How bout a poem?

 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882

I can't say I'm a huge fan of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. My closest brush with him was staying near his house for a few days in Cambridge years ago. His longer poems like Evangeline and Song of Hiawatha never tempted me, although I kind of like his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. He was even a character in Matthew Pearl's entertaining 2003 mystery The Dante Club, but I digress.

Anyhow, I somehow stumbled upon a charmingly retro poem of his that I think is worth sharing,  especially in times like these:

A Psalm of Life

What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

   Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

   And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

   And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

   Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

   Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

   Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

   And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

   Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,

   In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

   Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

   Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act,— act in the living Present!

   Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us

   We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

   Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

   Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

   Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

   With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

   Learn to labor and to wait.

Best book ending ever

This time of year, with darkness and the winding down of December, makes for reflections. Around here anyway. 

Today, in lieu of any social commentary, I have something better to offer...the ending of The Great Gatsby. It happens after (spoiler alert) Gatsby's death and after the cruel and arrogant rich folks leave. Nick Carraway, the narrator who has lost innocence and illusions, is getting ready to leave the city. On his last night he sits and looks at the island across from the Sound.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Dude could write.

Ashamed before the blade of grass

The theme at Goat Rope these days continues to be the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a focus at the moment on his famous essay Self Reliance, which is a call for and declaration of spiritual independence.

There is a pretty good bit of irony in today's selection, which involves quoting from a bit of his essay that opposes quoting other people. I beg to disagree with Waldo here. I love finding examples of people who say things better than I ever could. It happens all the time. But the paragraph also contains some good insights into the difficulty we have of living in the present.This is another example of how Emerson's ideas both reflected his interest in Buddhist thought and anticipated elements of it as yet unknown in America. And you can quote me on that.

Here's goes:

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

A GOOD IDEA. Here's economist Dean Baker with a column on how the US could improve its employment picture with a more extensive use of work sharing, which involves reducing hours rather than cutting jobs and letting affected workers draw partial benefits for the lost wages. El Cabrero and friends have tried to push this idea in WV. It actually made it through one legislative committee this session despite the irrational hostility of the state Chamber of Commerce for a business friendly measure and an equally bizarre attempt at sabotage at the state workforce agency.

ONE MORE LINK JUST FOR FUN. Here's a look at some of the whackiest things televangelist Pat Robertson has said. I'll bet it was hard to whittle it down to 10.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Do your work

During this busy season, I've been blogging off and on about the life and work of 19th century American literary giant Ralph Waldo Emerson. Right now I'm on his most Emersonian and American essay, Self Reliance.

Contrary to the associations such a title might bring to mind today, Emerson was not an intellectual predecessor of the vile Ayn Rand. Rather than exalting greed in the economic sphere, he was exhorting us to spiritual, personal and intellectual independence. 

The passage I'm highlighting today reminds me of the Hindu classic the Bhagavad Gita, a favorite of Emerson's. In that scripture, the god Krishna admonishes Arjuna to follow his own dharma or path of duty in the world, saying "It is better to fail in your own dharma than succeed in someone else's." In other words, do your own work and become yourself.

Here's a dose for the day:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. 

JUST ONE LINK. I couldn't join this massive rally by members of the United Mine Workers union in Charleston yesterday, but I was there in spirit. I hope they win justice from Patriot coal for union retirees.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The scholar's idle times

Drawing of Harvard by Eliza Susan Quincy, circa 1836, around the time of Emerson's lecture there on "The American Scholar." Image by way of wikipedia.

During this busy season, the theme at Goat Rope is the life and work of New England Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. This week the focus is on one of his influential early essays/lectures, The American Scholar, which was delivered at the annual meeting of Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society. Fifty years after it was given, Oliver Wendell Holmes called it "our Intellectual Declaration of Independence."

To tell the truth, Emerson at the time didn't think much of Harvard's method of education or of traditional education generally. In fact, this lifelong lover of reading took a few potshots at book learning, or at least book learning separated from the experience of life. Here are a few:

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke,  which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books... 

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system... 

Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings...

JUST DO IT. Here's another op-ed by yours truly in support of expanding Medicaid to low wage workers in WV.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, if you support expansion, please go to the Facebook page, like it, and stay in touch with advocacy efforts.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A mute gospel?

