling me. When a friend pointed out that Honey seemed to be my “girlfriend”, I wrote a short ditty:

You’re plumb out of luck
When your girlfriend’s a duck,
For you haven’t been granted your wish.
There isn’t much thrill
In kissing a bill,
And her feathers smell faintly of fish.

But I love her dearly. Here she is from yesterday (note the big flight feathers: she’s good to go):

I just went downstairs to give her breakfast. She’s gone again. . .