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the  work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a preeminent 19th century figure in American life and letters. The focus at the moment is his essay Nature (see last week's posts).

One thing that struck me the first time I read Nature (and every other time) is how totally pre-Darwinian are many of the ideas discussed. This is only to be expected, since Nature came out around 1836 and The Origin of Species more than 20 years later. Still, the gap between Emerson's universe and the modern scientific view of the same is vast.

Emerson believed that there was a deep correspondence between nature and the soul and that natural facts corresponded to moral facts, a far cry from the amoral universe of relentless natural selection.

Consider this passage:

...every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal preach to us.

Nature is beautiful and all but it is pretty red in tooth and claw. In a living world of prey, predators and parasites, I'm not sure how edifying the sermon would be. It is beyond good and evil.

Then he really steps in it:

What is a far but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,--it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes the fields.

Let me just say that if Goat Rope Farm is a mute gospel, it is one that didn't make the New Testament cut. Also, if you think about it farming is kind of the opposite of nature--that's why it's so hard. Creatures want to do their own thing, not the thing of the farmer. They also want to do it where they want, which often isn't where the farmer wants. All cultivated species, whether plant or animal, are a far cry from their original natural state, having been bred over many generations through artificial selection. If that were not the case, there would be no need to farm them.

There's something touching about such a cozy view of our relationship with the natural world but it seems to me to be clearly a relic of another time.

SPEAKING OF DARWIN, here's E.O. Wilson on human nature.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT. Here's a look at the facts about the minimum wage.

REASON 238128 TO EXPAND MEDICAID. It would help a lot of veterans.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

An original relation to the universe

 This is the time of year when things get a bit crazy for El Cabrero, so it might be good to have a theme around here to tie things together. And the theme at hand is the work of America's first (or maybe second, behind Franklin) sage, or at least one of its leading early public intellectuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Over the coming weeks, I plan on sampling some of his essays and poems and trying to figure out whether he was a wise man, a wind bag, or some combination thereof.

And what better place to start than his signature essay and speech, "Nature," which has had a huge impact. I have to admit that when I first read it, two kinds of thoughts ran through my head. The first was, the boy can turn a phrase. The second was, this is SOOOOO pre-Darwinian as to seem loopy. Maybe it's just a temperamental thing, but I wonder about people who seem too smug about their place in the universe...

Anyhow, the first lines of the essay are pure Emerson and are keepers. They express his signature idea that the same spirit which inspired the prophets, poets and seers of old is right here with us today and that we shouldn't settle for their leavings but have and trust our own immediate experience. (That kind of thinking helped end his career in the Unitarian ministry, which was quite a bit more doctrinally strict then than today.)

Here goes:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we enjoy and original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

I guess times have changed. These days, people tend to credit their own insights and neglect the wisdom of tradition.

ACTION ITEM. If you're concerned about the corrosive effects of money on our democracy, Tuesday is a day of action by West Virginians for Democracy. They plan to lobby legislators in support of a resolution calling for "ending the corrupt practices enabled by the Citizens United decision 3 years ago." They will hold a rally on the ground floor of the Capitol rotunda from 11:30-12:30. For more info, call WV Citizen Action Group at 304-346-5891. Read more here.

HEALTH CARE REFORM is coming. It looks like WV is taking some decent steps towards its implementation.

IT'S A LITTLE LATE FOR VALENTINE'S DAY, but here's a look at animal love.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

By their fruits

A few weeks back, I scored a major find at a local library. It was, and, yes, this does show what a geek I am, a 24 part lecture series on Transcendentalism and I was totally jazzed. I was all over it and regretted when it came to an end.

I'm not sure still what to make of Transcendentalism, that name for a diverse and fractious movement of writers, poets, dreamers, cranks and crazies that came spinning out of New England in the mid 1800s. And what a mixed lot they were, ranging from brilliant to batty.

But still, for all the amorphous verbosity, this was a movement or a trend in American thought that spread far beyond this continent and it had a largely beneficial influence, as its ripples were felt in the anti-slavery movement, support for the Union cause and abolition in the Civil War, the early women's movement, environmentalism, the utopian community movement,spiritual egalitarianism and other social reforms.

You could make a good case that one of these guys (Thoreau) accidentally laid the foundations for the theory of nonviolent action, which did great things during the Civil Rights movement and in many other circumstances..

People like Emerson and Thoreau were also among the earliest cultural bridges, promoting respect for other religions. No history of Buddhism's migration to the West or of the dawning appreciation in this country of such Indian classics as the Bhagavad Gita would be complete without a nod to this movement.

Jesus said "by their fruits shall you know them" and I try to make it a point to avoid sharp disagreements with him. By that standard, as loopy as some of the Transcendentalists were, they did pretty good.

Much more on Ralphie to come.

LATEST RANT. Here's my call for WV Governor Tomblin to expand Medicaid coverage to working West Virginians.

HUMAN EVOLUTION. Game on.

IT HAS BEEN WAY TOO LONG since I ran something about zombies.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A good time for writing

The period of time between 1850 and 1855 has sometimes been thought of as a golden age of American literature. (In terms of politics, race and slavery, it was anything but that.) Still, this was a time when great writers bloomed in this country. Think Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman.

In 1941, F.O. Matthiessen published an enduring work titled American Renaissance: Art and Experience in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. I actually read through all 600 and some pages of it a few years back, not that I remember a whole lot about it at the moment.

In recent years, predictably, Matthiessen has been criticized for emphasizing white male writers. After all, this was also the time of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Emily Dickinson, not to mention Frederick Douglass.

I am, however, not interested in staging literary show trials in the English department.

Instead, I must admit that I have turned to these writers, most of them anyway, for sustenance over the years and am a better person for it. I have wallowed in Thoreau and Whitman. I am wallowing again in Melville even now. I love Hawthorne's guided tours to the Dark Side.

But one of these writers is still a bit of a mystery to me and over the next spell I'm going to try to "settle accounts," as the Marxists used to say, with him. I am referring to Ralph Waldo Emerson. I can't decide whether he was a wise man or a wind bag or some combination of the above.

So over the next few weeks, as the WV legislature ramps up and things get crazy here, this blog is going to put Waldo through his paces. I'll share some key ideas from his essays and interesting facts about his life and some interesting quotes and see what there is to keep and what to discard.

Stay tuned...

STATE OF THE UNION? Here's one opinion on that.

URGENT JAPANESE FLYING SQUID UPDATE here.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN BRAZIL, it's raining spiders.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fair warning

My mind has been taking a stroll backwards lately to the spring of a year right before the millennial odometer rolled over. Most of us might not have been aware of it, but these were kind of the good old days in America. Maybe the last of them.

The country was at peace, mostly. The economy was booming, although it was kind of hard to tell in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia. In a word, things hadn't quite gone to hell yet as they would in the early years of the next decade.

It had been a good year for me as far as work was concerned. We won some major fights defending the safety need for poor families and people with disabilities, both in courts and in the legislature.

I was also working my way through graduate school in sociology, a class or two at a time. I had just completed another class in theory and was enjoying the fact that my reading time was again my own.

To clear my mental palate, I listened to an 84(!) part lecture series by Arnold Weinstein on the classics of American literature, courtesy of The Teaching Company and my local library. And I resolved to read or listen to as many of the works discussed as I could.

This is probably a sad commentary on my life but that whole thing was one of the more pleasant experiences I've had. I read or listened to Irving; renewed my cursory acquaintance with Emerson; learned new things about Poe; hit some of Twain's and Melville's work that I had missed; dove into Fitzgerald and Faulkner; read the great plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller; discovered "new" writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, etc.

Say what you want about the USA, but this country has produced some kickass writers.

Over the next few weeks, as things heat up in WV and I'm going to be spread kind of thin, this blog is going to focus on an early and hugely influential current in American literature, with a special focus on the work of one writer who is difficult to classify.

More on that to come.

I'M GETTING TIRED OF THIS DRAMA-OF-THE-WEEK GARBAGE from Washington, and from the leadership of the US House in particular. Here's a look at what the latest mess (the sequester thingie) would look like.

THE UBER MAMA OF MODERN MAMMALS, including us, was a bit of a rat.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Sober cannibals and drunken Christians

A while back, I vowed to blog about that (the) great American novel Moby-Dick and why you, Gentle Reader, should give it a try for the first or 50th time. As I've said before, one of the best reasons to read it is that it's laugh out loud funny.

Most of its humor is directed at Ishmael, its narrator, who may or may not be reliable. One great example of this occurs early in the book and involves a bit of a gender bender.

Much could be, and no doubt has been, written about homoerotic or at least sexually ambiguous themes in Melville's work. Not that there's anything wrong with that. One could argue that the first such episode in this classic occurs when Ishmael arrives in New Bedford, Massachusetts en route to a gig on a whaling ship. He learns to his dismay that he missed the boat to Nantucket and has to stay a few nights before the next one is available.

That raises just a bit of tension since our hero is a bit short of money. His tension rises more when he is told by Peter Coffin, proprietor of the Spouter Inn, that no more rooms are available and that he must share a bed with a harpooneer. I think it's fair to say that most guys would be just a bit weirded out to be told that they'd have to share a hotel room with a total stranger, much less a bed.

Ishmael gets even more weirded out the more he hears about his roommate, who is apparently out trying to sell shrunken heads--something he's even done on the sabbath! It gets worse when he hears that the stranger is a bit of a cannibal.

Ishmael then resolves not to sleep in said bed but to try to find some angle of repose on a bench in the dining room of the inn. When this doesn't work, and when it looks like the roommate may not return that night, he relents and tries to sleep. Mayhem very nearly ensues when the tattooed Queequeg returns and is startled by his bedmate.

In the end, all is well, and Ishmael claims never to have slept better in his life:

Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.

A bit later on, Ishmael relates that after sharing a companionable smoke from Queequeg's tomahawk pipe,

he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. 

What's really going on here, methinks, really has more to do with overcoming prejudices than with sexual ambiguity. Queequeg turns out to be far more admirable than most of the Christian characters in the book and Melville himself in other works delighted in unfavorably contrasting missionaries with cannibals.

The book is saying that the prejudices we harbor, then as now, often turn out not to be just wrong, but even comically wrong. Which is another reason you should read it.

THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING, or at least a critique of uncritical positive thinking, is discussed here.

THIS IS REALLY GROSS, but click here if you want to learn more about how maggots can heal wounds.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Water and meditation

The theme at Goat Rope these days, with some interruptions, is Moby-Dick and why everyone who hasn't should drop everything and read it. Or listen to a good recording of it. Or do either one again if one already has.

Here's another reason to do it: Melville says things in there that many of us have already thought or felt, only he says it  better. Or maybe he articulates something that was always in us, if somewhat vague and unformed.

Here's an example (and we're still in Chapter 1). Ever since I was a kid, I was drawn to water. Creeks, rivers, ponds, lakes, and the occasional ocean. Even a good mud puddle will do in a pinch. The absence of water, as in a drought, feels to me like the hatred of God. There's something soothing and calming about it.  Sometimes I just want to gaze at it and do nothing.

Ishmael put it way better:

Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

COALFIELD BLUES. Here's a great AP story on hard times in the coalfields.

TALKING SENSE AGAIN on the economy is Paul Krugman.

SPEAKING OF WHITE WHALES, this one can imitate human speech.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

How not to kill yourself

Every so often I teach a college class in sociology, often on the topic of "Deviance and Social Control." One of the topics usually covered is suicide. Sometimes I bring in literary readings, including Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech (soliloquy being too difficult a word to spell); a section of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf (not to be confused with the 70s rock group); and good old Moby-Dick.

Of the three, Moby has the best practical advice for people who may have self destructive thoughts but want to avoid acting them out. He has a safety plan. Safety plans are familiar to people working in the field of domestic violence. Potential victims are encouraged to devise a plan for escape if things ever get bad enough. As I understand it, even batterers undergoing treatment in intervention and prevention programs are encouraged to use safety plans when they feel the tension level rising. It's a way of getting the hell out of a situation when before the situation gets to you.

Ishmael, the windy narrator of Melville's classic, has his own safety plan when he gets a bit too morbid:

 Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

Maybe going off to sea on a whaling ship isn't the best option for people today when the hypos get the upper hand, but the basic idea is a good one. When things go bad, break the pattern.

We're just on the first paragraph of this greatest American novel and there's already been a potentially life saving tip. Who knows what else we'll find.

HERE'S ANOTHER GOOD IDEA: to wit, how not to give away the store and wind up with nothing when it comes to economic development incentives.

GOVERNMENT: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? Here are some ideas

SPEAKING OF READING, here's a look at how important it can be for the brain development of children. I say, make the little ones read Moby-Dick! (Actually, I think I did read a kid's version when I was young, which might explain a lot.)

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

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Dealing with monsters

Say what you want about human conflict, but literature would be a lot duller--or maybe even non-existent--without it. I remember a high school English class when a teacher explained that pretty much all of it had to do with conflict, either between characters, between characters and nature, or within characters. There might be some exceptions in this post-modern age, but he had a point

Imagine, for example, how dull Beowulf might have been if the creatures in it were expert at resolving conflict. In the epic, the monster Grendel is bothered by the noise of king Hrothgar's mead hall, where he and his boys revel all night:

Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,
nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him
to hear the din of the loud banquet
every day in the hall, the harp being struck
and the clear song of a skilled poet
telling with mastery of man's beginnings.

Eventually, he starts eating people there. Imagine instead this scenario instead:

GRENDEL: Sorry to bother you, Hrothgar, but I've been having a little trouble sleeping since you built your mead hall. I know that this is very important for you but would appreciate it if you could keep the noise level down a bit. The thing is, I have a tendency to eat a bunch of people when I get upset and I'd rather that not happen.

HROTHGAR: Gee, Grendel, I never thought about that. We always have such a great time drinking, feasting and listening to the bard that I never thought this could bother anybody. But you have to understand that someone in my position has to have a place like that to give gifts and keep my boys happy--otherwise they wouldn't fight for me when I needed it.

GRENDEL: I totally appreciate that. Maybe we could agree that you guys could revel for a while but try keeping it down after, say, midnight. And since you've recently converted to Catholicism, maybe you could try something like bingo when it gets late.

HROTHGAR: Bingo...I never thought of that. How about we try this for a few weeks and see how it works: we'll tone it down after midnight and will even cut you in some livestock every now and then if you'll refrain from eating my guys.

GRENDEL: Deal. Thanks! See you around.

That just doesn't do it for me.

DUMBING DOWN. Here's Leonard Pitts on our falling away from science.

SWORDS TO PLOWS. Literally. This story is about an effort to help combat veterans from the current wars to try their hand at organic farming.

FOOD, FLOODS AND CLIMATE discussed here.

URGENT BLACK WIDOW SPIDER UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The carriage held but just ourselves

OK, I admit it. I have a thing for Emily Dickinson. In her lifetime, she was like a volcanic eruption that nobody saw. And, at the risk of being a downer, I think some of her best poems were about mortality.

If life is what happens when we're making other plans, that is probably even more true about death. Here's one of my favorites:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

A little British snark

D.H. Lawrence was not a big Franklin fan. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has been amusing himself, and, he devoutly hopes, the Gentle Reader, lately by thumbing through the pages of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. This week I've been looking at his quest for moral perfection.

It's hard not to like Franklin, even when he's taking the whole Protestant Ethic/Spirit of capitalism thing too far. But there are those who manage to dislike him. One such person was the British writer D.H. Lawrence.

When he was able to tear himself away from writing about sex, Lawrence put together an amusing but venomous look at American literature in which he singles "sturdy, snuff-coloured Doctor Franklin" out for singular abuse.

In his discussion of Franklin's list of virtues and his practice of them, Lawrence accused him of attempting to fence in the human soul:

Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off!

Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsooth! And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound forever? More fools them...

And now I, at least, know why I can't stand Benjamin. He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest, my freedom. For how can any man be free, without an illimitable back-ground? And Benjamin tries to shove me into a barbed-wire paddock and make me grow potatoes or Chicagoes.

Chicagoes?

Rave on, D.H. For all his quirks, old Ben lived a full and generally useful life. I'm not sure it would have been better spent writing highbrow erotica.

VOLUNTEERING AGAIN. Here's an interesting news story about the growing number of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan volunteering to help civilians displaced and harmed by the war.

TAKING IT PERSONALLY. Here's an interesting article about how AIG executives who received post-bailout bonuses are feeling the scorn and ire of many people.

EAT IT. Are big changes coming to America's industrial food system? When an organic garden is about to be planted at the White House, anything is possible.

URGENT WHALE GENEALOGY UPDATE. Hippos may be their closest living relative. I was thinking maybe wolverines...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Talking poetry at the Head Start center

For about eight years, I taught pre-GED classes in Head Start centers in southern West Virginia. Most of those who attended were mothers of young children in the program, although it was open to anyone who was interested. Some were on public assistance and most if not all were living in or near poverty.

In a bit of a strange turn, I found that I enjoyed teaching math although I was pretty bad at it. In fact, it was only in my second year of teaching that I finally figured out how to do ratio and proportion problems: cross multiply and divide.

(I think the students thought I was playing dumb to make them look good but that was not the case.)

And while I've done a lot of writing, I found that subject much harder to teach. At least math at that level had rules, whereas it always seemed to me that writing had infinite possibilities.

One thing I did make an effort to do was not just stick to the GED study books but to bring in at least some major works of literature for students to read and discuss. As noted in earlier posts this week, I believe that the humanities can be especially important for disadvantaged people.

Among the things we'd read aloud and discuss were poetry by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and William Blake, stories by Poe (I once even tortured them with Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown") and works like the Declaration of Independence and speeches by Lincoln.

Of all the things I brought in, selections from Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience seemed to have the deepest impact. Some would cry over the chimney sweeper poems or make the political connections from "London." One very young mother in a tough situation seemed to find in "The Sick Rose" an inspiration for a proto-feminist awakening.

Something really powerful happens when people who haven't had the opportunity get a chance to read, reflect, think and talk about ideas. I would argue that it's even profoundly political in the broad sense.

THE AGE OF PONZI. Here's Krugman's latest.

BAILOUT MESS. In this piece, David Sirota argues that we've been had and suggests things to do about it.

CAPITALISM ON THE BRAIN. Here's an item about how unregulated capitalism short circuits the moral sense. My favorite part is a quote by the great primatologist Frans B.M. de Waal: "You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions."

A PEACE OFFENSIVE, if it happens, might look like this.

IN THE EVENT THAT YOU WERE WONDERING ABOUT THE TUSKS OF BEAKED WHALES, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

AMONTILLADO?

Caption: This is Poe's black cat or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Pretty scary, huh?

Welcome to the last day of Edgar Allan Poe Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts. You will also find links and comments about current events.

El Cabrero can't think of a better way to wrap up the week than with his selection of Greatest Hits from Poe's short stories.

Here goes:

*Cask of Amontillado. This tale of revenge by burial alive is a hoot. It's probably Poe at his most darkly humorous. I love the first paragraph:

THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled --but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

Aside from beautiful dead women, Poe had a major fixation about live burial. It was even better for him when a not quite dead beautiful woman was buried alive. Something like that happened in The Fall of The House of Usher.

*The Masque of the Red Death. A little justice is done by Death in this story, which shows that even rich folks have to pay the piper. Here are some first lines:

THE "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death."

But the Red Death had the last word. I love the last line:

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

*The Pit and the Pendulum. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition, much less the hapless narrator of this tale.

*The Telltale Heart. Although El Cabrero's taste for the theme of heats has diminished in the wake of his own cardio problems, this one is still a keeper. Again, some great first lines:

TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story.

I didn't include The Black Cat as I am a friend to the feline.

Did I miss any of your favorites?

CALLING IT A WIN. The United Mine Workers is declaring victory after an NLRB judge ruled in their favor in a dispute with Massey Energy at the Mammoth mine in Kanawha County, WV. Here's hoping it's over. Massey will appeal.

GASSING DOWN. A new study suggests the US could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent with relatively little costs.

SHINY UNHAPPY PEOPLE. El Cabrero's beloved state of WV comes within a hair of leading the nation in depression and suicide. Basic economic justice issues seem to be a major factor:

People who are college educated and have health insurance are less likely to be depressed or suicidal, the study concluded. About 245,000 of 1.8 million West Virginians are without health insurance, and roughly 16 percent have college degrees.

West Virginia also has a relatively low number of mental health professionals compared to other states. West Virginia has about eight psychiatrists and 10 psychologists per 100,000 people, compared with 22 and 83, respectively, in neighboring Maryland, one of the healthiest states in the country.

In addition, more than 17 percent of West Virginians report being unable to afford health care, about double the rate of South Dakota, which had the lowest depression rate.

CALAMITY JANE. This one from alternet suggests we move beyond the Jane Austen vogue. El Cabrero, however, is a big fan.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JINGLES AND BELLS

Caption: From a 1513 woodcut by Albrecht Duerer. Ride, boldly ride, if you seek El Dorado.

Welcome to Edgar Allan Poe Week at Goat Rope. In addition to comments and links about current events, it's all Poe all the time this week. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As mentioned yesterday, Ralph Waldo Emerson once referred to Poe as "the jingle-man." He had a point. Poe's poems were kind of obsessed with meter and can have an effect somewhere between hypnotic and irritating.

While some, like say The Conqueror Worm, are just kind of weird and gross, others hold up pretty well.

Here's El Cabrero's selection of Poe's Greatest Poetic Hits:

*The Raven. A perennial favorite. Here's the first stanza for old time's sake:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."

Once, when I was bored at a meeting, I wrote a parody of it with a little help from a friend (you know who you are, E.D.) as it might have been performed by Snoop Dogg. Alas, the manuscript has been lost. As a consolation prize, here's a cool interactive Raven website.

*Eldorado. This poem about a knight so bold was published in 1849 and was probably inspired by the California gold rush. I still like these lines:

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied-
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

*Annabel Lee. Poe had a major thing for beautiful dead women. This one goes out to anyone who has ever loved with a love that was more than love.

*The Bells. This is the jingle man at his most jingly. The late folk singer Phil Ochs did a really good musical version of this if you can find it.

And here's a bonus feature. In 1846, Poe wrote an essay titled "The Philosophy of Composition," which was really about how he wrote The Raven. It's unintentionally funny since he attempts to present the poem as the work of simple deductive reasoning. As he explained it, melancholy and death are the ideal subjects for poetic beauty and nothing could be more melancholy than the death of a beautiful and beloved woman. QED.

Everybody got that?

THE RACE IS ON between wages and inflation, but it looks like inflation is coming out ahead, according to the latest Economic Policy Institute snapshot.

MORE ON THE MIDDLE CLASS SQUEEZE from Demos.

THAT'S A RELIEF...Rush Limbaugh, international science expert, says there's nothing to climate change.

NEW NOTES. Here's the latest edition of Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

PERSONALS. SS, thanks for the Poe action figure! RC from Milton, thanks for the raven--Poe forever!--and watch out for Mean the Shark!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE JINGLE-MAN

Welcome to Edgar Allan Poe Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

In some ways, Edgar Allan Poe is the Rodney Dangerfield of American literature--he don't get no respect.

T.S. Eliot said some snarky things about him, for example, once stating that Poe "had the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the literary eminence of the early and mid 1800s, famously referred to him in a letter as "the jingle-man." To be fair, if you do read or hear more than the proper measure of his poetry, the jingles are very audible.

But here's the deal, Ralphie and Tommy Boy: more people know The Telltale Heart and The Raven than Self Reliance or The Waste Land.

(Note: I'm not implying that this is necessarily good thing.)

John Allan, his foster father, had a pretty sharp take on Poe's genius: "His talents are of an order that can never prove a comfort to their possessor."

Here's James Russell Lowell's take in verse:

"There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,
Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind."

The snooty Henry James--who was nowhere near as cool as his brother William--wrote that

With all due respect to the very original genius of the author of the Tales of Mystery, it seems to us that to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one's self. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

Walt Whitman was more charitable:

Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat. There is an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and reminiscences, as well as the poems.

(If it's any consolation, they loved him in France. But then they liked Jerry Lewis and Derrida over there too.)

But here's the deal: it doesn't really matter what the critics think. Poe has won the verdict of popularity. He was the father of the modern detective story and horror tale and a major early influence on science fiction. Those are three of the most popular literary genres (i.e. they are things people read voluntarily).

The accursed heart still beats...

AN ANNIVERSARY TO REMEMBER. Seventy five years ago this month, FDR--peace be unto him--was elected to the presidency.

THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY is the subject of this article from Time.

SPEAKING OF MORALITY AND SCIENCE, here's a good slam on economic libertarianism with a science slant.

FOR A 425 MILLION YEAR OLD PETRIFIED VELVET WORM UPDATE click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED